04-01-2021, 12:45 AM
i've been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night
and now i see daylight
and now i see daylight
It is noticeable, to her at least, the way the world around them suddenly goes quiet. She does not feel the wall, not from where she stands, but the sudden almost-silence feels like a weight being lifted off her. Like a curtain being drawn shut, like all the noise in the distance has been muted—the hum of conversation, the rattle of tree limbs, and the call of a lone bird in the sky. All of it fades away until it is only the two of them—and the quiet in her mind is suddenly the loudest thing she has ever heard.
“How did you do that?” she asks him with tangible wonder in her voice, and the idea of them being enclosed, together, does not stir the apprehension or fear that perhaps it should have. “You made it quieter,” she continues, her voice ever-soft but her eyes focused intently on his face, questions reflecting in the dark brown of them. “The voices….” she begins, and then abruptly stops. The voices in my head are gone sounds utterly insane, and she at least has the self-awareness to know that.
Thankfully he answers her question, revealing just the slightest glimpse of himself, which despite having just met him she was surprised by. He had pulled her in and yet somehow still seemed entirely locked down, walled up like a fortress that she wasn't sure she was brave enough to try and find a way inside of.
She has never been especially brave to begin with, and she does not understand why this man with the sharp green eyes and the blood spilling from his shoulder had decided to not just simply ignore her, because while she was adorned in rubies and flashed with gold, she was nothing remarkable.
What he says causes her heart to flutter in her throat, and she finds her tongue suddenly simmering with all the words she longs to say. To tell him that she understands because she cannot remember the last time she had any kind of relief from the ghosts in her mind or the ones that flicker at the edge of her vision. That she knows what it is to be alone and somehow never alone, and she wants to ask him if he finds it as exhausting as she does. She wants to ask him how he copes if he had to learn to be hard, or if he had been born that way—if there was any hope for her at all to not always be the unsure thing that she is.
She doesn’t ask him that, though, because all she can work up the nerve to ask is, “Who are you?”
“How did you do that?” she asks him with tangible wonder in her voice, and the idea of them being enclosed, together, does not stir the apprehension or fear that perhaps it should have. “You made it quieter,” she continues, her voice ever-soft but her eyes focused intently on his face, questions reflecting in the dark brown of them. “The voices….” she begins, and then abruptly stops. The voices in my head are gone sounds utterly insane, and she at least has the self-awareness to know that.
Thankfully he answers her question, revealing just the slightest glimpse of himself, which despite having just met him she was surprised by. He had pulled her in and yet somehow still seemed entirely locked down, walled up like a fortress that she wasn't sure she was brave enough to try and find a way inside of.
She has never been especially brave to begin with, and she does not understand why this man with the sharp green eyes and the blood spilling from his shoulder had decided to not just simply ignore her, because while she was adorned in rubies and flashed with gold, she was nothing remarkable.
What he says causes her heart to flutter in her throat, and she finds her tongue suddenly simmering with all the words she longs to say. To tell him that she understands because she cannot remember the last time she had any kind of relief from the ghosts in her mind or the ones that flicker at the edge of her vision. That she knows what it is to be alone and somehow never alone, and she wants to ask him if he finds it as exhausting as she does. She wants to ask him how he copes if he had to learn to be hard, or if he had been born that way—if there was any hope for her at all to not always be the unsure thing that she is.
She doesn’t ask him that, though, because all she can work up the nerve to ask is, “Who are you?”
narya
