psa: individual and unrelated drabbles for HakYona Week 2016. all other hakyona stuff i will soon compile into a big drabble/one-shot dump because the amount of writing i have on my profile is ridiculous and i'm too sentimental to get rid of everything just yet.
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notes: for Hakyona Week: prompt I love you. (first time participating, and very excited. this one is a little rambly if anything, with apologies)
hold steady my arrow, my heart
There's a million ways to say it, but none of them matter more than you.
Four hours since the moon rose and the crickets began chirping and she is still shooting.
Shooting is meditation to her, in a sense. Somewhere between the first and second hour, her right arm stopped complaining about her incessant practicing, her left hand couldn't tell the difference between bow and arrow tip, and her fingers numbed to blisters. There's a tight muscle knot between shoulder blades and her heels ache from standing too long and she has at least three drops of sweat at her brow itching to be wiped off by the back of her hand and every muscle in her wants to collapse and she is still shooting.
It's when her wooden practice splits into two—cracking from the center where she's accomplished many bullseyes—when Hak steps out of the shadows.
She's not surprised because she's known he's been there for the past half of her practice session but she still can't help but be overly self-conscious about every movement she makes—from the way she stops and puts aside her bow, sets down her arrow sack, walks over to her broken target, bends down to pick up the splintered and shot wood, everything, everything—
She brushes back her hair behind her ear, unconsciously at first, but then thinks of him watching her tuck her tresses in place. She purses her lips as she considers how to make another target to shoot, unconsciously at first, but then thinks of him watching the movements of her mouth. And every little thing she does is watched, and she tells herself not to care but at the same time she knows he cares, and what's worse is that she knows why he does, and that as he does, he only has three words on his mind for her and—
Well. The attention is better for her anyway.
Knowing that she affects him, knowing that she matters to him—it all pushes her to be better.
This pressure is good for her, she assures herself, and she recites this mantra loud in her head—louder than all the self-conscious comments—until suddenly she feels his heavy hand on her left shoulder and she sees his shadow loom against the moonlight before her, and everything stops, and he says:
"That's probably enough for tonight."
She turns her head up. Her eyes reach his, without hesitation.
"No," she tells him. "I'm going to keep going."
His eyes don't flicker as they used to when she did something he didn't like.
He's changing, she realizes. He's changing because of her.
But there's one thing that she knows hasn't changed about him, and these three words, he tells her in his silence, in his letting go of her shoulder and letting her go on with her practice routine.
These three words, he tells her in the way he wraps fresh cloth around her callused fingers, in the way he rubs cooling salve over her warm swollen skin and doesn't for a moment try to fluster her by 'accidentally' grazing his lips to her skin.
These three words, he tells her in the way he passes her water from the flask he's brought with him, in the way he makes sure that she has a drink for her throat she doesn't even realize is parched and how he doesn't hold the cup up to her lips and respects her own strength.
These three words, he tells her in the way he slowly lets go of the fact that she doesn't want to always rely on him and how he understands that her independence is one of the things she values most.
Three words he tells in an incalculable number of ways.
Three words meaning only one thing: I love you.
She remembers this, as she draws her next round of practice arrows, as he slips back into the shadows, and she finds she can pull her arrows back that much further.
figuring out the title for this one was the biggest pain of my day. or at least the hour. ahaha, i guess it kinda fits?
thir13enth