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"Marc," your voice was as soft and gentle as you could make it while still maintaining some sense of composure. He'd fallen asleep some time ago, and you'd decided to let him nap - to finally rest. The afternoon had bled into evening, the sky now painted inky shades of purples and blues. You'd turned on the bedside lamp so if he happened to wake up, he wouldn't be in total darkness, "love?"
You thought you'd heard him stirring and wanted to be there when he woke up, but he still appeared to be asleep. You couldn't help but smile fondly at him; today had been a taxing day and it really represented a whole new chapter in your relationship. For the first time, maybe the first ever, he'd told you about his past. His real past. Something had broken within him and then once he started he wasn't able to stop.
He'd told you, through a wave of tears he could barely contain, about his brother, how he'd blamed himself - how his mother had blamed him - for his death and how everything changed after that. He'd you told about the downward spiral his mother experienced, about how she'd taken out every ounce of anger on him, how Steven had came out in order for him to be able to survive, about how his father never seemed to be able to defend him, how he joined the army, how he'd ended up a mercenary, how he'd ended up as Khonshu's avatar...all of it.
He'd never told another soul all of this. He'd never even uttered half of what he'd said out loud before. But there had been something in the way you'd looked at him, how you'd taken care of him and simply asked are you okay? that had broken him. It had been hard to listen to, especially knowing he had been a young child when everything had begun. You wished you could have been there to protect him, to keep him safe and take away everything he had been through.
You might not have been able to protect him then, but you vowed that you would do everything within your power to take care of him now. The fact that he had shared any of this with you let you know exactly how much he trusted you, how much he loved you. You had listened to him with rapt attention, not wanting to interrupt him, but also wanting to support him. You'd wiped his tears as they rolled down his cheeks, held him when his shoulders started to shake with the grief that had been in his heart for so long, laid next to him as he was thoroughly spent from reliving the memories he had worked so hard to push away for so long.
