Private Pale Leaves

If that was all he wanted to give her, so be it.
Fucking died... should have died.

“I figured.” she said. Her fingers stilled, curled at the ridge of his neck. Just rested there, warm and alive on skin marked by death. Her thumb lingered over the pulse, ticking under his ear. His breath fell heavier, hotter, rasping, and the want in him tangled with the fear crawling through her chest. Her mind reeled. Every instinct screamed at her to step back, to draw a line in the night. But she felt the pull, a dark thing she could neither fight nor fully embrace.

Her eyes searched his face. The way his mouth stayed open. The tremble behind the corner of his jaw. A man starved not just of touch, but of mercy. As if she could hold back the dark gnawing at his bones. And what in the fuck was she supposed to do with that? This was no simple monster to strike down, no ghost to banish or wraith to bind. This was a living, breathing man, scarred and bitter and desperate. And for some reckless and impulsive reason, he wanted her.

“Garrod… I know it hurts.” His tears and the scars that had carved him into halves showed that survival alone was never enough. The seed whispered again, a hiss of something old and cold. The seed’s laughter bent and twisted with the wind, the world was full of things with a far crueler hunger and want. She felt caught between instinct and impulse, unsure if she was giving him comfort... or opening the door to something darker.

His lips hit hers hard, teeth clacked together, a scrape of bone and breath and want. It wasn’t smooth or graceful. It was messy and sudden. Wild and bruised. The kind of kiss that didn’t ask permission because it didn’t think there’d be another chance. She blinked. Drew blood from her upper lip. Her breath caught between them.

She tasted iron and smoke and need on his lips

Under different stars, maybe she would have dragged him down by the collar and made a night of it. A part of her wanted it. She couldn’t lie to herself about that. He was strong and scarred, and fucked-up, which always got her into trouble. Her fingers found his hair, coarser than it looked, thick and white like snowfall. She let them slide through it. Her lips pressed to his, kissed harder, until all air had left her lungs. And for a moment, just a heartbeat, she almost let herself become that silence he wished for.

But it was because she knew that she couldn’t. She leaned back, just enough to break the line of his mouth on hers.

“I can’t..” She let her hand fall to her lap.

“I am not what you’re really asking for.”

She knew it wasn’t about her.
It wasn't about romance.
Because it was escape.

And she knew the taste of escape. She’d spent enough coin on it, in backrooms and brothel beds. She’d given kisses like this to mouths that didn’t know her name.

It was about pain, and clawing for something else. anything else, to feel instead. Trying to bleed out sorrow through touch. A flailing reach for warmth, for something to remind him he was still his body and not buried in it.

He thought he wasn’t enough?
"Better? That’s not why I pulled away."

Not because he wasn’t good enough. Not because she didn’t want him. Hells, she did. She would not have agreed to follow him back, would not have set her bowl aside, would not have knelt behind him and undone each buckle. She wouldn’t have let her hand linger on his skin, wouldn’t have touched the scar on his neck if she did not want him. She came here for him. Not the coin. Because somewhere on the trail, she had started wanting him close.

But he would still feel all his old hurts tomorrow, no matter how hot or bloody or close this night became. He did not want her, truly her. He was trying to forget the old hurts that gnawed at his bones. She could say so many things. Gods knew they clawed at her throat, brittle and sharp like dried bones rattling in a bag.

But then he reached out and he brought his thumb to her mouth. Smearing the bead of blood she'd barely felt. Her gaze dropped as he sucked the blood from his thumb, and something in her expression shifted. Her eyes turned glassy and dark. When he brought his thumb to his mouth, sucking the blood clean, she felt it. Her lips parted slightly, a slow exhale.

She swallowed. Felt the pulse clawing up her throat.
Shit. This wasn’t the time.
She should eat. She should lie down. She was so fucking tired.

"This is torment..."

He saw her eyes. Saw the shake and tremble. The kind that worked through the sinew. Twinged sharp when you moved wrong. Bone and nail still between his teeth until the teeth went click.

"This is torment,"

He leaned forward. Reached out. Scooped up the bowl she had laid down. The old well worn maple looked older than most of his kit. Shallow hulled, and carved with care. It's dark striped rings gleamed, oiled and buffed, still visible in the fire light. Stew still warm inside. Mushrooms still fanned in their frilly fractal. Save where the spoon had dipped in and offset.

He grumbled.

"I'm... not very good," Shook his head. gave the bowl over to her. "Up close,"

The understatement of the decade, Oh Bearer Mine, the seed taunted all warped and wicked. Smile there, in its strange hiss.

“I’m not very good. Up close.”

The bowl sat warm in her palms. What did that even mean? She’d met phantoms that were easier to read than Garrod. She was tired and fucking done with guilt spoken in half-truths. Done with apologies dressed like favors.

Then she exhaled. Slow. Rough. Dragging the breath through a thick throat.

“I’ll tell you what torment means.” Daniyah stared at him over the rim of the stew. In certain lights, her pale eyes almost looked like silver. “It means I can’t keep my hands still, not when you’re near. It’s being dog-tired, bone-deep, soul-scraped tired, and still wanting you. Wanting to be near you, even now, when I smell like a hag’s teeth and you’re drunk on grief. Means I want things I shouldn’t. "

She stood, slow.
“You’re not kissing me because it’s me. You’re kissing me because you’re hurting. That’s the torment.”

