giving me a million reasons

make peace with your broken pieces

"You did ask for it, though." If Amalia could go back to a time where she didn't care about Remi, didn't know who Ronin was, would she do it? Erase them like a night of bad drinking? She hadn't asked to be their friends, and they hadn't asked to be hers. It just happened slow and cruel and insidious, until there wasn't a way out. Until their lives were so entangled as to be something close to family.

Family hurts you worse than anything else. It's a lesson Amalia has never managed to learn.

"Then be mad. Be dark and broody and whatever you want. But if you're allowed to be hurt and make mistakes then so are the rest of us."

There might have been some peace found there, or something close to it. Maybe they could have agreed to bury their differences for now, to go back to playing nice and pretending that they're both okay. Amalia may have been willing, at least.

But no.

In the moments that follow Remi's condemnation Amalia sits in unreadable silence as the rain begins to fall. Hurting and angry and lost for words, she stares into she sea, biting her lip against the tears and trying to keep her head above the rising tide of her roaring mind.

shield of safrin

REMI

the alchemist

I've said that hope I'll never find
To my myself I must confide

"When I came here. When she died everything changed." The Alchemist snarls in response. "You know that." Clinging to ghosts of who he once was, bright-eyed and unbroken, navigated the Hollowed Ground for the first time. That man had made friends, sure. But he wasn't that man anymore, as he'd painstakingly reminded everyone over and over again.

"Then stop acting like you haven't made any." Remi growled, his teeth threatening to become pointed and shark-like in his mouth. Mistakes were fine. But wrapping everything up under the banner of it being the right thing to do was declaring that it wasn't a mistake.  To his ears, anyways.

They've both gone too far now. He can see it in the way Amalia has receded into herself, and feel it in the teeth made jagged in his mouth. Swallowing, Remi finally does stand, but it isn't a petulant gesture. It's a sign of the stalemate they've reached. Their impasse.

"Enjoy your honeymoon." He does mean the words, but with circumstances as they are, they probably just make him sound like he's trying to get in one final jab before leaving.

Wanting nothing more than to bury his head in his pillow, preferably with Ronin next to him, Remi makes his way back toward the cottage.

~FIN

That there's no choice outside your mind
when your heart is overthrown

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!