Re: Wandering: Hannah/Fiach
"I don't care if it's soft," she said truthfully of the gauze she desired. "But I want to be able to see through it," she admitted, and maybe she didn't have that right, but that didn't change the fact that she desperately wanted it. She wanted visibility, to see what to do and know what was best, and she knew she was failing. When she'd been here alone, just her and a nameless town, she'd only failed herself, but now there were people she loved, and she only knew she didn't want to fail them. And maybe those weren't the right thoughts for the moment, and it wasn't his fault she was lost in melancholy and clouds. So she smiled at him, and the laughter at the spin was earnest, and it was good and light, and the room around them was a ballroom and no longer a dance studio, and Molly wasn't even hiding in the corners.
But he said his siblings detested him, and her smile became a frown, and they swayed. "Does it bother you?" she asked of his siblings and their hatred, because he said it as if it was nothing, and it was a nothing she was having trouble with herself. No, not hate, because she didn't think she was hated, but she wasn't even a sibling, really, and maybe that was worse.
He said he didn't know Hugh, and she thought it was very like Hugh to invite people he didn't know to a gathering. He liked playing host, and he liked people, and she'd lived here long enough and been with him long enough to know both of those truths for certainties. But he mentioned her layers, and she looked down and laughed, and her gaze wasn't sheepish when she raised it to meet his again. "There," she said, "I laughed again," she told him, and she was earnest when she added: "You should meet Hugh. He's really, really nice, and he's a very good host."
And then they were moving faster and faster, waltzing in a vast and ridiculous circle, and she laughed. Bright and madness banking against the walls, she laughed, and sometimes it was okay to be lost. It was so much easier than being found, and nothing was expected of a lost girl waltzing around a room of memory.
"Stop, stop," she finally said, still laughing and winded, a stitch in her side. "We must make such a sight," she added, catching her breath if he stopped as requested.