They had bonded through blood - Once foes, now more, and less, than that. Sirius could comprehend the depth of his feelings, for they bloomed before him in obvious colors, so stark and brilliant that he couldn't imagine having never seen them, couldn't imagine his bleak winter world without them. Such sensory pain and pleasure entwined, until the man couldn't understand why it had taken them so long, why it had never been this way before. But the question was answered by its own silence - Only now, in the wake of this loss and this betrayal, could they be such a thing, could they see such a splendid hue.
He had buried a dagger deep in a man's back for this. Kingslayer. Had watched the red stain his hands and chest, stain his vision with the fear that perhaps another life had been stolen from his grasp. But it had not - The eagle had lived through that battle, had survived the war, and they had crept away to their dark and secret places to lick clean the wounds that festered inside and out.
But Ezekiel had never healed. Perhaps he could never heal. In his eyes festered the infection still, the infection of battle and bloodshed, the terrible disease of the beast. He could not return to the crown he had once held, could not fit his face back into the mask that had been torn off. Sirius was more sinuous than that, and knew adaptation as survival, knew cunning as life. They were the same, and yet, eternally different.
The man crumbled against him, and as the sobs wracked his body, Sirius held him close, shared his warmth. His iron muscles supported the weight of the wanderer, allowing himself to slide to the ground, to buffer that form until both knelt on the dark earth, heads resting against one another. The broken man was slumped, and still his body craved it, still his blood rushed for it. A hand that lingered on one cheek traced a path over his throat, the pulse there, down to rest above his heart. The touch was warm, for although reptilian, he was a man, and a mortal.
"Stay," He said again, a soft voice that whispered like the wind, soothed and hissed and rattled in his chest. "Just one night more, stay with me." He could ask no more, and not again, for the words stuck like bones in his throat, and he was moving again to pin the other man's body against the ground with his own.
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