Sleepy Fox Hollow Gain the weight of you, then lose it

time's eternal interminable subhorror ticking and tocking;
paused for a time, a clock held in a near-apocalyptic stasis.
she had warded him away so many times that he had not come back; she had said leave and he had not heard ask me to come home. the sound of her sobbing was too familiar.
her tears trickled brackish and hot through the pelt of his shoulders; he lifted his muzzle only long enough to descend along her cheek, between her ears; tension fading from his musculature until he was only a plane of softstone made for her grief, allowing his own soul to pull scar tissue until black endings leaked back into red, somewhere in the arteries that still powered mahler through the heaviness of himself.
he smoothed the remembered down behind her ear with his lips, lifted his face to hers and featherlight laved the rivulets of seawater from the curves of her face,
so desperately afraid that anything he said now would be wrong, 
and yet having no words rise, for she did not need to hear his variances, only to be here —
mahler tamped down the cough boiling in his throat.