*COMPLETE* "People don't believe in us anymore. They don't believe that in the end we will do what is right. We can't let them down. We can't let Ben win."
Decisions made on top of the lonely, wind-swept cliff of Lethinor reverberate around the five...
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In faith, there is no man.
Being broken is a strangely abstract thing. In vague imaginings, those dreamy nightmares of her previous life, she imagined that being broken was accompanied by such a gust of crushing, reverberating anguish that it overwhelmed the senses, blotting out everything else.
Reality is different. She had anticipated sadness and anger—a fermenting, festering swell of anger—but the grief disarms her.
Grief does not work the way she thought it would. It seems to ebb and flow, building underneath that veneer of "fine," seeping through the cracks when the pressure mounts too high, and then falling in a void of numbness. Her limbs feel heavy long after the bones are set, and the vague pin-pricks of a headache lurk between her eyes. And her eyes, they feel heavy too, dragged down in a state of exhaustion that just doesn't quite seem real, doesn't quite feel tangible.
Nothing feels real anymore. That should be frightening—this should all be frightening—but then again, if it felt real she would have to cope with it being real.
She sits on her bed, watching porridge sludge off the spoon held between three stiff fingers.
This is real.
He's concerned that her food is only half-eaten. She can tell, but she can't seem to make her jaw move enough to get it all down. The porridge just sticks in her mouth, almost suffocatingly, and her arm feels like lead, hanging in the air.
He doesn't try to talk to her—it's what she likes best about him. It's why it has been so easy to stay, though somewhere in her she suspects she couldn't get herself to go even if she wanted to. He could ask a lot of questions. He's probably entitled to ask a lot of questions now, after all this time, but he doesn't.
It's strange, because on some level she would like him to talk at her. Not to her—not in a way that would require her to respond. Just at her, so she can hear a voice. It could be about cooking or gardening—something mundane that she could just focus on for a minute, something she could cling to, so she could start building herself back around this crumbling, fractured thing inside her, build herself back to normal, if only until the grief breaks over her again.
