Chapitre 2: 2.

August's heart thumps louder than thunder whenever he looks into those eyes. Intense and with the depth of the sea, he stopped seeing them as heavenly deep wells of liquid sapphire long ago; it was the moment when his crumbling yearning, pulverised from gut-churning disgust, grew into paralysing fear.

Similar to now when he can barely speak, utter a sound, let alone a word. His tongue and mouth are frozen like his arms. He can barely hold himself together or stand up. He trembles and shivers, knees digging into frosty blades of green as the ice spreads and saps the warmth of the Divines from him.

Every time—every single time—he's failed to voice the words sitting on the tip of his tongue. He remembers the gut-wrenching loathe burning in Nathan's eyes. The twist of his lips pulled back to bare his pearly-white teeth in a vicious snarl, and his slender, calloused fingers curled in a vice-like grip around the hilt of his unsheathed sword.

How 'My heart blooms for you' turned into 'Why do you keep hurting me?' and 'Care for Marcel... Please?' into 'How could you kill a blameless child?!'

Because, of course, he must be the villain. The enemy. Cut down. Again, and again, and again. Always the villain, always the enemy, always under his gleaming blade.

"Where this flower bloomed, you never cared where your feet stepped, did—"

The iron tang of crystalising blood fills his mouth, and August exhales hoarsely.

He keeps dying under no one else's hands but Nathan's.

(A small, sealed part of him agonises over this unfairness. How's he to face Marcel without feeling pink flesh and white bone spilling red down his frostbitten arms?)