It feels almost normal—standing here like this, discussing family, her home, their lives. It feels like the kind of thing they might have done had the circumstances been more different. Had they not spent so many years at each other’s throats. He wonders what that life would have been like. What it would have been to know her as a friend, to have told her that she could run away with him. What then?
It’s a distraction, enough so that he even gives her a tight smile, the expression not warm but at least not as anguished as it had been. He latches onto it greedily—pushing away his sorrow, his mourning.
“I think you will be surprised by how quickly children recover,” he says, studying her as she looks away. Trying to memorize the strong set of her jaw and the unblemished swath of her skin. Had she always been so beautiful? Had he been so determined to hate her that he had never noticed? He notices now, his golden eyes bright as he takes in all of her, healed and beautiful and ferocious, even in her intense thought.
Maybe especially in it.
When she looks back, he doesn’t break the eye contact. “You can only give him who you truly are now.” He reaches forward to touch her cheek briefly. “It will be enough.” It had been, for him, he knows. She had anchored him and brought him back. Had kept him from flying directly into the sun.
She had been enough.
(Was he? Enough for her now?)
“Silver Cove,” he muses, thoughts still tangled but willing himself to move forward in the conversation that she gallantly attempts to distract him with. “I’m not certain that I’ve ever seen it.” He smiles again, ignoring the twinge in his chest as everything else rises up within him. Beating it back, he turns his gaze toward the horizon, in the direction that he thinks the land to be. “Do you have any ideas for it?”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
@Mazikeen