◦ genuine relief
there comes a time when the people you surround yourself with start to weigh on you -- heavy on your arms and pulling down like weights, determined to drown you in a lake. this is especially so if you’ve spent long years without contact with the outside world, without a word and this is the case for kim jinhee. it’s visibly making her stiff right down to her toes, a jaw clenched and fingers clenching, unclenching. she is a brittle, dying leaf hanging on for dear life to the arms of her tree. she just wants normalcy.
flashbacks play back in her mind as she passes by each room and there she is drenched in the shower with a dying wolf boy in her arms with panic flooding her system, there she is with the wolf in her bed, then the one who left a rabbit by her feet. all of them quiet, all of them curled and made a place inside of her in their own way and she was unprepared -- didn’t expect, didn’t have her heart ready to accept so many. her lips purse a little and she closes her eyes, tries to remember a time when things were quiet, when she was quiet, when the only visitor she would have is the vampire who plays a human during the day just because he wants to see her -- like she doesn’t know he wants to see her.
and as if like clockwork, like he can tell she’s thinking of him, he comes by looking like the paper man he is, bones brittle and eyes tired. he’s looking like she could rip him apart if she tried, it’s an observation she made about him a long time ago -- but she is her own fragile leaf barely hanging on in the breeze. there is no more violence left in her bloody hands.
“ vampire.” her words are stiff as always when she speaks to him, though they hold none of their conviction and she’s sure he’ll be able to read something into it -- he’ll be able to tell that there’s something not quite right with the way she stands, the way her hair hangs about her shoulders, the look in her eye. he is probably the one who knows her best these past few years ( even if this is something she didn’t want at all ).
it’s like this that she thinks, if she is a leaf then he is the branch grasping on. jei has long since learned that he will not let her go.