KAJ

the aurelight

Her desperation seemed like a visceral thing, like seaweed grasping at his ankles and tugging him helplessly forward. Everything about her seemed to reach out and tangle itself into him, pulling him inward, falling hopelessly into the chasm of her familiar sorrow. Kaj did not attempt to slow his descent into her realm of numbness, instead feeling a free-falling sort of relief as the water lapped at his belly and cooled the undersides of his wings. He did not have to pretend to be whole here, try and save face and pride before his people and those he had willfully erased from his memories. There was nothing to taint the waters between he and Sohalia, and it felt like he was pulling back countless layers that had been laying heavy on his body and soul just by standing in her presence. 

Her smile was a tentative, broken thing, and Kaj's echoed it. There was something both sharp and intrinsically sad in the way their lips tried fruitlessly to lift, that even here in this place where they did not have to kid each other they still attempted to be normal. To prove - maybe to themselves - that they still had the strength to deal with all of this. He couldn't hold it against her, not when his own face was attempting the same expression. It didn't make the burden any easier to bear, but it also seemed to speak volumes. 

"I'm glad I found you," he admitted quietly, trying to find her eyes. He needed to know that she was here with him, that she wasn't some conjured dream, some last bid attempt at dealing with the eternal heartbreak that even his self-imposed amnesia could not seem to fix. He was glad that she had managed to shatter his shambling wanderings, because the world had started to seem too large, feeling like it was crushing him beneath the weight of its endless skies. A claustrophobia inspired by the expansiveness of the world, and the fact that even with how large Helovia was, he had still been alone in his travels. 

Her velvet lips caressed his in the briefest of kisses, only to return, firmer and less hesitant. Kaj's eyes slid shut, letting his world narrow to the warmth of her breath and the touch of her skin for a moment. A pinprick of light in the darkness, until he dared to open his eyes and see her illuminated beneath the moon once more. 

"Stay," she begged him. Always, he wanted to say, a vow he'd never been allowed to make. Until you ask me to leave, he hoped to whisper, except that request had always come in actions instead of words in his past. Instead he pressed their bare foreheads together, sharing her breaths, because he had nothing to promise her. He had nothing left to give, and he could not even assure something as insignificant as time. "Okay," he murmured instead, with nothing else to say and no other way to say it. And he stepped forward and let his wet wings come up to shield her from this cruel world, allowing the expanse of his back for their whips to caress instead of subjecting her to it. He could hold out a little longer, if it meant giving her the safe haven she clearly sought in him. And maybe all this time his greatest flaw had been selflessness.