secondnature | IC CONTACT ( meadowlark )

[One week later.]

Noctis.

I vanished. Like a lot of other people have. I wrote about it on the network.

I said I'd talk to you after everything. I couldn't.

You don't have to explain, okay? I just saw it

Idk what I understand about it but if you'd remembered to message me after that I would've been amazed. That's

listen, Keith, you wanna talk about it?

No.

But I think I should, anyway.

[He considers asking if they can meet up, but he decides against it. Already hard enough to talk about his feelings. This is just a recipe for things being worse.]

Hafid died for me.

[ It actually makes him pause, momentarily confused by reading Hafid's name. It takes him a second or two to follow, expecting a different conversation topic entirely. ]

Hafid? That was a long time ago for you now, right? I meant being sent away

He's okay, I've checked in on him a couple times. I just wanna know how you are now.

It feels like a long time ago and like it was yesterday.

[Keith wonders if that's what it was like for the original paladins when they learned of the world that they left behind. Did they feel like it was too much information to comprehend at once, bringing together two lives? It's both complicated and not.

But the fact that it's complicated at all gets under Keith's skin. He likes being able to simplify things.]

Back home, I didn't finish a war I'm fighting. One of my teammates hurt herself to make sure we could get the answers we needed. And someone told me that I made a mistake in bringing her there. Leading her there.

I was sure I made the right decision there, but now that I'm here. I don't know.

Hafid is part of that. He keeps telling me I could get people killed. And I almost did.

[ It's hard to take it all in even just reading it like this, so he certainly can't imagine what it was like for Keith to have to live it. ]

Keith...

Hafid's my friend so I get he means well, but he doesn't know half as much as he thinks he does. Following his way might work for him in his world, but things are more complicated than that. You can't blame yourself bc you don't know how much worse it could've gone if you didn't bring her.

It sounds like she made that choice too and you can't save everyone.

[ No matter how much you might want to. ]

No. But a leader needs to make the right choices. I can't doubt myself the way I did before when I was their leader. I left them behind, and it got them mixed up and nearly killed. I have to believe I was chosen for this position for a reason. And the thing is? I actually do now.

I don't know what that means for me here, only that as a paladin, I have to help. As the leader of the paladins, I can't just do nothing.

But even if you can't save everyone, Hafid made sure to save me.

It's why I'm all mixed up. I've been that way for as long as I've known him.

Now I don't even know if everything back home will be okay. Or if Allura will be fine. She's the one who did it. A princess. She's better than all of us, and at everything.

I guess I'm just worried. And I don't know what to do with myself.

IC CONTACT ( meadowlark )

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