[P] our love is god

[Acton]

Acton these violent delights have violent ends It was easy, in the cold, to forget just where he stood. What was Solterra without its heat, without its pounding sun that swallowed shadows and drew salt from the skins of its citizens? If he closed his eyes and inhaled nothing but the scent of her skin, he could be in any crooked alley of the Night Court. So much time given to white-hot hatred of this place, and now he could almost as easily pretend it was home. The chatter of her teeth drew him back, and Acton didn’t hesitate at all before pressing his shoulder and hip to her own. Bexley was not the kind of girl to shiver, (where was that warmth from the summit – or had that just been all the hot blood and headrush?) but this wasn’t supposed to be the kind of place where winds cut cold as Raum’s knife. He’d opened his mouth to say something to that end, but she spoke first, and even absent of her tone the buckskin wouldn’t have interrupted. He knew better than that. The buckskin’s brows climbed higher and higher still as she spoke, first in disbelief and then in admiration. “What a bastard,” he said, “but I gotta say, I’m glad you get under gods’ skins. Makes me feel better.” What a talent she had for it – and it was easier to think about that than the violation of having your magic stripped from you. The idea that it might never have been yours to begin with (Acton, for instance, had never thanked Caligo for his own – he’d never been too sure it came from her, anyway.) He huffed a laugh at her next comment, though there was likely not much funny about it to the hot-blooded horses of the desert. “You mean this isn’t standard?” Almost he made a different kind of joke, but suggesting Solis had a limp dick right after being told the god had stripped the powers of his own city’s Regent was probably inadvisable. The silence that dropped around them after he answered her question was heavier by far than any strange stillness of the day, and Acton was grateful when her gaze caught his the way it always did. That blue-burning distrust, familiar as his closest friends. Dutifully his heart kicked into a higher gear and his crooked grin worked its way back onto his mouth. If you’re sure, she said, and he couldn’t tell over the rush of blood and heat and want if his heart was pounding out a warning or wonder. That, then, was when the snow began. And all the clues of the weather finally caught up with him, but adrenaline made him careless, made him laugh at the flakes that fell now faster and faster. He ought to have guessed that the day he walked into Solterra for something other than war it would snow in the gods-damned desert. But they were all heat, had never been anything but tinder and flint, and what care had Acton for the gods, even now? “Maybe we should go inside,” he said, some trace of that laugh still in his voice as his gaze caught hers once more, “and I’ll show you just how sure I am.” @Bexley lordy I'm rusty AF with him but here's a closer <3