It’s when he sees you smiling and laughing, always carefree, lounging leaning on whatever would support your weight with the demeanor of a lanky teenager.
It’s when he sees you fight better than someone half your age. Your rangy frame and wiry muscles working with unexpected speed and strength and viciousness, beating down threats when they thought you had lost the advantage granted by your rifle. They were always wrong.
It’s when he sees you with that skag only you would name Fluffy, rolling and wrestling and hugging, not caring even a little when he licks your face, shrugging off any scratches, always maintaining your dominant place in the hierarchy even when the animal could bite your head off.
It’s when he sees you with your rifle raised and eye on the scope. Standing, crouching, lying down; regardless, your aim is perfect. He likes to watch you then, see you breathe in and out and pause for that instant in which you pull the trigger. The way you grin with a perfect shot to the head, the ease with which you show your strength, the exhilaration of the easy kill and the reminder of how often you’ve done it before.
It’s when you come home after a job, tired and sweaty and, if he’s there, sparing a little while to embrace him, even when he playfully tries to squirm away. He never actually does. It’s just easier than admitting that he always wants you. Wanting someone is still strange. It’s easier to pretend that he’s capable of resisting you, even a little.
It’s when he thinks about your past as a bandit, as someone who killed and took indiscriminately and without mercy, when you wore paint on your face and had another name. He wonders if you would have killed him, had you met back then. Probably. The thought makes him curl in on himself, because then he wouldn’t have had a chance to know you.
It’s when you pin him down, teeth marking his shoulders and the back of his neck, always able to overpower him but adoring how difficult he liked to make it sometimes. He liked testing strength, yours and his own, until he’s utterly lost in the physicality of the moment and there isn’t an inch of space between you both, throaty growling grunts interspersed with husky laughter.
It’s when he thinks about you in civilization. No rifle on your back, no goggles on your face, in a place where something callled the law would take issue whenever you punch someone and nobody else knows how to survive like you do. He thinks you’d last a month. But he’s sure you’d love the food.
It’s even when your temper rears and no-one can get too close, when irrational anger makes you push everyone away. It never lasts for long and it stings every time, but he knows that someone who feels as strongly as you do will have troubles. It never stops him from wanting to help.
It’s when he’s curled up close, watching starlight on your skin, looking over scars he wishes he could have prevented, when he listens to your heart, when he tastes the salt on your skin with his lips and enjoys the warmth you provide on cold desert nights, when he feels safe and protected and and an overwhelming desire to make you feel the same way, little as you might need it, apex predator that you are.
It’s then that Sebastian is reminded that he had always loved wild things.