First Cringe Of Morning || Self Para
Everything felt different these days. The feel of her own fingertips rubbing against each other as she thought of what she was doing, the cool numbness running up her legs as the snow melted around her feet, the wetness running down her cheeks as she decided once and for all.
Noah's delighted giggles echoed through the cabin they had been staying in for the past month, breaking her concentration and placing an automatic smile on her face. Even smiling felt different. It was the consequence of being trapped inside the same room for over a month, enduring innumerable beatings and psychological torture. They had left the entirety of her changed, so much that Paul had had a hard time believing she was still her when they were reunited.
It was him that had drawn her away from the group in the dead of night, without a sound and without a goodbye. She couldn't think of the people she loved as she left. She couldn't. There were things to do, and if she stayed, so many people would not survive this harsh world. Rose had left with her baby and never looked back. The feeling pulling her towards her husband was unrelenting and intense, completely impossible to ignore.
But they had been reunited, and it was beautiful and impossible and terrible at the same time. But above all, it was right. It was the first thing to feel right since that damned prison.
That was weeks ago, and now she had made a choice to leave them both. Rose knew she would be able to find them again, but it would be a while before she would see them again. She could feel it. She could feel that there would be someone else when she came back, but she also knew it would not matter in the end. They were her family, the ones she was supposed to have, but not the one in her future. They were a very small part of her now, the last piece of her battered humanity.
She knelt over them, smiling softly as Paul put their son in his small bed. Rose took her baby in one last time, hoping he would remember the love in her eyes. Noah's eyelids fluttered closed. She turned to her husband. The adoration was obvious in the lines on his skin and the small touch to her cheek. Hers was in the silence, in not telling him she would be back, in giving him permission to find that someone in his future. Rose kissed his lips for the last time before telling him to sleep.
He went without argument, surely thinking she would join him in a few minutes.
She did not.









