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Love was a foreign entity.
Theoretically, one's first introduction to love should be the warmth of their parents wrapping them up in protection. Adoration. A feeling of I'm so glad you're here.
Or a sibling's embrace. A child's giggle that spreads like the lazy sunset over the sea. A I'm so happy I get to meet you!
Qiyana didn't get either. As early as she could reach inside the memories of the body she inhabited, there was a lack of warmth. A temperature-controlled greenhouse that surrounded her heart. She learned later that romantic love was supposed to come from another source, so she waited. For the radiant strike of the light, or the lick of the sunrise over her face in the morning, or even the shy rays through the leaves in the afternoon. She tried to find it first amongst the classes of other young elementalists her age. Then amongst the Yun Tal once she joined them. The expected blossoming of what everyone else called a crush never came.
It was not as if Qiyana wasn't sought after. Courting was daily. Letters, flowers, pastries. They were met with a cordial thankfulness from the princess herself, then by servants as she grew tired of the pleasantries. There was no fullfilment. No flutter of the stomach. No flushing of her cheeks. No tingles of excitement over the goosebumps on her skin. Nothing.
That is, until she left Ixtal.
It was a spur of the moment thing, really. An outstretched hand offered to show what else was there, and how was she supposed to rule everything when she barely knew what existed outside? So, she took it.
At the beginning, it was the very same she had already gone through. There was a static-like numbness that made every conversation, every touch, every look lukewarm. And yet, like the many-layered gifts of the Yun Tal ceremony (as many layers as one's age, each a different pattern), the static was peeled back.
It had been a year since meeting him when the sunlight finally shone through her barriers, amplified as if reflected through glass, concentrated and powerfully melting.
She recalled waking up with hair clinging to her neck and face, sweat-prickled skin raised with goosebumps, and a new glow in her eyes. Then, a question. What the hell was that? And the wall came tumbling down.
It felt good. It felt warm. It felt like something she did not earn or deserve, but had quietly longed for for years.
Calloused hands held her face and wiped her tears, did not mind the stains of violence on her palms, and gently shushed her through her nightmares. The lingering scent of sake and seabreeze that she had thought repulsing at first brought her comfort. She didn't become a better person because of love. Qiyana had set onto that journey on her own. But it became so much easier to want to be good when there was someone she could trust. Someone she craved to have by her side, because the gelid dark of insecurity and anxiety over this new life path was made so much easier by having her hand in his.
And so, Yun Qiyana found she was worthy of love even without the title of empress she thought was her way into her family and other's heart.
All she needed was the right hand to hold.