She returns to them and she is changed. Still soft and sweet, a delicate wisp of blue and white lace, of a gentle smiled pressed against an even gentler mouth. But there are bruises in her eyes too, now, a darkness in the hollows of her face and shadows sleeping in the back of her eyes. She had meant to hide this from them, as she had hid her leaving, as she had hid that she would be travelling far and leaving them for a couple days, but she finds she cannot, finds instead that these lies do not suit her at all.

So she slips into their small clearing with early morning warm and soft against her back, with the wound on her neck clean but still swollen, still jagged, still ugly, and crumbles when she finds both Shahrizai and Ilka waiting with tired, worried eyes at the mouth of their small cave. The expressions on their faces, this new dark that is there because she allowed it to be, because she placed it there, is enough to still her feet and glue her in place at the edge of the trees. She is so tried and so sad, and when she traces their faces, traces the lines of tension in their bodies, in the way they stand curled together, she feels too much shame to join them.

Nothing she could say, no excuse she could make would ever be enough to soothe those worried lines from their faces, to erase that she had deceived them, that she had, accidentally, hurt them. Yet when she breathes, a sound that is sharp and ragged and loud in the silence of morning, their eyes turn to find her and the relief she finds there is enough to pull her feet into motion again until she is three, two, one step away and crashing with a quiet whimper into their warm, waiting chests.“I’m so sorry.” She says, she whispers, she presses her face against her father’s shoulder, feeling Ilka’s soft lips pressing kisses against the blue of her trembling skin. “I shouldn’t have misled you.”

It is calming to be tucked beneath their necks, to be pressed to their chests and against the beating of their hearts, but it does nothing to untangle the mess of her thoughts, does nothing to help her begin to explain. “I-“ she starts and breaks off, closing her eyes and chewing worriedly on her lip, willing them not to notice the wound in her neck until she can decide how to explain it. But how can she explain something she doesn’t understand? How can she tell them that she was attacked by someone she refuses to hate, by someone with so much sad branded into their soul that even now, she worries about him. So instead she starts at the beginning, unraveling things slowly, refusing to be moved from beneath the safety of their embraces.

“I went to Sylva,” she says, and she voice is soft and silver like starlight, quiet where she breathes her words against Shah’s warm neck, “I wanted to visit a friend, see the home she has told me about.” She pauses and her skin flushes, grows warm, and she realizes she does not want to, does not know how to, tell them about Stillwater. “I ended up making a new friend, instead.” It is the closest she can come to the truth, and maybe it is the truth, maybe she is just a friend to him. The dishonesty is only in that he is much, much more to her.

Her sides heave and her chest aches and she rubs her face worriedly against her father’s shoulder again, leaving spots of damp where worry and exhaustion force tears from the edges of those dark eyes. “I am so, so sorry,” a pause and her head drops lower, tired, “I didn’t mean to make you worry. I am alright, I promise.”