Again, Lythe did not disturb the boy's silence. It never got any easier to see those looks of hopelessness on another's face. Those heartstrings of hers had been toughened by death after death that trickled out of Orzammar to pool their tragedies in the bowels of the Deep Roads, but tough did not mean unfeeling. It was only the ability to pick up again and move on, because it was what one had to do. It was the first and hardest lesson the Dead had to learn, lest the physical darkness consume them the same way emotional darkness did, and it was equally the hardest to teach.
Her faint surprise when Rhocanth turned into her shoulder lasted only a moment, then she curled her arm tight around his shoulders in response. She did not like the way he soon began to tremble, yet still she was silent. Lythe knew that thoughts had to be tumbling through his head over and over, like boulders in a rockslide, and it wasn't something for her to disturb. As painful as it was to watch, even more so for the youth to endure, his mourning was a necessarily thing.
But his tears were hot against her shoulder, seeping into her shirt, and Rhocanth was so young and vulnerable and the Legion was a choice while he had been given none, and it was getting harder to try and keep that comparison up in her thoughts. Her free hand moved almost of its own accord, gently pulling the forgotten, balled-up rag from his hands. She flicked it out to the side, shaking out a relatively dry corner which she then used to dab the boy's upturned cheek with unpracticed care. Then, when he turned in even closer, it was almost like a memory. Was it her mother that she recalled? Her two brothers, each so much younger than she? Had she been the one who cried, or the one who comforted?
It was probably all those things, and the distance she'd been trying to keep as an older veteran finally collapsed. Giving in to the maternal urge, she reached her other arm around and embraced him as tightly as sitting side-by-side allowed, as if she could still his despairing tremors that way.
"Oh, Rho," she murmured, briefly smoothing his hair. "You just go a day at a time. It may be hard and you might not think you can, but I believe in you." And though her voice was almost as soft as his and the faith of one Dead Legionnaire probably meant nothing to his grief, she spoke with utter conviction. He had come too far for his Ancestors to let him to fall.