[SE] all the choirs in my head

Maea

Stars, hide your fires

It was a long time since she stopped keeping track of what passed in his life. Maybe it would have been different if the war hadn't happened, if they had kept talking things through and found the way back to the friendship they'd started out with. But Nate died and she turned to stone, and now so many years had passed that she didn't feel like she knew Sunjata anymore. If she ever actually had; their fallout suggested a lot of wishful thinking had been involved on both sides.

"You don't care about the consequences?" she wondered, grimacing lightly at the thought of letting her own shifts run amok. "What if people get in the way, get hurt..?" It sounded reckless to her ears, who had never had a good relationship with control or the lack of it.

Shrugging as the question rebounded on her, Maea hesitated. Unsure what to say, if anything. "Oh, you know... same old. Trying to be useful, failing spectacularly, trying to mend fences, making it worse..." She didn't mean to sound bitter, because it was just her reality at this point. But she looked tired, more so than she realized or would ever have admitted on her own. "I left the Grounds, though, and I'm doing what I can to break some bad patterns. Not sure how it's going yet."

Let not light see my black and deep desires