{ history } what i cannot love, i overlook
Outside the walls, Nuala could hear her world burning.
As their armies were driven back again and again, their villages and towns destroyed and their warriors cut down, she was poignantly aware (moreso than her attendants, whose hope she fostered and held in her hands as if it were something very precious) that they were failing. It seemed to be only a matter of time before the palace was breached and the injuries that she tended mostly alone would no longer be echoes of the battlefield - yet for now it was a solemn hold out where a strained normalcy held her in its suffocating grip. Her father watched her sway with a fatigue not her own and bade her rest; she slept and dreamed of fire and the fallen through eyes she trusted to watch after her safety.
(And she woke alone, afraid, lost for a moment deciphering the sounds in her mind and those outside the shuttered window.)
The heat of battle had Nuada's blood singing in her veins and she shut her eyes over her teacup, struggling to master herself; she was dimly aware of the cup breaking, felt the sword slip in his suddenly bloody hands and willed him not to falter in her weakness. Later, she slept, she slept so many of those hours, laying cocooned in soft fabrics with her hands wrapped and hoping that her idleness would keep him safe, that her stillness would be no distraction, that his mind would be sharp and his hands would be swift.
In the suspended moments between, they sat with their heads bent together and their hands clasped and made of themselves something untouched and inaccessible. Something of the way Nuala's fingers curled around her brother's war-forged hands carried with it a thread of desperation; she didn't cling to him but held him in her moment, breathing one breath and whispering without words I am you are we are don't leave me. His eyes had changed and Nuala never looked in the mirror any more to see that hers had, too.
She spent nights at his bedside when he was there in the palace, watching him sleep as he'd watched over her when they were younger and their world was beautiful and their friends had human names and spoke human tongues and would never bring arms against them. She watched over him and reassured herself that this way he couldn't leave without her seeing (but sometimes she'd wake upon the divan and he'd be already gone, leaving only a faint sense of regret, and the rage of grief burning in her chest that wasn't her own). The very last time, she struck him when he returned and he held her wrists until her eyes softened. Neither of them spoke an apology, but he woke her in the morning and she accepted that.
Her arms held mourners, while her heart kept time with the drums calling her brother to battle and promising her his safety, and she felt selfish and ashamed and the tears she wept with them were bitter.
«Let it end,» she begged, and so it did.