12-12-2021, 06:43 PM
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
He is no friend worth having.
His worth does not lie in his unwillingness to give up on her, he knows that. He suspects that she knows it, too, though he does not speak it aloud. He just shakes his head and averts his gaze, lets his heart cramp with the first death; the death he should have stopped but didn’t.
He does not argue because she is so much stronger than he is, so much fiercer, her convictions things made of concrete instead of feathers. He exhales a shaky breath and nods to indicate that he has heard what she’s said. She didn’t want to be saved, she wanted them to give up, but the brothers had been stubborn. (Firion, he thinks, a brother he has heard only murmurs of.)
“You were always bigger than he was,” he says, “Gale.” He studies the horizon, his failures slipped under his skin like blades. “I’m glad someone was able to make you see that.”
He shifts his focus back to her face and she smiles. He searches her face a long moment then, a vise clenched tight around his windpipe, and then meets her steady gaze again. No, it will not be his turn next. He is a coward, capable only of warnings, not action.
But his mouth shifts around a lopsided smile that fails to reach those glacial blue eyes. “Maybe,” he echoes.
No.
No, Maze, it will never be his turn.
—I just bite my tongue a bit harder
@Mazikeen