I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
It is harsh but she does not cower now.
He snaps it at her but she does not grimace as she swallows it down.
It tastes bitter but she welcomes it.
Because it makes sense.
She remembers the first time she’d met Velkan in the meadow. How he had extended her a kindness that she did not know how to translate. It had unsettled her, made her wary, she had skirted around it with wide eyes and flared nostrils (figuratively speaking – physically, she had only eyed him wearily). Her friend’s kindness had troubled her perhaps even more than Brigade’s serrated edges.
She shakes her head. And finally, finally, there in the furthest corner of her mouth is the glimmer of something that might have resembled a smile if it had lasted a beat longer or if it had been worn by someone else. “It’s okay,” she says, sincere.
“What did you do, except try to save me from myself?” she asks then, a rhetorical question. But it is asked with patience, tenderness. Forgiveness. But she knows, perhaps better than anyone, that it does not matter that she forgives him if he cannot forgive himself.
She considers his words, considers the weight and the gravity of them. She wonders if he tells her this in the same way she’d told him about all that crippling loneliness – in the hopes that sharing it with someone might make it lighter, easier to carrier.
“Me, too,” she whispers. She wishes she could be someone different, too. Someone worth being saved, maybe. Someone worth the effort and the anger. Then she shrugs her shoulders and shakes her head with a mournful sigh.
lilian
