I'd bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there
I'm too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
These kisses, this touch, should thrill her. They should be the embers burning in her belly, the wildfires starting in her veins, and yet she feels nothing but cold. Hollow. As empty as she had been when she had first awoken and stood on these new legs, death having just loosened its grip on her. There’s ash on her tongue as she listens, feeling that ringing somewhere in the back of her head—that endless echo.
Her mother, dead.
The war, over.
The kingdom, hers.
And it was all for what?
She wears a crown and holds the bloodied sword and yet the only thing that her selfish heart has ever, truly wanted lays behind her grasp. She can’t bear to look up, can’t bear to see the emptiness mirrored back at her, and so she looks downward, focusing on the exhaustion that ripples throughout her, lining the edges of her soul with its tenterhooks. It’s easier to wind herself around the core of that fatigue.
To forget all that she has lost.
All that has never been hers.
“It will starve either way,” she manages, feeling the bastard thing clench in her chest. She would beat fists against him, would howl with indifference, but she finds that she has the energy for neither. There is something like beaten acceptance—that this is the path that she must walk, alone. He wouldn’t be coming back to Hyaline with her, she realizes. There would be no home with him in it. No children one day.
Nothing but her and the pack and her mother’s dream thrust upon her.
Finally, she gathers the strength to look at him and there would be tears in the corners of her eyes if she let herself have them. Instead she straightens and gives herself this moment. She leans slightly to kiss the edge of his draconic mouth, lingering there and imagining a warmth that doesn’t exist there.
“Do not ask me to lie for you, Yadigar. I have already died for you. It would be death of another name.”
There’s a pause as she finally pulls back, avoiding the fates in his eyes.
What could they possibly show her now but the endless abyss?
so take all the wind from my lungs if you're out of air
just deliver me truth, deliver me you