this is all of me for all the world to see; leliana

[leliana]

I know what it is but I'm hoping that all is well
no harvest of green but it's still my heart to sell

His hurt surprises her, catches her off guard.

She focuses in on the bewilderment in his eyes, the confusion, and the way he paces like a sudden animal. The way that his muscles jump under his coat, the blood that pools by his very bones, the armor that erupts from his flesh. It hurts worse than the flesh that peels away from it, it stings and bruises in ways that she never knew that it could.

The way that he ignores her proclamation hurts in way that Zoryn never could.

But suddenly he is turning and leaving her, walking away as if she had never said anything at all. She takes a stumbling step forward, a soft cry uncorking from her throat to spill out into the air between. "Wait!" Her voice was uneasy, broken along the edges, as she took another step and then dropped her head, a crease growing between her brow. She swallowed back the tears as they formed, the hurt that grew so steadily there.

For a long moment, she said nothing.

Could say nothing.

How could she explain to him that she was going to ask him to stay? That in spite of everything she just said, all of the truths that were on her tongue, she was still going to ask him to lie with her, to sleep? Self-loathing incinerated her veins as she looked away, disbelief at her own selfish desires, their greedy hands that continually reached for him.

He didn't even want her and she still threw herself before him. She placed herself on the pyre of her dreams, her own twisted memories. She had been nothing to him. She had been just a tryst. A distraction. A momentary burst of entertainment. And he? He had been everything. He had ignited things in her that she didn't know were possible. His touch had birthed passions she didn't know were possible. He lived inside of her now.

And she would have to endure that.

She would have to live forever knowing she loved a man who hadn't cared for her at all.

Still, all of that knowledge didn't stop her from lifting her head, from finding the depthless gaze, from forming words she knew she would regret. (Why torture herself with the truth? Why let him slip yet another dagger between her ribs?)

She had to know.

"Why..."

Her voice caught, breath unsteady.

"Why did you come to Tephra?"

I put everything I had into something that didn't grow
like going on a wild hunt, shooting arrows without a bow