Tarian stands there, suspended in time, and existing only between the thunderous heartbeats inside his chest.
She doesn't turn past him and run, like some part of him had been afraid she might. She doesn't even try to tease him for his light words, doesn't try to engage him in any kind of banter so there isn't even that to fall back on. Instead, there is a moment looming that Tarian has feared more than any battle.
There is no way to fix what he's broken, though his mind races in a million ways to find a way to figure out how to undo all of this.
But this woman - as tempestuous as any storm - manages to tame the wild gale that is his thoughts. He can see the tears on her cheeks, shining beneath the moonlight, and yet as she approaches him, Tarian knows that these weren't the tears he was afraid of. This isn't the same kind of sadness that he saw peering out from his grandmother's eyes, grief from a life that had been too hard on the soul. Altissima reaches for Tarian and he wraps himself around her as she does him and they fit together in a way that he knows is right.
He's not entirely sure that he has ever fit in anywhere - Pariaso, Liridon, Loess - but he knows that at this moment, he fits right here. With her.
And Tarian understands at this moment, that sometimes, there aren't words. So when she presses her cheek against his, when she kisses where she can reach, Tarian presses his own into her and returns her embrace like he's already imagining her gone. That there will come a time where he will be hollow with ache just for the want of seeing her, let alone touching her. He touches her like the dream that he still sometimes imagines she must be, like he will wake and somehow this will all be gone; that she had been an enigma all along.
So Tarian answers her the only way he knows how, with each touch more real and reverent than the last. The only way he knows how to tell her, that this - them - is the most absolute thing that he has ever known.
TARIAN
@Altissima