If I can't be everything to you.....you will be nothin to me

I want to believe you but I can't.

1 month and a week before the wedding

She spent a lot of her time in her  room, as of late. Between her bed and the warm windowsill of the main living room, she found her mind quieting only when she had a book in one hand, or a pen with paper in the other.

If she read a thousand words, painted a dozen pieces, she could keep her thoughts from muttering as many worriments.

She'd read and reread The Iliad three times in the last week, and her notebooks were beginning to grow cramped as she squeezed new sketches onto occupied pages, despising the disorganization but relying on it nevertheless to occupy her thoughts. It was all she could do, really, being benched as Robin, having nowhere to go as Dahlia (stop that, stop that, stop that , don't think about Jon, don't).

Anything that left her hands or attention uninvolved left her lost in obtrusive, feckless thoughts.

Memories of her training, the cruel admission that she was Father's daughter only by blood , the haunting of Jon welcoming Iris into his front door she could still hear her giggling, still peek through the window and see Jon's hands on her, his lips on her skin.

Dahlia grinded her teeth and told herself that she wouldn't cry, that she'd run out of tears, that she was moving on, now, and Jon would be a mere lesson.

The lesson that love only got her  hurt, that she could never trust anyone, no matter how trustworthy they seemed, not with her skin, not her heart, not with anything they couldn't see beyond her armor.

Love was for people who could take that pain, people like Grayson, or Drake, or even her father. Dahlia well, she could take any poison, any bullet, any bruise and lost limb, she could even take the pain of death, but she wasn't naive enough to think she was impervious to the wounds that reached within, not anymore. When she was younger, she'd have told anyone who asked that she had no fears, and there was no strain she couldn't take, and she'd have been bold-facedly lying.

She'd never been able to take mental tribulation, had never been good at stomaching her grief.

She could channel it, well enough, into her fighting. That got her benched. So instead she elected to not think about it. The pain would go away eventually.

She had a fiance, now, and finding companionship would be something she never had to worry about again.

There was a knock at her door, three small taps that resounded against the polished wood. Dahlia hummed. "Come in."

The door opened, and Grayson peeked his head in from around the corner. "Hey, Lil' D."

"Grayson?" She set down her notebook and pen. It was rare that her brother visited the manor, anymore, let alone so soon. "What are you doing here?"

"Just wanted to come visit the little bride-to-be!"

Dahlia snorted and rolled her eyes, unable to hide her smile. Grayson always had a way of doing that to her, even more so as the years passed. Todd said she'd gotten soft. She told Todd she hoped Reassa couldn't say the same about him. ,"The wedding is in a month. You'll be seeing plenty of me between rehearsals and dress  fittings."

"Hah hah, I could never see too much of you, Lil' D." He strutted into the bedroom with one hand raised, patting her at the head and messing up her not-so-fastidiously-styled hair. Dahlia huffed and faked a scowl up at him, because she was no thirteen anymore, but Grayson knew and didn't care. "I have to say, I wouldn't have expected you to be the second  Robin to get married off."

"None of you had mothers meticulous enough to pick someone for you."

" None of us are her sons thankfully "