art: @nikhio (twitter/ig)
Shotgun with my love.
He needs you just as badly as you need him. Clinging to you for comfort and hope like the sweat clings to your skin when he runs his hands along your skin . He likes to hear you beg because it alllws him to hear how much you crave him. The confirmation he needs to feel like he can breathe. Inhale, exhale, growling and grasping at you like his last breathe, afraid you’ll disintegrate beneath him like everything else he’s every loved.
He believes you when you say your his, but he doesn’t feel like he deserves it. He doesn’t want to feel like he needs you. The comfort and safety of being alone helps him to keep going, to keep doing what he’s always done, stay alive, just to feel the pain spreading into his limbs reminding him of the toxic he was. But you pushed through that, you stayed long enough to make him believe he was worth more. Worth trying to reach. Not to fix him, but to show him that he wasn’t alone. You may not have a quirk that destroys you from the inside, but the pain you felt was real and you knew he shared that pain.
It wasn’t much, what you had to give. Just time, and the willingness to listen. To see past the scars and the choices he’s made into the one thing that mattered, his willingness to be who you saw him to be. Someone with fears, and hope, and feeling, not the numb human husk he imagined himself to be. Your presence brought him comfort, your words brought him reprieve from the storm constantly clouding his mind. Your touch, the salve to the wounds that were too deep to see. He needed you, just as much as you needed him. Every moment you had together, no matter how small keeping the spark to his flames ignited.
