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“I hate you, I hate you,” you shout, slamming your palms against his chest. Your display of rage is undermined by the tremble in your voice and the tears that are threatening to spill over your cheeks at any moment.
“Please, pancake,” says Valko, letting you hit him, his face pained. Not because of the blows, but because he’s never been able to bear watching you cry. “If I could have been here, I would. It killed me every day I wasn’t here, knowing you wouldn’t know why, knowing you might think…”
“I needed you,” you choke out, your palms stilling to just rest on his warm, strong chest, a chest you’d love to just lie against, soaking up his warmth and listening to his heartbeat. “We’d only just… I’d only just started to feel like you could be mine, started to imagine you in my life. And then you went away.”
He wraps his arms around you then, cradling you against him and gently guiding you backwards, away from the cold air of the balcony and into your apartment. As he does, he nuzzles your hair, and you know he’s breathing you in, soaking up the scent you can’t sense but he swears smells like maple syrup and lily of the valley. You give in to it, relaxing against him, letting him take the weight not just of your exhausted body but of the grief you’ve been carrying for so many endless days.
“I didn’t know I would be gone, and I had no way to let you know,” he whispers against your ear. “I was locked up, kept somewhere dark with no metal in sight, and when I tried to fight…” A shudder runs through him. “I would have clawed my way through a thousand men to get to you if it had been an option. But I’m here now. I’m here now, and we’re going to do all the things we talked about, all the things you’ve been dreaming of. You… you have still been dreaming about them, right? You still want me?”
He pulls his head back to look at you, his golden eyes glistening, and seeing his usually cocky face so uncertain, so scared, cracks something open in you. You bite your lip in a desperate attempt to hold back more tears and nod. You reach up to run your hands through his soft hair, stroking his right ear, and he leans into the touch almost desperately, a low whimper escaping his lips. Finally, you close the final inches of distance between you and kiss him. It’s everything. It’s an apology and an I missed you and a homecoming all at once. It’s finding him again after looking for him every day for so long, even when it seemed like there was no hope, like you’d lost him forever. It’s soft at first, his lips grazing yours before something in you both turns ravenous, like your mouths want to make up for lost time. Too quickly, he pulls away, but when he does, there’s a smile there, the one you love that gives you just a glimpse of his sharp canines.
“I looked for you, even when they said it was hopeless,” you say, needing him to know.
“I knew you would,” he whispers back. “Now,” he says, shaking himself off, his golden eyes looking around the apartment and his voice suddenly taking on the teasing tone that you can’t resist, “tell me you still have a stash of my chocolate somewhere around this place.”