His love was like a tender bruise. The repeated pounding of a mallet upon freshly slaughtered cattle, to be prepared for an exquisite meal. A will to be shaped with all the gentleness of a butcher providing for his family.
Ryou did not pretend that this love was a wholesome one. He knew precisely that he was being used.
But he did not care in the slightest.
After the never-placated death that followed him on burning heels, his presence was a salve of stinging nettles upon his pride and mind. Cruelly-cut eyes of fractured garnet watched his every move with the warm precision of an assassin counting steps and corners.
He was never alone - that much was true. Oftentimes there was a distinct feeling of being herded and his will stripped of him in the most brutal of manners. More than that was the dizzying sensation of time slipping through his fingers like sand set on fire.
Mind and body and soul. These were naught but lands to be conquered, snatched with the calculating curiosity of pushing boundaries.
It was an almost demeaning relationship of give-and-take. A constant, consistent test of who could bow and flex to the demands of both this world and the one beyond before snapping like a shoot of frozen bamboo before the onslaught of a terrifying white-out.
They both needed each other - a gruesome fact that was never acknowledged. One to right the wrongs of a desperate world and ease the incessant terrors of the past; the other to find a foothold and significance in an age of anonymity and nonchalance, to escape the terrible truths of forced desertion.
Both carried bruises, never treated with the healing touch of genuine care. And after so long, those subcutaneous wounds became a part of them, unwilling to let the lessons of those marks fade into the past. It was their chosen tortures to complete their endgames, to display these bruises with a bitter grin.
Like pieces of a puzzle cut with a dull, warped blade, their jagged edges cut into each other and filled the places that others dared not encroach upon. Contrary to the belief of those who knew them best - and, truly, they never knew either of them at all - their very ability to mutilate was what drew and kept them together.
Kin too close for blood to unite except in the most ephemeral of measures, they were truly wound around each other. Much like the never-healing bruise of a meal meant for the lords.