Flowing over sorrow days

Hotaru

I know they'll be coming to find me soon
But I fear I'm getting used to being held by you

His presence in the bond is a cloaked thing, but it’s enough to know he’s where she’d hoped to find him. There’s nowhere she wouldn’t scour to find him, but the lodge assures her that whatever awaits within, it isn’t a battle to be won or an injury to mend. At least not the physical sort. But that leaves so much worse to fill the imagination, and it carries her hard and fast through his doorway.

Whatever she was thinking disappears from her head as their eyes meet and she takes in his haggard and crumpled expression. She doesn’t bother to take off her coat and boots as she normally would, hardly remembering to close the door and doing so with a thoughtless kick of her heel. The slam of it is a whisper compared to the volume in which she hears her name off his tongue.

His soul rises to meet hers, and his grief is so familiar it tastes like her own as her heart rises painfully into the back of her throat. It’s a crushing, overwhelming force that has old wounds flaring into fresh hurt sympathetically. But she doesn’t throttle the connection or close it off, not even for self-preservation. She pushes through it as surely as she crosses the distance between them, uncertain if her boots even touch the floor.

“Noah.” A guttural repetition that feels more meaningful than the empty platitudes he will hear from everyone from today and evermore. She’d grown sick of them, hated to hear apologies and sympathies from people who could never understand. She won’t subject him to such inadequacies, not from her.

Her arms come to wrap around him in an embrace that cradles in a configuration their normal hugs don’t take. She holds tight enough to crush - or maybe just hard enough to keep the pieces together. There had been no love lost between Cordelia and Hotaru, but she’s here for Noah. This life-altering loss is one she knows well and it is entirely at his disposal. Empathy, companionship, and exactly zero expectations. She can’t take the hurt from him, but she can sit beside him and weather it at his side.

I used to sing about being free
Oh, baby, look what you've done to me