How do I keep myself from fallin' apart when I ain't never felt part of a whole?
The flex of his jaw is precisely why she had tried to clarify, but as his walls build higher she’s left with no way to reach him, despite how her own are as pitiful as glass. Transparent and fragile. So there is no hiding the entangled despair and confusion over Frey’s mild response. Her heart cries in agonized confusion, wanting a target to point all this painful emotion toward and finding…nothing.
His outburst makes her flinch. In surprise, if nothing else. Heterochromatic eyes wide and unblinking as the creature around her neck stiffens into stone. Don’t, Hotaru begs, shuddering at the rawness of a bond that makes her cringe to feel again, but desperate not to make this worse. To fix it somehow. She’s not very good at that, but they’d managed it together hadn’t they? She’s learned so much and -
The tense question pulls her out of the spiral of her thoughts, crushing them as simply as one might clench their hand around a brittle autumn leaf. Horror and denial rise in her throat like acid, clenched hands rising to press against her sternum. The urge to beg is so intense it nearly sweeps her over. Or perhaps to her knees, which feel so weak she can neither move closer nor back away. But when did begging ever make him stay? Change his mind, listen?
Swallowing tastes like glass, or maybe the blood is just the byproduct of her own teeth cutting into the soft tissue inside her mouth to strangle down the initial fireworks of different feelings that try to explode free. Those sparks had burned them down once before and she has tried ever since to douse and bury them.
“Do you want it back for now, or forever?” It’s a strained, darkened tone that ekes free after an uncomfortably long silence. The clenched hands at her chest ache, the weight of the ring on her finger like an anvil but as light as a feather compared to the weight of the heart he has asked for her to return. The heart in her own chest.
His outburst makes her flinch. In surprise, if nothing else. Heterochromatic eyes wide and unblinking as the creature around her neck stiffens into stone. Don’t, Hotaru begs, shuddering at the rawness of a bond that makes her cringe to feel again, but desperate not to make this worse. To fix it somehow. She’s not very good at that, but they’d managed it together hadn’t they? She’s learned so much and -
The tense question pulls her out of the spiral of her thoughts, crushing them as simply as one might clench their hand around a brittle autumn leaf. Horror and denial rise in her throat like acid, clenched hands rising to press against her sternum. The urge to beg is so intense it nearly sweeps her over. Or perhaps to her knees, which feel so weak she can neither move closer nor back away. But when did begging ever make him stay? Change his mind, listen?
Swallowing tastes like glass, or maybe the blood is just the byproduct of her own teeth cutting into the soft tissue inside her mouth to strangle down the initial fireworks of different feelings that try to explode free. Those sparks had burned them down once before and she has tried ever since to douse and bury them.
“Do you want it back for now, or forever?” It’s a strained, darkened tone that ekes free after an uncomfortably long silence. The clenched hands at her chest ache, the weight of the ring on her finger like an anvil but as light as a feather compared to the weight of the heart he has asked for her to return. The heart in her own chest.
HOTARU
