The conversation is tangled, thorny, and she knows that she won’t get out of it completely without at least some cuts and bruises. She knows that she won’t get out of it completely without tearing at the softest parts of her—that she won’t be able to shield herself forever. It’s a truth that is branded on the innermost pieces of her. This knowledge that there are some things that she will never get back. There are some things that she will never be able to completely regain. Some wounds that will never heal.
But she doesn’t run away—not yet, not now.
Instead she just stands there, letting the silence speak for her. Letting that tension rise up between them and stretch. When did they get here? When did they lose one another so completely?
She doesn’t know the answer. Has no way of finding it out.
Instead she just inclines her head when she says that he is listening and then shakes it. “I don’t know what I want,” there’s something raw in her voice, something stripped down from the smoke and the husk. “I just know that I need to find it.” She needs to find it in the pack that she is slowly building around herself. She needs to find it in the roaming and the wilderness and the relationships blossoming around her.
She needs to find it in Spirit and Risk and the new child that grows within her now.
“I need the freedom and space to do that,” she says and this, too, is gentle. “I need to be given the chance to…” her voice trails off and her silvery eyes move to the horizon, to what lies beyond. They rest there for a second before they come back to him. “I don’t know what that means or what it looks like. I don’t expect you do either, but if you can accept that I can’t be tied down any longer, we may have something left.” Another pause as she brings her gaze back to his dual colored ones. “Eventually, at least.”
He broke the permanency of their relationship before. Shattered what she had once thought to be forever. She knows that she can’t go back to that. Can’t be the woman who patrols his borders. Who supports his claim to kingdoms she doesn’t care about. She can’t watch from the shadows and can’t pledge herself to him when he has made it clear his pledge matters little. She isn’t willing to lose what she has begun with Risk—to sever the tie that has let her survive this—but she knows that she isn’t completely done with Castile either. In what capacity and to what extent, she isn’t sure.
she said a war ain't a war before both sides bleed