She turned and walked back toward the riverbank. Stones clicked underfoot. The soft hush of the water whispered things it always did to the lonely. She sat down hard, cross-legged, and raised the bowl to her lips.

The wind moved like it was limping through the trees on the other side of the river, thin, uneven, too tired to carry anything heavier than the soft whisper of old leaves. The cool breeze lifted the ends of her hair, but couldn't lift them very high before it let go. She leaned back, let her head tilt toward the stars just barely peeking through the night clouds. Loneliness has a thing with teeth. It did not care who it bit.

"Soul scraped tired, huh? I'll have to steal that one." She turned her head towards the sound of his voice. Silently, she reached out and took the spoon he’d offered her. Garrod sat beside her, all steel and sorrow, voice spilling like a torn sack. Many truths spilling from his lips. She dipped the spoon into the bowl and took a bite. "I don't know how to be around you." She didn’t know how to be around him either, didn’t know the rules, the boundaries, the right way to tread near someone who burned you with a glance.

“You scared of me?” she muttered. “Good. You fucking should be." Her mouth curved with a smirk, but her voice didn’t carry the bite it might have, not really. It had edge, like a wolf teasing a bear. She took another bite of stew, slow. Chewed. Swallowed. The bowl in her lap rattled as she stretched out her legs. Daniyah watched him out of the corner of her eye. His bowl trembled faintly in his hand. All that rawness, that stripped-down confession, like flayed nerve and tendon left twitching in the open air.

"You just put your hands to places I forgot, places I'd rather forget. It drives me crazy." She had already told him how hard it was not to touch him. Daniyah felt her cheeks heat up. "Sorry" Her gaze drifted to his hands, the way he kept flexing them, like they were claws trying to remember how to be hands again.

"I don't want to torment you,"
“I appreciate you telling me that,” she said. Daniyah’s gaze softened, flicking to the trembling bowl in his hands. "I'll take the sorry. Thank you.”

She nudged her shoulder against his. “You should eat,” she said, her voice husky, roughened by smoke and exhaustion. “The stew… it’s bloody good. Don’t waste it by staring at it.”

Shouldn’t have said all that.

The words sat too long in the air.

Daniyah felt them stretch in the silence that followed, her own words, her own voice, thrown out like guts on a table. She shifted, hunched a little more over the bowl in her lap. She hated how bare she felt. Like she had peeled herself open, only to sit there now, ribs wide and stupid. Wasn’t his fault, not really. He had been honest with her, in his own way. Maybe that was why it chafed. Maybe that’s what made it worse. Beasts were made for blood, howling and fight. Were they made for this? For cracked-open moments by riverside fires. For stew passed back and forth like offerings?

His laugh had the nerve to warm her. "You like that I poke and prod..?" she said low, smirking "And here I thought it was slapping you were into."

She tapped her fingers gently along the bowl’s edge. Her nails, trimmed short but still edged with something dark. The marks of someone who worked with death as much as against it. She gave a rough breath through her nose. Let her spoon tilt. “Used to go days without eating." Her stomach still turned slow and clumsy in her gut, like it wasn’t sure if it wanted to hold food or turn it out. A flick of her tongue across her teeth. She looked away from him, eyes tracing the low dark river.

"In between the veils, you stop needing it. Stop wanting it. And then it’s easy to forget what hunger even is. Harder still to feel it again.” That place didn't recognize hunger, or sleep, or warmth, not in the way the waking world did. She turned to glance at him. “So if I eat slow, or I don’t finish, it’s not the stew. It’s me.”

Daniyah’s jaw worked slow, teeth grinding just barely behind her lips. The stew had gone cool, but she took another bite anyway. She didn’t answer him right away. She lowered her spoon. It had been a long time since she had thought about her life before the Cazadores. Even longer since she had talked about it.

“First place I learned anything about the dead was a stone cellar beneath a chapel. I was five. Maybe six." She rolled her neck, felt the exhaustion settle deeper on her shoulders. The memories never came in a neat line. The cult. The vampire. Brayan’s hand on her shoulder as he told her how to kill what she once worshipped.

“There was a cult. Called themselves The Red Mouth. They worshipped and bled for a vampire that slept beneath the chapel. Said he was old as starlight. Said he was kind. Merciful." She flexed her hand. Scars over the wrist and forearm, barely visible now. Not from blades. From fangs. They had lied. Ul'Varek, that pale ancient thing she later killed. "My parents gave me up to them. I was young. Could hear the dead. The Red Mouth liked that.” Her fingers picked at her sleeve, finding a loose thread, twisting it around her index finger. "They taught me most rites."

Daniyah glanced toward Garrod then, lips twitching at the memory. She had learned about the dead and the damned from cultist and monsters. But she learned how to survive from a Cazadore. "I ran away when I was 14.. I think. Brayan found me half-conscious on some beach near White Harbour, I was covered in cult sigils." A faint laugh scraped out of her throat. “He thought I was possessed. Tied me to some driftwood and threatened to burn me.”