[private] Forever is never enough

[lilliana]

She expects the stranger to turn and she expects to be wrong.

Lilliana has seen his face on a hundred strangers and yet each time his ghost appears, it vanishes before she can grasp it. Much like their time in Beyond, he is always gone too soon. (The closest she has ever come to finding him was on the edge of the roguish smile of a stranger.) And she knows this is just her heart being foolish. Her head lifts and so does her chin, giving the slender chestnut an almost defiant air.

She is ready to be wrong.
But she isn't ready for him.

Her blue eyes widen, suddenly understanding that this wasn't hope getting the best of her. This wasn't a dream or even her gift projecting something that she hadn't ever let herself imagine. But there he is, standing as noble and proud as she remembered him. Her bewildered gaze traces over him for a moment, starting at the blaze of red feathers, coming down to the patches of white on his face and then down to the deep gray of his coat. (How had she forgotten that? In the years that had passed, he burned brighter and brighter in her mind until he became a hue like her own brilliant red.)

And then her mind is burning with so many questions.
All the things she had never gotten to ask.
All those feelings that she had shoved as deep as the grave that she had so often imagined him in.

Was he angry with her? He had spoken his feelings for her and she had said nothing at all. Lilliana had never forgotten what Broch said to her on the dawn that he had left for the fight. Those words he spoke about how if things had gone differently, he would have done something about them already. That he hoped that he the chance to come back and make up for that. When she had learned of his death, she wondered if Broch had laid dying and thought of her with contempt. She wondered if he was angry with her for being unable to speak of her feelings, for being so unsure of herself that she couldn't be certain of anything else.

(There is the flash of his life lived; the face of an older mare, the aching feeling of loneliness. It is how she knows that he is real. His pain almost hollows her out.)

He smiles softly and it nearly undoes her.

Her dark lips attempt to move, to say something but she can't find the words. Broch speaks (no, some part of her reasons. He doesn't speak - he sings in that beautiful dialect as he always has) about thinking that she might be a ghost and the slender chestnut with her silence might be as haunting as one. How? is the question that she wants to ask over and over, that she wants to pour into him so that Brochturach might explain how a dead man can be resurrected so easily. But then he takes a step towards her and while a large part of her remains so afraid that touching him will break the illusion, that he'll touch her and the spell would be broken; she can't stand to have him so near and not touch him.

When he comes close and drops his head, she takes a quiet step forward. She reaches for him, still hesitant but the drive to know that he was alive overcame her. Her touch wavers when it first grazes lightly against his skin, reaching up to his chestnut forehead. There is a warmth radiating from him - that same light she had seen radiating from his blue eyes - and then the slender female presses her forehead against his own, finally accepting the inevitable.

"They said you were dead," she finally tells him in a shaky voice. "Rougaru. Malachi." Lilliana quietly explains, "He went to the Summit to look for you." The chestnut closes her eyes, because she can't be angry with her older brother when they had so recently made their peace. But she hadn't been allowed. Even after everything that had happened, they were still trying to protect her from the horrors and tragedies of their world.

The image of her silver sibling swims in her mind's eye, remembering the way that the red clay and the blood from the battlegrounds had stained his coat. "All he found was blood," she continues with a soft tremor, "He said that there was too much - that - that there was no - " and then she can't bear to say anymore. 

@Brochturach