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It gets so quiet around these parts. You can hear the wind for miles, howling its laments against the sky. It prowls around their hut like a dark animal, drawing its awful circles closer and closer. Often, he listens to its assault. It rubs its back against their shuttered windows and whistles, high and sharp, like a cruel father after a running child. It gets so quiet, the wind turns into a monster at their threshold, its pale eye peering through the crack in the door. That’s what you do, these days. You invent monsters, the large and ravenous kind. There must always be a monster lurking somewhere, watching you, slavering at the thought of your body. Without it, you are left with nothing but people. And people are unbearable.
Perhaps they are lucky, to be in such high demand, to always have something that wants to sink its teeth in. The landscape has a hunger of its own. It eats. Only the wind, loping along on gray paws, can still travel the distance, can leap across the gnashing molars. The world has grown new mouths, dripping fangs and red tongues all over. It grows them in the shape of corpse fields, where the dead spring up like daisies, and in the form of fortified towns, rifle barrels sticking out like so many quills. Nobody moves for fear of stepping over an imaginary line, of losing their footing and toppling off some ledge or other. That’s how it goes, to nobody’s surprise. One wall comes down, a hundred spring up in its place.
Nobody can blame them for how they have become burrowing animals, how they have retreated back behind their walls, the walls they made. There is nothing out there worth their time, nothing they could have said to anyone. They make the forest for themselves, turn the kitchen table into a glade, the hallway into thicket and underbrush. A secret garden, composed of furniture and creaking floorboards. This is their forest, ghostly pines skewering the ceiling instead of support beams. Here, the wind and all its teeth, the people and all their guns, they won’t find them. The walls are sturdy and they keep quiet. Here two bodies hunt each other, here they crouch and prey. He follows her nape by the scent of it. She cuts his throat until the blood runs like a pretty red ribbon. Though she has no love for the color. Lean and hungry, they lick off each other’s skins, exhume the silver fur beneath.
Often she bends his knees for him. Often he sits by her feet and wraps his long, jagged arms around her legs to make of himself her devotee. They turn to stone like that, wither like marble, even here, where the wind can’t beat them. All testaments, all legacies, are a matter of minutes. He still sees them there, encased in the glass they have poured, frozen in wordless understanding. He holds her and has nothing to say to her. All the blood that drips from his hands, now it drips from hers. He loves her despite the color, despite how she never says his name. Between a god and its killer, there can be communion. He has no petition he needs her to hear, and she has no absolution to bestow. The blades they stuck into each other won’t ever come out. They live around them. They make room. Sometimes, the river runs so red, there is no washing in it anymore. Sometimes you simply have to build your home by the riptide and watch it roil.
Tonight he lets her slay him again, because it is what she asks for with her silent mouth, with her silent eyes. Because he wants to be laid low again, buried beneath flesh. It is so quiet, he can listen to her breathing, the soft, raspy gasp of it. He is perfectly entombed by her thighs, where her weight presses him into the thin bedding. This is their compromise, the slick rhythm with which they slot against each other in their den. The nature they invoke is a prehistoric, murky thing. It abides by no law but trial and error, offers no streamline. In their forest, their secret, silent forest, they mate in backwards ways. She is seated atop, straddling his head. Her fingers are in his hair where she curls them in and twists. She splits herself open over him, and he receives her. Heat pours into his open mouth like honey. He, too, has gone too hungry for too long. His tongue may not impale her, but he licks into the wet velvet of her folds, even so.
She engulfs him, casts him in the looming shadow of her body. His nose is buried in the downy curls of her mound when he mouthes at her clit, teases it to stiffness against his rutting tongue, each flick and rub sparking a new ache of arousal in her tightening body. They are experienced accomplices. She rides his face with slow, rocking motions, gives him half a beat to breathe, before he submerges himself in her warmth again. Her scent is enough to make his mouth water. To taste her is to strike fire down the length of his spine. It grips him hard when she twitches against him, when she forgets her silvery chill and flushes for him. They are creatures of blood, inside and out. He won’t let her forget. He wants her warm and out of breath, a pink luster to her austere cheeks until the softness melts back into her eyes.
