Heir of the Forgotten

~The Past~

For three days, Vincent and Dorian took turns watching Selene.

Selene didn't get out of bed. She always looked far off. She rested, but would often wake so she could clear her wound. One of them would wake to find her cleaning blood from the floor.

Dorian tried every time to offer her comfort, but she rejected every advance. He was hurting for her. He hated how, despite everything they went through together, she closed herself to him.

It worries him, though. Her words, where she may be headed.

Today, after three days of letting this go on, he grabs her wrist and drags her outside. Initially resistant, she eventually surrenders. She's so weak, weaker than she had been. He sits with her on the deck, watching the waves. "You can hate me, but we're pulling you out of this slump you're in." He and Vincent will fix this.

Selene does not speak as she stares at the water.

Dorian sighs, leaning over the railing, letting Selene sit. "By the gods, you make me feel things I didn't think I could." His voice is a low whisper, barely louder than the wind running through his hair. The water crashing against the boat is louder than his voice, and yet Selene hears him as if the world were silent. "Since I met you at the market... I..." His cheeks flush as he stares at the rushing tides. "I set it all aside because you and Vincent were... but I... Losing you that day when I had finally come to terms with what I felt..."

Selene glances at him, opening her lips for a brief second, before closing them tight again.

"I thought I could not feel fear, but the way I felt when I thought I'd lost you swallowed me whole. I have never feared for anybody but Vincent. You..." Dorian pauses again, taking a deep breath. "You worry me, scare me. Gods, you consume my thoughts. Right now I'm terrified that you're here but gone. Your self-pity isn't exactly what I'm used to." Dorian curses himself for his last sentence. It wasn't necessary, but he needed a buffer of sorts.

Selene lifts her arm to reach for his hand. She doesn't know how to react. "Everything feels like it's crumbling again." Her lips produce such soft, hesitant words. "One small memory that keeps coming to me clearer each time. Every time it gets worse. The blood, gods, the puddle was a pinkie deep." She has never mourned. Now she realizes, in her assassin years, she remembered fragments of her former self. This memory plagued her mind even then. Though, She's unsure if it had been this fragmented or clear.

Dorian holds her hand as he takes a seat beside her. "I can't imagine the pain..." No, that doesn't sound right. He takes a deep breath and tries again. "I can tell you are in pain, even if I can never grasp how it hurts." He lost friends, but that isn't the pain she's experiencing. He's never suffered as she has.

Tears prick Selene's eyes. She was going to cry; she'd told herself she was done being weak. Yet she finds them trickling down. "Every time I shut my eyes to rest, some minor detail of that night comes to me. My pregnant mother's dress stained red as her blood turned our fountain crimson."

Dorian stares, trying not to let the horror show in his eyes.

"Sometimes I'm running, trailing behind my sister, still not yet processing everything until her blood sprays all over me and she falls. The newest detail is horrid, though. She was still alive. Choking on her own blood as she desperately tried to heal herself. I ran... I left her to die. I could have saved her. She was prettier, smarter, and more mature. I was sheltered, babied, and always kept at a distance from everybody else." The memory weighs less and less as she describes it.

Dorian pulls her close, holding her against his chest. He is left speechless. There is nothing he could say to ease the guilt she must feel. "If you had stayed, you might have died yourself." In the horrid way her family died, something was missing. Something is incredibly wrong with the equation.