come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
The existence of him fractures her, reaches deep into her chest to wrap fingers of ice around a heart that never seems to stop bleeding. She can feel herself coming undone by him, feel the yawning chasm as she is torn in two, those careful halves she’d sewn together ripped apart as though she were made of paper and not bone. He is everything she does not want to remember, everything she isn’t sure she can survive thinking about. That he is here at all, and just exactly as she remembers, feels like coming loose from time and slipping into the past.
Except the past is nowhere she would ever want to be.
Her eyes are so hard on his face, not stone but ice, and the danger is in the way he is fire. The way he makes her feel safe enough to thaw.
She nearly turns from him, embracing distance instead of the closeness she had once always reached for. She imagines turning away into the trees where she knows, with time, she can erase this new fragment of memory, this moment he reached out and wrapped a hand around her ankle before she could fall away into an oblivion sky above a world with no gravity. The only thing that keeps her feet rooted in place is the knowledge that this would be the cowards way, and though she is many things, and so little of it good, she is almost certain that she is not a coward.
The ice in her turns to fire, a heat that roars to meet his as she resolves to stay. There is an odd kind of accusation in her eyes, and it shines through in the cracks of her brokenness as clearly as if the emotion was veined in gold throughout the brown of her irises. She isn’t even sure what this accusation is, but it is fueled by a pain that eats her up as though she is little more than dry kindling. “If they are one in the same, then why do I feel changed?” The question comes in a whisper, a sound only in the same way the wind is when it breathes through the trees.
But there is something in the way he doesn’t leave that makes her soften again, something in those brown eyes that makes it impossible for her to be anywhere but here. He shackles her with a glance. “Not your neck.” She says, and she doesn’t share his laugh, her voice is still the empty nothingness of sound remembered after waking from a dream. “There are worse places to leave scars than the places you can see with your eyes.” It is neither a threat nor a promise, but the teetering edge of brokenness and madness which she balances on so precariously.
For a moment she merely watches him, thinking and wondering and worrying at what it means that the world has flung them back together again. She wants to curl in against his side and let him hold her close as he had before, let him soothe away her jagged edges with the balm of his eyes and his lips. She wants to bare her teeth and chase him away until he never looks at her this way again, until he can see who she is now, and who she isn’t.
Desperate to be saved, and desperately afraid of her own brokenness.
“Fenris,” she says, whispers it as her eyes search his face, as her feet carry her close enough to reach him. Her lips touch the corner of his mouth, shy and unsure and exploring the contours of his jaw and his cheek like she has any right to do so. And then, abruptly, she pauses, her lips pressed like a kiss to his cheek as she whispers hypnotically, “You’ve just realized I am a stranger, and now you want to leave.”
And it is a wonder that she ever thought she was not a coward.
even though i try not to
