Hotaru
My head's a burial ground of your memory
There are far too many uncertainties abound to bring any level of calm or comfort to a woman as calculating as Hotaru in any other situation. But nothing has ever been the same since these two came into her life, flipping her upside down and inside out as if she was a child's puzzle in their quizzical hands. It's difficult to complain however when those same hands catch and pull her close, their natural scents so familiar to her she could find them even with all other physical senses stripped away. For a moment Hotaru merely clings to them, feeling their contrasting levels of body heat, only just barely holding back the desire to thread her sooty fingers through their hair as she is so fond of doing. Speaking of soot - "I'm gone a few days and you accidentally burn our house down?" The incredulity and natural rhythm of exasperated endearment nearly conceals the shake of nerves that seems to tie knots around all three of them. Only for her throat to catch in an odd click of audible noise as Sunjata - he-
"Where did I go?" she says almost to herself, Atlas' consciousness a maelstrom of emotions she can't focus upon enough to parse. "How...how long was I gone?" That heavy horror she'd refused to name gleefully stealing any air she'd hoped to store in her lungs. Were it not for their hands still warm and steady upon her, she'd likely be stumbling backwards as soon as they release her. Her own tremble noticeably as she numbly reaches up to push her hair away from her face where the seabreeze continually rustles it. Nate's soft, crooning voice is a water-distorted murmur as she tries to quiet the alarms in her head enough to think. "Just...just a cut. I think." Nothing Atlas couldn't heal, but they'd both been far too singularly focused on getting home.
Home that apparently isn't home anymore. At least not the one she remembers. Hotaru feels ill with the implications. How much time did she lose? A season? Five? Does she even still belong here in their arms? Did they think she'd abandoned them, in the way she'd sought never to do after all the times it had happened to her? Without her conscious intention, she has committed the worst sort of betrayal in her own eyes, and the determination that had previously fueled her now drains away and leaves nothing but a shaken shell. Even so, there is nowhere they could not guide her where she would not follow, and her head nods slowly before she's aware she's agreeing to follow Sunjata to this...new home. A Governor's house. Gods. "There's not much to say, I...I don't remember anything." But he's right, they can go over that somewhere more comfortable than the skeleton of their old abode. Atlas comes up from behind to join them now that the initial reunion has passed, nose soft and warm on her shoulder as the woman reaches for one hand each from Nate and Sunjata. "Lead us home," she manages to say in some imitation of her previous spirit, throat constricting over the agonizing intrusive thought that this was one threshold she had wanted to be carried over. Radiant and newly wed instead of disheveled and newly found. But it seems even that dream has been stolen by the murk of time and amnesia.
