you pour the water —
There is something in his sadness that rolls a bell in her own mind, something that comes uninvited. In time, she would learn that it is the consequence of leaving herself too open—inviting in all of the emotions around her until she drowns in it—but she does not yet know the expanse of her own abilities. Of these curses the don a halo and dare call themself a gift. She just knows that her own heart aches in a way that is compounded, a heaviness that does not call itself her own, and her eyes darken with it.
“That is tragic,” she says simply, not necessarily offering pity, but not denying him the truth of his own existence. She does not yet know how to offer hope in the face of such sorrow—to alleviate what he knows is true. So she doesn’t. She just sits in the darkness with him, offering companionship instead.
Curiosity, however, also exists there—weaving amongst her sadness. A bright light there. “Do you change to stone in whatever position you are when the light touches you?” Perhaps it is rude to pry into such a sensitive subject, but the youth have little grace with such things, and Baptiste is no exception.
“Do you know what is happening around you when you are stone?”
Another question to follow the first before her attention is snagged with his admission. This time, her own sad smile rises to greet his own. “I never said it was comfortable for me,” she rolls a slender shoulder, her soft face dipping a little, the light of the halo still illuminating it. “But home does not always mean what you think it means.” Comfort was not something she was familiar with either. Not in this sense. She chose the night, but was she comfortable with the darkness of it? The darkness of her soul?
She wasn’t sure.
She hoped she wasn’t.
(She feared she might be.)
— I would haul the stones
@Nemeon