She regretted her words as soon as they left her lips. The blue, that aching indigo, it was the stuff of nightmares (her nightmares) made real, tangible. She didn’t want him to know about her ghosts, about the things that waited for her as soon as sleep came. Memories relived again and again. Memories that blurred at the edges, frayed and unraveling, bleeding into dreams and impossible things.
And yet-
The burden of knowing was more than she could bare alone. It eroded the edges of sanity, blurred the lines between real and pretend. She saw things in the shadows, in the corners of her eyes, beasts brought to life by the consequence of a mind worn too thin. She had tried to tell Sleaze, to tell Erebor, and for a moment the world had seemed a little smaller, a little less lonely. But when she looked into their eyes and found their ghosts staring back at her, it was like falling into a bottomless black pit. Nothing to catch her, nothing to slow the fall. Only fear and loneliness, only the dread of the unknown.
When she looks to him, when those same green eyes flash to his and hold steady for a heartbeat, there is only sorrow waiting for him there. She knows she cannot tell him why, or how, cannot make her burdens his. And even if she could, even if she could trade these demons, how would she ever find the words to explain to him of a world that should not exist. What could he possibly know of little human girls and their toys, of dolls and clowns and boxes meant for trapping things.
She presses her chest against his and slings her chin over his back, she doesn’t want to be able to see his eyes now, doesn’t want him to see the ghosts hiding in the indigo hollows of her face. “I can’t.” She tells him in a voice soaked through with regret. Can’t, not won’t, and she wills him to notice the difference. Her eyes close and for once there is nothing waiting for her there. “I love you, dad.”
MALIS
makai x oksana