how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
There is an echoed memory here between them.
Something that had once been so easy in childhood reflected back now, although it was twisted and made different, made more difficult. He wants to swallow away the tension, but he doesn’t know how to remove something that he has caused. He is the one who left, who slipped into the shadows when he could not bear to watch his family tear themselves apart. When it became clear his new life was one that would be built around this injury—that he would never have the things for himself that he had so longed for.
He was the one who had left, and she was the one who stayed behind.
How could he just wash that all way?
He can’t, and he knows it in the way that she looks up at him, her pink eyes pained. His stomach clenches and there is something painful in his throat that only eases as the light teasing that feels like it used to. “I’ve lost more than that,” he replies, not realizing until after that it sounded more dark than joke.
His handsome face falls a little, a storm cloud moving over it, but he doesn’t give up. Doesn’t stop trying to reach for that light of her, that light they had once been. If he just gets past this one hurdle, he thinks. If he just can climb this last mountain. Perhaps then it would be as it had once been.
Perhaps then she could forgive him—understand why he must go again.
But each moment it only gets harder as she finally splits the space between them, touching him with those wooden lips. “Okay,” he breathes, throat tight, nearly relieved at her willingness to send him away, and then feeling the simultaneous frustration and joy at what she says next. “Linnea,” her name comes so effortlessly to him as he takes another limping step toward her, finally pulling her close to his chest.
“You can’t come with me,” he breathes into the flowers and leaves.
His voice cracks, the sorrow rushing in to fill it.
“I can’t protect you where I’m going.”
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )