She gets this look in her eyes whenever you touch her.
It might just be an attempt at a comforting hand on her back or a supportive brush of your fingertips against her arm, but every single time. (You aren't used to it. You can't get used to it.) Every fucking time, she's doing everything and anything to escape from your reach with that same goddamn look and it frustrates you so much.
You're not entirely sure what it is, but it makes her normally bright pink eyes lose their light. (And you're not even sure if Jane's lifey thing could help.) Pink eyes become wide and distant with a kind of morbid not-quite-surprise, and you think you catch a flash of something that could be disappointment or panic or hurt, but it is gone before you can confirm it. Her eyes become plain dull and lifeless and it makes your heart plummet into your stomach. (Which in turn makes you feel inexplicably sick.)
The corners of her mouth are slack; thin black lips form a tired, straight line that always threatens to fall into a frown, and she's turning away before you can get a better look at her flat, tell-tale expression.
Your fingers begrudgingly coil into a fist as you retract the offending hand, and you resist the urge to sit next to her, to ask her what her deal is. You like to think that the silence is more for her benefit, but that's a lie because it's mostly for you. Feelings were never your strong point, and treading along that dangerous territory with the girl did not seem like such a good idea. The territory you currently resided on was precarious enough.
(You start to see the attraction of mind-numbing alcohols, but you digress, not only for yourself, but for her, too.)
She's been acting this way— cagey and distant— since you had entered the game. As you grew closer to Jake, she would grow farther from you. Her pesterlogs, sparse and far apart as they have become, gave you a slight sense of normalcy when you skimmed them over shallowly, but if you gave each line even a moment's consideration, they were just as vague as the blonde herself.
When you and Jake had broken off, too, the flash of hurt in her eyes resurfaces in your mind again and you almost scream. You don't, of course, but your throat still feels as choked up and your chest feels just as suffocated as if you really had screamed and screamed yourself raw.
You're utterly alone on your planet, so you can afford to take your shades off, to fling them angrily across the dead fields and collapse to the ground, staring emptily up at blank and black skies. Even with the gas mask, you feel like you're breathing in pure krypton, making your lungs weighted and your chest aching.
You can hear uneasy requests for personal space, see disappointed pink eyes and dark green proposals of the negative sorts, and everything swirls tumultuously in your head— a series of gunshots, three blank faces bearing only frowns, the glint of a blade, and two intertwined hands.
You slam your eyes shut, but it's all in your mind's eye. The images still speed through your thoughts, unaffected by your shut eyelids, and you will them, with all your might, to stop. Just stop.
Stop!
Your eyes fly open and everything is bright without your shades. Disorientating colors still swirl in your sights as your eyes adjust, a familar, blinding pink dominating all else.
It's your fault— the heavy expression in her eyes.
She had opened up her heart to you long before the game even started— long before you knew you were a Prince of Heart— but you still managed to live up to your title and shatter the everything she had trusted you with. Maybe you never should have touched her because that haunting lifelessness you saw, that was just you fucking things up like the goddamn Prince you are.
You rest your hands over your mask, pushing the cold surface closer against your skin. Even the ground below you is cold. It is hard, and sharp pebbles dig into your exposed skin. You really could care less about that.
It's sad, you decide finally. It's sad, funny, ironic, cruel that someone slated to destroy hearts would have his flawed mess of a blood pusher ensnared by the girl whose own heart was so damn pure, even after all the lashings it has endured.
Never before have you unironically hated irony so fucking much, (not as much as you hate yourself right now) and never before have you wanted to go back in time and fix your mistakes like you do in this moment.
You wish for rain, freezing and unforgiving, that would submerge you. You would hold your breath until your lungs would nearly burst, and then maybe you could pick your pathetic ass up, shivering, soaked to the bone, and familar enough with how numb lifelessness felt to utter the two syllables that could pave a road to atonement.
She could help you— because that's who she is— to find what you're lacking in the void that's your chest and you could throw the stupid titles right back at Skaia's sadistic ass. You could fix a heart instead of damn it.
You could, you could, you should.
For now, though, you're stuck waiting. You are waiting for the rain that will not come to drown you. (At least, not before the unwanted irony and stomach churning guilt find you first.)