They have been so silent so long, speaking of nothing, letting their dead rot in the ground out by the herb garden. He has come to think of them this way, two silent companions, only the whisper of fabric between them. Does she understand? Does she hate? He often imagines her face, tired and wan, twisted in disgust when he traces the jutting ridge of her vertebrae. He thinks she must shake with her unlived vengeance. He thinks she must eat more. And he is sure, she thinks the same about him. (What have we done? What will we do?) So she feeds him first, lets him lap lust from her lips. That is why he is between her legs, licking her the way a wolf licks his lover’s muzzle. There is no creature left on this earth that could take him, the way she pins him down.
“I’m so close.”
Words fall from her gasping mouth. They ring in her throat like a small silver bell, like the wind chime she set up last spring. Language reenters the world with a moan. He wakes from his trance, the days-long dreaming, the amorphous nightmare in the forest. Mikasa breaks the spell, unweaves what web has them strangled side by side. She wakes him when she speaks. And her voice, her voice! His ears ring with the sound of it, the high-pitched, keening sigh of it. She doesn’t tell him, she is pleading. By what strings his consciousness is suspended, she grabs it by the roots and jerks it free. He crashes into his own body, breaks his neck upon impact. Suddenly his heart is beating, suddenly his forearms strain where he holds her back, fingers digging crescent bruises into her pale thighs. Suddenly he is a man. Suddenly she is a woman. Her man. His woman.
He groans back, pleasure punching down the length of his body as she dampens his chin, trying to rub herself to completion against the hook of his nose. He tightens his grip, keeps her still as he tenderly suffocates. His strokes come faster now, focusing on the one spot beside her clit that has always sped up her breathing. Mikasa winds up above him, clenches her legs against the sides of his head as if to clamp him in place, writhing in his relentless grasp. She pours herself into him. He drinks her down, he lets her spill. More noises, soft and insistent, growing into choking sob-like sounds. He feels the shocks of pleasure as they paralyze her body, where they cramp her muscles and spur her on as she rides him. Mikasa’s orgasm shakes her with a toneless gasp. She coils into herself, her balance teetering off-kilter, still thrusting her hips helplessly against his tongue for the last droplets of sweet friction to further her high. Her moan peters out into a stuttered amalgam of syllables, the sentinel against the dark of night, against the mounting quiet and the wind, always that wind: “Bertholdt...!”
Bertholdt. She husks out his name in gratitude, awash in release. It stuns him, to hear her say it, this name. As if she knows who he is. As if he hasn’t by some deception stolen into her home, into her bed, and silently exploited her absence of questions. He somehow didn’t believe it, that she knew. He shivers under the onslaught of that, of every moment they shared where his name must have grown crooked in her mind, never enough to jab past her lips. When he kissed her, she knew. When she held him at night, she knew. When he chopped the firewood and she pumped the water, when they built that fencing together and patched up the roof. All that time, Mikasa looked at him and silently called him by name. He is briefly more than the remnant of a bloodied world, a disastrous relic that is best forgotten. She knows his name even out here, even in the quiet that spins its silver cocoon around them, denying them any metamorphosis. Even in their mute companionship, she’s always known, and she accepted him by the fireplace. He supposes it is fair. For all he’s taken from her, she’s taken more.
She’s broken a sweat, he notices, as she breaks above him. Her scarred, lean limbs unfurl as she slumps, as the strength saps from her body. Mikasa gleams in the dark. Bertholdt turns his head as he follows her trajectory, as she melts beside him. He is cold without the cover of her dancing body. He wishes the chill were still a novelty to him. But no such luck. Her hand crawls across the murky divide to gently wipe at his lips, to wipe the traces of her arousal from his skin. Bertholdt catches her by the wrist there, instead, presses a tired kiss to her fingertips. He knows the taste well. There will be no blood between them tonight.