she didn't want to love
she wanted to b e l o v e d
and that was entirely different
His silence is longer than she is prepared to bear, because underneath it lingers something. An electric thing, an unsaid thing, a thing that has built and burnt as embers for the year since he first took her hand and placed them to his lips, since she looked into his eyes and knew that somehow - somehow - he saw her, and was not afraid. In the heartbeats that pass her smile falters, the radiant beam growing subdued as the Shield's heart quickens, her breath coming fast.she wanted to b e l o v e d
and that was entirely different
She knows what is about to happen before his hand rises from his pocket, but she does not look down. Her eyes don't leave his for a moment - not as his palms shift, not as the box opens, not as he exhales that one verbal syllable, the rest of it falling easily into her mind where it resonates and echoes and bounces and thunders, a drumbeat in the bounding of her pulse, electricity in her blood.
I love you-
Every moment replays in her mind, at once and in tandem, sunbeams and dewdrops and radiance in a year that has struck her harder than she ever dreamed possible, raised her higher than she ever feared. And in every moment, a constant theme: him, his hands, his eyes, his breath, his voice, his constancy, his devotion, his faith. Falling Spires and rising mountains; fishing for stones and hunting for tomes. Shrines were built, darkness survived, portals opened, pits escape- and through all of it, in all of it, she came out stronger for him.
Marry me--
She doesn't answer immediately, because she doesn't know what to say. Her expression is blank as a newborn lamb's, wondrous as the first time she looked at the sky. Her eyes are wide and her face flushed and her hands tremble as they stay on his face, frozen in her overwhelm--
-- and then she breaks, like clouds giving way to the brightest sun, and there are tears in her eyes and a smile on her lips and laughter in her throat as she throws her arms around him, leaping fearlessly into his arms, her mouth upon his in fervent adoration, worshipful abandon, helpless trust. Weightless, unafraid, she crashes upon him, a storm on a mountain, a wave on the shore. Without reserve she gives herself to him, the action an answer as much as her words--
"--Yes," she whispers, cries, intones, a hymn and an anthem, the answer first written on a fateful day a year before. Yes, because it has always been her answer, will always be her answer, because how could it ever have been anything else.
Because in a senseless world full of difficult choices and murky morality, in a year of changes and horrible uncertainty, here is a thing she can understand. She is his Shield and he is her Sword, and if this not right, well, she will spend her life being wrong- as long as she is with him. Yes. Always. Yes.
Amalia
we are all b r o k e n
that's how the l i g h t gets in
that's how the l i g h t gets in
