#vincent.

-> vincent carden || 30 || model & influencer.

Time. He's had time every step of the way here to collect his anger, to carry it with him like layers of folded steel. Time enough to replay too many horrific scenarios in his head, the beginning and the end. To warp fear and lingering guilt into a cold fury.

Everything that has been taken from him– ripped away, burnt into bloody cinders, until his palms bleed with eight, crescent-shaped marks clawed into his skin, until the pain explodes with tears darkening fabric, until he finds himself carrying the last rites for the people who deserved to outlive him. He wants to hurl all that pain at Vincent, however irrational, it feels right to give his anger direction; a target that could absorb his rage without bending or breaking.

Someone who intimately understood what it felt like to have a monster wrapped so tightly into your psyche, ensō, an imperfect circle with no beginning and end. 

Right now, Cloud doesn’t want to understand. He wants to be angry. To lose himself to one emotion or another, to give up this illusion of choice. Violence is satisfying. A shower of wood splinters and flashes of bared teeth, two bodies caught in a ricochet from one wall to the next.

Vincent’s molten-gold gaze is not enough to temper him, nor the sepulchral tremor of a voice that ought to have the hairs on his neck standing on end. He knows, logically, that he should wisely wear a fear that is visceral, so primal that it stretches deep into his bones. 

What he finds, beside his rage and tension and so many other things, is anticipation. 

When the veneer of control finally shatters, Vincent is both terrifying and intoxicating. Fury ignites into desire, a bleed of one extreme to the next as they become a tangle of limbs aimlessly shoving away derelict furnishings and moth-eaten upholstery. 

Not enough oxygen in the room. In his lungs. 

Messy kisses and nipped skin between mouthfuls of air, unbuckled fastenings and a long trail of torn, unwanted clothing.  

But this is not unwanted. Chisel and hammer, driven straight into the cracks to give form to something he had never seen before. Wilted anger and wonder, spent as frosted breath and bare skin on the cold stone floor. 

“...I’m not afraid of him. I’m not afraid of you.”