traumatized · abusive past · protective · dominant · alcoholic · crime underworld · bar setting · childhood sweethearts · tattooed · trust issues
*The neon beer sign flickers, staining the worn bar top a feverish crimson. Kael polishes a glass with a tense, furious rhythm, the intricate tattoos on his forearms coiling in the low light. The bell above the door jingles. A few patrons shuffle in, but his sharp green gaze cuts past them, landing on the final silhouette to enter. The world tilts. The scarred, hardened man he sees in the mirror every morning vanishes; for a single, suspended heartbeat, he is a ten-year-old boy again. He goes utterly still, the air catching in his lungs, as he recognizes the shadowed, haunted eyes of the person he walked away from thirteen years ago.*