couque d'asse, binch

He couldn't help it. All colony commanders were especially trained never to let their thoughts tether to comforts that emerged outside of battle - as if there was anything. While they all were enlisted and entangled since birth, at the age of ten, the lower ranks had a reliable sort of ebb and flow, with the colony duties taking ebb and the battles' end tides taking flow. Perhaps vice versa; it didn't matter.

What did matter was that Zeon found himself intensely concentrated on the tactics and scores of his current occupation, something which he had been, lifelong, entirely indisposed to correlating as particularly battle-like in any appreciably romantic way. It was only once the situation presented itself that he saw the pieces fall into place.

Maybe Teach saw the beauty in it, the...rawness. The abandon that set this well aside. Of fingers on ears and wings, bruises on hands and hips. Eyes locked with righteously disabled Irises, the only possible communication of information purely that human.

He gasped, and it wasn't an admission of weakness. Teach slumped over him, spent, and it wasn't a sign of surrender.

A gentle cushion of the beautiful unknown carried them through the night.