Hold Me

He sat away from the main group – away from the warmth and light of the fire. He watched his sister sit down by the fire. She had asked him if he was alright, but he’d asked her for some time alone. They could check up on each other and comfort each other later. He didn’t want to talk right now. He knew how he felt. He knew what he thought of himself, of the situation. But voicing those thoughts… Putting them to words for his sister to hear. His thoughts and feelings were already a burden for him. He didn’t want them to weigh her down.

He doubted she thought he was happy. Who could be happy after that? But he didn’t think she deserved to know how self-deprecating his thoughts were. She would try to comfort him, focus on him instead of herself. He wasn’t blind. He knew she would put him before herself, given the opportunity. It was the same way he would ignore any pain of his own in order to sooth her. He didn’t know how to not lean on someone else. He didn’t know how to support himself. Perhaps the fault for that lay at his clan’s feet for always making sure someone was there for him. Perhaps they coddled him and sheltered him more than he had realized.

Or perhaps he had missed some part of growing up. The stage where independence kicked in. What was the stage where you learned how to rely on yourself? Maybe he had skipped that one.

Now seemed like a good time to try to stand on his own two feet, so to speak. To see if he could swim or if he would sink. So far he felt like he was sinking. It didn’t help that he couldn’t actually swim. Though figuratively swimming and actual swimming were two different things and one didn’t seem to affect the other.

Galen shivered, curling in on himself in an attempt to stay warm. He felt something dropped over him and felt the soft hold of a blanket. He wrapped it around himself like a cloak, with part of it pulled up on his head like a hood. He looked over to see Dorian sit down next to him, draped with his own blanket.

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