and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love
in this city that we love
She hadn’t known she was a coward.
It was not a word she associated with herself, not really. Granted, there had not been much that had tested it, for as strange as her upbringing was it had always been a good kind of strange. She had not crossed paths with terror, had never had her life threatened, had never suffered terrible injury or even heartbreak.
But when she’d complimented him, so casually (he was handsome – and young. Too young) and he had turned it back to her, she had frozen.
She was stuttering goodbye before she even knew what she was saying, and turning, and leaving, her mind already replaying the moments in her head, mocking all the ways she had gone wrong.
In time, she convinced herself it maybe didn’t matter. She did not see him again, though her eye fell on a few red horses, they were never him.
So, it didn’t matter.
So, she was a coward.
It was good, she supposed, to learn such things now. She will try to do better. She has not felt it since, that urge to flee, though she also has not engaged in conversations of any depth that matched theirs, the words she exchanged with others were nothing but brief pleasantries, airy and lacking any kind of substance.
Her eyes fall again to a streak of red in the meadow, and her gait falters, because it is matched by antlers, a familiar form.
She’d looked for him but had not actually expected to see him again, and now, confronted with the option of approaching him, she is once more a coward.
But she takes a deep breath, steadying herself (though her heart still beats too fast), and she approaches him again.
He looks older, more grown, but his eyes are the same. She smiles, all relief and fear.
“Brigade,” she says, “you look well.”
Irisa
tarnished x heartworm
@[brigade]