JUDE
the light of dawn is coming
It’s all the more jarring to see her here when the last they’d met had been a crossroads of tangled emotions pulled to the surface; relief and gratitude that she was alive after being missing for so long, uncertainty over where they stood - which remains yet unresolved - and how they were meant to proceed, and the devastating freshness of his (theirs) dad’s death.
Flowers are all anyone is talking about these days, so it shouldn’t surprise him. He shrugs - less awkwardly these days, though whether it’s due to his frame slowly filling out or the reluctant building of esteem - and utilizes the topic as a way to tear his eyes away from her to gesture out at the woods around them. “I’m that ‘everyone else’, didn’t you know?” His smile is a shadow of what it once had been for her (only her), but there are hints of the same young man she’d once met in a blushberry field.
He looks back at her, feeling the distance between them keenly, and not just in the physical sense. “My best friend is infected. Are you - I mean, is it for a friend or the greater good?” Jude isn’t privy to her life anymore. Can’t let himself desire it either. But he wonders all the same.
Flowers are all anyone is talking about these days, so it shouldn’t surprise him. He shrugs - less awkwardly these days, though whether it’s due to his frame slowly filling out or the reluctant building of esteem - and utilizes the topic as a way to tear his eyes away from her to gesture out at the woods around them. “I’m that ‘everyone else’, didn’t you know?” His smile is a shadow of what it once had been for her (only her), but there are hints of the same young man she’d once met in a blushberry field.
He looks back at her, feeling the distance between them keenly, and not just in the physical sense. “My best friend is infected. Are you - I mean, is it for a friend or the greater good?” Jude isn’t privy to her life anymore. Can’t let himself desire it either. But he wonders all the same.
ready to return everything the darkness stole
