nanako hasaba

Once she’d finally found a good spot, she remembered what she was trying to do. Slowly and steadily, she brought her hand up and over his chest, the light sheet rippling above her the only thing keeping them from the warm autumn night. Again, she brought it down past the end of the hair on his belly and only stopped once she felt that rough patch of hair just above his groin. With only the moon filtering through the sheet above she could barely make it out as she peered over her dad’s waist. Short and curly, much curlier than his armpit hair, pitch-black, though most of his hair was with only a bit of grey poking through.

But at that moment, a memory flashed through his mind, something Noah said to him after he lost his arm. ‘People don’t know how to fight someone with missing or prosthetic limbs. It throws them off balance, and he took advantage of that. No one expects to be kicked in the chest with a peg leg.’ He glanced at Ingram, focused entirely on the fall and keeping Roc restrained. From the look in his eyes, he was most worried about Roc’s free wing getting in the way or failing to pull away in time and crashing with him. For all of his focus, all of his determination, his guard was dropped entirely.

Seraph gripped his head, threatening to rip out his hair as tears poured from his eyes. “I am a coward, remember? I ate that plum because I wanted to escape the pain I now know I deserved. But I wish that plum really had killed me. I wish I had died that day. It would have been better than a life with no hope of redemption. Every morning, I open my eyes and remember waking up after the fight. Realizing you’re alive after trying to end it all, I never knew something could be so painful. Every breath hurt, every beat of my heart was agony, every thought in my mind felt like hot lead, and it all comes again fresh every morning. All I’ve wanted to do since then is… finish what I started.”“I know how you feel.”