#i am drowning in stormblood drk feels

[drk-brain]

Don't know if you wanted prompts but 4. Rainy for the prompts list!

oh hell yeah, hadn't considered it but I am SO open to prompts let's fucking go, time to christen this place with my bullshit. Just know if you prompt me you're gambling with like a 90% chance it'll come back sid/anora

(fair warning I maybe went overboard I am not good at Short Things)

------

It never rains in Coerthas anymore. Not since the calamity. If Sidurgu were honest with himself (he isn't), he would perhaps admit he's missed it (he won't).

But as they near the base of the mountain, fog and mist turn to a drizzle, and that turns quickly to a downpour. It's cold rain, each drop heavy with the dream of being ice, and it's not so long before they are forced to duck into an alcove too small to call a cave seeking shelter.

He'd nearly forgotten it rains in Dravania. He knew before—had traveled some of these lands before, in days he no longer wished to remember—given the low elevation and the humidity, but it had been so long since he'd thought of any weather but snow...

Sidurgu is no longer well-traveled, despite what most in Ishgard might think upon uneasy first impressions. He could go anywhere now if he wanted, of course. But where would he go? Home? Home was never a place; it was always people. So, knowing there is no home to return to, he finds himself only treading the same paths day to day, counting cobblestones worn by his own feet.

Sohm Al is the furthest he's been from the city in two years, and had it not been for Anora, he would never have bothered. But he did, and now she is gone again, leaving him to walk the long road back. Again.

He allows a familiar scowl to cross his face as he settles onto the ground beside the wall of the alcove and picks through his bag. He finds the flint and hands it to Rielle without a word, and she crouches to clumsily light a fire for them.

"You miss her," Rielle says as she works, and somehow those words carry loud and clear over the sound of the rain in a way his own thoughts did not.

"Hmph," he only grunts, instinctively crossing his arms and leaning back against the stone. It's a habit he wears like a shield—petulant, perhaps, but effective.

But halfway through the motion he's reminded not so gently of his injury and, with gritted teeth, drops them back to his sides instead, open and vulnerable.

"More than before," she says pointedly.

"Nothing's different," he snaps, though his frustration gives up the lie. He's stopped trying to lie to Rielle anymore, anyway. But something about Anora being in his life again... It's brought out the self-destructive side he'd hoped he'd quelled forever.

"It's plenty different," Rielle says as a spark hits the tinder and finally catches. Satisfied, she sits back beside him. "And it's obvious to anyone with half a brain and at least one eye that you care."

He scowls at her, but she isn't looking, eyes cast out of their makeshift camp toward the skies, gray and stormy and an undeniable sort of beautiful.

"I know you're not going to say anything about it," she says, "but it's okay to feel like that. She just left. You miss her. It happens. And you know she'll be back this time."

As if it were that simple, he thinks. But Rielle is fifteen, sixteen at most, and he doesn't have the stomach to kill her spark of optimism.

So he only shrugs instead, ignoring the dread that's been stewing in his gut in the days since they'd parted ways again. The familiar one that always whispered to him in the dead of every night, asking if he felt ready for each goodbye to be the last.

He has no right to feel this, he knows. She needs no protecting, and even if she did, he would not be the one to give it. But still it aches, watching her go. He lets it tear new holes in his psyche, because that, he thinks, is easier than feeling helpless.

She’d crashed into his life like a thunderstorm, after all. It only makes sense, then, that she would leave wreckage behind her. But he’d always loved the smell of rain; the gray and gloomy skies; the electricity that hung in the air when it passed.

Perhaps it means he could learn to love this, too. The way she fashions new cracks in the iron mask each time she looks at him. The way he crumbles into sharp and aching splinters every time he watches her disappear again.