If the Kingbreaker can be content- perhaps- he is content to watch our hero’s expressions for a while. Not simply the expressions of his face, of which there are so many subtle variations, but those of his long, soft body, and the distribution of weight upon his fragile feet, and the tremor of his pulse just behind his flexing jaw. The white heart on his ashen shoulder flickers to a beat when his muscles shift just so. Upon the jut of his narrow hip, the bladed, bone-bright marking jags toward his knee so brutally that the ripple of his leg settling seems gruesome, and so dearly tender; where is the exposed meat in this rift in his frail body? There are no flashing veins; no gleaming femur. But he is exposed, his dear, daring, devilish hero. -And ready to expose in turn, with a question so swift it twists out of his mouth and into the Kingbreaker’s hovering, arching throat like a knife.

“Should I call you something else?”

“Should…” whispers the beast, almost breathless with the weight of the word, his face stone but his eyes brighter, brighter, upon the deep golden shadows of Rehoboam’s woodland gaze.

“No, my love, you should not call me anything but the Kingbreaker.” His black mouth, for a moment, trembles- neither smile nor frown but captured in some unbearable purgatory between. Under the twisting bramble of his forelock, his brow is not quite still. “As I should call you nothing but a nickname if I am to prove my love for you, isn’t that so-” Reh, a little puff of breath, sweet and fleeting- a momentary flutter of butterfly wings against his dark, dry lips- “Rehoboam.” The full name fills his mouth, and rolls in it like a summer storm, and lingers in a long and thunderous M that does not so much fade as deepen to tones his ear could no longer hear, but that resonate within the marrow of his bones, still here, still here- a name that, still alive, could haunt. He could relate.

“You should not call me Friend, nor Love,” he murmurs, watching the silken continents of Rehoboam’s features shift, velvet shores drawing near and apart, raising ripples of silver where they creased the oceans of his sleek face. His hero’s brow might be cut by the weight of a crown, so fragile is the soft glow of his ashen skin. He watches the pieces on the board so raptly. What do all the things hiding in the dappled sunlight of his stare wish to make of themselves? “You should not call me Dear, nor Safe, nor Precious.” A warning; a threat, but more than any of the brutal words of unbridled affection he had lain on our hero’s shoulders like cutting weights, these are said with a faded softness; a bruised and tender lightness so hushed it shies from touching Rehoboam’s noble hairline with his breath, wisping into nothingness just beyond the dry, cold seam of his iron mouth.

“Least of all should you call me Echion. Rehoboam.”

In the heavy, heavy silence after this- his metal mouth stripped of coal, stripped of bone, stripped of blood, just an empty iron cage, the beast it had held circling between them with that word upon its black head- his eyes upon his hero’s quiet, calculating, not-quite-worried face are dull. Not with regret- not for shedding that word, nor for loosing it upon him now like a ghoulish hound. But there are eons of decisions between that word and what stands before Rehoboam now. Can he hear that, as he heard the hollow ring of the Kingbreaker’s new one? He’s the first, and there is a part of the monster that wonders at this; a part of him that dreads it. Cauterize it. Continue.

“But you’re clever. Rehoboam.” Its own statement; always his name is its own careful segment in his words, standing, brazen and unbroken by false familiarity, alone in his mouth. Adored and alien, and rumbling in the backs of his molars long after it’s done. Haunting.

“You knew that already, didn’t you, my love?”