#chimera and titan's relationship is so important to me and ugh

[brahkest-fr]

CW: trauma, maggot/worm imagery, blood, general violence | Titan n Chimera have a moment

Titan rushed down the hall, long tail flailing mercilessly behind him, tripping cursing guards as he sprinted through ancient corridors that reeked with the stench of dust and mold. Another tundra stood at the end of the dungeon, old eyes cold and weary, not at all surprised at the other’s sudden appearance. He crossed his arms as Titan approached apprehensively. He didn’t meet his gaze but the elder bore through him with a fire that could raise the dead.

“Let me see her,” Titan demanded, rare harshness in his voice.

The other tundra squinted. “Be my guest. She will be dealt with by the morning,” he spat and pushed past him, frail old shoulder barely nudging Titan’s massive frame but the sentiment was there. “I told you something like this would happen.”

He waited until the other left before gingerly opening the wooden cell door, its creaking overwhelming the deep, pained breaths from within. His jaw slacked as he gazed over the hunched form of Chimera, kneeling on bare stone, arms folded behind her and chained to the wall. She peered upwards, head heavy and swaying. Her vision was blurry but made out Titan’s broad shoulders, haloed in the dusty light of the door frame. Angelic. She thought she was dying.

Titan conversely became aware of the dull, raspy sound of Chimera’s wheezing and the utter nothing coming from his own throat. Knees buckling, Titan faltered to the floor, hand grasping at the stone as he crawled towards her in a silent frenzy, hesitantly cupping his dear friend’s face with soft paws, head pressed to hers. Her breath quivered, recognizing the gentle touch and glimmering fur that encased her trembling form in a warmth that seemed foreign and unbelievable. He smelled like spices and sun, strong on her dull senses that have been subjected to the stale, putrid jail cell. She mouthed something weakly, spittle dribbling down her chin. He wiped it away, running his hands gently down her shoulders.

She shuddered, gray and melting in the dark of his shadow.

Chimera always saw beauty in bruises. Never was anyone more moved by the blossom of welts and the flush of cut flesh. He briefly wondered if she would have thought the way she appeared now, broken and stiff, was pretty.

She would. Even this dark place - she would.

“I’m so sorry Chimera...I should have stopped you sooner. I should have been with you before-” he gasped as he nuzzled her forehead, ignoring the blood oozing from her cuts.

Should. Should. Should. He always should have something.

“Titan,” she hissed, “It’s not your fault.”

He felt her cool blood seep into his fur, a jarring sick wetness.

He lowered himself, peering into her sickly yellow eyes that struggled to flutter open. They were pussy, glassy - tired. He ran the pads of his thumbs across her cheeks, wiping away thin tears she didn’t realize had fallen. He kissed the wedge of her snout, nauseated by the coldness of her skin, the stillness of her body other than minute flinches. He wrapped his plush tail around her, fur coated in the filth of her blood and sweat. She collapsed into his body, for what little slack the chains gave her. Pressing gentle fingers to the base of her spines, he massaged her neck, earning an exasperated choke from her.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked in the smallest voice he could muster.

Chimera’s eyes widened, manic and fearful though her body remained defeated and limp. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck. “The same. Always the same...” she sobbed.

He constricted her body, desperate to hold her pieces in place. “Where are you?”

Chimera grit her teeth, “It’s all red. All red and flesh and fog. She’s watching me again. But her hands are around me... I can feel her nails-” she heaved into a wailing bob back and forth, Titan pressing her to his chest.

It was routine for him, holding her, talking her through her delusions. It was the same story each time but progressively getting worse, an assault he couldn’t stop. A nightmare he couldn’t end. At first he thought Chimera simply had many peculiar fears here and there, bad dreams and the like as everyone does. But when her tough facade melted away into pure terror, screaming into the morning because she thought the hand reaching from her throat was real, Titan couldn’t pretend it was nothing. He wished it was nothing.

He loathed to be helpless when he shook her awake, failing to convince her she was safe. How the paralysis of sleep and fear would take her - how his very touch would send shock waves up her spine and out her maw as whines for help. How he was a sailor lost in the midst of her storms, throwing him wave after wave into her darkness. Drowning always inevitable. But the sun would rise and she would be there, resting on the railing of their sinking ship. She’d be pale in his nightmares. Dead. But he would hold her, tell her she was really alive and really there with him. The dark would come and swallow them whole. A story he knew the end to. He’d wake up and in a mad scramble would find Chimera sleeping restlessly in the guest room, tangled in ripped sheets. He’d breathe and slide down the door frame. Content. A moment of relief betrayed by continued suffering.

Titan was her rock though crumbling.

In all their years together, she could only cope with his hands stroking the whole of her back as the terrors would keep her up at night and plague her throughout the day with visions she couldn’t understand nor ones he could ease away. Chimera was always her strongest out in the city where she put on a brave face that day after day cracked slowly, along fault lines that he knew too well - the pinches to her forehead, the distant look in her eyes, the smile that was painfully fake. She tried her best to avoid being a burden though Titan would never consider her as such. It was hard to convince her that this nightmare was his own as well, something he chose to participate in, something he wanted to help heal. She’d look at him like a bug to flick away but like a tick he stuck to her side, sharing in the cursed blood. The gods awful nights and tortured days. The unholy body in alien skin.

