When his nose finds the curve of her sooty cheek, she closes her eyes and leans lightly into the soft of his touch. In that moment she cannot help but feel like she was meant to come to the meadow, meant to run from the fire, if only to find him here. A stranger who felt so impossibly like family it made her heart ache with a false loneliness. She loved the hint of a smile on his mouth, the light in his eyes (though it was dampened some with concern), the way he seemed to notice that touch had a manner of pulling her from her self-pitying thoughts.
“Thank you.” She tells him in a murmurous voice. When she drops her cheek from his touch, her eyes fall open again, a brown so pale they almost seem gold. Her chest expands with a sigh, and when she exhales it leaves the hint of a frown on her dark, uncertain mouth. “I just wish I could be more for them. They’re family now, and family is everything.” Her heart tightens in her chest as images of the Queen being taken away play on repeat behind her eyes.
Her head hangs a little lower then, subtly, and she hopes the ash and shadow is enough to hide the defeat that stretches across her delicate face. “I know it isn’t my fault, I couldn’t have changed anything, but it gives my pain some direction if I can blame myself.” She pauses and looks at him, really looks at him, and there is something dark that flickers just beneath the surface of her eyes, a thought that pulls her back under. She does not want to tell him that her family lives in the offending kingdom, that she had seen a friend and he had led the charge. It hurts too much, even if she knows how silly it is.
“They might.” She says in answer to his next question, her eyes tracing whorls in the dirt at their feet. But that doesn’t mean I have to. She thinks with a furrowed brow. But when her eyes lift to his face, to the earnest concern knit in the furrow of his brow and the kindness shining in those eyes, she knows she’ll tell him. “They took Fiasko.” She breathed, her voice wavering painfully. “They took the Queen.” And it’s like the confession took a piece of her heart with it as she crumples before him, her shoulders hunched and every muscle clenched painfully tight beneath her smooth black skin.
His next words pull her face back to him, her pale brown eyes to his. And even though her face is buried in shadow, she still finds a smile for him, just the hint of one, touching the corners of her velvet mouth. “I know.” She tells him in an impossibly soft voice. "I feel it too." That kinship beyond words, beyond explanation. And then, “I’m glad I came. I’m glad I met you.”
ILKA
makai x oksana