Never again.
He was going to become the scariest of them all.
Saving her had destroyed him. One day, he vowed as he watched a man pick up the little girl and take her away, his blue eyes on her, he would collect his debt.
Morana.
Present Day.
She didn’t know this, this coiled knot of emotions in her chest.
It just hurt.
Everything hurt. Every-fucking-thing.
Her trembling hands, her trembling lips, her trembling heart. All of it.
She couldn’t breathe. The air was trapped somewhere in her chest, close to her bleeding heart. Her throat was tight, locked down; a weight settling low in her stomach as the noise from the airplane flying overhead filled the death in the graveyard.
The airplane came and went.
And it still hurt.
She hurt.
In a way she’d not thought herself capable of hurting. In a manner she’d never known a person could hurt.
Eyes stinging, Morana blinked rapidly, years of training herself not to shed a tear in front of anyone not allowing her the liberty to let a single drop fall. But would it have stopped at a single drop? Would it have stopped at all when the weight on her chest seemed to get heavier and heavier with each passing breath?
She wanted to screech until her throat pained as her heart did. She wanted to become hoarse until the sound faded away into the nothingness inside. She wanted to scream but couldn’t find her voice.
She was innocent.
Completely innocent.
She had done nothing wrong except exist.
Yet, her very existence made her want to weep. Her very existence made her want to break bones.
She existed because of him. She was innocent but he had been innocent too. She was innocent, and yet she was stained with blood.
His blood.
The blood of his father.
The blood he had shed to save her; the blood he had marked her with trying to clean her.
People who knew the story thought he’d made a claim in that gesture. But she knew, she knew he’d just been a sweet boy trying to wipe the blood off the face of an innocent baby.
Pain and rage, hate and turmoil, compassion and heartbreak, amalgamated inside her in a knot she could feel in her throat, transfused in her blood that beat in every inch of her body, came together in a way she couldn’t distinguish one from another, didn’t understand which was directed at whom.
She closed her eyes, her body starting to shake, unable to bear the conflict inside her very soul.
“Morana.”
Amara’s broken voice made her eyes flutter open. Unlike herself, the other woman was crying openly, the pain in her eyes reflective of her own. Morana owed the other woman so much, so much she couldn’t even begin to comprehend it, for simply telling her the truth that had been stymied from her at every turn, for breaking her vow and putting her faith in her.
“Do you want me to stop?”