One winter, he finds a she-wolf caught in a trap. She is slavering and mindless with pain and fear, ready to tear off her own limbs to escape. With aura-coated hands he keeps her teeth at bay and loosens the trap. Taiyang is a man who wrangles with beowolves twice his size, often using only his bare fists. A wriggling she-wolf is no problem for him.
He keeps her in the barn for a bit, tending to her until the day he decides she has healed enough, and lets her run away. Not once does he entertain the romantic fantasy of keeping her, a young Androcles and his loyal companion. He'd had his heart broken once by a wild thing. But that was when he was a boy.
He knows better now.
Yet he can't help but think of that she-wolf when he opens the door to his house and finds Raven on the verge of death. A bloody trail leads straight from a shattered window to where she is curled up in his living room, a hand pressed to her side to try and stem the bleeding.
"Help," she says, but there's no pleading tone to her voice. She demands it, teeth grit, eye wild and unsteady. "Help me, for the love of god!"
Taiyang drops everything in his arms. Groceries go spilling across the floor. He runs, skidding to a halt in front of her as he drops to his knees and tears her hands away from the gaping wound. "Why isn't your aura-?"
"No more. Drained it all in a fight and got bit right after!"
This is bad. This is so bad. His hand comes away red and sticky; he presses it to her cheek, forcing her to look up at him. There's no fear in her eyes, only anger, something fiery and all-consuming. Hunger, maybe.
"I'm calling an ambulance, hold on. You hold on, understand me?"
An iron grip locks around his throat; Raven drags him closer. "No hospitals," she says, her voice little more than a rasping wheeze. "Just relax."
Taiyang is confused, terrified that he is about to watch his partner die. Raven was his first girlfriend, the woman who left him, the woman he loves still in spite of all the pain she causes him.
Then he feels loss, an emptiness so cavernous and immense that he can't ever hope to escape it on his own.
Holding Raven's gaze, Taiyang feels her slowly drain his aura away to supplement hers. Their breathing is ragged, alternating his inhale to her exhale. And then they start to breathe as one, the coils of her power wrapping around his soul and pulling him closer than they had ever been before.
A single teardrop slides down his cheek.
He feels in her the immediacy of a wild animal, the madness of an everlasting "now". Nothing further than the next meal, the next hunt, sustenance and consumption and conquest. It beats like the heart of a bird in his bloody palm, and when it's over Raven slumps against him, fast asleep.
When she wakes up the next day, she is scarred terribly from the fight. Taiyang tears her clothes off and blackmails her until she takes a shower. When she is freshly scrubbed and clean she finds him hunched over the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
"Thanks," she says. Her palm is still damp when she smooths it over his wild blond hair; he looks up at her with a guarded expression. "You're a good man, Taiyang." She caresses his cheek. "You're my man. Always."
"Put some pants on," he grumbles, glancing away.
She finds some of Summer's clothes. Holds them to her chest and inhales deeply before putting them on. "Where are the others?"
"Summer is in Atlas training with some of their elite," Taiyang says, his fingers tapping out an anxious rhythm on the table. "Qrow is in some desert trading post, lost in Vacuo last I heard."
Raven leans over, takes his chin to plant a kiss on his lips. She does it with no hesitation or question, taking him the way she takes everything. "Good. Tell them I miss them, when they return."
He wrenches his face away. "I'm not telling them a damn thing. You want to send a message, do it yourself!" He gets up from his chair to glare at her, shocked, as always, how she meets him head-on. He's so used to Summer and Qrow looking up at him; Raven's exactly his height.
But in the end, his anger simmers down from the sheer futility of it. You might as well hold a grudge against a hurricane as hold one against Raven Branwen. "You can stay for just a little bit," he says, looking away from her. "Just until you feel better. But you have to leave."
She puts a hand on his face, fondly scraping the stubble there. And then her palm trails down the center of his chest, popping open every button on its path. Raven undresses him casually, grabbing him by the belt buckle and yanking him closer until they are chest to chest.
"So I'll stay the night," she promises him, full of wicked pleasure at the idea. "Just as a thank-you for helping me out today."
Both hands work apart his belt and fly, her teeth scraping out a path down the twitching, sculpted grooves of his abdominal muscles. He thinks of his hands, not even twenty hours previously, soaked in her blood. He sees the scars criss-crossing her body, the punishment for not letting nature take its course and heal through time. He has no such scars; she comments on his perfection, as always, the satin softness of his skin as she takes him in her mouth.
Later, she kisses his brow as he lies in bed, sore and aching and drenched in sweat and sex.
"You're my man, Taiyang," she promises him, kissing him again, and again.
And then she leaves.
