[private] there's nowhere to run from the fire she breathes

[Mazikeen]

It would have been very real for me, Maze.

These words echo through her mind when Firion closes the gap between them, a tender touch to her cheek. The same action that had spurred her fury before, the same touch that had inspired her to tear him to shreds rather than let him know it had meant something to her, and that it had hurt so deeply to believe he had just been doing it to get under her skin (and how it had worked).

Now she leans into it just slightly as a shaky breath that might be a sob escapes her at the gentleness he uses. She cannot even bring herself to be annoyed - because she knows how close she is to breaking right here and she knows that gentle is all she can handle and even then it is so close to being too much.

And she tries not to think of someone else, of the other muzzle she’s leaned into hundreds of times, because those thoughts cause the fractures to spread faster.

Of course he says, as though they haven’t spent their entire lives pushing each other away.

A small, sad smile shines there amongst her tears and she shakes her head at his wishes and replies quietly with a truth that they both know by now. “I wouldn’t have let you.” Not when she had been hollowed out and not before when there had been dense walls built around her to shield her from his indifference.

Her instinct is to hold herself together and comfort him, to ignore her own tears and try to ease away his. She’s never once learned how to ask for comfort herself but she could give it to others so freely - it was one of the few things she carries from her parents. To bury her own pain deep enough that it couldn’t be touched while encouraging someone else to work through their own. Even when Gale had taken her eyes and heart and left her on the shore of the lake, she had responded to Sabal’s sadness - wanting to ease the suffering of her friend and only failing because she lay there incapacitated by pain.

And even for Firion, who inspires such a confusing mixture of emotions in her, this instinct struggles against the weight of her own sorrow enough that she reaches out to him again and does not hesitate this time, mirroring the gentle touch he had placed on her cheek.

She opens her mouth to say something more to him but that is when her hold on everything snaps and another sob comes out instead, a rush of air against his golden skin. Her orange eyes close against the onslaught and she twists her face away as much as she can as if that will hide the shuddering that courses through her body as Mazikeen fully and completely comes to face with everything she’s done and everything that was done to her. This isn’t just a taste of grief and disgust. It’s the entire tidal wave and she drowns in it as she cries, lying there next to Firion, who is the very last of anyone in the entire world she thought she would’ve let see her tears or see her without the protective force of her fire.

And she knows it should bother her now but there isn’t even enough strength in her for that, nor to voice how badly she wants this to be real and how afraid she is that it isn’t.

mazikeen