hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She is made of self pity. Of broken things forced back together, edges too jagged, too incomplete to ever be the way they were before. And for a long time she thought she could be fixed, thought she wanted to be fixed, to be less like her mother who let emotion rule everything in her life and more like father with his smiles and levity. But whatever things he was made of, she was not made of the same. This weight suited her, drowning beneath oceans of sorrow and misbelonging. She was so much like her mother, entirely made of broken things forced back together.
Isle notices him long before he notices her. She can feel his presence like a pressure in her thoughts and it is almost reflexive the way her mind reaches to touch his, to cradle his thoughts alongside hers. But she flinches instead, closing her mind like a fist before it has a chance to peer inside his head. The action makes her stomach hurt, makes her chest ache and her bones weak. There is nothing right about denying who you are, and yet she must.
She must.
He notices her and she watches him draw closer, the line of her jaw tightening subtly beneath the shadow of her delicate brown face. There is so much kindness in the steel and pewter of his face, such warmth in the lilt of his strange voice. She can feel her chest caving in, can feel her heart beating itself ragged against her ribs with the ache to tell a kind stranger all the woes nestled like parasites in her soul.
But she can’t, she won’t.
And oh, she wants to.
“Are you?” She asks instead, avoiding his question altogether with a furrowing of her dark brow. "No one comes this deep into the forest unless they're hiding from something." She watches him quietly and those green eyes flash like emeralds buried in the earth.
Isle
