Moonspear southern gothic

You can need me, too.

There was a fleeting moment where her ears perked up and eyes widened, taken aback by the statement. Those words weren’t ones that she thought herself to need until they were presented to her, and then she found herself grasping at them—but was it selfish to do so? Part of her wanted to open up—Yama had never been the type to hide her feelings, not until that awful day—and share her woes, share her feelings and her fears, every thought that crossed through her mind since her parents’ passing. Yet, at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel as if doing so would only cause more trouble than it would good. She could need her sister and she did need her sister but… she couldn’t need her more than the older woman’s children, or more than the pack as a whole. At some point, she had to stand up on her own feet.

And perhaps that point would be forced to come sooner than she ever would have thought, the notion that her nieces and nephews might need her revealed.

“I don’t know how to stop hurting,” she whispered. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I want to go back to how things were. I want… I don’t want to be sad anymore.” What would her nieces and nephews think, to see her like this? What would her parents have thought? Up until that point, she couldn’t figure out what she wanted; she used to think that she wanted to join her parents, wherever they may be, but she knew now that, that was never the case. She didn’t want to join them, she wanted to live for them—but figuring out how to live without them wasn’t easy. And in the process of spiraling downward, she lost sight of who she was, of who they must have hoped her to be. She secluded herself, abandoning the rest of her family in favour of self-pity when the event that shook them all should have driven her closer to them. Her time should have been spent with her only remaining brother, her attention given to the newest additions to their family, yet there she remained; alone and desperate for anything she could find to hold onto again.