Pride kept her from following him, kept her rooted in place as he turned from her and disappeared, left her promising herself that she would spend every second of every day for the rest of her life trying to forget him.
That isn’t what happens, of course, because he is as rooted in her thoughts as he is in her heart. He is hers, and maybe it is only because they are broken in the same way, all their jagged edges finding ways to fit together, but she knows they belong. Even if he does not. And that knowledge is both lonely and alienating, it keeps her isolated and angry until it finally breaks her, and through all those new cracks return the doubts that perhaps she had been wrong all along.
Not about trading her life for his, never that. But maybe they had never been something capable of togetherness, never whole or broken in any way that fit together. So when the dark comes, so does a bitter disloyalty that settles like a rotten seed in her chest, taking root. She does not wonder about him - there is a wall of thorns around her heart, an impenetrable maze of which she is the center - and he is a banished thing she refuses to consider.
Except, as always, thoughts of him slip through her guards. But they come paired with the frown on her delicate mouth and a subtle fury in her brow, with a glint in those beautiful eyes that turn the pink from flower petal to something hard like tourmaline.
But it is only at first, because when the dark never lifts and the sun cannot break free of whatever shackles it to the moon, Linnea begins to die. It is slow at first, like a coldness at her core that makes her feel lethargic and unsteady, but that cold stays and it drains her and it leaves her as brittle and bare as the dying forests until she is all but skeletal.
That is when Nikolaus finds her.
Or, he would have if she had returned his worried shouts, but pain silences her as effectively as death will. She cannot see him now, cannot let him find her, cannot allow his heart to love her again. She is ephemeral, she is loss, and her impermanence will only break him.
It is easy to hear the desperation in his voice as he searches for her, and the sound of it has even sharper teeth than the wind of this nuclear winter. It flays her. But he cannot be allowed to find her, cannot be allowed to watch her wither away into this death that is more certain with every passing moment. So she finds a place amongst the bare bones of the nearest trees, slipping the wasted dry rot of her body in beside trunks and branches until, in this dark, she is nearly indiscernible.
Her eyes close and she presses her brow to the rough bark of a tree, clinging to the sound of her name on his lips like the selfish creature she is. But this is better. He will kill himself trying to keep a dying thing safe, and she is not like him. She is not strong enough to survive the loss of him in trade for her life, if it ever came to that. So she is still and she is quiet, and the only sound that escapes her is a muted sob she tries to strangle.
This love will break them both.
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
@[nikolaus]