❰❰ EMBRACE ❱❱ (for the event or not, your choice~)
They don't even get to stay beside him for long; the world shudders and shifts beneath their feet, and suddenly they're back in that bloodstained bunker and freedom has never tasted so bitter. There isn't any good reason for it, but it doesn't feel the same when they don't stand with Innes where he fell. She had felt him die, and Gerik... he held himself together, but Maria had heard him bellow Innes' name; holding himself together didn't mean he would stay standing when he let his arms down.
She doesn't know when that is or will be. Time passes because it does, and she dries her tears for the others that will inevitably worry for her beneath the weight of their own. Fingers interlaced, hands held to her lips, the pad of one thumb presses hard against the joint of the other in the shadow of her chin. How long she focuses on the pressure, she isn't sure, but she looks up when a shadow rises.
"Oh-- Mister..."
There are no words she can offer him that would mean anything, and so she doesn't; she knows well enough that adults feel worse when children comfort them, anyways. (Too small, they don't know, can't understand, as if she didn't feel the moment Innes' life was snuffed out with her very hands, as if the magic she'd wrapped around him didn't feel the warm pulse of life turn cold and dead) Sometimes, she thinks (hopes), the best way to comfort someone is to unselfishly comfort yourself.
Her arms wrap around his torso, face pressed against him, and in the cold, too-empty Sreng, Gerik is warm and alive. The tears well, but do not fall; a beat passes, and her shoulders relax. She is also warm and alive. They are warm and alive. It isn't enough, but... ...even kind children are children still, and as she is given all she had meant to give, the little princess falls asleep.
