come to me in the night hours, i will wait for you
It is easiest to be like the storms that gather beneath her skin, to be distant and volatile, to be always moving, always unraveling. She can feel that magic simmering inside her chest, feel it in her bones and in her veins, feel it like an ichor that fuels her fury in all the worst ways. She thinks there had been a time in her life where she might have been able to ignore it, to let it grow into something good, something better. But now it is just a manifestation of a pain she does not know how to tear free of her soul.
It is wounds that won’t heal, bruises that don’t fade.
It is bones broken and knit poorly back together.
She has glimpses of remembering though, moments that find her and dim that smoldering in her eyes to something soft again, something gentle. Moments like now, as she watches Fenris step into view on the path ahead and there is something like wild joy that flares to life inside her chest, dwarfing that fear and wrath as though they are such inconsequential pieces of her. It is nice when the good outweighs the burdens that have glued themselves into hands that won’t unfist, into fingers fused and knotted out of stubborn ignorance. Nice, because she knows that this feeling is the way she used to be, this lightness was the levity of her entire starlit soul.
She loves to remember, even though it burns to remember this part of her is gone. That she is less and she is broken, that she is someone she would have never wanted to know.
She has no way to know if he sees that moment of joy, that spark of affection that burns inside the soft of quiet eyes that settle on his face and refuse to leave. It would be nothing to steal into his mind and find the answer she seeks, but she has grown cautious of doing so when so many of his thoughts are shaped around the ugliness of who she has become. That thought strikes her like a stone, leaving an ache inside her chest that pushes her softness back and outwards to the periphery again.
Why do you stay? She wonders, silent and still, watching him with as much pain inside her chest as he has in his. Why don’t you take the children and leave. He should. Should have done so a thousand times over, and yet if he ever did there would be nothing left of her. Nothing but the storms behind her eyes. Nothing but a pain that would turn her to ruin, cave her in and leave her empty, leave her bleeding for every eternity.
“Fenris.” She says, and it feels like her storms have broken themselves on the rocks inside her chest, because there is something gentle in the way she says his name, something aching and honest. She takes a step, and there is a flash of yearning that crosses the blue of her face, something fragile and wanting in a way only he can coax out of her. But it is gone in an instant - not vanished but changed, ruined and made ugly by the way she stops again because she remembers how corrosive her love is, how desperately she wants to protect him from the way she loves him. She can already see the ways she is changing him, see a darkness where there had been none before, a raggedness only their children can soothe.
“I warned you not to stay.” She says, and she is surprised by the strange hollowness of her voice as she remains rooted in place watching him with eyes like dark twin bruises. “In the whole world, you are the only one I know how to care for, the only one who means anything to me. And not even I can save you from myself.”
even though i try not to
