Hotaru
i'm still here but all is lost
She concedes the point with a soft hum and nothing more. Honestly she hadn’t been seeking him out intentionally, needing to see the refuge with her own eyes out of curiosity, driven by the restless fear of her twins refusing to utilize it. Or maybe she’s just chasing ghosts, now. As his arm wraps around her she leans into it, too tired to feel much more than the sting of her own eyes as she watches her own hand smoothing over the cougar’s head. Of course he knows. It was ridiculous to imagine she was the only one to receive a letter, wasn’t it? Not a footnote this time, but still only one in a handful of preemptive goodbyes. She shouldn’t be so selfish as to wish she was the only one, but when has she ever cared about being selfish before? Her covetous nature has never awarded her anything permanent. Everything that passes through her fingers is destined to be grasped only temporarily.
“I don’t want to be pathetic enough to say this should be my sign to give up,” she murmurs into his shoulder, wishing she didn’t find his embrace so comforting after all they’d done to each other. “But it feels like it.” She’s scarcely thirty years old, and already she feels as if this is it. That her solitary nature has now doomed her heart to be the same. That fate, and the cruelty of gods, will never allow her true happiness.
