Chapter Text
For as much as he values her mind and defiant nature, one she worked so hard to turn gentle, he cannot deny his appreciation for her body. Beyond his greed for her soft hips, the hunger for plush lips, the need to devour because by God this woman is beautiful- there’s the familiarity of it all.
Because with the same certainty that broad hands find her hips, he knows they’ll slide upwards, fingers spreading to slot into the deep crevices between her ribs. They never fill out, a testament to their history, each rib a life lost, spent gnawing on bare bones and drinking watery slog that didn’t pass for soup even by the most optimistic of minds; reminder of hunger so glaringly obvious she might’ve been months from starving for how well-fed she looks beneath her chemise.
He knows them like he knows his own. Knows her ribs, frail and so unbelievably -artificially- compact, knows the exact shape his hands need to form to accommodate her. Knows them like he knows his own, cracked and aching after a fight he could’ve avoided, never as pronounced as hers, but always there, visible beneath the surface, because they both suffered.
He knows her inside and out, plush lips moving against his in a dance long rehearsed, known to them for near a century. He knows her kiss the way he knows his own heartbeat, knows the scars along the insides of her cheeks, lining the seam of her lips from worrying at it with her teeth with the same assuredness that he knows his own lead fillings, knows that she no longer feels the pain of ripping flesh from the cavity of her mouth.
But she knows him too, and doesn’t that fill him with pride? She knows the beat of his heart beneath his ribs, the buzzing of bees in the rumble of his laughter; knows those fillings that he now knows would’ve killed him with their toxicity, likely before he even reached his forties, as intimately as he does, despite never having had them hammered into her cavities.
It’s an eternal dance, familiarity accumulated through openness and judgement not of it, but of reasons it might be prevented. She knows his crooked nose, and he the roughness of her scarred and calloused hands against his skin. He knows her and she knows him, body and mind, heart and soul.