It has been so long since he last crossed paths with anyone outside of the home he has built with Plumeria that he has almost forgotten what it felt like to be seen for the first time.
He wonders what she sees. What he must look like.
Withered, maybe. Wilted.
Not at all the man he had been once. But perhaps this is for the best. Perhaps it is safer this way. For he feels no overwhelming urge to reach out and touch her. He does not huff a soft breath in her direction, sidle close enough to smell her.
She is beautiful, certainly, but there is no distant murmuring in his chest beyond the pulsing sickness that has lived there since he emerged from some dark place some years ago. Spit back into the world a shell of the man he had been once.
“Aislyn,” he echoes, a faint, faint smile tying up the furthest corners of his dark mouth, too. The most he can manage these days. Anything else makes the heart spasm and twinge. Makes his vision dim with the pain of it.
He studies her a moment. How vibrant she is when viewed through the lens of all that gold. He shakes his head but he does not allow himself to be mournful, though he aches to. Everything in him bleeds with sorrow, but he will not let it out now. Dams it up in his throat.
“No,” he tells her, just that simple. “This is my reward for trying to be a hero.”