[private] dawn is coming, open your eyes, phae

[dear]

careful, child, light the fuse and get away—

Love is the only thing she has ever known, she has feasted on it from the earliest days of her youth, basked in the warmth of it, turned her face into it and drank it in with the understanding that the well of it would never run dry. 

But that love had only ever been familial. Her mother, her father, her siblings, the herd of deer she considered some extension of her family. And she has loved friends, too. She has loved some small part of every creature she has encountered.

But she has never been in love. She has never loved anyone the way her mother loves her father. She does not know what it means to give your heart away entirely, to trust someone else to look after it. Heat pools in her cheeks as she considers this, embarrassed, perhaps, by her naivety. 

“It’s not?” she asks, the question coming out in a kind of timid quiet. He dips his head closer, as if sharing with her some great secret, and a spike of adrenaline surges through her. Not out of fear, no, but a kind of thrill. Because no friend has ever spoken to her this way, no one at all has ever smiled at her this way.

She blinks up at him, breathless. She had been raised to believe that she was everything, just as her siblings had been. But this has a different feel altogether. It sets her heart to pounding, the corners of her mouth itching in the beginnings of some new, shy smile. 

“I’m…” she begins and then stops herself, uncertain what to say. She wants to insist that he is the special one, that he is spectacular in ways that she is not and never will be. Instead, she shifts, glancing away and murmuring softly, “thank you.” Because it is thrilling to feel as if she, too, is something worth marveling.

“My parents have always told me that they love me and that they love each other,” she explains, drawing her focus back to his face. (Stricken, again, by the wonder of it.) “Weren’t your parents in love? Didn’t they tell you how much you were loved?”

— cause happiness throws a shower of sparks

@daedalus