my held breath fills the room with blood
hurting in ways I can't describe
The times Hotaru has said the same, feeling Raeden’s loss like a gaping wound, is innumerable. “You can, love. You have to. You won’t be the same - we will never be the same - but we have to.” Because if she loses Flora, then it all dies with Hotaru. The Kaito line, the Kaliesin, all of it razed. Flora is her only reason to keep going in this fraught, endless moment. A weight Hotaru had never intended to put on her daughter’s shoulders. She prays the girl does not sense it.
Holding Flora closer as she shivers, Hotaru only just barely manages to not dig possessive, clawlike fingers into her daughter’s figure. Stay here, stay with me, you can never leave my sight again. Swallowing against those words makes her throat burn like her saliva has turned to acid, something dark and long-wounded at war with the eternal desire to be a good mother. “You can stay with me as long as you need. You don’t have to go back, sweetheart. I can take care of you here.” The pleading is too well buried to hear, but the words and the grip of her hands betray it regardless.
Holding Flora closer as she shivers, Hotaru only just barely manages to not dig possessive, clawlike fingers into her daughter’s figure. Stay here, stay with me, you can never leave my sight again. Swallowing against those words makes her throat burn like her saliva has turned to acid, something dark and long-wounded at war with the eternal desire to be a good mother. “You can stay with me as long as you need. You don’t have to go back, sweetheart. I can take care of you here.” The pleading is too well buried to hear, but the words and the grip of her hands betray it regardless.
my heart bends and breaks
so many, many times
HOTARU
