#yyyyyhhhhhhhh this might be bullshit but wHATEVER ITS DONE NOW

[pinespittinink]

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.” in the deep of the trees specifically tiddy lady and her hot evil boyfriend who is definitely not tigerclaw

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

ꕥ 🍃 ꕥ 🌿 ꕥ 🌱 ꕥ

Sabine's voice is a low, soft thing, green and quiet as the droonlight lanterns hung throughout the height of Palatruza. Titus could listen to her always and never hear steel in her tone. She touches the side of his face with her palm, fingers leafing down to petal over his wrist, held in her other hand between them.

“You broke their chains in the palms of your hands long ago. They have not held you for years."

“They have not held me ever,” Titus replies. He is tall in the shadows, large in the light, a man undiminished by nature.

Sabine's gaze is a verdant thing, like the lotuses, like the emerald trench of the deep. Her eyes are large and round, thick-lashed and down-turned at the corners. She has never been frightened of him, no matter how much blood he spills. Her hand curls over his, and Titus reaches up to palm the black fall of her hair, the supple curve of her neck. Sabine looks up at him, her head cradled in his hand.

“You are free to do whatever you want," she tells him.

“Am I?” His voice is a silken growl, black as the deep. He lays a kiss at her neck, dipping to mouth another one further toward the soft hollow of her throat. She has always been so small compared to him; a pearl in his hands. “Dearest, dearest Sabine. What of yourself?”

“Oh, my love,” Sabine says. Her breath tickles his ear, brushing like the fern fronds that drape and feather from the trees. "Don’t you know?”

He noses from her neck across her shoulder as he slips a hand around through her hair to the small of her back, the supple curve of her body against his own, draped as she is in pale silk. She's favored these filmy things as long as he can remember, dressing as though she's come from a lily bed, a spider's web. The very cloth of the moon, foreign above the thick of the trees.

“Your freedom lies with me," Sabine murmurs, like gentle commandment, "within the ledge of my ribs, my lips, the pink of my ear. It is within me that you may do whatever you desire. Within all in my hands.”

Titus makes a bestial sound, an obsidian huff licked through with his own disdain as he draws back from her, lifting his head only enough look down at her, slung still in his arms.

“I am not free then,” Titus replies darkly. “Not from you."

"Could you ever be?"

A low sound ripples through his chest, a burr dark and bloody. He curls his fingers in her hair, digs his grip in around her waist.

"I am not some prey animal for you to toy with," Titus says, embers licking through his teeth.

"No," Sabine agrees simply, unfazed. "But neither am I."

The night birds sing around them, calling through the dark. Titus studies her, the dark amber-green of his eyes gleaming. She is accustomed to his temper by now, but he does not believe it has ever angered or frightened her.

“The others," Titus rumbles, "they see you as just that, don’t they? A prey animal. Something meek and soft, to be left alone with your own milk teeth.”

Sabine tilts her head at him, the dark river of her hair tumbling down her back. She has always let it grow so long, untameably so.

“But you do not, do you?” she asks.

The question sears the air between them, percolating. Titus inclines his head down toward her, nails clawing smoothly through her hair, as though raking through water.

“I have seen the truth of you since first I saw you,” Titus growls, vetiver dark. 

“What truth is that?” Sabine asks him.

She offers her neck to him, gleaming in the droonlight, and Titus kisses her there. He travels up to the soft edge of her jaw, nose brushing against the scent of her skin, like the dew of the morning mist. He kisses her on the lips, her mouth plush and small and warm beneath his. She tastes of the deep, and Titus wonders just how long it will be before she gives in and makes a descent on her own, leaving him up among the trees.

“We are the same, you and I,” he says, breath heady, crumbling with emerald heat, lifting away only to speak against her lips, that she may swallow the truth whole. “You are a hunting thing, just as I am.”