He had known, of course, that Cullen would be angry. He had been waiting for it, restless in all his churning body for the confrontation, and yet the eager, frightened heat within him, which had been his constant companion for years, had seemingly been hollowed from his vibrating corpse, and though his body was unable to sit still, his mind was a bleak sort of blankness. He had thought he'd given up years ago, and that he'd lived all this time in surrender, but perhaps that had been a mere step and he had, finally, let himself plunge off the cliff's edge.

It seemed to take him so much longer to come after him than Varanduil expected, but he knew that couldn't be true, because Cullen was always swift and full of purpose, and in his wrathful face as he approached was only the purpose of flaying open Varanduil's bronze breast to reach his small and fluttering heart. When he did appear, it was with a horrible sort of gravity; even furious- no, especially furious- he was something exquisite to behold, and Varanduil watched him roil through the trees to him without moving, struck by the molten passion contorting his beautiful face. He couldn't have run from the weight of Cullen's storming presence if he'd wanted to- and he didn't want to. He had wondered once what those writhing shadows beneath Cullen's mirror-surface could do to him- would do to him, because it could only be a matter of time, with Varanduil- and the marrow of his fragile bones still sang to find out now.

He had expected far more than a bite.

Perhaps, he thought, almost disappointed, he had expected Cullen would drive him down into the dirt and churn it muddy with the last of his blood.

But he would take his teeth, if Cullen offered them so heatedly- and he did take them, without flinching, though the force of Cullen's marble mouth made him stagger. His golden leader did not recoil after the strike, but remained face to face, nearly brow to crumpled brow and mouth to pining mouth with him. Had Cullen ever stood so directly with him..? Ever faced him so closely or looked at him so seriously? Varanduil couldn't recall a time, for all his murmured sweetnesses and serious, matter-of-fact gifts, and his intimate, impassioned presence now, sharing swift breaths, left him dazed.

Quietly adoring every furious line of his face with his dazzled dark eyes, Varanduil listened to him in hushed reverence, and though he knew he shouldn't make Cullen wait for a reply, for a moment he was struck silent by the resplendence of his wrath. When he found his voice, it was barely a voice at all, but rather the long lone tremor of a single violin string.

"Yes, you've given me everything. More than I will ever deserve or know how to repay. I couldn't even keep him for you." Cullen's twisting, furious mouth was so beautiful, the soft, luminous pink of it so translucently vulnerable around a heated snarl. He wanted to touch him so badly that it was making his stomach sour with a wanting fear. "He didn't need to be an enemy. I thought..." Admitting a pointless, failed plan to Cullen, who drove to every goal with such proud confidence, was wounding in a way he hadn't expected, even though Cullen was surely accustomed to expecting nothing but failure from Varanduil by now. "...I thought he cared for our brothers as we did. I thought he might stay, and see you save them, and see you... See you. As I see you. I thought he would- it doesn't matter, does it..? For all his talk about you, about himself, it was his own loyalty that was cheap. Conditional," he sneered in quavering disgust, though whether at a child's well-intentioned cruel lies or his own pathetic gullibility for believing them heartfelt, even he wasn't sure.

"But mine isn't," he whispered with conviction, staring through his lashes at the flaring wrinkle of Cullen's pale nose as if focusing on Cullen's golden, ireful gravity was the only thing keeping his dizzy legs from giving out beneath him, "and I'll pay for both of us."