Hotaru
the horrors you've seen do not define who you are
His hands are sure and, god help her, familiar. She suspects it will always be harder with Nate; letting go, moving on - forgetting. He’d never been the one to hurt her in their relationship, for all she’d unfairly included him in her retribution when it came. The ties that once bound them are frayed and singed in ways that pull with each breath, shaky as they are when they come, face buried in the lukewarm skin of his neck. Even his scent is familiar as she clings to him, and it makes the tremble in her chest shake harder with belated terror. I could have lost you forever. It torments her, and the way he leans into her - the two of them like felled trees propping each other up against all odds - is the tangible proof she needs that she hasn’t. It’s the first time she’s heard him speak softly to her in years, and it has her blindly reaching back for the hands that linger but don’t have the courage to stay. As she waits for her tears to slow her hand blindly reaches for his, making the choice for him. Once impatient palms have brushed them away she moves back into his orbit, restless and helpless to avoid his gravity. Uniting the shoulders of the hands that find one another, using that slight touch as one last method of restraint to keep from crawling back fully into an embrace she has no further claim to.
She is sick with anger at her own ignorance. At the ignorance forced and foisted upon her by Remi, by Sunjata, by Wessex. She seethes through his explanations, silent, writhing. Sam is the only other loss she knows. A kind, nervous man in a bar she’d spent an afternoon with and nothing more. But it’s a loss that didn’t need to happen. And there it is - the crux of the issue. That it didn’t need to happen at all. And it feels ironic, that it so deeply parallels the same attack they’d made on her in Halo, but even that bitterness feels far away now.
Turning into him, weak, she rests her forehead on his clavicle beside where their shoulders meet. Squeezes his hand until her own fingers prickle with needles. “Every personal grievance has to be a shitshow you know,” she tries weakly for the same bitter bite of humor he wields, but it falls just as flat. Ru takes a moment to breathe, heart slowing only marginally. “I’m so glad she saved you,” she admits quietly, only capable of it because of the darkness of her closed eyes pressed against his skin. Like a private confession. Even without tears her eyes burn. “I’m so…” but what is there to say? The magnitude of her feelings chokes her once more. For all she feels with the intensity of the sun, Hotaru has never been gifted with verbalizing them. “I’m so sorry.” It’s a wretched thing, wrenched free from her lips by time it comes. And there’s so much to be sorry for that even Ru doesn’t know which she means.
For the fire. For the fire she didn’t set. For the way they left each other. For the last time they spoke in King’s End, and all that had been said. For having ruined everything so perfectly that even when he was killed, nobody felt Hotaru needed to know.
Or had they just assumed she would no longer care?
Maybe that would have been easier, if she didn’t.
