He knows that if she ever finds out just how much he is hers, just how much his soul, his self, aches for her, it could be his undoing. He has long learned that he is not meant to want. Men made monsters are meant to hole out in hideaways locked far from the tenderness of other people. And he is, was, undoubtedly, kept on the outskirts. On purpose. By choice. Or, perhaps he has only convinced himself it is by choice.
Truthfully, it is because he was unwanted: an outsider, even in the DWMA where the weirdos all collect and find solidarity. So, he kept himself in an empty lab, hoarding trinkets he could undo and remake, textbooks, beakers. He was a dragon in the belly of the lab and he knew it, and he knew no one sane would ever step foot, willingly, into such a graveyard.
But she does. She did, before, too. Marie does. And he wonders if he has been hers since she did so, or since he first saw her, when she was a little girl with little fists and too much destruction in her veins. He knows he is hers, now. Perhaps he always was, perhaps he was since she came back into his life, once more, brought color to the gray of his home.
He had always been slate, steel. Cold and frigid, his eyes a needle-like stare with unearthly green that resembled nothing in nature. No one could claim he had eyes like grass, like leaves. Perhaps if those leaves were dead, one could make the comparison. But, no one had seen his eyes up close for long, either. He hid, always. In his lab, on the outskirts, behind glasses, under long, shaggy gray hair.
It is because he is hers that she can see him. It is because he is hers, has always been hers, that he lets her push his hair back and observe his eyes as they lay down together, side by side. His legs are curled up, tangling with her own, and her hands are soft and gentle and his mouth feels dry, lined with words he feels but cannot say, does not know how to say. For all his eloquence, all his education, he is unable to articulate, now, when it most counts.
And yet, Marie smiles. And women like Marie do not smile at men made monsters, so he supposes he is just what she has always seen him as: painfully human in every way. Her fingers trace over his self inflicted scars and the scars he did not cause and she steps willingly into the graveyard of his stare.
"You know…you have a lot of gold in your eyes," she says, and he knows only she could find warmth where he had merely saw frost, before.
He does not know how to tell her that it is because she is there, now. Metaphorical apple of his eye, her light a reflection in his iris. He does not know how to tell her how he feels, what he feels, but he knows she can feel it in their resonance.
So he only smiles, soft and rare, lips tipped up just barely at the edges.
He does not know how to tell her that he is hers, but perhaps she already knows, knows just how much he belongs to her, has fallen for her and to her. Perhaps he is already undone, unwound. And, as her glowing fingers trace the scar beneath his eye, her wavelength thrumming against him, her lips parting to speak of another color she has found in his stare, he thinks that, with her, he has never truly been on the outskirts, after all.
Whoops. I've been writing a TON over on Tumblr and Ao3 and sort of started to neglect FF D: Sorry, y'all.