[ The squeeze of his hand around hers is the very contact she had been trying to avoid. Closeness means warmth and warmth means kindness and her body's response to kindness when she hurts like this is tears, and more than anything she had not wanted tears.
Tears beg for pity. Little matter if that pity is for her pain or for her weakness or for someone else for needing to bear such a woman as she, so fragile that the closeness of a hand-press begins to crumble her.
Athessa had bought them, but it is different between women. Bastien is a man, and a Bard, and had said "all the happiness he would have if it were our choice" with a kind of gentleness that had tasted different and sent her to think into the darkness of her bedroom later, carding her fingers through memories to see if she could find other bits like it.
And so Bastien cannot see them now. He is become a piece on the board whose placement and movement she doesn't know, and he cannot see her tears. Not when she does not know whether or not he has his own.
(On the outside it just looks like smoothing. A body less ragged so that things like clasped hands and friendship and sympathy can't snag upon it. She tilts her head and smiles and squeezes back.) ]
no subject
Tears beg for pity. Little matter if that pity is for her pain or for her weakness or for someone else for needing to bear such a woman as she, so fragile that the closeness of a hand-press begins to crumble her.
Athessa had bought them, but it is different between women. Bastien is a man, and a Bard, and had said "all the happiness he would have if it were our choice" with a kind of gentleness that had tasted different and sent her to think into the darkness of her bedroom later, carding her fingers through memories to see if she could find other bits like it.
And so Bastien cannot see them now. He is become a piece on the board whose placement and movement she doesn't know, and he cannot see her tears. Not when she does not know whether or not he has his own.
(On the outside it just looks like smoothing. A body less ragged so that things like clasped hands and friendship and sympathy can't snag upon it. She tilts her head and smiles and squeezes back.) ]
May I take word to anyone in Antiva City for you?