Sawtooth Spire a silver whisper, take flight and steal into my mouth

Riley's tirade was over, but the buckling of his composure had only just begun. Now he had no choice but to ride the wave of his emotional tsunami; he watched Esme like an animal caged.

Did he feel better now? No -- the answer was no. "You always make me feel stupid." Riley forced, a mumble of words that tumbled from his mouth like an upended house of cards. Why did he endure it? What good had he gotten of any of this, besides torment and mounting feelings of strangled inadequacy?

Maybe he was being a victim, maybe he was guilty of being just as self-involved. Riley was incapable of such rational introspection in that moment, because the great battering ram that had been Esme's continuous abject disinterest had splintered the gates of Riley's confidence, and now nothing but bitterness and hurt outpoured forth.

At least she had moved away from the embankment; for that, some edge of relief softened the hard clap of torment within. Each syllable that rolled off of Esme's tongue was a dart well aimed; a slap, over and over and over, to his reddened and dismayed cheeks. "You won't let me!" Riley interjected, feeling once more adrift on a bucking and furious sea. "I don't know anything about you because you won't let me in." It wasn't just as if Riley only wanted Esme for -- well, what stirred under her tail -- there was something about her that captured his heart and delivered a sparkle to his eyes. It wasn't just puppy love -- not to Riley -- it was a sense of finding someone else just as fucked up as him, someone who belonged to that same community of wretchedness and shattered peace. Someone else with just as many frayed edges and jagged pieces, that somehow fit together perfectly in gilded kintsukuroi. 

How could a bumbling idiot like him even begin to explain? He felt stung anew as she accused him of wanting to control his woman -- that was just the thing, wasn't it? And it wasn't true! He was earnestly convinced of that.

Riley had never had much mental armor. Each word flung from Esme's mouth unhinged the soft carapaces holding him upright, until at last he was bald and stripped of any decency or rejoinder in which to defend himself. She was right too, that he was just as broken -- that he had never had someone there for him. His jaw worked in a feeble reply that never aired; how could he explain he just wanted to try -- to discover what it was like to be deserving of a tranquil heart and mind?

And why not? Why couldn't they try together? What law, what order, forbade them from climbing out from the jagged fangs of their demonds, which had held to them like steel jaws their entire life?

He hung his head. "No, it wasn't my father." Riley mumbled, tail low and disarrayed fur falling into place along his hackles and cheeks. Then, Esme asked of his mother -- for that, Riley's gaze burned as it jumped up to her in resentful silence.

As if going for the tender-spots and raking him over the coals for his mother was not enough, Esme had the wherewithal to take her harpoon and broadside Riley like a stunned fish -- by bringing back to memory the anguishing time he had tried and failed to mate with her. Riley's mouth opened and closed, his eyelids fluttering -- his breath exhaled in a hurt plume from his dark nose.

Not even Laurel, who had simply been indifferent to him, had ever clawed so deep. Not even Indra, who had tried to drown him, had ever set her fangs so cruelly against him -- but Esme drew no quarter.

"You. It was you." Laurel might have started tradition by showing Riley nothing but a rocky path in his early life, but it was Esme, encountered on the trail, that had turned him from his upward climb, and condemned his soul to an endless plain of salt and brambles.