My knees give out and force me to the ground, dragging Skull down with me. I rip into the wet soil with my hands and press my face to the stalks of grass and small yellow flowers sprouting beneath me. A scream builds in my chest and then pours out of my mouth, clawing across the ground until it leaps from the cliff and charges at the crashing waves. Another one tears out of me just as the first one dies, and the violent crush of the sea against the cliff face sounds like an answering roar. The water bellows with me as I try to purge the fury and torment from my veins.
I wail and scream as I expel the pain. I rip open the soldered doors trapping everything I was forced to bury and ignore. I expel everything I’ve choked down for too long, uncovering layers of loss and torment. The agony evolves as I scream, the source transforming from my body being sold and used without my permission to the beatings and torture at the hands of Tilleo and his masters. I rage and disgorge until I’m back in Dorsin’s quarters. Time and my memories rewind in a slow crawl as I relive being carried down the hall by brutal orcs and then waking up in an iron cage.
A black wall slams into me then. My anguish tries to push past it, tries to raze it to the ground, but no matter what I do, all I see is the blank reminder of the nothing that I come from. My wails wane. My screams are ripped away by the cleansing wind and drowned in the dark ocean beyond. I’m left lying in the grass, the flattened flowers as empty and blank as my origins are.
I don’t know how long I lie there. I can’t say when Scorpius and Bones move to surround me. Put their hands on my back or my leg in silent support. Skull’s arms are still wrapped around my waist like he’s worried I might fly away on the wings of my fury if he lets go. The Scorpions don’t speak. Instead, we bask in the sound of the waves as they try to wash all the harm away.
There’s no judgment. No promises that it will get better. No exchange of horror stories to help me feel less alone.
They just sit with me.
Breathe with me.
Hurt with me.
Each of us floating in the abyss of unfair fate and the countless wrongs against us.
A hollowness sits in my chest where everything once sat heavy and onerous. I know the demons of my past won’t disappear forever. No matter how much I wish they’d been shoved over the cliff, never to return, they’ll crawl back. They’ll once again settle silently inside me until another day like today wakes them up and forces me to fight for what they try to claim.
I will.
I’ll never let them win no matter how bloody they leave me after our battles.
I look over at the Scorpions, and something resonates within me. Maybe if I fill the caverns in my chest with other things, replace the hollow with the happy, there will be less room for the monstrous things that plague me.
A trail of crimson drips from gouges in Bones’s arm.
Shit. Did I do that?
My fangs drop as I watch the trails of blood spill over to spatter against the bright yellow petals of the flowers below.
“You can drink,” Bones offers, his black gaze studying my empty eyes and the tips of my sharp teeth that are just visible between my lips.
I stare at him, confused at first by the offer.
Drink?
I taste the invitation on my tongue, trying to discern if that’s what I need right now to fill the crater in my chest.
“Take it, my Blood, take whatever you need,” Bones implores, but it isn’t what’s spilling down his arm that’s calling to me the loudest.
It’s his mouth. His fangs. The way his tongue strokes the words he’s bestowing alongside his blood, that’s the siren’s song I want to answer right now.
I grab his arm, but instead of lapping up his scarlet offering, I pull Bones to me. My lips crash into his. I’m rough, unapologetic, and one of his fangs slices across my bottom lip. A sweet tang blesses the joining of our mouths. My tongue searches for his, and he moans into the kiss when they finally meet. He sucks my lip hard, and I groan into his mouth as he swallows me down, his hands in my hair as he pulls me closer and deepens the kiss.
The void in my chest fills the tiniest degree, and if I could crawl inside of Bones right now to escape the sting of the anguish that still remains, I would. He captures my face between his hands and presses into me as he kisses me fiercely. It’s as though the ache is inside him now, too, and the only thing holding it at bay is the way our mouths fuse together and our tongues dance. Bones leans me back until I bump into Skull, who continues to guard me from behind.
I moan at the sensation of being caught between the two of them, and Bones greedily steals the sound for himself. I pull my mouth from his and turn to pull Skull to me. He claims me just as fiercely with a molten kiss that feels as though it melts me and then reshapes me all in the span of tangled tongues and enthralling lips.
Scorpius is there when I reach for him. His thumb runs across the small cut on my lip. I disregard any concern he might be harboring and instead consume him. He meets me nip for nip, stroke for stroke, until the frigid ache inside of me begins to warm from the growing fire their mouths and touches start to stoke. I pull back, panting for a whole new reason.
“I don’t know what the fuck that was,” I admit breathily as I look at each of them in turn.
I feel as though I need to explain myself, even though none of them are looking at me like they need answers. Mytake me or leave mepersonality feels inadequate for what just happened though. I just lost it in an epic and all-consuming way, and I want them to know that they can still trust me and rely on me despite my…moment.
“Where I’m from, we call it a kiss,” Bones teases.
I laugh at Bones’s joke, something that felt forever out of reach only a few moments ago, but I’m suddenly light. I’m unburdened, and now there’s room for the Scorpions where there should be, instead of only pain and anger.
