#pagosthe

“So, your name’s Hra...Hrarow...Hrarowtnar?” Queer though the sounds from the Fox’s mouth were, they did not ring true. They burned in his throat, pushed like poison at his gums, as though they were a caged animal, something dangerous that did not belong.

( Apologies, it’s not something humans can understand, she had said, but Ban was no longer a human true. The Fountain of Youth pounded through his heart, and who had ever seen Ban the Undead back down from a challenge? )

A familiar smirk pulled on the Sin’s lips, the point of a fang pressed impishly against the flesh. “Y’know I’m not gonna give up, right?”

A long, drawn-out moan rolled around Team MTST’s room, as listless and sluggish in itself as its owner; hardly proper for a would-be king, but Sabre found he did not care. Unbridled warmth and comfort had been his for what seemed a moment -- in truth, hours beyond that any human or faunus truly needed -- until the harsh bark of Thea’s voice and the thunderous crack of a pillow against his face had pulled him from slumber’s grasp. What he had done to warrant such a treatment, the Tyrannosaur knew not, but he would not go quietly to his doubtless doom at the hands of his betrothed.

Sabre briefly made a note to petition his father for an alteration to their vows: thou shalt not smear thy husband’s brains across the bed with a rock masquerading as a pillow.

Bleary red eyes glared, with neither spine nor venom, up at the other from beneath the sanctuary of his arm, flung across his brow to half-block all light from his eyes. “What did I ever do to you?! Is someone dead? They better be.”

Complacency was a foul den of creatures to rest in the bones. It corroded the soul, manipulated the very strings of the heart, until all life lived was a pit of indolence, uniformity, parity, gnawing idly at the heels as a hound upon a bone. No being should live such a way, Bai Hu thought, yet it seemed without his knowledge, the vines of negligence had wound their way about him, rooted his very soul to the spot.

Never before had he questioned his existence, the very manner of his being. Yet, with Ashe’s pursuing questions, a thousand or more crowding upon her tongue in the later hours of the evening when they came to her, the spirit’s eyes had opened to his own neglectful sense of self.

It was with an honest gaze, though she could not truly see beyond the snarling frame of his helm, Bái Hǔ gave what answers he could. “You do not need to worry for me, Ashe; I do not feel the heat. Truthfully--” There, a breath of chilled air plumed from the snarl of his helm to brush like a lover’s hand about her face; a mote of respite in the sticky southern heat. “--I run rather cold.”

“What happened to your face? It’s filthy.”