"Please make me stay," you thought he whispered, but his lips don't move and his eyes don't hold a single letter of the words keep me or don't let me go.

You think you'd say it yourself, please stay, but your tongue doesn't work when it comes to him, you've found, and words were never something you had to wield easily, so you couldn't have. You couldn't possibly have, not as he begins to move, his last goodbyes said.

It takes a certain sort of bravery to watch as his hands get shoved into his pockets, to not want to reach out and grab his fingers, lace them together with yours and hold him next to you, and it takes a certain kind of desperation to know that your heart is breaking as he turns his back to you, the mark on his back grinning at you like it knew your secret.

They match, you know, the one on his back and the one on your chest, and that is something you wished for at the start, but now you just want to scrape the skin off of his back and get rid of the mark, though you know it means so much to him, because then it wouldn't mean so much to him.

It wouldn't mean so much that his brother was betrayed, it wouldn't mean so much that the tattoo he'd branded into himself had been so disgraced, it wouldn't mean so much because he wouldn't care about a single one of you, and maybe than you wouldn't care about him.

You think that'd be nice, in the hours when this grows as painful as carrying around thorns, but the moments that are perfect make everything seem a better, for a little while.

If only it didn't mean so much to you that your name was the first to come to his lips when he needed-

A friend.

A brother.

A person to stand by his side in the middle of battle-

but not when he's looking for a hand to hold.

Striker moves away from the Moby Dick, and Ace does not look back; you don't wait for him to.

AN: Well this was fun. First one-sided/unrequited that I'm actually kind of happy with? (soughsmainlybecauseitendedsobadlyLAUGHS) Prompt from Lolles with the line, "Please Stay." and MarcoAce. Technically I used it?

Also my first MarcoAce! Wooo.