come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
She cannot tear her dark eyes away from the quiet story of his beautiful face. He remembers, she realizes, watching his mouth curve down into an unfamiliar frown as the silence between them builds to a crescendo with no end. He remembers that there is something to remember, knows enough to realize that something is amiss, just slightly wrong. It is because he is clever, she thinks, and not because she meant anything to him in any significant way. Certainly not that.
But the possibility is a pinprick of pain that she knows she will ignore until it grows and festers and consumes whatever is left of this paper thing inside her chest.
He smiles, and she is immediately, and oddly, jealous of the way he smiles at her, a stranger. Her brow furrows beneath her forelock, her mouth tightening until the corners shift downwards ever so slightly. And then his eyes sparkle in a way she is not entirely familiar with - they had found each other almost always in dark times, and the levity in his face now is something new that had hardly fit their prior encounters. Still, she considers him, inclining her head to search his face more closely. “Are you always so charming?” She asks, and there is an odd note of tension in her voice that makes her sound too brittle to be the pretty someone he speaks of.
She is wholly unprepared for the torrent of pain that rips through her. The realization of why she had done what she had done, and the horror that maybe she made the wrong choice. In the moment, it had been easier to erase whatever connection had grown between them, because she had learned those connections only ever hurt, only ever broke. She had learned that even at her best, she was never enough, and that it would be no different here either, with him. He would leave her as everyone had, and she would have nothing but the broken shards of a shattered heart to protect herself with.
But what if he had been different, what if there could have been more. More than hurt and pain and a loneliness that ate holes through her faster than any disease. More than broken faith and broken trust and broken promises. More than pain.
She needs to hide her face from him, she knows it must be a tapestry in progress, a map of all the wild leaps her thoughts keep making in his presence. But there is nowhere to go except away, and away is a thorn inside her chest and pressed against the beating of her poisoned heart.
Instead her eyes fall to the sand at his feet, watching the patterns turn and swirl and then die again against the dark of his legs. “That was what I was afraid of.” She tells him without looking up, tells him with those dark eyes fixed firmly away from his face and his gaze and his crooked grin. “That you were the monster.” Then she’s forcing her gaze up, a little wild with the pain and uncertainty burning through her like a fever. “But it was me. It was me all along.”
Things are bleeding into one another now. Past Fenris and present Fenris, and she is not being careful enough, not building walls with her words and keeping these two versions of him safely apart. There is too much regret inside her now, too much sorrow and disgust, too much hatred of this thing she has become. This creature who burns with darkness. “I don’t want it to be me.” But she’s backing away now, feeling like things are too broken to fix, like who she is does not deserve the affection of who he is. “You know me, Fenris.” She says, and the sound of her voice is without starlight, without softness. It is hollow and defeated, something so brittle it is a wonder the words don’t reach him in the same unrecognizable fragments she's reduced his memory to.
even though i try not to
@[fenris]