Work Text:
Your skin breaks under your nails. Startled, you look down at your left forearm — you hadn't even realized you were scratching in the first place. You've been sort of scattered, you guess.
Turquoise beads on your skin and runs down the length of your arm, twin parallel lines. You watch them with dull interest. The sharp ache draws your attention away from your thoughts, and you can't honestly say you mind that.
You've been feeling... off, lately. Well, you mean, it’s fine, really! But it’s just that it used to be so much easier to shrug things off, to let adversity roll off your back with a smile. It’s okay, though. You just need to get used to this new — well. To everything, you guess.
It feels like a lifetime ago at this point. Like several of them. But your blood still boils whenever you remember the look on his face as he bound you, using those things — and suddenly it’s like you’re still there, seeing it all play out in front of your eyes for a second, third, fourth time. Infinite times. How he hurt you, mocked you—
How he took her away from you.
The intensity of it all still scares you. You feel... you don’t know how you feel. It’s all— jumbled together in your mind, an amorphous wave of dread that crashes over you with zero warning. It makes you feel like you’re a stranger inside your own skin.
It’s suffocating. It’s terrible, and you have no idea how to make it stop.
“Serpaz?”
You start. Your head whips up and you meet Laivan’s eyes. Your stomach sinks as you take in the concerned furrow of his brow, guilt pooling inside you, nauseating.
He’s been so worried about you. You hate being the source of his distress, the opposite of what you should be, as his matesprit. Thinking about how much you’re failing him is almost as bad as revisiting the memories of your game entry, the knowledge that your bad feelings are responsible for his bad feelings all coalescing into a single big, nasty cloud of self-perpetuating badness that looms over the two of you.
Ugh. You’re terrible at putting these things into words.
The smile that stretches your mouth feels tacked-on, unnatural. Still, you do it, more for his benefit than yours. You laugh, and it rings dissonant in your ears in a way you don’t really care to examine right now. “Oh, sorry! Guess I must’ve gotten distracted or something. You were saying…?”
His face falls, and your insides twist painfully. He glances down at your— oh, right. The blood’s trailed down to the tips of your fingers at this point, colorful droplets splashing on the ground at erratic intervals. How long have you been standing here for?
Before you know it, Laivan is by your side, and you watch as he gently takes your hand into his own, turning it this and that way to better inspect your wounds. You look away.
“Sorry.” You’re not sure what you’re apologizing for.
He exhales through his nose. There’s a pause, then you hear a soft hey. The word makes you glance in his direction again, and what greets you is a tentative, tired smile. There’s something in his eyes that makes your throat seize up, and your vision blurs as he pulls you closer and plants a kiss just under your left cheekbone. You take in a shaky breath, and he repeats the motion, again, again, and again, as if he’s on a personal mission to cover every inch of your face with his lips at least once.
He is so thorough that it starts bordering on the ridiculous, and by the end of it, you end up cradled close to his chest, the two of you breathless and laughing — genuinely, this time.
Laivan takes your face in his hands. Gingerly, he tucks a strand of hair behind your ear before he gives you the brightest smile you’ve seen in recent memory. “C’mon, let’s go get you patched up.”
You answer by pulling him in for one final kiss. He laughs against your mouth, smushing your cheeks together, and it’s like a tiny piece of yourself just got put right back into place. You’re not sure how long this feeling is going to last, but for now, it’s enough.
He’s enough.