This with a drink and good company.

Travel Greece 04 / İskeçe / Xanthi:

Yunanistan'ın Batı Trakya bölgesinde İskeçe ilinin merkezidir. Lozan Antlaşmasının imzalamasıyla nüfus mübadelesinden İskeçe Türk halkı muaf tutulur. Türklerin yoğun yaşadığı yerlerdendir. Yaz kış turistlerin ilgisinde, Avrupa Birliği tarafından Yunanistan'ın en iyi korunmuş eski şehri unvanına sahiptir. "İskeçe Eski Kasaba Festivali" bölgede ilgi çeken önemli festivallerdendir. 

Gothi stared at the shattered test tube. Big enough for a man. Big enough for a god. 

A synthetic god, at least.

It wasn’t—it wasn’t the test tube she knew. The one she’d sat next to, stood next to, again and again, for years and years and years.

“If you really had empathy, wouldn’t you have done more for your friend?” 

Such words were only meant to confuse her. Sips had already talked her down from it (and since when was Sips the mature one, soothing and comforting Gothi?) (She loved him so much it felt like carving his initials on her ribs, the sweet heat of blood and sunlight spilling over her fingers as she did so) (He’d only ever been soft for Sneeze, before. What right did she have to his gentleness?). She didn’t need to rehash this.

She’d cared for Xanu. Still did. Two and a half thousand years apart, and she loved Xanu like she’d stop breathing if she didn’t. 

Shouldn’t she have done more? 

“Gothica?”

Gothi flinched. Squeezed her fingers into the skin of her own arms, a facsimile of hugging herself.

“Gothica, the others are looking for you.”

“Okay,” she said without turning, “I’ll be right there.”

Footsteps, slow and uncertain, approached her. She felt his hand touch her elbow, a little too rough, then almost leaving as he corrected.

“Gothica?”

They stared at the shattered tube together.

“It rouses unpleasant memories,” he stated, low and distasteful. Gothi hunched in on herself further. 

“Do you—”

Xanu turned to her. She knew she was trembling.

“Do you blame me?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“I could’ve—I could’ve done something.”

“Gothica—”

“I could have done anything. They were hurting you and I just let them do it!”

“Gothica that isn’t tr—”

“I should’ve done something,” she whined, voice pitched high, tears stinging at her eyes, misting underneath her mask, “I should have done anything, I should’ve done more, but I was scared, and cowardly—

“Gothi!”

She flinched.

His hand touched her mask, missing the first time, fingers twitching as he settled it, rough and uncoordinated and finally, gentle, to cup her face.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, tears spilling out beneath the wood, “I’m so sorry Xanu.”

“Gothica. Nothing that happened to me was ever your fault.”

“But I could’ve done something!” 

“You want to think that,” he said, blunt and harsh as he ever was, but with a tenderness he reserved for her. Only ever for her. “But you could not have, Gothica. You were just as much a prisoner in that place as I was.”

“They hurt you,” she whispered, shoulders shaking with tears, “they never hurt me.”

Slowly, fumbling, he drew her close to him.

“Not like they hurt me, no, but they did. They hurt us both.”

“It feels wrong,” she choked, resting her face against his chest, his arms around her, but she still just hugged herself. “Accepting comfort for this. When you had it so much worse. When I—”

“Gothica,” he said softly, and she let go of herself to cling to him, holding him upright with her physical body as he held her while she fell apart. “You want to feel like you had control in a situation where you didn’t. But you didn’t. Nothing that happened to me was your fault. You could not have stopped them. I saw you, many times, when you tried.”

“I—”

“You are allowed,” he pressed on, “to accept comfort from others. You do not have to be the strong one all the time. You do not always have to be the one who holds it all together.”