It was silly, really, that he would need to repeat this every night. That his throbs and aches would push him, again and again, over the edge of reason until only she could pull him back. In the coldness of a metal fortress, built on magnetism and sharp with rebellion, he always seemed unable to stop himself from guiding his way with a burning hand to her room, which was never locked to him when he came in the night to bow to her touch and whisper in reverence everything he failed to say when they lived in a far different time. When the hint of war was nothing at all and they were safe in a school of thoughts and dreams and wishful thinking. There, he had stayed locked inside himself, steady as a candle's flame in a windowless room, until one day war wasn't just a far off blur, but was as clear as the pictures on the evening news.
How he, the wildfire pyromaniac, and she, the untouchable rogue, came to be on the same side in a war that was suddenly all around them, he would never understand. He only knew that he had left to fight and she had followed later. And in a place where one could die without cause or warning, the rules of the old mansion were not more than distant memories of simpler times. Now, without curfew or control, he nightly walks through the cold hallways almost against his will to the only person he can erase himself with. She no longer asks him what he needs when she sees his hungry eyes, or murmurs in surprise and confusion when his flames jump to light up her room in the dead of night, reflecting off metallic walls and heating the mountain air.
As he kneels at her bedside, looking up at her lying with hair splayed out and cheeks flushed pink, he doesn't speak anymore, like he did those first few nights, when his wonder at her appearance was new to them both and his words were tangled and ill-put. He only takes her toxic palms in his, covers his tear streaked face with their slender forgiveness and draws off the silk that protects and mocks him. The dark presses into his eyes, into his heart, into his mind, and he can't take it, won't have it, doesn't want it. Not anymore. Desperation falls to relief as her cool fingers trace wet cheeks, slick eyelashes, cracked lips. And slowly he feels what he hates most inside dragged out of him like shards of glass, broken and useless, wounds that infect him with hatred and fear. All of his hidden alibis, tainted motivations, and burnt out dreams come rushing to meet her hands, as if wishing to see the light of consciousness and acknowledgement just one time after being locked away in his heart for an eternity.
And when her power has numbed his pain, taking away what cannot remain, he is a better man for it, and rises, only to fall like he always does to her gaze and appeal. He is broken inside, but she holds him together with steady hands and soft lips. He lays, submissive in his speechless need, while the pyro now inside of her takes control, acting on his own hidden desires and forsaken lust. Naked hands rape sweating skin, scratch deeper meaning, rip out of his gasping mouth unwilling moans and whimpers of need. He hates to admit it even to himself that he needs to be controlled sometimes, that he can't be the strong one all the time, and so only when she pulls out of him his own twisted exhaustion with dominance does he acquiesce to her ravaging. He listens to his own words come out of her mouth, as she rises up and sinks down in sweaty passion, as her mutation stops working for lack of anything left inside of him to grasp, as he secretly embraces the loss of himself. When he digs his fingertips into her hips and can't hardly breathe with the intensity of nothing of what he is left inside to hold back his catharsis of pleasure, heat, love; then he is finally free.
Her lips crush to his, wanting more, demanding more, and he is hardly surprised, because after all it is his own need that is burning inside her, urging her on, hot with want. And after she has taken everything he can and can't give, after he is so dead to himself he cannot even remember his own name, he finds himself saying hers. Because for every scrap of his soul she rips out of him, another of hers is thrust into him, letting him see exactly what she sees in him when he comes to her at night, crumbling and uncertain. With the turmoil that normally fills him up to the bursting point suddenly gone, he is empty and weak, but clarity has finally come. Her name tumbles numbly down from his lips with a finality he scarcely shows anymore.
"Marie."