It seemed fitting that Leilan is the one she has this conversation with.
He had been the one to tease her when she had been pregnant with Nashua and Yanhua on the open Nerinian moorlands. He had been the one that she had ventured into the topic of parenthood with, deciding to ask him instead of Kagerus or any of the other parents she had known. He had been the one that she asked if the fear she had, the worry of what would happen once they were brought into the world would get any easier.
Leilan had told her that worry never truly goes away, and he had been right. It had stayed, but she had followed his advice, and all her children had grown into adulthood. They would go their own way in this life, and she had to trust that they would find their path.
"Perhaps he went looking for it," she murmured, looking anywhere but the Dragon Magician. "I told them all stories of it," she had made Paraiso sound like a fairytale. She had told it to all her children - from Nashua to Reave - a haven they might look for, if this world truly proved to be too dangerous. A place they might find, thanks to her blood in their veins.
Lilliana clings to that thought because the reality is much harsher than she is ready to face.
Then what had been a conversation suddenly felt like an argument, as the conversation shifted towards a darker subject. Something else that Lilli wasn't quite ready to face (or speak about), but Leilan mentions Wolfbane again and it wrests something from her chest. Her blue eyes glance up, watching him because there has been no man in her life that she has known better than Leilan. They had laughed together. They had teased together. They had even blurred the lines of their friendship into something else to bring Oren and Roselin into the world. They might not have been lovers in the traditional sense - not after their argument about Pangea - but they had still come together to raise multiple children.
His face - regardless of the emotion - has become one of certainty in her life when so much was always changing, and the chestnut studies his face now for a sign of what he was feeling. And then what she had been staring at vanishes, becoming an onslaught of memories that do not belong to her. The image of Breckin that she had pressed so gingerly into his mind explodes into a whole life lived in hers. It startles her, so much so that when comes back to herself, Lilliana is ready to fight for something that Leilan has already dismissed as gone.
She can feel him pulling away, and perhaps it would be easier to just let him go, but after everything that has happened to her, Lilliana says something. "I would have wanted that," she says in a quiet voice. "With you." Her vision clears and yet the breaking sensation is still there in her chest, causing a slight tremor to her voice. "But after everything that happened with Wolfbane" she continues, finally saying the name and casting it out like the curse it had been, thinking of the affair and the darkness that came after. Leilan had been right, he had never asked and she had never tried. Not after their big fight, not after their tempers had both flared. It seemed easier to remain friends, to not complicate their lives (and those around them) any more than they both had.
But life was messy. It was complicated, and she had still arrived at this moment, despite how neatly she had tried to live.
"I just never thought that anybody would want that with me."
And then she turned away.
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind