15 + 17
for whoever you’d prefer but I’d like it to involve a vanserra :))
veris + trembling hands, empty
In the hazy unreality between dream and waking, the loss does not yet strike him. He has not opened his eyes; he has not even roused enough to realize that he can do so.
His body unfurls instinctually to stretch out limbs that have been tucked in too tight against his chest through the night, and perhaps much longer beyond. It does not yet alarm him that her weight has not dipped into his, nor that she has not thrown an arm over him, nuzzled into his neck, murmured out some drowsy incoherence.
There is nowhere else for her to be but beside him.
Eris turns into the middle of the bed and reaches for her. Where his hand should catch her waist, it falls through empty air and hits the mattress with a dull thump, one that clatters against his bones. He feels his heart pick up in his chest, then creep slowly up his throat.
Something, he knows now, looms above him.
Something that will crush him through.
Their bed is large, he reasons. Perhaps she became overwarm in the night, and she had to move away. She has told him so often that he feels a hearthside, that to curl up against him is to have no need for any other comfort. This has never been enough to send her fleeing so far before, but she has surprised him many a time since their first meeting.
If he moves a bit farther, if he reaches his hand just another inch, he knows he will brush against her. He will draw her in close; he will wrap himself around her like a vine about a cypress, keep her pressed against him for ever, so that none may prise away one without taking the other.
Eris feels his fingers slip down off the edge of the mattress, and his hands begin to tremble. He balls them into fists, like that will help anything. Like that will keep this loss from cleaving him in two.
Like that will keep him from opening his eyes to their bed, to his life, once more bereft of her.
