you shouldn't have to pay for your love
with your bones and your flesh
with your bones and your flesh
She seems to understand the weight he’s worn on his shoulders since he was a small child -- the guilt and the loneliness, the constant grief for a woman he had never met and an action he’s barely known that he had committed. Birth was hard, yes, but -- he had never even been wanted in the first place, according to his Father. “Father… he would tell me that I should have been the one to die.” He breathes out, thinking of how serious his father had looked, every time he had said those words -- through anger and sorrow, his father had always meant them, and perhaps that was how they had weighed so heavily upon his mind even years later.
He leans into the brush against his shoulder, the skin-to-skin contact something that comforts a craving he’s always ignored -- a hunger for contact he never seemed to satisfy, and his muzzle brushes against her neck in a wordless gesture of appreciation for the support she offers. She doesn’t seem to judge him, for all of his mistakes (gods, there’s been so many mistakes in his life, so many of them before he had ever truly gotten the chance to live). It brings him some sort of hard-won peace, to drag his skeletons into the light and lay them bare, to face them instead of constantly burying the past and locking it away.
When she speaks, he offers her the same undivided attention that she has given him, his heart aching for her own tragedies. What sort of gods might allow this, what sort of world could take advantage of its youth so easily? They had both been so young, so full of promise -- and yet, when he looks at them both, standing there side-by-side, he starts to realize that maybe there was a purpose behind everything that has happened after all.
They have been forged in the molten cores of a world who would cast away souls like theirs -- they have picked their bones up off the floor and rebuilt their bodies in the image of themselves, shattered and rebuilt themselves into what could be called survivors, and yet they could still lend a shoulder for each other, could still listen to the tales others told of their own woe. They have learned empathy through sorrow, he thinks, and maybe that might not be such a terrible thing, because they have learned how to shed light even through the darkest of nights.
For the first time since he was a very young child, his shoulders straighten and his head lifts just that little bit higher, so that he could wipe away the tears in her eyes. “I think your daughters would understand,” He says softly, thinking of Theodosia and her fierce devotion, how brightly his daughter shone. “Perhaps it might not be this life that you are reunited, but I think you will meet them again, and I believe they would be proud of the person you have become.”
When he turns his gaze back towards the path in front of them, he can see what he thinks might be a light in the darkness -- and when he thinks of the future, he thinks of his daughter’s bright eyes, of a horned man’s cocky smile, of the night markets and a little home that he could make for himself here amongst the people of Denocte.
@
you were only a boy,
when you were thrown into a war.
when you were thrown into a war.
