i hate dreaming of being alone

AmaLIa

shield of safrin

Her story had been too much: too serious, too deep, too selfish, too raw. His silence feels damning and overwhelming, and for a moment the girl wonders if perhaps she has drowned them both once more in darkness, the shrouds of the past threatening to encompass them both in a haze of sorrow. Dropping her head to look at Jyoti, the Shield lets her eyes fall shut. On her retinas dance a million images, faces and moments and blood and regrets, the deaths they've endured, the ones they will never have back-

Then his arms are around her, engulfing, encompassing, a comfort she does not deserve but leans into nonetheless. She presses her forehead into his chest, exhaling a long and shuddering sigh, inhaling his scent and letting it fill her. For a minute she is silent, her mind falling open to allow him in, the images spinning out into existence and easing between them, a flowing river of experiences and thoughts. Days of laughter beside her grandmother, nights of mourning for her losses; smiles and stories and fights and flights of fancy, the things she never told anyone about, the memories she kept for herself for so long. She lets them out and invites him to do the same, to think them if he cannot speak of it. Good and bad, smiles and tears, sickness and health and sorrow and mirth.

And when she is finished, when she has thought over all that is gone and lost and missed and mourned, when the flood of history Pandora's Box is at last freed, there at the bottom is hope. Hope for the future, hope for them, dreams she feels guilty for having but cannot hold back. Happiness, that they have a home together, that they will be married; dreams of serving gods and preserving life. Friends and family and sisters and brothers-

"Oh right," she mumbles into his chest. "I have a brother and sister now. So uh. Yeah."

you can't choose what stays
and what fades away