What Sober Couldn't Say

[Killian Tabiner]

Killian was not the sort who followed. He wasn't much interested in tradition or any of the trappings that came with it. Perhaps that was why his new year's eve would be rung in with glasses of bittersweet champagne. His night would bear the hazy mindset of a drunken madman, his usual state. No parade would celebrate his losses, no resolution could break through to his frozen soul.

But she had.

He'd sworn this saga of his, this tragedy he would never write - his own life - would never lead to a personal revolution. So rather than going out and joining the revelry, he sat in his study, the door locked, with nothing but the acrid burn of his alcohol and his own striken thoughts. The fog from the liquor did nothing to keep the thoughts of her stifled.

Some logical part of him knew that these wicked feelings had to be mistaken, a lovelorn lark he should recover from. But even the clanking of bottle against glass as he poured another seemed to ring with her name. He found his hands to be quaking as he dipped his quill into the well of opaque black ink, and wrote her name at the top of a piece of parchment laid before him.

Regina.