Good times and bad.
Everything, together.
"But that means allowing me to lead when I'm forced to by our circumstances," she continues, the words landing with implications I can't argue against. "Not because I don't appreciate you taking the burden off me, because fuck..."
She needs to take a breath.
Fighting tears that threaten to spill despite her obvious efforts to contain them.
"It's hard." The admission emerges as whisper. "All of this is hard. And I'm truly drained."
Drained.
Of course she's drained.
She's been carrying weight that would crush anyone else.
"But just one more set of trials." Hope colors her voice now—fragile hope, desperate hope, but hope nonetheless. "Just one more rollercoaster of chaos, and we deal with my damn sister, and that'sit."
Her transformed features carry determination that refuses to surrender despite everything stacked against us.
"We get to finally be in control of our destiny."
She meets my eyes with the particular intensity of someone asking for agreement, for support, for faith that what she's saying might actually be possible.
"Okay?"
Okay.
Such a simple word.
Such massive implications.
A single tear escapes her control—moisture tracking down her transformed cheek, carrying evidence of the emotion she's been trying to contain. The drop catches light as it falls, shimmering with the particular luminescence that her Fae awakening has apparently made permanent.
I reach out.
My thumb finds the tear, brushing it away with gentleness that contradicts the roughness of most of my interactions with the world. The moisture transfers from her skin to mine, her grief literally becoming part of me through this simple act of comfort.
I nod.
"Okay."
The word emerges as whisper—agreement, acknowledgment, surrender to arguments I can't counter.
She's right.
About all of it.
And I've been too focused on protecting her to realize I was also constraining her.
We stare at one another.
The moment stretches with the particular weight of understanding reached, of conflicts resolved—or at least acknowledged. The chaos continues around us, but in this space, on this platform of shadows suspended above volcanic destruction, something has shifted between us.
Better.
We're better.
