#teb

Nil e Teb ❤️

A man who has built his life around doing things correctly and is quietly paying for it. Methodical. Self contained. The kind of person who processes things internally for so long that by the time he says something out loud he's already had the argument with himself three times and lost twice. He is not cold but he runs cool, comfortable with silence in a way that unnerves people who aren't used to it.

He takes his obligations seriously to a fault, his friendship with Thomas being the clearest example, a thirty year loyalty he treats as something close to sacred. He is funnier than he appears and warmer than he allows and considerably more stubborn than either.

He has a code and he lives by it and the one summer he came closest to breaking it cost him more than he expected and less than he feared. He is the kind of man who says no and means it right up until the moment he doesn't.

He built something real on that ranch. The horses, the land, the life. He tends all of it with the same quiet consistency he brings to everything. He doesn't need company but he notices its absence more than he used to.

The horses trust him completely.

She was arranging things on the floor with the focused domestic efficiency of someone making a plan, pulling the thick blanket down from the couch, stacking cushions, building something habitable out of what was available. She moved around the small radius of firelight and every time she bent or shifted or reached for something his peripheral vision supplied information he was not asking for and his body responded to it with its now customary complete lack of discipline.

He was hard. 

Of course he was. 

He'd been in a more or less continuous state of it since she arrived and the current situation, the dark and the fire and the shirt and the pink he'd imagined, was not improving things. 

He closed his eyes, tasting the air and saw her pink, bare and small in his mind eye.

Horizon Zero Dawn characters being pretty.