Current mood:

satisfied

High Stakes
Title: High Stakes
Author: serindrana
Rating: PG
Characters: Tybalt/Adeline
Summary: Tybalt needs forgiveness.
Word Count: 751
Other: A present for the amazingly awesome peridium! It's an AU of our two characters, Tybalt and Adeline. It's a bit hard to tell from how short this is, but it's set in medeival Europe (I suppose), complete with monarchs and witch trials!

High Stakes


He knew all along that this could happen, but he never realized just how much it would matter until this moment. It hurts, sitting here, holding her slowly, slowly breathing body in his arms. She's covered in burns and scars and blood and her wings look so achingly ripped apart and she isn't breathing nearly enough. She's going to live, though. It isn't like she can die, not with the stumps of her wings still there and her halo embedded in her cheek and not quite gone. She isn't going to die.

He mourns for her sake while she cannot. Her lips are, for the time being, scarred shut, as are her eyes. It's probably for the best. For all he would usually want to torment her and twist her and tempt her - for all that he's already done just that - he doesn't want her to see herself. Not now, not like this. Not while he can still almost smell the blood on his hands.

For the first time in his life, he feels disgusting, and it's not a good feeling.

It's such a contrast to when he first saw her. Then, her eyes were wide with glistening innocence mixed with tears, her skin clear of any blemish save the small nervous scratches she'd given her own wrists with rubbing fingernails. He'd come to her softly, on cautious feet, sat down beside her and spoken gentle words to her. To his surprise, she'd listened. Not only had she listened, she'd let him take her hand and stroke his thumb over her fingers.

He had told her it was going to be okay, and while that afternoon he'd only meant that her father would forgive her for being late to court, he had intended it forever. It would all be okay, even when she might suffer at his hands, because he would do it out of purest affection.

"Don't worry," was what he had murmured then, and he murmurs it again now, head bowed over her body. He wonders if she even hears him, but the faint almost-smile he thinks he can see reassures him. She smiled at him that day, too, he remembers - smiled a half-there, nervous smile that she didn't quite know what to do with. He thinks that may have been when he lost himself to her, when a simple mission to tempt and twist became a so much sweeter encounter. He'd slowed his tactics, then, stilled his stratagems to a bare minimum. He appeared when she was upset, stroked her hair and made her laugh that awkward unsure laugh that slowly began to turn the world for him.

He had been so careful, he reminds himself again and again. He had hid his movements, his comings and goings, but perhaps one of the nights when he drew her close to him and kissed her pale mouth and felt her breath against his lips, perhaps then he had slipped out too slowly. Somebody had seen, somebody must have seen, because within the month the witch hunt had begun. He'd tried to stay by her, but they locked her away, tore her apart before the courts, tied her to a stake and set the pyre alight. And as the gathered crowds had watched, as she'd screamed while her dress and hair turned to ash and her skin blackened, snowy white wings had ripped from her back and fallen to painful bloody pieces and he'd finally understood why. Why she consumed his every thought. Why she had made him better with every parting of ways. Why she'd cried out when he kissed her with his filthy, sin-blackened lips and why, though she tried so hard to fight the pain, she'd had to pull away from his arms cloaked in human flesh.

It was all his fault, he thinks with a strangled sob, pulling her closer to his chest, trying desperately to match his breaths to hers. He doesn't cry, not quite, but his voice is choked as he tries to apologize, to explain, to beg forgiveness. He presses kisses to the crown of her head, closes his eyes and just rests with shuddering sighs, feeling her against him. When the hand he holds gently, tenderly with one of his own slowly closes around his a moment later, a few tears finally fall, tasting of muted joy.