Work Text:
Grace worries about Xullara, all the time. It might seem strange, when they are always a bold whirlwind of ideas, and so much stronger than she, but they are reckless. More than that, too, she has seen what very few others have, and knows that there is a lot they keep tucked away. They are afraid, very often. Of her, sometimes. That’s an awful feeling, a guilt that sticks to her insides and makes her feel ill. She has never wanted anyone to be afraid of her, least of all one she loves. There are things she wishes to ask, but Xullara is so flighty, so quick to startle, and she worries she would scare them further.
So, all she can do is sift through implications. In her mind, she pieces together every detail they have ever shared about their background, every offhand reference to this or that. It’s not much. All she really knows is that they have suffered, and learned to turn their body into a tool to be used.
She has never seen them working, but when they are bed together, she wonders how much of what Xullara shows her is a performance. She’s not jealous of those others. She resents them, not because they slept with Xullara first, but because she has heard enough to know how young Xullara was when they started. That young person, so out of their depth, haunts her.
She watches them with her children, and thinks of the child they once were. They were a child taught to fear. They speak fondly of much of their childhood, and she has no desire to ruin that for them, yet still what she knows flutters around her mind. She knows they nearly died more than once. She has seen all their scars.
It is not an easy thing, to love someone so scarred. Xullara is evasive, and often thoughtless. Fearful though they are, they have killed. They have never been violent towards her or her children, but they have collapsed on her sofa, bleeding out.
She wishes they would tell her more. They speak so little of either past or present, coming and going like the wind with never a word of warning. She doesn’t know where they go, when they leave for days or weeks at a time. Sometimes they come back in the same state they had been before, sometimes better, and sometimes they stagger to her door bleeding. Many things are uncertain, with them, and she cannot live always in that unsure realm.
She will always love them, in one sense or another, and she will always fear for them, and be willing to shelter them, but she cannot live like this indefinitely.