After all, courage is knowing that fear is inevitable, but living your life despite of it,' she murmured, the words partly obscured by his shoulder. 'Don’t fear love anymore. Sometimes, you just have to keep going and remember that you are not your heartache...' her voice was soft, pronounced, '...and you will find a way.

And when their hands connected in the space between their bodies, they realised that it didn’t matter how or where they grew up, or who they were now, because in that moment they knew that home wasn’t a place, it was a feeling.

At long last, his parents no longer symbolized immoveable fixtures that scared him, but rather a chance of a future, a future where he could come into this house without knocking, because he had been given a key.

Nobody said that that admission, that truth, settled something within them—not a reassurance of purpose, but a profound, faraway recognition, something so deeply buried inside them that the only thing they felt was that tiny fragment of themselves, calmly and easily, open up.

She was done running! The stars were above her head and shining too brightly; all she had to do now was tip her head back and look.

Alice placed her trembling hand atop Rhæna’s, marveling at how well they fit; how surely they belonged. It was almost as if they were the same person—one heart, one mind, one body to shelter them both in warmth; against the cold, against the world. A beautiful monster born from something as pure as love, that existed in serenity.

They were so peculiar, these days. They were so absurdly hopeful that their faces had taken on some of the stupidity of domestic beasts.

But the question always snuck up on her whenever it could, between comfortable, drawn-out moments of silence, through the breaking of dawn when they were gallantly trying to stay up to catch a glimpse of the sunrise, or through their watered down smiles and hands clutching wine glasses, yearning desperately for a quick abandonment of their too-sharp, too-stark minds.

Delight, pain, agony, ecstasy, rapture, woe—what curious things.He made himself promise to never ignore them again.