Lilliana fully anticipates him to lunge. Everything in her rigid stance - the taut muscles, the way she angles her stomach away from him, the fire burning brightly in her blue eyes - shows that she expects this. It’s easier to come to this assumption than anything else these days. And perhaps Rhaegor is doing her a kindness - at least she sees him coming.
But as she is so prone to do these days - swinging from one emotion to the next - the leap leaves her vulnerable. While she would protect herself in this anger, it leaves a crack for the buckskin stallion to slip into and the images he projects into her mind sends her reeling back. He doesn’t need to physically lunge at her when he overwhelms her with the very thing that keeps Lilliana from falling apart: memories.
She doesn’t know the faces. There are flashes of Hyaline (and how her heart lurches at that), of the Cove that doesn’t align with the present they stand in and other places that Lilliana isn’t familiar with. (How could she when there is still so much of Beqanna she doesn’t know, that she is still coming to understand?) There are forms that dance through his memories that she has no way of knowing who they are but she feels his ache for them. (She doesn’t know the stories but she doesn’t need to - not when her own pages are littered with loss. Like calls to like.)
The two of them might not have clashed physically but Lilliana feels the impact of his memories like a blow.
The copper mare takes another step back and then another as her mind recovers from the images, the jagged lines of her own vulnerability shines through her eyes as she continues to move away from him. Those serrated edges hurt, she's learned. They wound and leave scars behind and she has no intention of inflicting that harm on either of them.
(How can she do anything when he shakes like that? How can she just let him walk away when he looks like that?)
"Don’t!” her voice sharply manifests as silver plumes of smoke from her dark nostrils as they flare. Whether she says in reference to his apology or that she return to the warm memories that she barricades herself with on this bleak shore (she can’t), Lilliana doesn’t specify. The white of her blue eyes shows momentarily before she lowers her head, visibly torn between wanting to let him leave and yet...
When he turns to go, her blue eyes drop to the fresh burn on his tawny chest.
His voice hitches on a sob and it gets stuck somewhere between her own heart and throat, a hollow thought that leaves her too quickly. It slips before she can grasp it. A metaphysical bruise that lingers between them. I can’t help with that. Fighting within herself, she finally lowers her head and takes a tentative step closer. Her dark maw points to the burn, but that I might be able too.
Just- , she cuts herself off. Moments before she had been ready to run from him, hurt him if it was deemed necessary. That conflict still lines her copper face. But now, @[Rhaegor] trembles and looks so lost on this lonely beach that Lilliana just wants him found. Don’t you have something like that? she tries. Don’t you have something to protect yourself with?
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions