How long had they spent getting to this place?
How many times had they clashed?
Coming together only to drive one another apart. Getting close to something like friendship, something that meant something more, only to drive the knife into one another’s heart. He was the worst offender, he knows. The primary cause of the division between them, especially at the start. But she had been too alert, her eye too keen, and he had known that to stay near her was to strip himself bare. Because he could only hide behind the mask for so long. He could only pretend so much when she always saw the truth of him.
So he shouldn’t be surprised at the apprehension on her face as she settles into herself. He shouldn’t be surprised by the wariness or surprise and yet it cuts all the same, the wound as self-inflicted as any that he has ever borne. He watches her wrestle with everything that must be flooding through her and he does his best to get a white-knuckle grip on his own emotions. He struggles to pull them under control so that he can be there for her and not focused on the grief that had so nearly consume him just seconds before.
He feels her reach for him and then stop and so he closes the distance himself. He presses a tender touch to her cheek, as if reassuring himself that she is alive. That she is still there and capable of breath and therefore capable of smiling or laughing or even cutting his throat should the whim strike. He knew she could, would probably still, do all three. And he can’t find it in him to care. Can’t find it in him to wish that she wouldn’t or wish that their relationship was anything but this chaotic mess that it was.
“Of course I came,” he whispers, breath fanning over her.
His magic brushes over her, hunting for any ache or pain that he could heal, but he finds nothing. Nothing for him to focus on except for the intimacy of them lying like this, his emotions so stark on his face that there was no chance of him pretending this time—no mask for him to fumble into place.
His mouth pulls into a frown as he finds her gaze and snags on it, his voice thick with tears and regret.
“I wish I had come sooner. I wish I had been there. I should have done more, Maze.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)