he can make hell feel like home.
[lust]
It's the curls. They're the shade of sugar cookies right out of the oven: buttered and golden to a perfect color that is mouth watering to look at, makes her want to rake her virginally porcelain hand in their tangle, weaving the tips of her fingers, letting the strands get caught under her dirty nails.
They make him look like a cherub, which isn't all that far off because she had heard it once before that Lucifer was God's favorite angel until he took that grand catapult down down deep down and stayed forever. The devil hath power to assume beautiful shape, she has read somewhere before, and damn those curls for they're the baby's breath in the bouquet of his angel face.
[gluttony]
His eyes are hell on her heart, and she has seen them in many ways.
There's the crazy way where he appears anything but human with that stress that she can tell will weigh on what's left of his soul for many lifetimes to come. There's the innocent way where he prints poetry on her collarbone and prose on the graceful column of her neck, stains symphonies on her bloodied pink pout, nothing but a boy that loves a girl. No more no less. There's the anger and the rage and the overly compensating fuck you that boils that beautiful evergreen into sickly acid and makes her stomach turn over, clench in fear because she is not afraid, never afraid of him like this like a monster.
(She is more terrified when he is saying those three words over and over with those forest tinted orbs memorizing the planes of her face and the swerve of her hips and the the everything, all of it, too much.)
[greed]
The tone of his voice changes depending on his mood. She had noticed this long ago, how bad the day was or good the night was added or depleted how he was going to speak, let the sentences be chopped and bitter or long and languorous, admiring or loathing, but with her, always and only with her – she was the exception to his rules.
Each honey coated breath of (dead) air hitched in his throat, choked him bringing death in yet another instant because fuck it all he is trapped and guess what he is stuck and then she came and all of a sudden it was like he would die time and time over to ensure that the angel of death's face was Violet's.
Because he said it, you know, it. And for the first time in ever and the hundred years of solitude and hundred more and eternity of hell after wards he has meant it because violet, I love you.
[pride]
They read Keats this one time with her being held by him, his left hand resting on her forehead, the cool metal of the silver plated ivy ring imprinting on her skin.
She never asks him where he got it or what it means to him, why he never takes the godforsaken thing off his finger.
[wrath]
Guilt eats away, dehydrating every pore on her dead flesh, and still some part of her screams out in protest to forgive and forgive and forgive because if this is her forever then she will not fucking waste it on some boy that she thought she wanted but cannot have.
I love you.
She can still hear his contained sobs, see the scorched rim of his evergreen eyes, feel the pulsating rage off his bone skin, taste the salt of the tears on his ragged cheeks, smell the fear of rejection emanating.
I can't forgive you.
Sometimes she wonders if she could, I mean shit, she only has eternity to make up her mind. But really she decided a long time ago (love is forgiveness silly girl, she can practically hear Constance in her head).
[envy]
You died loved, he whispers to her, warm air flushing against her cheek, his fingers tracing delicate lines of hearts on her spine.
He did not die loved she had known from the moment that she saw the newspapers. She isn't even sure he lived loved, but she can love him now even if it uses her all up, even if it sends her into a crazy oblivion that she isn't even sure exists in her world or his world.
You're all I want, she tells him and means it. She's never had something to call her own, never wanted anything to call her own, until now at least. He grins at her that magnificent grin that gives her heart palpitations and makes her soul lurch forward in the cavity of her body saying something like let me out cause I finally feel like we've got something that feels like home. She lights another cigarette, the embers burning deep brimstone orange against her bloodied pink mouth.
[sloth]
They will try for eons to stay even if the other ones knows nothing of it. He has stood outside her bedroom door for decades understanding that he will not be let in though she waits and listens to him breathing on the opposite side of the wood. She has lingered in the basement threshold for twice as long memorizing the way his smirk is carved into those cheekbones but only when he is thinking about her and the recollection of her naked form pressed tightly against his.
Some days she'd sleep in the bathtub, her tawny reams of hair flowing out the side, cool water covering her from head to toe, sucking in eucalyptus and sandalwood from the candles he had lit in the adjacent room knowing she'd venture back his way. He would crack the door and watch her rest, admire the jaded purple punches of her eyes and the lithe swoop of her collarbone, and dangerously dangle his face so close that he almost touches her lips.
Some days he stands with his back to the stained glass windows in the study, their opal and turquoise, crimson and molten gold, casting a fantastic slash on his features that she quietly reserves from her spot in the hallway. He can feel her there, gazing at him like he is the second coming, but he never turns around for fear that she will run and lock herself away and he will cease to understand once more.
x
[love]
She feels his hand travel down the highway of her naked back, how he shudders little delights on her shoulders, the guiding of his fingers instructing her to hold his hips, how he needs to be tamed, needs to be leashed, and she sees it when he rolls her body toward him, how scared he is in his forest colored eyes: just a little boy that needs to be held, needs to be remembered. And god how that look terrifies her.
I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU WEREN'T AFRAID OF ANYTHING.
It echoes in brilliant shadow of breaking glass and his cries are louder and the memory snaps her in pieces, so she does the only thing she can think of to do because shit, really, she can do this, and when she opens the door, his ivy ringed hand is already slammed up to the frame and reaching for her because violet, I love you and she knows because—
he'd burn the world down just to dig her out of its ashes.