This thing between them is not what it was meant to be—not what she deserved. It hadn’t started with shy flirtations or the cautious time of getting to know one another. It hadn’t been friendship that had bloomed into something more. It wasn’t even the racing heat of passion that swept them together.
Instead it was something that had blossomed in the most unlikely of places. Adversity serving as the fertile soil for more. They had seen one another—truly seen one another—and driven each other away. Tangled together and broke apart. Went for the throat before they fled. It was ugly and angry and yet.
And yet.
Here they stood. Comforting one another through their life’s largest tragedies. Holding one another up when it would be so much easier to fall. He isn’t certain when he stopped seeing her as a threat and started seeing her as a companion, as something more, but he clings to it in this hour of need. He focuses on the sound of her breathing and her soft touches—that feel of her steady against him.
“Isn’t it though?” his words are thick but without venom, even toward himself. Instead, he is just tired. Exhausted from his mourning. Desperate for anything but what he is feeling now. He closes his eyes again and focuses on his thrumming pulse, sending some of his magic to spread throughout him and help slow it further—to dull the pain. It is a cheap use of his power, but he doesn’t care.
He would do anything to not feeling the way he is feeling.
Anything to distract himself.
“How have you been?” he manages, pulling back so that he can study her face, feeling that tentative warmth between them—as solid as the Taiga treeline. “I need to think about something else.”
This, a confession, and one of the many truths he now shared only with her.
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)