[ How can it be okay? crosses his mind, all of his usual logic shattered as surely as if it had been pushed over the balcony. There's no way for it to be okay, not with Mal gone, her effusive light snuffed out too soon. They still needed to go to Paris during her favorite season, to subsist off of street crepes and too many pain aux chocolat. To break in the new pairs of matching boots they'd gotten for each other one holiday, completely unplanned, and had broken into hysterics over. She needed to finish the half-full bottle of perfume on her dresser and complain bitterly the formula was different (it wasn't) when she bought a new one.
He needed to find her keys hundreds of thousands more times.
Tears well over, dampening the front of Kalmiya's shirt, and he chokes on a sob as he feels the slow caress of her hand. Little by little, each pass feels like she's sweeping the flood waters back, the suffocating pressure in his chest beginning to lift. And as it does, his awareness drips back in—the curl of her body like a curtain, how she's both steady in the storm and in the sure grip of her hand with his through the tether.
It's okay, because taking the plunge is the first step. It's okay to miss his best friend like a limb, to be more than a bit angry over it, because he's spent over two years not thinking about it at all. Burying it anytime it resurfaced, only allowing himself to skip to accepting it.
Molded so closely, his ears no longer ringing with the deafening sound of grief, he listens to the fixed beat of her heart, letting the muted vibration of it help dictate his own pulse. Pulling in a shivering inhale, he gives Kalmiya a grateful squeeze around the middle, spending another few moments just breathing in the berry-sweet scent of guava and summer warmed jasmine. ]
... Sorry about your shirt. [ To break the tension, though he doubts she's worried about that at all. Voice muffled, he sounds—tired, mostly, but different from the brittle exhaustion of being chased by his mirror. It's more okay; a fragile catharsis. ]
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He needed to find her keys hundreds of thousands more times.
Tears well over, dampening the front of Kalmiya's shirt, and he chokes on a sob as he feels the slow caress of her hand. Little by little, each pass feels like she's sweeping the flood waters back, the suffocating pressure in his chest beginning to lift. And as it does, his awareness drips back in—the curl of her body like a curtain, how she's both steady in the storm and in the sure grip of her hand with his through the tether.
It's okay, because taking the plunge is the first step. It's okay to miss his best friend like a limb, to be more than a bit angry over it, because he's spent over two years not thinking about it at all. Burying it anytime it resurfaced, only allowing himself to skip to accepting it.
Molded so closely, his ears no longer ringing with the deafening sound of grief, he listens to the fixed beat of her heart, letting the muted vibration of it help dictate his own pulse. Pulling in a shivering inhale, he gives Kalmiya a grateful squeeze around the middle, spending another few moments just breathing in the berry-sweet scent of guava and summer warmed jasmine. ]
... Sorry about your shirt. [ To break the tension, though he doubts she's worried about that at all. Voice muffled, he sounds—tired, mostly, but different from the brittle exhaustion of being chased by his mirror. It's more okay; a fragile catharsis. ]