Recollections beg a bittersweet remembrance from her, beckoning forth that which she buries so deep in the cavity of bare-bone existence. For all her want, all her power, she is still just a girl. A girl so dutifully wrapped in that which she is predestined for — a life of glory and gore, befitting of her station and purpose. She does not dispute that he had to leave nor does her temper flourish at the thought of it. By now, the maiden girl had grown used to such behavior from those she knew, those who she became… dare she think, attached? Names and faces to pass over her memory and all the same, they leave. One after the other — her father, her friends, and simply put something more.
Never questioning. Never yielding to fate. She moves onward. His happiness is paramount in that moment, a stillness overlooking the ireful chill, and she cannot berate such behavior. Why for? To what end would that garner her. Placing undue demands on someone who sparsely came to a glimmer in her mind.
It’s easier when they don’t come back.
❝ I didn’t ask you to, I’m not so childish. ❞
Shoulders slump and weariness flutters through her voice. Tiresome is this process, unwilling to batter and bray for longer than needed she simmers herself. Useless tidings. In careful stride she does take a step or two towards the straw-haired boy, nose crinkling as lapis lazuli irises look beyond the strong loll of his shoulder.
❝At least you’re alive. I suppose that’s something to remark on. ❞
Unlike so many others I knew.
"Alive and more."
Victory in gaining what was stolen from him had invigorated him beyond measure. His right arm was surely missed, but something far more precious had been found in the blood that blinded him so in that furious battle. Where so many lives were lost, where precious comrades were forsaken for some idiotic righteous cause of a would-be-god. Aureate fury had laid witness to his own power, to what had been awoken in the oncoming triumphant spree. His heart responded to the call of everything that he had lost--but everything that he could gain.
"...Annie."
Breathed was her name, a title that bestowed such vigor to him in the eye of that seemingly endless storm. He looked to her in adoration once more, ire dispelled for the lack of strength to carry it out. Leather no longer still across floorboards, his frame now inches from her own as he began to simper towards the lioness before him. "If I hafta' break through that glacial barrier again, I will. ...I'm here to stay. I'm here to be with you."
And there was a chance that she would deny him the right to indulge in something so selfish--so unlike them. They were maimed beyond reckoning, hearts so tender that they bleed to a mere graze. But there was no amount of might in the world to deny what he harbored for this being--this girl wound in titanium and bathed in carmine.
So came the confession of his core, discovered on the edge into oblivion.
"I love you."
