Sometimes love isn't two sides of a coin or two hands that fit perfectly together. Sometimes it isn't even a kiss goodnight or a promise to always be together, bolstering strong during the trials of life, content with a marriage well loved together.

Sometimes it's different. Sometimes it is a friendship built rock solid, when the years grow tough, one that doesn't give up. Sometimes it's stifled feelings, in order to watch the other one light up with a smile brighter and wider than moonlight, or to watch as her hand meets someone else's and sometimes you might catch a whisper of a promise that you are both grateful to hear and really wish you hadn't heart.

Love is forgiveness when you know you deserve none of it, and it's gratitude for even the littlest thing. It's a hand to hold when one needs it or a hug when another's lonely. It's a quiet conversation or a joke here or there.

Love is so much more than a feeling. It's going to a library, when you hate to read, and standing guard, just in case something happens. It's fighting exhaustion to make sure the other's safe. It's an escort to a ball that you won't get to dance at. It's learning to do a job that you never picked for yourself, because sometimes a little help is a really great offer for a friend, and sometimes there are rewards or perks to it. Perks like Roka alcohol or getting a stolen chance to hold the woman you love just as much as you love air in your lungs, a little reminder you're alive, though you don't think about holding her when you lift her up, instead you think of the little things.

Should you carry her back to her room, like this? Will she remember today tomorrow? She won't be hungover, will she? Is every stolen moment between Master and her, even with her across her back, perfect enough to hold them up when work makes them feel far apart from each other?

Only later, will you question whether or not, it was selfish. Was it selfish to relish the feeling of warmth across your back, to feel productive in a way that goes beyond the jobs that built up your livelihood before? It feels selfish, but no one will tell you it is.

Love is holding your heart in place, because you value the way that she smiles up at Master, because you love them both so much that it would be a crime to separate them. Love isn't always romantic, you know. You content yourself on the platonic, even if your heart sometimes races, or your mind sometimes wanders. Or even when your skin tingles like a live flame, when she touches you. A touch is never without a reason, and you know that, as you try to put out the flame without extinguishing the touch.

There's a reason you can't say, 'yes,' to the organ beating inside of you. And perhaps before you met her, you thought that if you ever encountered love, it would be a sacrifice on your end. No one deserves an assassin for a husband or one for a father for that matter. You knew better, so the shock of finding love isn't entirely a shock. Though you had doubted your cold heart could love, and then you find it and it's a sacrifice too.

So, you tuck up the ever casual pain that usually doesn't arrive, but shows up just in time to remind you that it's a sacrifice. You hide your heart in the shadows, because that's the place it fit best and perhaps that will make it easier on you one day.

Sometimes you plot out just how you'll leave and where you'll go, what your job prospects are like, but you think most of the time that you won't go through with it. Sometimes moving away from love makes one feel as if he were to chop off his arm and go without something that he's come to depend on, on just a whim.

People survive missing an arm all the time, you tell yourself, but still, you stay. You don't want to chop this off. It feels like life blood or rather something that reminds you that you are breathing, that you're alive.

Sometimes love is platonic. Sometimes love is a sacrifice made for another person, and sometimes love is something cherished, something special, that's impossible to part from, no matter what kind of love it is.