#// mar you are killing me /catcry

[varldsormr]

"That is... the short of it." A low, acknowledging rumble leaves his throat and mingles with the muffled sounds of clatter from the kitchens, Jhin's hand resting in the form of a loosely tightened fist upon the table. Not much, she says. But perhaps enough. He ruminates on the image of the devil stalking home from their encounter. His mind, fixed as it has been, on the look that Thorne had worn before he went; Sharp eyes at once both cold and burning as the winter wind swept through around him from the doors to the saloon, hinges creaking whilst the fading of his steps left an empty, hollow echo in his wake.

He knows the emotions of the devil blazes hot before they fizzle out to smoke and embers. But it is easier to imagine him angry.

Seeing the shifts of Dahlia across the booth in his peripheral, the serpent's brow knits even further as she recounts what Thorne relayed. What he had said. He recalls anew - a little bitterly - the snap in the devil's voice when Jhin denied him, the bite in his old partner's parting words digging teeth into places where he knew that it would hurt. A petty blow if ever there was one. The prodding of a bruise shaped like the woman sat across from him. Jhin wishes he could say he'd handled it with a grim and tempered dignity, detached, unmoved -- alas, he is no less a damned fool than any other.

Anger and relief had both become him when Thorne had stepped into the room, blending with a range of vague and muddied sentiments as their reunion quickly spiralled. Desperation. Frustration. Uncertainty. In the end, the ranger hadn't known what to do with the pitifully dull and yearning aching in his chest but to send the source of it away, and to drink until all of it was swallowed up again, drowned somewhere at the pit of him like a ship being dragged by a beast beneath the waves.

How disconcertingly easily she makes him float again.

"It would be dishonest of me, to claim I did not wish to see you." Jhin forfeits confession under his lady's solemn gaze, his own drifting up to meet it, only to sink below her lashes a moment after, lowered by the weight of guilt to see her features burdened by regret on his account. It isn't what he wanted. Sorrow does not suit her. "But I've never been good with... this." He grunts, waving with a few fingers of his hand. "Words. I knew not what to say. To either of you."

It's presumably an innocent remark but enough to send swirls of pink up her neck and over her cheeks, remembering all too easily the ways in which his dry humour would occasionally turn lewd when you least expected it. It was almost inappropriate to find his remark funny, so with a mix of embarrassment and inevitable amusement Dahlia lowers her gaze to her side of the table, studying the collection of condensation rings that had marked the wood over the years. "I'll say." Jhin had dodged her question. However, she wasn't here to impart judgement or inspect the ins and outs of his recent decisions. He was a free man.

What could she remember of that snowy night, when Thorne had come back from town? He was ice hot and shivering, and collapsed on her bed to weep in her lap. That was the thing about the devil: whatever he felt he did so with violent immediacy. While most carried their grief around until it crushed them and forced them to look darkness in the eye, Thorne was porous, swift and volatile with all matters of the heart. Dahlia had held him in near stupor, asking questions he didn't have the answers to. It didn't feel real. It couldn't be real.

"Not much." It's true. He had blubbered, mostly, shaking with each wet sob that convulsed him, saying disjointed things and repeating the same phrases like he was trying to pry each and every nail that had been driven into his heart. "That you recovered somewhere. That you were in bad shape." Something about Jhin's injury, too, which she decides not to mention over breakfast. Too sensitive a topic, perhaps, and her former partner had already declined help. Eventually the redhead does raise her chin once more, gentle sorrow weighing down her brows, dimming the light in her eyes.

"That you did not want to see me."