tsuyu; male; no mate; no imprint

tsuyu
three
male
black

motley and nondescript. a mess of legs and angles, points and curve of bone. he is conventionally unattractive, scruffy and scabbed, his coat skirting between black and a dark, slate grey. 28 inches high; weighs 58 pounds.

non-imprintable
deer

deerhotel @ aim
rules have been read.
200 word minimum.
old player returning.

he looks like a skeleton gone walking, the bright canvas of a bleeding artist with bruises littered like war marks – purpling teeth indents at his throat and collar, eye and sharp line of his cheekbone dark like the shrieking eye of a storm and when he touches them it burns, nips him like another set of teeth. students peer at him often: leer at him from creaking corners and he’s not sure what they know or if they can read it in the flaking lines of his flesh, the way gael had written scriptures across the opus of his throat and tarquin the comatose blue of his tongue.

first there had been hurt, bleeding and branding and it had lit the match to his smile, blew smoke down his throat until there was a rush of something white and now he’s mostly numb, wandering with wobbly legs with bones that barely works and he prefer it, he thinks, prefers it to the way his heart had grown a set of teeth and worked it’s languid way eating through the weeping flesh of his chest.

(he’s mostly rot now: old wood that’s been eaten and when you crack it open there’s only colonies of dead civilizations, termites that’d once prospered but now succumbed to the dust.)

he tries not to think of gael anymore: doesn’t think of tarquin or ísólf or ronin or anyone because he’s had enough, he thinks, of this – combusting like branches left to the mouth of a bushfire and maybe it had been better, before, when he was revolting (a body made of rubble and webs of silk spiders, beetles in the walls of his stomach and wasps in his eyes and nobody had wanted him then, nobody at all, and tsuyu had always known there was a reason.)

and yet –

he hadn’t known tarquin had wanted him and there’s a molten crackle like fire in his throat when he’s feeble enough to wonder at it, to needle beneath the uncomfortable weight that he’d done to someone what gael had to him and tsuyu had always been a giving boy, wants tarquin to smile like he had once without the carnal edge of loss and who was tsuyu not to give it to him, to press his eyes closed and breath in his scent like biting salt and dry leaves if that was what tarquin wanted?

tsuyu had done worse: he deserves less. would it be that terrible a fate to bare his neck to the boy with an animal inside him?

he’s got his books pressed to his chest and he can feel each shaky breath through the mesh-wire of his ribs as he settles at the door of ravenclaw’s common rooms – murmurs the password with a voice that’s wobbly and he’s had a headache since this morning, since he’d left the grounds when tarquin fled, when he’d set eyes on the fangs gael hid beneath his smile.

(the door swings open and tsuyu steps through and his cheek starts burning, stinging like bites from angry bull ants and he’s remembering clutching his face in his hands and weeping into the torn flesh of his palms; blotting a bloody nose with the sleeve of his robe which he’d first put in his hamper and then pressed to the bottom of his draw, kept it there with the button-down shirt gael had ruined, memories and a dresser he’s not brave enough to open.)

the curtains of the dormitory are drawn and he’s alone and first there’s something sharp like longing for a boy with paper skin and brown eyes, hands warm where they touch and tsuyu misses him with a ferocity that burns, runs rampant down his spine until he wobbles and the numb returns, soothes him like a woollen blanket while he’s being smothered.

it’s strangely cold but he tugs his robe off anyway, toes off his shoes and wanders to björn’s cage where he’s scrabbling at the walls, loud and agitated. he wasn’t much closer to the rodent but he’d been tsuyu’s only friend for a brittle count of days and he’d grown fond of something that can’t hurt him, can nip his fingers and draw blood but couldn’t trample his chest – take a handful of his heart and squeeze.

“är du okej?” he asks softly, presses a finger to the bars of his cage and his voice is loud in the silence, reminds him of things he’d rather it not and so then stays silent.