Work Text:
He is quiet, afterwards, with something like a child’s exhaustion, head pillowed on your arm, body encircled by your arm, and you are careful not to move it, and careful not to think, eyes on his slumbering face, how difficult this is, that you had hoped would be easy, how like carrying—you are given to such thoughts, but something of his mind is now in you—fire in a broken eggshell cup, how easy it would be, to crush it, and how dangerous. Perhaps it needs gentler hands—the dead girl, violet-wreathed—but the time for violets has passed.