Re: [Lake: "Sparrow" & Luke]
She wasn't scared. Fear was something left behind, and maybe she'd felt it when she had something to lose, but what did she have to fear now? Nothing, and so the woman standing at the edge of the dock, she was liberated of anything like fear. Non, she didn't startle and she didn't flinch. She didn't even turn entirely until he said she was too close to the water, though the turning didn't move her any further from the near-ice murk beneath the old dock. If she was weaker, she might end it all. Splash down deliberately and refuse to surface. Her clothing was certainly heavy enough, outdated and ill-suited, and just like she was. But there was a fragile resilience to the woman who was merely shadows in the darkness, and she would not jump, and she would not allow herself to fall.
"People tell you all kinds of things every day. It doesn't mean you shouldn't believe them, and it doesn't mean they're wrong." Her voice was quiet in the chill night, but there was a firmness to the reversed echo, and a smile there too, behind the words and warm, even amid all this frigid cold.
She looked down when she heard the swish of the dog's tail, or perhaps she merely sensed it. Her gaze went downward, which he could not see, but her movement was a thing of shadows, visible even without the moon to light her limbs.
She crouched slow and without any deliberate grace, and she held an arm out for the dog she couldn't see in the darkness. "I'm nice," she promised, and she thought the dog was probably not scary at all, just like the man standing there, finally giving into the reluctant desire to urge her away from the water, was. "I'm not too close to the water. If you weren't scared of something, and I told you that you should be, would it change your mind at all?"
It wouldn't. She knew it wouldn't, because he was here, wasn't he? She'd warned and warned, and he was still standing here, like some knight come in the moonless dark. "You can't save anyone here. You can't do that anymore than I can." A smile, warmth curling in syllables. "But it's nice that you're someone who wants to try, even if it's hopeless."