I'm trying to pick myself up piece by piece, Leilan

[Briseis]

little do you know how I'm breaking while you fall asleep,
little do you know I'm still haunted by the memories,
little do you know I'm trying to pick myself up piece by piece

She had never known it was possible for a heart to break in half, but she is learning.

The pain that splits across her chest is intolerable. It feels like fire, and drowning, all at once, and she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do with it. She had gone from being nearly void of all emotion, to whatever turmoil this is – a tempest of confusion and hurt, of shame and humiliation. She could still smell the blue stallion, his scent clinging to her like a sickening cloak. She could still feel his teeth against her skin, could still hear the gravel-tone of his voice against her neck. She doesn’t think any of that will ever go away; her nightmares have taken on a new shape, a new face, and she almost misses the content of her old ones. At least that, she had been able to run from. At least in those ones, she had outran her demons, instead of being caught, every single time.

She could have handled the shame after her encounter with Tunnel, possibly. She could have picked up the broken pieces, and maybe put something back together. But whatever she had been precariously still grasping onto had been cruelly yanked from her, like barbed wire through the hands. Ether’s eyes haunt her memories, the ache in his voice an echo in her mind that refuses to go away. He hadn’t even given her the chance to explain, before pulling his shadows around him, and taking him to a place that she could never follow – not uninvited. She had no way of telling him that he had it wrong; so completely, terribly wrong, and it was crushing her.

She had looked for him, or tried to. But just as she had avoided him when she didn’t want to be found, he was able to do the same to her. It was weeks before she finally gave up, and before she finally accepted that she cannot bear the weight of this alone.

Without even thinking twice, she goes to Nerine.

The cold winter winds are especially biting on the coast, and her black coat pulls taut over her once-lithe frame, though her barrel is now obviously swollen with the child inside of her. The child she had not asked for, at all, but that she hoped against hope that she would love all the same. There is a part of her – a part that is larger than she would care to admit – that is terrified she will only see Tunnel’s face whenever she looks at it, but she tries to not think about that; not right now, anyway. Now, her somber brown eyes are scanning the rocky expanse of the land before her, searching for the first face that had ever been familiar to her in this wild, untamed land she had washed up on.

”Leilan,” She says his name once she sees him, having no way of knowing it was pure luck to find him here, and that he would normally be found in Icicle Isle. With the space closing between them, she comes alongside of him, brushing her muzzle lightly against his scaled shoulder. Something about his scent – perhaps that it is familiar, and that she knows he is nothing to be feared – triggers the emotion to well in her chest again, tight and asphyxiating, and her voice is hardly above an aching whisper as she says, ”I’m so glad I found you.”

BRISEIS

underneath it all I'm held captive by the hole inside,
I've been holding back for the fear that you might change your mind

@[Leilan]

also @[Heartfire] if she wants to use her magic eyes so she can tell Ether he's a dummy D: