milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Hel enters the bar, brushing slush off her boots before she heads for the fire. She's had a lot to think of lately.

Most of it hasn't made her smile, but she's done a lot of thinking.

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"I do not know how to love."

She says in her turn,

"I never have, not in the way of men and women. You are married. This is...it is impossible. It is foolish. I don't want to feel this for you. I do not want to love you."

And she looks over at him, from the center of her living eye with the dead half of her face exposed in a rare moment of deliberate vulnerability.

"And if we could make hearts listen to their bearers, a great many things could have been avoided," he says, almost to himself.

It is impossible. It is foolish, and it is wrong, and it is any number of other things.

But it feels right.

And he doesn't recoil from the dead side of her face.

Softly, so softly, he whispers, "I don't want to want to love you. But I do."

"But I do."

She echoes him, but does not reach out. Her hands, gloved, stay clasped in her lap and her instinct is to hide again. To pull her braid across her face, her cloak around her shoulders, and disappear out into the cold once more.

Instead she looks at him, solemn and sober.

"Fate is capricious, it would seem," he murmurs.

"Yes."

She agrees with him,

"They are. I do not want to hurt your wife."

She'll stay away from him, if he wishes her to.

"I have no wish to hurt her, but living a lie can bring nothing but pain, for ourselves and those we care for."

"Perhaps it is simply...simply a crush."

She's grasping at straws,

"You should return to her. See...see if being away from me makes it stop?"

Hel has a life full of hard things to do, hard things to say. This is the hardest, and her right hand creeps over toward him, stopping on the floor half-way.

He looks down, closing his eyes for a moment.

"If you think it best."

"It would let you know?"

She says it quietly, looking up at the rafters with an expression of abject pain,

"And...you would not have...done anything that you would regret."

Like touch her. The monster child of a traitor. Like love her. Not really.

He's silent, for a few moments.

Then, quietly: "you're right. I... I should find out, for certain."

His voice is far from steady, far from pain-free.

"I'll return, if I can, Hel. I swear."

"Return if you want to."

Her voice shakes as well, and she touches his elbow gently,

"Just be happy, whatever you choose."

He smiles at her, a little.

"I wish I could give you the same gift."

Her face is sober when she looks at him, and she says quietly,

"I have been loved by one such as you. Even if it does not last, it makes me happy."

Softly, he says, "even if it does not last, it was true while it was here."

Someday she may even convince herself to believe it.

He hesitates again, then leans forward and softly, very softly kisses her, just once.

"It is true," he whispers.

And then he stands, and with one last, sorrowful look at her, he leaves.

She watches him leave, until he has gone to wherever it is that he is going.

And then she weeps into gloved hands.

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