Re: Diner: Seven & Marta
Even if Marta hadn’t been clinging to his hand as to a lifeline, he wouldn’t have tried to pull away. He’d pulled away enough in his life, and had it karmically returned to him tenfold, and each time that someone had pulled away a part of Seven had gone with it. He knew what it was to be fractured, yeah. To give out bits of your heart like it was Halloween candy, to whomsoever should darken his doorway at any particular moment. Or brighten it.
For all his swagger and all his self-assured smirks, Seven had always loved openly and easily. And yeah, that had left him less than whole more times than he cared to remember. But where he’d used to be stubborn, he’d learned that grudges hurt more than love. More than forgiveness, and learning how to give it.
He accepted the desperate searching of her other hand easily, gathering it into the safety of his own without hesitation. His forehead creased as the tremors of her arms reverberated through his own, and then he was up, coming around the other side of the booth. He never let go of her hands, just changed the angle of his hold so that he could slip onto the edge of the vinyl seat next to her.
“Hey,” he murmured, a soft rumble with his mouth next to her ear through the curtain of her hair that cut her off from the rest of the world. “Hey, okay, just breathe. You’re okay.” And he did slip one of his hands free then, but only so that his arm could reach around her shoulders and gently, so very gently, cup against the side of her head that faced away from him.
“Come on, c'mere,” he said quietly, like it was so simple, because he knew this. It was what he should have been able to do from the beginning, when she was breaking open inside and hiding it from him. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to see, he didn’t know. What he did know was how to coax her into leaning her weight against him, to tuck her head under his chin. His thumb slid over her scalp, the satin of her hair. “I got you, yeah? Just breathe.’