Lilliana stared at Soren.
He could see how hard she was trying not to collapse into the offered softness of that sentence, how years of habit were fighting it, telling her to sit up properly, apologise properly, recover properly.
"I just…"
She swallowed hard and looked away.
"I thought if I explained it carefully, then maybe I could make you understand why I reacted the way I did. That's all. I didn't mean to make this about myself."
Soren felt his chest ache.
As if it could possibly be about anything else.
He shifted closer.
"You don't need an excuse."
She laughed once, weakly, and the sound cracked in the middle.
"I know that's what people say."
"I mean it."
That made her go quiet.
For one second, two, three, neither of them moved.
Then she whispered, so softly he almost didn't hear it.
"I don't know how to do this without an excuse."
And that was the sentence that undid him.
Not because it was the worst thing she had said, not after everything she had just told him, but because it was so small and so nakedly true that it cut through all the rest of it.
Soren reached for her properly then and pulled her into his arms.
She made a startled little sound, breath catching sharply, one hand instinctively bracing against his chest as though she hadn't expected the contact at all.
For a moment her whole body was rigid.
Too light.
Too tense.
Like she was being held together by the effort of not breaking and didn't yet know what to do with the fact that she no longer had to hold all of it up alone.
Soren kept his hold gentle, one arm around her shoulders, the other settling across her back.
He didn't squeeze too hard, didn't crowd her, just held her there with as much steadiness as he could.
"It's okay," he murmured.
Lilliana's fingers twisted into his shirt.
"No, it isn't," she said immediately, and the answer came out strangled and wet.
He shut his eyes briefly.
"No," he admitted more quietly. "It isn't."
That seemed to hit her harder than reassurance had.
Her forehead pressed against his chest.
Her next breath shuddered.
"I still think about him when I'm hungry," she whispered. "Isn't that awful? Even now. Even now, after all this time, if I miss a meal, or if I wake up feeling that ache in my throat, or if I smell blood too suddenly, I—"
Her voice snapped.
"I remember exactly how he looked at the end."
Soren's hand moved slowly against her back, not a pat, not anything too obviously comforting, just a small grounding motion.
"You don't have to hide that from me."
"I do."
Her grip tightened.
"I do, because I'm supposed to be better now. I am better now. I have a good life here, I have work I care about, I have students, I can choose things for myself, I can make tea when I like, I can grow flowers, I can…"
She drew in a shaking breath that turned into something dangerously close to a sob.
"I can be normal."
The last word came out with painful effort, as if she already knew how impossible it sounded.
Soren's chest hurt.
He had seen her as composed, elegant, kind, a little strict, quietly warm under the mask.
He had seen the slips too, the soft lunches, the watchful care, the awkward tenderness she tried to disguise as professionalism.
But this was the deepest look he'd had yet at what all of that was built on, and it made every smaller detail rearrange itself inside him.
The carefulness.
The overthinking.
The way she watched people eat.
The way she fed him.
The way she had gone pale when he asked about blood magic.
They were not quirks, not habits picked up at random, but the shape trauma had carved into her life and left behind.
"You're allowed to still be hurt."
At that, her restraint broke further.
"I tried so hard," she choked out. "I tried so hard to be the sort of person that house couldn't ruin."
Her body shook harder now.
"I thought if I was useful enough, then maybe it would stop mattering, maybe it would become something that happened before instead of something still inside me, but it still is, Soren, it still is."
He tightened his hold, careful but sure.
"I know."
"No, you don't," she sobbed, and there was no anger in it, only pain spilling wherever it could. "You don't know what it feels like to remember him starving, to remember being relieved when I escaped, to remember that I left and he didn't—"
The sentence shattered.
Soren felt her fold further into him, years of practised restraint giving way all at once and leaving nothing behind to catch her.
Her shoulders trembled violently.
Her tears soaked straight through his shirt.
"I hated myself," she cried. "I hated myself for eating afterwards, for sleeping afterwards, for… living afterwards. I hated that my body kept wanting things, as if it hadn't happened, as if I hadn't watched him—"
She couldn't finish.
He held her anyway.
Held her because there was nothing useful to say to that, nothing clean enough, nothing that wouldn't sound shallow beside the depth of it.
Held her because she had held him together before in smaller, quieter ways, because she had fed him and checked on him and watched over him even while carrying all of this inside her, because right now she was shaking apart in his arms and the least he could do was stay.
So he stayed.
Lilliana cried with the ugly lack of restraint that came only after someone had been trying not to cry for far too long.
Her breathing turned uneven and ragged, words breaking apart between sobs, the remnants of her mask falling away so thoroughly that even the way she clutched at him changed.
There was nothing polished left in it.
Nothing professor-like.
Nothing measured.
Just grief.
Just someone who had been hurt too young, too deeply, and had learned to package that hurt so neatly that most people would never know it was there until the seams split open.
"I miss him," she sobbed. "I miss him so much."
"I know."
"He was kind. He was trying so hard to be kind even at the end, and I couldn't— I couldn't—"
"You don't have to say it."
"But I do. Because if I don't say it then it still feels like I'm pretending it wasn't real, and it was real, it was real, he was there and then he wasn't and I can still see him—"
Her words dissolved again.
Soren lowered his head slightly, cheek almost resting against her hair.
"If you ever need to talk about him," he said quietly, the strain in his own voice harder to hide now, "then talk to me. If you need to cry, cry. If you need someone there, I'll be there."
Lilliana made a broken sound that might have been his name.
He went on anyway, because he needed her to hear it.
"You've taken care of me plenty of times. You don't have to keep pretending you're fine in front of me. You don't have to make yourself neat first. You don't have to earn being comforted."
That did something to her.
Her grip on his shirt became almost desperate.
"Is that really okay?" she whispered, small and wrecked and nothing like the composed professor who he had met on his first day in this world.
"Yeah," he said at once. "Of course it is."
For a moment she only cried harder.
Then the words started spilling out again, less structured now, less controlled, coming in fragments between breaths.
"I was scared all the time," she said. "I still am, sometimes, and I hate that, I hate it, I hate that hunger can still frighten me, I hate that I still hear her voice, I hate that part of me still waits for permission to eat, to rest, to—"
She broke off with another sob.
Soren's hand moved against her back again, slow and steady.
"There's nothing wrong with you."
Lilliana shook her head against him like she couldn't accept that, not yet, maybe not for a long time.
But she didn't pull away.
She stayed there in his arms, crying until the sounds lost some of their sharpness and became softer, shakier things, until the force of it exhausted itself enough to leave behind only tremors and uneven breaths.
By then his shirt was damp, his chest ached, and the room felt changed, stripped of the delicate formality it had worn at the start.
The flowers were still there.
The oversized pyjamas were still adorable.
The soft domestic warmth of the room had not vanished.
But none of it felt cute now, not really.
Not in the shallow way it had at first glance.
It all meant something heavier.
Something sadder and more tender at once.
Lilliana was not just elegant, or capable, or beautiful, or quietly sweet beneath her mask.
She was fragile in ways she had hidden so carefully that even she seemed ashamed of them.
And still, despite everything that had been done to her, despite everything that should have hollowed her out beyond repair, she had remained kind.
She had remained gentle.
She had remained someone who cooked for others, who watched their faces for what they liked, who filled a room with growing things and sweetness and soft light as though trying to prove, over and over, that life could still be nurtured.
Soren held her a little closer, just for a second.
Then he stayed still again and let her cry for as long as she needed.
————「❤︎」————