Often Titan’s thoughts looped back to Sorrow, the vile witch they visited years ago for some semblance of an answer. It was said she knew everything. Foolish of them to think they would get a straight answer from a creature who delighted in the plights of dragons. The snowy, angelic imperial whose divine body was draped in silk and stars smugly sneered, a soft hand trailing down her own neck to chest, indulging in the deliciousness of their desperation.

“The gods certainly like to choose their favorites, don’t they? How cruel of them,” she laughed sweetly, predatory evil behind cold alabaster eyes.

It was hardly an answer but answer enough. Chimera was a victim of divinity, an ant under a magnifying glass. But what solution they could muster would elude them.

It would break them.

And now sits Chimera, kneeling under a shadow of death, oblivious to the world around her except the all consuming thoughts worming holes in her mind since childhood. Squirming like maggots in a wound, hungry to burrow and fester, their chafing claws scratched at her ears, throbbing rustling heartbeats haunted her sleep and peeled away her resolve. She’d pick at them like dead skin, indulging in habits that would only give her seconds of relief. A fight here. A fight there. Hours of physical training. Her mood was always electric and frenzied, focused on the next thing that would distract her. The worms hollowed the space just under her skin, slithering like plump veins in sickening patterns only she could see. Scratching. Wriggling. Squirming.

Titan often had his aristocratic duties and she knew that’d she’d have to cope alone, avoided by neighboring dragons too fearful or annoyed at the ridgeback who stalked the streets with a fervor that danced on the edge of violence. She suffered in silence, other than her wails that verbalized at the cusp of dawn in the arms of her friend who forced her to share his home, worried what such terrors would make her do. What they did make her do.

-

The grand library was dead silent. Dark. Titan's feet froze on the cold marble floor that could not be a more obvious sign to leave. She’s gone, he thought briefly - unwillingly - and shook his head. No. No. He can help her. She’s here and he’ll help her.

He found her deep in the basement of the library, surrounded by books meant to be locked up now lay open faced, ghostly runes visibly tearing themselves from the pages. Screaming wails from nowhere bounced off the walls as Chimera sat in the middle of a magic circle, muttering a language not even the Shade knew, lost in thought. Possessed. He yelled to her, held back by an invisible force of her own creation and she turned, face wet and screaming, desperate to end her torment. While an ancient tongue left her lips, she mouthed, help me.

Please.

Titan, filled with a fury and desperation that puppeteered his movements, tore through the magic barrier with a feral violence masked by the ghostly paleness of his face: a visible trace of doubt should he fail.

Why couldn’t he be here sooner.

He pulled her away from the cursed tomes but not without a fight as she flailed, child-like and dangerous, claws narrowly digging into the scruff of his throat. In this effort he forgot how strong she truly was, tangling themselves in a heap of limbs. In a last attempt to summon some gods’ forsaken horror, Chimera flew to a book, screeching its words like a siren until Titan grabbed her by face, tearing her away along with a vibrant strip of flesh from chin to eyebrow. Reeling back in pain and blinded by blood, she collapsed, pooled in sweat and sobs as she held her cheek, crying for it all to end, for the maggots in her brain to cease their chatter. Her back arched and she tore at her scales as if covered in ants, rolling along the cool floor to disperse the heat in her muscles. Titan loomed over her, hands unsure what to hold, how to touch. It was a piercing self awareness of his vulnerability in that moment. He heard yelling from above, likely guards posted outside. Chimera kept screaming, scratching, panting, crying. He shakily stared at his paws, fur now sticky with sweat and blood and grime. He wiped his hands in frantic motions, desperate to clean himself of the viscera he drew but it only smeared and matted his fur in pungent red. It was all wrong. Everything was wrong. He didn’t know what to do.

He didn’t know what to do.

-

He was beside her again now, no more confident than before but he could hide that, for now. His arms wrapped around her shoulders as she wailed, biting into his flesh, drawing crimson over his sunset fur. The pain was dull and fleeting while his thoughts were scattered and distant in the love he wished was enough. Her ribs cracked as she heaved in coughing fits, delicate and ready to burst. He wanted the floor to fall away, enveloping them in a comforting darkness - a place of attractive nothingness. He wished for a lot of things in that moment.

His tailed tightened, python-tight and unwillingly to let go. The torn flesh cutting across her eye festered, swollen and red. He forced himself to keep from turning away. You did that. Her sobs slowed and she was coming back to the present, away from the pit of worms who for now would slumber, buried deep under her skin, ghosts pricking their nails in anticipation against her bones. He stared at the chains bolted to the wall. Brittle.

“Chimera?”

She hung her head. Resigned.

“I want you to run.”