Prompt by @the-modern-typewriter : It is a terrible thing to want happiness but not know what to do with peace, because we were raised on war and I learnt to love you fighting. But you love gently, arms laid down, and that is not the version of you I fell in love with.
When I first met you, you snarled at me from the shadows. You were dark eyes and thorned words wrapped in shattered glass and steel cords. Blood poured down from your nose and from the knives clutched in your bruised hands. Yet like a moth pulled towards the flame, I was drawn to the defiance poured into every line of you. And, somehow, irrevocably, you were drawn to me too.
You taught me what it was like to be rain after a storm - lying wanting and exhausted in a puddle at your feet.
We stole hellfire kisses in trenches and ruined streets, amid choking smoke. I learned how to sear want into your skin with my mouth. How to feed hunger into your eyes, and bite at it from between your thighs. When your touch lanced lightning through my body, I kissed the thunder from your lips and learned how to make love to a storm.
We may not have been made of blood and fire, but fire and blood made us. So when the dust settled, when there were no bodies left but ours, you caught my gaze from across the battlefield and I despaired. Because how could flames stay alive with no fuel nor oxygen?
But you knew how to simmer instead of burn.
You dripped honey instead of poison from your lips for me and traded your serrated blades for cautious fingertips that made me ache for more. You branded kisses into my skin, bit at the hunger on my lips, and on rainy nights we were a hurricane. You held, never gripped. Asked, never expected. You gave, and gave, and gave, and gave, and slowly I remembered how to give in return.
I knew the weight and breadth of your voice so I learned how to listen to the silence and the noise between. I learned how to guide air back into your lungs with kisses on the nights the ghosts sucked the wind out of your lungs. I knew how to catch your hand when your fingers sought mine, and on rare occasions when my heart was light, I returned your smile just to watch yours grow brighter.
Slowly but surely, I learned how to love you in the aftermath, when the war left your knives and my fists but lingered in our eyes.
We were not meant for peace, my love, but we learned to manage the quiet.