[P] but I'd risk it all just to be with you

[Raum]

 

He wonders how he is still here. How her fire has not consumed him and the sun not melted the skin from his bones…
 
Yet he is here, still. And Rhoswen is soft against him, soft and so full of sorrow. She is flames along his skin rippling, crackling warming. Pressed close, their skin hot and thin between them, the Crow feels the racing of her heart. It is a hummingbird’s wing, so much smaller, so much more fragile than his. He knows there are no ways in which he will not protect it. There is nothing that he would not do for her and fear of that trembles in his bones.
 
It is not the first time he thinks of Rhoswen before his Crows. His betrayal runs deep, it is engraved in his bones and she holds the scalpel.
 
They stand together, no, he thinks, they cling together. Over the crown of her auburn head, Raum drinks in this land of sand and sun. There is nothing of comfort here, nothing but the comfort he finds now and even that is a floundering sea. It is a well running dry.
 
He closes his eyes and there is no respite, for she is there too. Yet, here, in the quiet of himself, this girl is a phantom and a promise. The fire of her skin reminds him of how they will destroy each other, how their love is too big for either of them and how they are both too obstinate to let the other win.  He was detined to fight this girl, tooth and nail and
 
In his mind the ghosts of her walk back to him, as weary, as thin as she has been all the times she has reluctantly returned to him. For that is what they did, Rhoswen and Raum, they faught, they pushed they pulled to be apart. Always she returned to him and always she hates herself for it. He is poison in her veins, he will arrest her heart, but by the gods he would make it beat again: fierce and wild.
 
The storm of them is a dark and fierce thing and it gathers upon their horizon. It steals the breath from their lungs. Where, oh where can they go from here? He knows, he knows where they can go, but he knows it will summon the storm of her. It will bring lightning to the earth – it will strike along his spine and into the very heart of him. He was made to weather her, no matter how many times her wrath will strike him. “Come to Denocte with me.”
 
He might have whispered the words, might have cooed them into her ears as though she were a flighty doe. But he knows her better, this storm-ravaged girl of his. He knows the fire that smolders within her and threatens to melt him into quicksilver. Rhoswen has forever molded him, this sister of his brother Crow. He is shaped for her, but she does not recognize it. She does not want to want him. It would be easier for all, if they could deny their hearts.
 
His eyes trail over where her body is larger, where truth swells bright and brilliant and true. “Does anyone know yet? Will you tell them it’s mine?” He asks softly and gently; now he has to tread carefully, now he has to think. For Solterra to know is for the three of them to suffer if the truth of his deception comes out.
 
Fate had a bitter arrow and an echoing laugh. The timing could not be worse, the truth of it is in the racing of her heart, the downward curve of her silken lips. “One time.” He says to her, to fate, to the skies, to the silence between them. “Your brother is going to kill me isn’t he?”


@Rhoswen Sorry, it's super sketchy and full of errors <3 <3