Pathos - A Duskwood Fanfiction

Chapter 7

One of the most powerful moments of Lilly's life was happening to her as she stood in room #6 of the Duskwood motel at 3 AM on a silent October morning, staring at a man that she had never met before.

He was taller than her by a good amount, so she had to tilt her head upwards slightly to see his face as he stood silently before her. He had just turned on a small lamp that sat on a desk by the room door, and the sudden brilliance of the light that exploded into the pure dark of the room almost hurt her eyes even though the lamp was small and its output soft and dim.

The hand that had summoned the light had fallen slack at his side as he locked gazes with her, his expression unreadable as he stood with an almost eerie stillness in front of her.

Had it been absolutely anyone else, she would have been supremely weirded out by the inscrutability of the man now gazing at her with unblinking intensity, but because she knew who he was, and because she knew what he had done, the only thing that she could feel in this moment was the purest of gratitude.

They had never met before this moment - she hadn't seen so much as a picture of the man that now stood before her - but she knew that this was Jake and she knew the power and the compassion of the mind behind those eyes.

So she stood still as his gaze scanned every single square inch of her face, something that she would not have tolerated from anyone else just from sheer self-consciousness alone, and met his eye contact steadily as he seemed to stare into and through her physical self and into something else. She let him scan her eyes as deeply as he needed to, which appeared to be considerable, and in so doing was granted access to his.

It seemed to her, as she stared at her brother for the first time, to be perfectly natural and expected for him to have eyes like twin stars that seemed to see right through her, and for him to project an aura of almost preternatural stillness as he did so. The deep and soft gloss of his black hair and eyebrows only served to intensify the effect, becoming a peripheral vingnette that only made the blueness of his eyes all the more vivid.

And as she looked into his eyes, the eyes so similar to their father's and sister's upon initial inspection, she saw a depth and weight and solitude in them that she had never seen in anyone else's before. They were the colour of that deepest, richest blue that the sky sank into before the sun completely disappeared at dusk, she found herself thinking. A dark and deep teal.

Well, that made sense, she thought hazily, as he remained silent.

Having eyes the colour of the sky's swan song before it fell into darkness seemed to be absolutely fitting for the strange and unfathomable presence that stood before her. But then, as she drank them in, something suddenly shattered so painfully and so completely inside of her chest that the force of it propelled her forward before she could stop herself and sent her flying into his arms.

He took a half step backwards as she had caught him off guard, but recovered quickly as she flung her arms around him tightly. The first thing that she became aware of as she pressed her face into his skin was the surprising warmth of him; she hadn't realized how cold she had become as she had paced outside of his room for an hour previous, desperately trying to find the courage to knock on his door.

The heat radiating from his body enveloped her like the blast of warmth from a newly opened oven door; and as she buried her face into his chest, she realized for the first time since entering that he didn't have a shirt on. He smelled, in a weirdly familiar way that she couldn't initially place, like fresh soap and deodorant, and she distantly noted the towel wrapped around his waist.

He slowly and hesitantly raised his arms to carefully enclose around her, and that's when the familiarity of his scent uncloaked itself as the sudden overwhelming humanity of him hit her with full force. It wasn't like he smelled like anything special or noteworthy, but that was the point. That's what smelled familiar. His normalcy. His humanity. He was just a guy who smelled like normal soap and normal deodorant.