[Salieri listens, quietly, to the prayer--and almost startles when the hand goes to his back. He almost pulls away, instinctively; he's used to hand shakes and such things, but this kind of comforting contact, especially with slow back and forth, is something has not experienced since his parents were alive. It makes a part of him want to recoil from it and its strangeness; another part of him aches to lean into it, to accept that comfort in a place of safety that he hasn't been afforded for decades.
It's enough to threaten the thin walls that have been holding back a lot of the excess emotion, and he finds his bottom lip trembling, voice choked as he says, simply, at the end of the prayer]
no subject
It's enough to threaten the thin walls that have been holding back a lot of the excess emotion, and he finds his bottom lip trembling, voice choked as he says, simply, at the end of the prayer]
Amen.