I see visions. I see you when I close my eyes. Not just in dreams, but also in the colors that paint the backs of my eyelids, color my vision when there's nothing to see. I find you buried in my bones, your words like Braille carved between the notches of a hundred moons. I see ghosts.

The wind outside howls prayers like hallelujah and eli eli, and I am on my knees, a sinner and a saint. Don't lay your cross on my back, carved from your paranoia like lead. Don't point at me when you crucify yourself, hung up before the crowd, with you the martyred aristocrat, and I, your original sin. What do you imagine was my price? Thirty pieces of silver with which to destroy us both?

But I am the weak one. I am withered and broken, driftwood after the storm in your mind (in your body. Magic like angry wind swirling at your fingertips, violence and hate.) I could annihilate you, do you realise? Do you think about this when my teeth tear at your flesh, when my mouth is on your neck? (Not that you are defenseless, with landmines in your skin. Small explosions of terrifying feeling, I feel them with my fingers, but you are not immune to their shrapnel.) It would be so simple. I have suffered, but you would suffer more, no longer an outcast of your own making but the stuff of legends.

And we are legend. We are epic. Your hips on my hips are a million words wound through the pages of history. Our story is the story of time, written before we were born, carved in the heavy stones of the ancients with magic long extinct. We struggle and resist, but we are just petulant children who can't yet see the futility of it (but I am beginning to see.) I begin to notice. Just give me this, give me sanctuary, give me safe passage. Let me have this memory for memory's sake (memorize the lines of your hands, your cheeks, your legs around my waist), because I can't bear to forget. And when your fingertips press bruises into my flesh, and when your gray-dagger eyes fly at me with a sound like don't bloody ruin this, and panting breath and creaking bone, I will pretend not to notice all the things I wish I didn't notice (the cold, growing shadow between us on the bed.)

Stay with me. Stay silent and stay whole, your whole self against me, pleads like please and more hide their meanings in the shadows of lust and the shadows beneath your eyes (please don't let go and more than anything, always.)

You tell me to be quiet, to preserve the momentum, but what are you afraid I will say? That I know you? That I know your doubts, your thoughts, the twisted wreckage of your mind, and I am still here (even though you are not, not really)? What are you afraid of, your own shame? The shame that keeps your eyes closed when my mouth is on your skin. Are you ashamed of sleeping with the enemy or of the fact that you have made an enemy of the one you're sleeping with?

It would be alright, the loss and the leaving, if you didn't come back to me in fleeting moments of sanity when my fingertips scrape raw and bloody through the suspicion in your eyes and find your thoughts, hidden in your head, mangled by the fear in the air, the fear that floods your lungs. Because in those moments, I am not alone. And this is my greatest weakness (this is the reason I am still here, tangled in ice-cold sheets in the naked morning light. Alone.) You are more than a chink in my armor; you are a tear in my flesh, a bone-deep wound that aches to be covered, protected. But I let you reopen it, night after night, with gentle fingertips on the lines of my hips and silent lips on the back of my neck.