There will always be enough of him to miss.
She wonders at the darkness etched into those words, wonders how deep those chasms run inside him. Is he full of it now? Full of dark and disquiet, full of regret made more jagged, more broken. She thinks maybe she can see hints of it in those beautiful eyes that make her feel so shy now, like she cannot watch them for any more seconds than there are petals on a daisy before she has to glance away again. Maybe it is the unfamiliarity of this newfound dark that pushes her away from him like a broken tide, like gravity come undone.
Or maybe it is just fear and cowardice. Maybe she isn’t brave enough to love him again, and certainly not foolish enough to think she could ever know him again without also knowing that love.
The memory of them is a wound in her heart, and she has thought of him so many times that in all these years it has never completely healed.
She might have been able to let him go again, if he truly insisted. It would’ve been pain and misery, but not anything she didn’t already know, hadn’t already survived. But then he says her name and it is like her heart is a flower that blooms wide for him, every petal a piece of memory she had locked down safely inside. In that one word, in her name on his lips, she can hear every laughing, scowling, annoyed time he had ever said that same word before.
But if her heart is a flower, then his next words are the hand that plucks it from her chest, and she cannot help but wonder what he intends to do with it, if he even knows the weight of what he holds.
She is a sliver of every emotion, trying to decide which one she feels the loudest. Pain is there, but pain is an easy color to wear, even cradled like this against his chest. Same for sorrow and the blue of sadness. Love is both easy and hard, both tight in her fist and dancing just at the ends of reaching fingertips. It is not quiet, it is more than a whisper, but she wrestles it back to deeper oceans inside her. The loudest, she thinks, is so close to anger that even she shies from it.
“You stopped protecting me a long time ago, Nikolaus.” She is slow to speak, stiff now against his chest because she cannot decide whether to pull away and look at him, or to stay here where the sound of his heart is the closest she’s been to home in a long while. “And anyway, I don’t need protecting.” Except from him, she thinks, but that is not true at all. She presses her cheek against him harder, gritting her teeth at the frustration building inside her chest, and then leans back abruptly, but not away from him. She could no sooner leave his gravity than the earth could leave the sun. “Where are you going, and who is going to protect you?” There is an emphasis on that last word, a subtle narrowing of petal-pink eyes. “And when did I become so easy to throw away.”
linnea
these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape
