aware, aware you stalk your prey
with criminal mentality

---

In the silence between thunderclaps, in the darkness beneath the clouds, Andras’ words are a crack of lightning. Ipomoea can feel them, see them, hear them echoing in the deepest parts of himself - the parts he did not know existed. A part of him is rising up to meet those words, teeth flashing brightly, a snarl threatening to rip him in two. He can feel his skin tremble, struggling to hold the monsters at bay.

He does not know when he became the monster.

But the blood rising like a red tidal wave inside of him is singing yes, yes, yes with every drop of rain that arcs down his face like a teardrop, and he knows it is only a matter of time before the tenuous chain holding the beast back snaps. If he was a monster, if he gave into the monster - it would be because they made him one.

One of his flowers pulls away from his ankle, hanging its rain-sodden head low, and trembles. Ipomoea is watching as it does, feeling the petals wrapped around his heart begin to drop. And perhaps that is how he knows it is the flowers who speak next, and not the monsters.

“Go home, Andras.”

He tightens the chain just a little bit more, and tells the snarling and the frothing teeth not tonight. The wind howls its fury at him, the clouds roar their disapproval; he wants to listen to them. Oh how he wants to give into them, and turn their raindrops red, red, red. But he turns his back on them, on Andras; he drags the monster down just a little bit further, buries it deep enough to last the night.

Not tonight, he had told it; but as he stares into the darkness he whispers now to reassure it, and himself, soon. 

He is already beginning to walk away when he turns one red, glittering eye on his Warden. “Get dry. Get some rest. We’re going to need it.”

His heart beats out the words like a song, like a promise, like a swear. There’s a reckoning coming, and Ipomoea does not know if he will be the judge or the judged when it does.

The storm claws at him as he bows his head to it, shouldering his way through the rain and cold and darkness, retracing his steps back to the court. There would be no more hunting tonight; there was no use. Not when the footsteps had erased themselves, and the blood had been washed away into the river, and the storm was determined to consume friend and foe both in her rage. His monsters had waited his entire life for this; they could wait a little longer still.





@Andras
"Speaking."