Amalia
A deeper conversation is all I want from you-
He wraps around her and she can feel herself drowning, kicking desperately against dark water to try and stay afloat. Hands coil protectively over his back, rubbing his neck, trying to soothe a wound that cannot be healed. "I know," she murmurs, his pain ricocheting to her through the Attuned bond, something she cannot echo. All they'd ever wanted was to protect the things they had, and yet so often had they been made to watch their loved ones slip away? Every failure, every loss- they haunt her, the ghosts of her mistakes.And they live in him. She sees them every day in his haunted face, feels them in the way she has come to keep herself closed. Even now Amalia holds back the parts of her that threaten to spill apart, but gods is she tired. Tired of these moments where they mourn, tired of seeing more tears than smiles.
"Of course you are. You are enough." She says the words fervently and means them, too: he is enough and more again, a better man than any other Amalia can name. "This was not your fault." And yet she can feel the disharmony in it, the way that trauma has made their edges jagged, no longer quite connecting. They used to be parts of the same puzzle, pieces of a whole. Now as she holds him she can only think of the thing that they are missing, the harpy-shaped absence that will never fill in.
He is enough, and he is who she loves. But he is not what she needs.
- I want the words you're afraid to say:
the lonely ones you keep hidden
between the folds of your heart
