@yinjiyang asked: ❝ you deserve so much more than what you were given. ❞ ( for Feng Wu )
The statement felt out of place, she didn’t really know what to make of it. For a moment, she dragged her eyes away from the stars, glanced at him as she tried, and failed, to read that expression on his face. It wasn’t that he was hard to read, it's just the idea that he looked at her in any special way completely escaped her.
Why would he? Why would anyone?
After all, the man she’d been betrothed to for most of her life, hadn’t even fought her execution. Part of her had believed in this stupid idea that maybe people cared. That all the years they had known each other, all of those childhood days spent running around courtyards, sneaking in and out of palaces, had meant something. This horrible sensation in her chest had appeared in the moments she realised….that no one was going to defend her. All of these people who were meant to care had simply stepped aside and watched her fall. Kinda hard to believe in anything in the wake of that.
Still, she smiled, pasted a smile over whatever feeling it was sitting in her chest and just…shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not so sure about that one.” She wasn’t. Maybe they didn’t deserve anything? Who was she to know? Everything that she had believed in, or observed, had been turned on its head. Here she was, skirting through the countryside in the dark in an attempt to evade authorities and somehow fix the fucking mess they found themselves in, through no fault of their own.
“It just is.” Sure, it sounded defeatist, because it was.
They both had, it was why they were in this mess in the first place. The Empire had won and here they were, eeking out a living and a way forward together. Then a sigh left her. “I guess I must have really screwed up in a past life or something.” Sure, she laughed when she said it, but it wasn’t a joke.