lucatiel reaches over & holds her hand :)
Lucatiel’s hand found hers as though it had always known the way.
A soldier’s hand. A survivor’s hand. Warm, despite all that conspired to leach such warmth from them both.
Anri turned her own fingers slightly, marvelling that they still remembered how to answer so gentle a gesture. Her gauntlet creaked – a faint, betraying sound. Through worn-smooth leather she felt the shape of Lucatiel’s grip and imagined the calluses earned from years of blade-work, each a testament to a life spent enduring.
Her thumb shifted, brushing against Lucatiel in shy, searching strokes.
Only a hand, extended and accepted, yet it bore the weight of every vow she had failed to keep, every companion she had not been able to save. It stirred that old, familiar grief, the one she had long since learned to cradle quietly.
It stirred gratitude, too. That small, flickering thing.
How long had it been since her hand had been held?
Anri’s forget-me-not gaze drifted nearer, keenly aware of Lucatiel’s presence and proximity – the guarded stillness, the sense of a self still fought for, moment by moment, breath by breath.
She knew that struggle.
There was a warmth second to that in her hand. One that threatened to take root in the eroded spaces within her, to bloom, sweet as summer-ripe peaches, where nothing ought to grow.
“Thank you,” Anri said at last, quietly.
For the hand.
For everything besides.
