@healpalm // RIN.
❛ Do you ever — ❜
lips part in question -- only to falter and fall shut once more, hesitation obscured by a soft, mournful sigh. such disquiet is uncharacteristic of him ; though prone to privacy, haku has never been a nervous or trepidatious child. to see him standing before rin’s kitchen window, brows furrowed as unreadable brown eyes scan the faces of civillians mulling in the streets below, fingers rotating the dog-tag necklace usually hidden beneath his clothing with increasing agitation, is . . . strange, to say the least.
fingers fist over the windowsill, fingernails pressing crescents into the old wood. the words lingering on his tongue are bitter and bleak, rolling in his mouth like marbles, staining him from the inside out as he struggles to contain the blackness. a week of bearing such feelings on his own, with no one to take them to. he has not wanted to be ungrateful for the gift given him, nor disrespectful to those who had lost so many in combat, least of all the warm, soul-soothing presence that is RIN, but. but he just two months past his fifteenth birthday, he is so young for all the terror and hardship he has seen and wrought, he has known so much lost already. and it is selfish of him, perhaps, but just this once he wants someone else to feel it with him. to feel the weight of the pain carried upon such thin shoulders.
❛ Do you ever wonder what would be different if they had lived and you had died ? ❜ haku’s voice is firm and clear, despite the faint tremors of sorrow and rage coiling in its depths. there is no need to define the subject. he knows by her eyes that the young woman knows loss as well as he. he knows she has heard stories of the devil of the mist and the angel of death hovering in his wake. ❛ What could have been, if only you hadn’t been you. If only you had been faster, stronger. Better. ❜ he does not dare look at her, for fear of what he should see — or, worse, what she would see: the black irascible fury pacing in him like a caged animal, its pained howls and brutal self-loathing. haku has never wanted for pity, least of all from those he admires.
I didn’t raise a coward, a dark voice growls in his head. Always look your enemy in the eyes.
slowly does he shift, staring across the kitchen at his host with dry, hollow eyes, lips parting to say the words he has thought for so long now:
❛ It should have been me. ❜
