OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

030 || One More Wrong

He wasn't supposed to be there, but they both agreed that was exactly where he should have been, so Coriolanus accepted the risk and wrapped his arm around Daphne too, giving her the warmth he didn't have to be some genius to guess she needed. In that vulnerable moment, he found himself thinking — She's such a soft thing in my arms. 

She often joked that he held her as if he was handling precious porcelain, but just then, Coriolanus realized it was more fitting to say that he held her as if he were the wind and she was a dandelion with whose puff he had fallen in love with. 

After claiming a rather short moment of serenity in the position where she felt the safest, Daphne lifted her head again and leant back so she could look Coriolanus in the eyes. "Can I make it up to you in any way?" she asked, such genuine worry clinging to her words and arching her eyebrows upward that Coriolanus couldn't help but smile. 

"You could," he trailed his hands down to her waist in a caress with tenderness to which her eyes reacted the loudest. "But there is one problem," he stilled his hands and tilted his head ever so slightly to the side so his gaze may slip from her eyes, to her lips and down to her collarbones only to raise back again on the same path unfelt. "I'm not mad at you." 

"Disappointed then?" She assumed.

"I understand preparing for the worst is in your nature and that may well be the only thing ensuring the New World's success, but dear," Coriolanus lifted only one hand to cup the side of her face, "I'm not mad and I am not disappointed. I understand you completely."

The heavy sigh she released, the weight of her head as she trusted him to hold it for her, the slowness of her blinks, they were all fragments of an ode to love and he knew she felt then as he had felt for so very long — lucky to have him. 

"If it helps you in any way, you should know that had I been in your shoes, I would have probably been much worse," he confessed, rejoicing at seeing her smile in return, at long last. "Stress and exhaustion makes us all insufferable at least once."

"I was insufferable, wasn't I?" Daphne scrunched her nose and closed her eyes, embarrassed now to think back at that day.

"Nothing I can't deal with," Coriolanus shrugged, raising his chin in boastful fashion. "You could probably kill me and I would still love you too much to haunt you."

"Haunting me sounds pretty romantic though," a sheepish nuance appeared within her smile before she looked back over her shoulder. "But you shouldn't worry —"

"Too little audience to kill me," he said at the same time with her, their voices harmonizing in such a way that Daphne was immediately compelled to lean forward in a fit of giggles she simply had to subdue in any way possible. "I remember when you told me that like it was yesterday," he boasted, even as he risked utter shamelessness in doing so. "Perks of a perfect memory extend themselves outside the Academy, I suppose, because I get to remember all the small moments like when you sat next to my hospital bed, an autumnal forest come to life." Bringing that memory to the forefront of his mind surprised Coriolanus with a vivid vision of a sharing characteristic he had to underline out loud, sad as it may be to discover it as a fact, "You were tired back then too."

Daphne sighed, and though initially she seemed to have chosen her answer to be a prolonged silence, eventually she made her murmur heard, "Sleep is for people who have time."