His anger is like wildfire to your paper heart.

You see the moment his face changes, tenses, and it is instantly mirrored in your own. You stare right back at him, clutching to your own anger, to stubbornness, to all the things that are swept away by the ocean of his eyes, leaving you no protection from the turmoil that you tried to bury underneath. His anger is like wildfire, and you can only burn within the billowing flames, unable to think of the words to help him when that is all you were trying to do in the first place, when all your help has only caused frustration, hurt, has only made everything all the worse.

The longer you look at him, the trails of tears along his face, the tightness of his jaw and the accusations in his eyes, you wonder if it will ever be easy like it had been before. If you would ever be the reason he smiled again, or if it would remain like this—if it would always be fractured because one of you said the wrong thing or fell victim to some tragic circumstance. If it would ever be simple, if you would ever be the children that yearned only for the fun of tricks and harmless sabotage, of silly little adventures that never amounted to anything truly worthwhile, only satisfied curiosity for a time.

’It would mean he didn’t get away with it,’

If it would ever be easy to forget the two of you were forced to grow up way too fast, if only for a minute again.

‘It would mean he’d be punished for his crimes, for his actions. It would mean someone would be held accountable for their cruelty.’

You cannot help the sharpness of the breath you take, stop the images of the man’s hanging flesh, the way it felt to be doused in someone else’s blood (and your skin crawls, sticky with the still drying substance)—the way your body cracked underneath his weight. The way he had walked through the dimness of the memory, as if he was barely able to stand himself, for all the blood he had lost. Your mouth tightens, eyes slightly widening as fear chills your heart with things that you do not want to consider a possibility.

‘Why shouldn’t there be consequences for his behavior?’

Your throat tightens, the taste of bile overwhelming on your heavy, heavy tongue.

‘Why should anyone be allowed to corrupt, damage, and destroy everything?’

You flinch as he leans closer, blinking rapidly as your head bows away, cringing against the words that fall like poison from him, thick and perverse as it rings in your ears: ‘He should pay.’ ‘I could have killed him.’ You want to say it, want to yell it until he understands just what you had done, just how the cretin had paid for it. Just the way it had made you feel, to damage someone else like you had, to not know whether they were even alive anymore, because of you. You want to make him understand, for all of his ignorance, his anger, his want of revenge. You want to, but as you look at him from the corner of your eye, a deep sense of shame, that little flicker of satisfaction, forces you to swallow the words, the notion, fearful of what it would do to him, to you, to say it out-loud.

He moves away, and though you want to follow, afraid of the distance in between, you stay, watery eyes never leaving his face.

‘There should be some justice in this world. If no one else wants to bother, then I’ll certainly try. I’ll always try for my friends.’

You laugh, laugh for the way that it makes you forget the despair within the lines of his face, the lack of color there; the way that it makes you forget the resonating pain of your battered body, the abuse that came before. Laugh, because he makes it sound as if it is so simple that you want to believe he can. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you, Erebos.” It is tender, the way you say his name even as your smile fades, as you somber, in the midst of it all again, unable to forget for too long.

“When you answer violence with violence, it only brings more. More violence, hatred, contempt—more pain—like the way you hurt now, because of what he did to me.” You smile softly, feebly apologetic, wanting to comfort him but knowing that it is not comfort in all of the ways you could possibly give it to him (a name, a face, the smell of pine and the sea) that he craves. “By going after him, it would only make someone else hurt like that. How is that still justice?” Perhaps it doesn’t matter to him, something that hadn’t crossed his mind because of the fact that it would be in retaliation, somehow making their pain less meaningful, less worthy, just less.

“I don’t blame you, for wanting that, for wanting to make him suffer. I don’t know what I would do if it was me that found you instead.” Your voice drifts to a notch above a whisper, shaky as you breathe out against the catch in your throat. It had happened once—you had found him ravaged, bleeding, hurt. It had been your first realization that he was not as invincible as you blindly convinced yourself, that he, too, could be taken from you so very easily. Even now it stirs a darkness in the pit of your stomach, your feral, innate, desire to protect him, to protect when he is so dearly precious to you.

“But I do know that I would want to see someone, anyone, bleed for just an inkling, a breath, of thought to harming you, to be made to suffer a thousand times over anything that they dare do to you. I—“ you stop yourself, squeezing your eyes shut as a shiver follows the line of your spine as subtle as an earthquake, suddenly naked, suddenly ashamed. “I would want to end them, and if I didn’t watch them take their last breaths, if I didn’t have the guts to do it, I would want to make sure that they would never forget what they had done. You are not wrong, or alone, in wanting to punish wickedness, or to seek out, create, fairness in an unfair world. Those that show cruelty because they can should pay.”

The man that had taken Arwen from him, from her family, should pay.

Misael for his mutilation of your child, Caleb for the act of conceiving her, the monstrosity that left you for dead, that would have left Etziel without a mother, without his father, should pay.

Anyone that would do something like that should pay.

You breathe slow, listening to the faint sound of his heartbeat, struggling against the rise of anger in your stomach, against the possibility that that anyone could ever include Erebos too.

Maybe it is not him that your heart doubts, fears, only that. Only him being mutilated by someone who felt it was right, just like he does, for wanting to make the world into something better for the ones he loves. Maybe it is only the chance that you will never be able to protect him, try for him, too, if he will not listen.

“Just…”
(Not because of you.)

“Nevermind.”

Despite the softness of the word, heavy with defeat, with a tiredness of listening to yourself talk, the hurt that breaks against your voice, it is a roar within the quiet, within the face of his utter silence, against the sting within your already aching chest. You pull from him as quickly as you had pressed into him, pirouetting on your thin legs, away. Away from his warmth and its comfort, its familiarity, tearing yourself from the fondness of his touch, the need for it nestled somewhere deep inside of you, and you move through this room of memories, memories suddenly too too much to bear, through the piercing, too-hurtful quiet. You only glance in his direction once as you reach the rocky little slope, your face calm against the sea raging just underneath before you slip away.

enna & erebos

for you, just you