she huffed and stomped off, heading for the fire.
Before she reached it, she locked up tight and pivoted to face him, causing her blonde hair to sway outwards from her shoulders, flicking water across the dirt.
“You know what, Thanatos? You should be sorry. You should be on your knees, begging for forgiveness.”
If anyone else had told him to get onto his knees, he would have laughed in their faces and then cut off their head.
But for her, he dropped to them in an instant.
“Forgive me, Calindria,” he husked, his brow furrowing and his chest aching as he waited to see if she would.
Rather than giving him the absolution he desperately needed, she stormed away from him and sat by the fire, scowling at it. He wearily pushed to his feet, his body feeling as heavy as his heart as he sighed, as he realised that this time, it wasn’t going to be as easy to convince her to forgive him.
He moved to the fire and sat on the other side of it to her, focused on cooking for her and cutting off pieces of meat before it charred. He offered them to her. She took them but she only picked at them, her gaze downcast as she nibbled small pieces of the meat.
He ached as he stared at her, as he sat in tense silence with her, a cloud hanging over them both. All the light that had been in her eyes had vanished. His fault, and nothing he could say or do right now would make it better. He had been the one to extinguish the light in her when he should have made it shine more brightly.
He was tainting her with his darkness, dragging her back down into the black abyss when she was doing her best to shun the shadows and step back into the light, to cast off her past and look to her future.
Thanatos wished he could do that.
He wrestled with the words again, sure that if he confessed the things that had happened to him, even in the most basic detail, that she would understand why he reacted the way he did whenever they were intimate. She would understand how difficult this was for him. He wanted to be with her, wanted to give all of himself to her, but he feared it at the same time. In the heat of the moment, when his past clouded his mind and awakened the instinct to protect himself, he saw her as a female who meant him harm.
A female who meant to treat him as the demigoddess had.
The ache in his chest worsened as he stared across the fire at Calindria, as the small distance between them felt like a vast chasm.
He wasn’t sure he had ever felt like this. Tied in knots. As if his very life depended upon one person. As if that one person turning her back on him would be enough to destroy him.
He picked at his own food, losing his appetite as the gloom in the air grew thicker, weighing more heavily upon him.
In fact, he was sure he had never felt like this, because he had never been in love, and gods have mercy on his wretched soul, he knew this was love. He felt it in every fibre of his being as he looked at her, as he went in circles desperately seeking the words that would be the ones to make her forgive him rather than make things worse.
He wanted to move to be near to her, as close as she had allowed him to be before, but he knew she wouldn’t accept it and he hated that. He hated that she was distancing herself now, drawing away from him. He craved her, was sure she had cast some sort of spell upon him to make him want her so badly when he hadn’t wanted a female in centuries.
The depth of that want only grew as the air between them chilled, as that chasm yawned wider.
As he began to think about every moment they had shared.
He already missed the way she would smile at him, how she would glance at him whenever she thought he wasn’t aware of her and would let her eyes linger. He missed the way they had talked, how at ease he had felt around her, and how good it had felt to unburden himself a little and learn more about her.
All things he hadn’t been aware of at the time, but now that