how it can hold me up and kill me in the end; vulgaris

[leliana]

leliana

she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind
how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”

Would they ever break this cycle? Could they? Heavens knows she wants to. Heavens knows she wants to find the core of their love and cling right to it. She wants to unravel herself for it. She wants to sink into it. She is starving for the bright joy of the beginning. How often can she find herself hungering for the past? How often can she orbit her memories, clinging tight to their reflected beauty?

But she doesn’t turn him away.

She leans into him, feels hot tears on her cheeks at the gentle brush of his lips against her skin. She shivers in spite of it, feeling the ghosts of them rise between them. “I would whisper our story to you until I have no voice with which to tell it,” she says quietly, slipping closer into him. Their chests meet and she runs velvety lips down his spine. His broad back is so familiar that she could cry with relief.

“The first time we met, it was by a river,” she says, whispering it into him. “You asked me to love you, but just for the night.” Her voice waivers slightly and she closes her hazel eyes against the memories that slam into her, the emotions that leave her breathless. “But I couldn’t love you for just then. I have never stopped.”

Not when he found her again. Not when he took her home.

Not when his sister threatened to come between them and he drove her from Loess.

Not even now.

She rests her cheek against his scales and breathes him in, finding the comfort through the fear and the pain. The comfort of being surrounded by him, by being held gently by him. There are other memories, other ghosts, that whisper in the back of her mind, but she closes them off for now. She focuses instead on this sweet gift, this chance to start over, this beautiful moment pressed into her palm.

“I have never healed a mind. I have only healed the body,” she swallows, finding that golden light within her once more. “But I can try.” A sob breaks in her throat, the desperation to crack through this wall to find him again—to pluck him free from this void of nothingness. “Please let me try.”

She reaches into herself, and with a soft cry, pushes her gift into him—

and desperately tries to save the man she knows still lives within him.

@[vulgaris]