who do you feel most protective over? who do you feel is protecting you most?
Oh. This is very hard to answer. For ease I’ll talk just about my party, but it almost doesn’t feel possible to pick one person that I feel the most protective of. Some days it’s easier to focus on one or two people but recently it feels like I’m being stretched across to everyone and that’s on me of course, but it’s hard to not be scared during a time like this.
If I have to pick someone, I’d say Sai is the one I feel the most consistently overwhelmingly protective over. She’d probably get angry at me for this but she is a child.
Let me say that when I say that, I don’t mean she’s childlike or naive or immature (most days). I mean that for all intents and purposes she is the age of a child. She hasn’t had the time to live like the rest of us, even if she 54. She’s so young to be mixed up in all of this but for as strong as she is and has proven herself to be- I worry that she’s losing out on so much. I think about the possibility that she won’t get to have that after all is said and done and my gut reaction is to protect her and I guess save her. She can save herself though, she has grown so much in the time we’ve traveled together that while I still consider her a friend, perhaps even a sibling or a daughter-type figure, I have tried to pull back and let her do what she needs to do. She’s capable, as capable as any of us.
We protect each other in different ways and at different times. There’s no one person who protects more than the others because we all do it differently. There’s Poe who pushes people away if she’s afraid they’ll be in danger because of her or throws herself in front of whatever is coming at the people she cares about. Poe is scared and has been through things the rest of us can’t even imagine but she is so fearless when it comes to protecting us.
There’s Gonk who doesn’t always get the way the rest of us act but Gonk loves and cares as fiercely as the rest of us and knows exactly what we need but not always what we want. Gonk is the one who will do everything to figure out the best, most efficient, path when the rest of us are ready to run in without thinking and Gonk either reigns us in or follows ready to protect us.
There’s Sanapa who somehow always seems to know when to lend a hand and how to do it to the point where when everything else feels so overwhelming I know Sanapa is there to keep us from falling apart too much. She’s quick and careful and quiet, naturally, and it bleeds over into how she protects us both emotionally and physically. We don’t give her enough credit for how she takes care of us.
And then of course there’s Sai. Sai, who knows when to lay her cards out and be genuinely open with people. She finds a way to talk to people when they need her in ways that fit both people. When Sai lowers her guard it is always to take care of the party, whether it’s doing what she needs so she can help us later or taking care of us individually. She has also become just as competent a fighter as the rest of us but she also takes care of us and makes sure we’re okay- sometimes at the expense of herself.
We are a party, we protect each other at the end of the day.
