Damien
the woods have remembered you
He stayed still for a moment, letting her words settle around them like the snow in the barracks. When he spoke, it wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t loud. Just as steady as always, but it was also deliberate, as if each word had its own weight. “You’re not useless,” he said first, because it needed saying. He let it hang, soft but firm. “Not to me. Not to anyone who’s paying attention. What you just—” he gestured vaguely, not at her body but at the frustration she’d spilled, and he shifted on his feet in a kind of restless manner because she was so unnecessarily hard on herself. “—what you just said, that’s not how I see it. You move like... a shadow or fire. You're clever, you're fast, you're sharp. I’ve had to work harder than I ever thought I would to keep up with you. You've made me stronger.”He moved to stay in her field of vision, boots crunching in the snow, letting the small distance between them shrink again. His gaze held hers, careful, quiet, but not pleading. “The shield…” His voice dipped a fraction, almost a grunt, almost a sigh. Something on the tip of his tongue that he didn't know how to articulate. “I thought it’d give you more… room to breathe. Not hold you back. I was wrong about it, clearly.” A brief pause, just long enough for the cold to fill it. “Stupid on my part. Didn’t think it through. Just… tossed it at you, hoping it might click. Didn’t mean to make you feel boxed in or… or worse.”
He took another step closer, letting the snow crunch beneath him, steady as his words. “I don’t spar with you to see who wins or loses. I spar with you because…” He looked away for a fraction of a second, chest rising, then back to her. “…because of the rush I get from it, the give and take, the way your mind works under pressure. And you’ve got one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever faced. I can't keep up with you, I have to pull that shit because you'll just.. assassinate me every time, Theea. And you still did anyway." He scoffed because damn it, it was true. "You’re not losing to anything but the lies you tell yourself. The only person you’d ever be losing to in my eyes is the version of yourself who thinks she’s not enough.”
The tension in his shoulders eased, a quiet warmth threading through the cold air. “You want to be your own shield. I get that. And I’ll respect it. But if we’re going to spar, or fight, or whatever comes next…” His voice dropped just slightly, careful and low. “…we can’t have pride getting in the way. You’d have to trust that I’m not trying to put out your fire. And I’d have to trust that you’re not trying to show me up just for the sake of proving you can. Think you can do that?”
ever since the first time you got lost in them
