Its armor is dark and impenetrable, on show for the world to see how grand it is, how beautiful the destruction of something hidden and something real.

It stands high, feet planted in the ocean floor and it laughs laughs laughs in the faces of those who think they can beat it. There is no way to escape and there is no way to win, there is no hope and it will hold him inside no matter the cost until the world is safe and the world is free of conflict and there is unity because the only thing stopping them is

Soft.

He’s not hard and brittle. His hair and his skin that presses onto the unforgiving rock is soft. And whatever escape he had been hoping for is gone because it only holds suffering anymore. The exterior remains beautiful and intimidating and looming over its server but what is happening inside is none of that. It is a storm and it is a neverending show for no one but the prisoner and the ones that haunt him. There is no way to tell the time, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t sleep.

When someone gets inside and he takes off the armor and the person laying locked inside a cell of his own design is defeated on the hard and brittle floor, when he draws a blade made from jagged, shining metal, and it cuts, it’s soft. For once when the blood spreads over the floor and punches land, there is only something soft and something vulnerable and something so viscerally human in that cell. It is surrounded by something that has always been firmer and always been stronger and always been more terrifying than himself.

Something he’s built and that holds death and that strips what is inside inch by inch of himself and that was necessary to purge the world of what is soft and what is human because there is nothing more horrible than seeing the facade crumble and give way to the hurt and beaten.

He leans into the soft touch of the person laying next to him, waiting for another day to arrive, for help, for a sign. His hands, scarred and everything but beautiful, are soft, digging into the soft cape as he closes his eyes.