His life has drastically changed since the last time he saw her.
He had been just a wild boy with a howling moon for a heart, and she had been an older girl (a woman, he knows now) who had caused his pulse to quicken. She had talked to him about dreams and other worlds and the forest and fern of him had not been able to imagine it, but he had wanted to make a world for her. He had wanted to to carve a home for her out of the stars; he had wanted to do it for her.
But they had grown apart and his life had crumpled around him.
He had ruined everything—absolutely everything—and now his life was a monster of his making.
And then she is there before he can even wrap his head around it, with his name on her tongue, and his gaze flicks up. Confusion ripples around the red-wine of his face, his brow furrowing, his lips tightening. “Irisa?” he isn’t even sure he knows how to pronounce her name anymore—not even sure he deserves to stay it like he was the same boy that she had once known with kindness buried in him like a seed.
So much swells in his throat, all of the things he could tell her. About the way that he abandoned his home or the way he hasn’t seen his family in years or the fact that he sold his loyalty for a healer and hasn’t had the strength to break from the contract and face the destruction he caused in the rest of his life. He wants to tell her that the wildness in him caught up and he’s been twisted in the trap until his leg nearly snapped.
Instead he just stares at her, his light grey eyes storming.
Finally, a confession:
“I wasn’t sure that I would ever see you again.”
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake
