#and the most heartless cruel fucks who should never speak to another human in real life

[lazylittledragon]

twitter is hilarious because i get people in my replies saying “you shouldn’t draw these characters together because x never really cared about x etc etc” because it’s obvious that they weren’t there back in the day when we would make characters from entirely different franchises rail eachother

[infinitelyblue]

earthy when he sings.

words: 6.7k.

etr: 22 min.

cw: none.

His voice isn’t clear and smooth when he sings, like the voices on the radio, the meticulously-fashioned purity of a bell tone. It wavers, at times, uncertain and insecure against guitar strings that buzz occasionally under misplaced fingers. There are notes overreached, others gone flat, and others still that fall but a hair’s breadth shy of their intended frequencies.

Imperfections, all of them, only expected of an amateur musician.

But despite the negative connotations of the word, she finds that imperfect gives his voice, his music, a character lacking in its bell-tone counterparts. Imperfect colors his voice earthy when he sings, textured, like gravel and a sprinkle of his soul crunching beneath her bare feet.

Where the stars stretch for their home in the heavens, whetted to nigh-perfection, he’s right down here, in the sand and the gravel, on the ground. Here, with her.

-

He as a whole, similarly, falls short of that looming pinnacle called masculine perfection. His forehead is large (very large), his eyes set ever so slightly wide in their sockets, only just barely; his eyebrows, bushy and unkempt, angle somewhat downward, almost as if in perpetual disappointment or vague fright. And he’s rather thin, too—all lanky arms and legs and gangling height—with a soft jawline and soft features. He’s no Chris Evans, to be certain, or Henry Cavill, or any of those sculpted men marketed as immaculate deities.

But ah, he’s so very lovely.

His features are gentler, yes, than the standards expected (how ludicrous, anyway) of his sex—but elegantly so. Eyes shaped like rounded almonds, coated in dark chocolate; a strong nose peaked to a graceful pointe; a plush, supple lower lip, crowned with a Cupid’s bow crafted by God Himself.

(How soft, she wonders—how warm—would his mouth be, pressed feverishly to her own.)

There is an awkward grace, too, to the rest of him—to his somewhat slight frame, his willowy limbs, his towering height. Something about his Adam’s apple, the way it casts a soft, rounded shadow against the column of his throat, makes her gut twinge and her heart flutter. Something about the way his hair flops against his forehead—earthy, free, textured like his voice. Something about the way his long, elegant fingers twist the cap off of the vodka bottle.

(Long, slender, graceful. Perfect to entangle with her own fingers. Perfect to warm her hands against the cold mist of a cruel and heartless world, blissfully numb to her pain.)

When those lovely lips part into a winsome smile, chiseling dimples deep into his cheeks, she realizes in full that she has fallen in love.

-

The prickly pear that’s been sitting obstinately in the hollow of her chest rises to stick to the base of her tongue as she takes a single, fateful step forward.

“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). He doesn’t look up immediately, features concealed by a fringe of artfully-disheveled, earth-toned hair as he fiddles with a button on his shirt. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.

“Hi,” she replies, not allowing herself even the liberty of a steadying breath before she speaks. Her tone is stable, at least—disinterested, almost. It’s a façade, one that grates against the truth, the way her heart pounds ruthlessly against her breast.

In the short pause that follows, an eon’s worth of imagination tracks across her brain as she envisions how the next several seconds will transpire. What will his reaction be when he looks up, she thinks. Revulsion? Disinterest? Or, nothing at all—an aching emptiness that stings more than hatred itself?

He looks up, barely before her mind can begin running another scenario. Deep ganache meets muddy green, and the world ceases to spin around her. Around them.

She’s paralyzed, drowning in his gaze. Her breath drops from beneath her as she watches his lips part, his long lashes flutter in a half-blink. His eyes, she’s convinced, burn straight through her very soul.

Fuck, she thinks, hardly for the first time (and certainly not the last). The thought echoes hollow in a mind that’s gone suddenly blank. He’s gorgeous.

Whatever spell has bewitched them both passes in an instant, just as abruptly as it had been cast. He blinks, and all at once, sensation comes rushing back to her consciousness as he breaks away from her gaze. “Sorry,” he says crisply, dropping his eyes to the pen he’s resumed twirling between elegant fingers.

Her eyes latch onto his Adam’s apple as it bobs in a nervous swallow. “What?” she says, dumbly. Very dumbly. What an intelligent response.

When he looks back up, his cheeks are flushed a soft rose. The first shadows of his dimples appear as a shy smile dawns on his lips.

“You just...sorry, you’re just...really beautiful.”

-

She enjoys watching him, much in the same respect that she enjoys his voice. Dashing, magnetic good looks aside, he’s simply a delightful person to observe—charismatic and quirky, at times, cool and polished at others.

She watches him, from afar, as he frolics about with his friends, has a laugh with his good mates, all kept close at arm’s length. Watches him smooth unruly locks to one side, revealing one eye, glinting with subdued mirth, and shadowing the other. Watches him toss a tired, carefree smile in the others’ direction, as they vie in a reasonably elegant cacophony for his affections.

Because, of course, her heart is hardly the only one to be captured by his alluring persona (and he’s so lovely, how could it possibly be the only one?). He’s constantly flocked by people, waiting on his right hand and on his left, flanking him back and front. Hoping, each and every one, that perhaps they will be the one he truly allows to attach—the one, the only one, he truly allows to burrow into his soul.

For all his soft words and soft eyes and gentle smiles, it’s an extraordinarily high wall to scale. None of them make the cut; sometimes, she wonders if any ever will. But still, they stay, wined and dined by the flirtatious mirage he offers of a genuine connection. That’s the only reason they stay, in fact. Otherwise, he would have found himself abandoned long ago.

(Perhaps, she thinks, she can be the one to crack his code.)

-

Given where she stands in his social circle—forever stranded at the periphery, behind an invisible but hopelessly insurmountable barrier—she finds, strangely, that she knows him better than most. Better than any of the others at her level, naturally. But better, too, than those who reside further inward, towards the core of his sprawling social system.

There are the obvious things to know, of course, the scraps of history and personality he freely tosses to the winds—his favorite movie, for example (A Silent Voice), or his hometown (Sheffield), or his age and birthdate (23, 5 September 1997). Those who pine for him most ardently lap them up as if dying of thirst, those few and precious details, fitting them together as they would puzzle pieces and hoping—praying—that they will one day form the key to his looming walls.

They are blissfully blind to the futility of their efforts, to the reality that those meticulously-curated details merely skim the surface of deeper, and perhaps darker, waters. Waters whose depths seem visible in full only to her, shadowed in plain sight from the prying eyes of the world.

But perhaps that is simply in her essence—to see, as the others do, and to understand as they do not. Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice how his battery dies in public, after a point, when he’s wearied of the shallow company his fellow humans offer. His smile always stretches drawn and plastic when it does, and his voice clips to an unforgiving point, words cutting where they should not.

Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice the distinct pain of a broken family bleeding from his voice, dripping from his eyes—one that’s been spliced and spliced again, but even so remains tattered and frayed. (It’s not so much the sort of pain to be promptly identified as it is the type to be dug up by the root. The type she likens most to a decaying tuber, wedged securely in a rotting wound.)

Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice, wandering slightly too far into those guarded doe eyes, the jagged splinters of a shattered man, forever denied by his gender the opportunity to take stock of what he’s lost. To acknowledge the damage. To heal.

(Perhaps it is simply in her nature to feel what the others cannot, and what he is not allowed to. To rage in his rage, to laugh in his joy. To cry his tears. To feel his pain.)

-

They’ve never stood quite so close before—so close that the fabric of their trench coats brushes with shallow breaths, so close that she can make out the rough silhouette of a healing razor burn in the shadows on his neck. Close enough that she can smell the edge of his scent against the thick aroma of water in the air.

Even under the shroud of darkness, he’s ethereal, almost—the lights of London life dancing across his features with the shadows of night, figure framed by evening raindrops that flash coppery under the streetlight. He’s so indescribably lovely, without trying at all, that she wonders—even as her heart stutters pathetically in her chest, watching those luscious lips part and those dark lashes flutter in a not-quite-blink—if he’s even real at all.

He bends down, just slightly, face angled in a way it hadn’t been before. An intoxicating cocktail of nerves and hot anticipation rushes to her head like steam, clouding her senses and muffling the world around them. The thin layer of confusion lingering along the top falls away suddenly, and though he doesn’t speak, she understands.

She rises to her tiptoes to meet him halfway, fingers curling into soft, dark locks beneath his beanie, and molds her mouth to his.

A firecracker of sensation erupts across her face at the contact, sparking and popping with every fraction of a movement their lips make against each other. His are everything that she imagined them to be, soft and warm and distantly sweet. He tastes like bourbon and Britain and something else for which she has no words, something she can only describe as uniquely him.

Unexpected tears spring to her eyes then, riding a sudden swell of overwhelming emotion, as he gently works her top lip between his, slow and careful and sweet as if it is his most treasured possession—as if she is his most treasured possession. She feels suddenly drunk on his touch, on the heat that shudders through her as he slides his free hand, the one not suspending the umbrella above them, around to her back, rolling her deeper into him.

In the moment that he sighs into her, gripping her tight and true as she feathers and pulls at that lovely lower lip, she wishes for nothing more than to collapse into him entirely, saturating her senses with him until that’s all there is left to feel of this miserable world.

-

Of those fortunate enough to be members of his elite, his close-cropped inner circle, only a mere few are women. None of them are particularly remarkable to her—except for Karin.

She doesn’t know much about Karin at all (not that there’s much to know, with how generally dull and saltless she is), just that she’s a year or so his junior and that her name isn’t actually Karin. It’s something Dutch, and far too complicated to bother expending the energy to remember. Karin is easier, in part because the one Dutch person she’s met before had been named Karin, and in part because it seems to better suit her.

Karin is madly in love with him, it’s clear—hopelessly infatuated with his voice and his face and his eyes, wholly enamored with even the worst of his flaws. It’s agonizingly obvious, impossible to miss, in everything that she does when they’re together—in the crop top and tight jeans, the layers of makeup, her immaculately faux-blonde beach waves. The lingering gaze and soft smiles, the gentle (and often unnecessary) touches, the quiet giggles that bubble from her lips when any fraction of his attention brushes across her.

In the truest, most visceral sense of the word, it’s pathetic to watch. She’s pathetic to watch.

Perhaps she should feel some semblance of a detached pity, at least, for Karin, her heart lodged firmly in the grip of an indifferent hand. For all his cavalier disinterest in her efforts, he seems to derive an impish pleasure from toying with her heartstrings, weaving and stretching them between his fingers with a practiced dexterity that leaves her a trembling mess in his palm.

It’s an indisputably skilled act, one so artfully convincing that there are times when she wonders if perhaps he is in love with Karin after all. But though he teases the charade to its very brink, he always pulls away before the finish—and though his fingers remain entangled in her yarn, he never pulls her with him, never closer. Only to the edge of an arm’s length, and never further.

Perhaps she should be angry with him, disgusted that he seems to delight in a pastime some might describe as plain cruel. And she should sympathize with Karin, too, sharing with her the pain of an unrequited love and a man who can’t bring himself to care in the slightest. Is that not the human experience, after all? Is that not the life of a woman?

She cannot bring herself to feel bad for Karin (at the expense of an aching conscience), and she cannot bring herself to fault him for how he treats her. She cannot help but to think that in a way, perhaps Karin deserves it. It’s the least karma can trade, after all, for the innate privilege that is irrevocably tied to her flawless Aryan features, and the effortless success that comes with it. And besides, maybe if she weren’t so miserably and blatantly desperate for his affections…

(Perhaps needless to say, she is not incredibly fond of Karin.)

-

It’s a perfect twilight, cloudless and cool after another long and torturous day spent baking beneath the desert sun. Stars are beginning to dot a flawless canvas of ombré blues, interrupted only by the platinum sliver of a waxing crescent that’s sinking steadily to meet the edge of an arid and rocky mountain behind him, the one that the restaurant’s been built into.

He’s quite lovely in the candlelight, face cast from below in a warm glow that flickers in the same evening breeze that tousles his windswept locks (which he’s recently had cropped into a more conservative cut). Though he’s sitting right across from her, his mind is elsewhere, gaze lost to the side, down the barren, sun-scorched slope and out in the distant lights sprawled across the valley below. It’s a good look on him, she thinks—the gentle, faraway expression of unarticulated musings.

The tranquility of his trance is broken only by the waitress’ (no, waiter’s) wordless arrival, whisking away the empty bread basket and replacing it with a fresh one before moving to the next table. He draws his eyes from the city then, lifting his glass to take an effortlessly graceful sip of pinot noir, and turns to link his gaze with hers.

Her heart skips a beat, catches in her windpipe at the contact with shadowed ganache, twinkling with reflections of the candle’s flame. The way she mentally traces the familiar path she’s carved across his features is reflexive, habitual—warm and comforting, in a peculiarly bittersweet sense, like a distant home.

There is something in the moment that her eyes connect with his again—something in the shared ease of the silence between them, the hushed chatter of the other patrons on the patio, and the din of the other diners inside. Something about the quiet strains of one of Saltwater’s newest releases, floating away from mounted speakers into the cool breath of the descending night. Just...something.

The weight of an old and weary tension she’s never realized she’s been carrying bleeds from her shoulders as she slips her hand across the table and into his. Dark eyes crinkle, cheeks dimpling with a smile so impossibly warm and soft that a pang of sudden and overwhelming emotion begins to prick at the corners of her eyes.

She thinks, for the first time in her recoverable memory, that maybe she’ll be okay after all.

-

He’s looking directly at her now, gaze boring dark and unyielding through the glass and the layers and the sadness—straight into her eyes and then further still, deep into the shadowed crannies of her soul.

It isn’t a prying sort of gaze, by any means, the sort that chips relentlessly at her walls, seeking structural imperfections and tender scars to exploit, to leverage. But there is something unmistakably wild to his eyes, an unhinged and clawing abandon that escapes occasionally to stretch his irresistible smile wide and sharp, to infect his mannerisms, the stories he tells, with the uncanny essence of a madman.

The others seem to quite enjoy it, that briny twist of mild insanity—it is only an act, after all, a bit he plays purely for the sake of their entertainment. (Or, so the story goes, at least.) But it is a part played far too well, far too convincingly, to persuade her that there is no truth to be found in that persona.

She thinks she understands. He has been blessed, too, with the curse that afflicts her: the terrible ability, the beautiful power, to feel what the world feels—the agony and the rage, the laughter and the tears, and everything in between. She likens it to incessantly experiencing the sensation of drowning, gasping for oxygen in a deluge of such magnitude that there are times when she cannot differentiate her own suffering from anyone else’s.

Perhaps he does not recognize, yet, the horrible blessing that he has been bestowed. Perhaps that is why the fabric of his sanity frays a bit at the edges, worn in threadbare patches. Perhaps that is why there are days when he truly seems mere steps from the edge of insane.

She lifts her chin, ignoring the chill that rolls down her spine, pinned beneath his eyes (those eyes that see, and understand), and meets his gaze head on.

(If only she could get close enough, perhaps she could find a way to help him.)

-

The interstate dips gently into the valley before them, a dull gleam beneath the sun that stretches straight before curling away into distant mountains. Their destination lies a mere hour from here, sprawled eighty miles ahead along the coastline. If they make good time, perhaps they will reach the hotel before sunset.

He’s awake now; he had been dozing before, head lolling against the window in spotty sleep. (Not that she can fault him—this part of the desert, barren and lonely and largely featureless, does not provide much in the way of visual stimulation.) She peels her eyes from the road to risk a glance at him upon hearing his yawn, tracing his profile with her gaze. Committing it to memory, as if there’s any chance she could ever forget.

He looks over to her, sunlight glancing across his iris and melting chocolate into warm gingerbread-caramel. Dimples pit his cheeks as his lips curve upwards into a placid smile, and she stops, mind stalling stubbornly on the image, crystallizing it in time and tucking it away to be seared into her memory, an indelible and beautiful scar.

Her heart stumbles over a beat when he reaches up, taking her by the chin and turning her head to face the highway. “Eyes on the road,” he says, eyes light, tone jovial. “I didn’t come all this way to die in a car accident because you can’t focus on the road.”

His touch lingers, callused at the tips in the way only a string player’s can be, and she feels herself smile.

-

He’s all warm colors, she realizes, watching him in the orange-golds of the sinking sun—all golden skin and frizzed honey-brown highlights, warm dark eyes and warm dark hair. Warm lips, warm hands, a warm smile.

He’s beautiful.

His fingers twitch, entwined in her grasp, as another wave rolls in with the tide, buffeting their ankles with salt water and seaweed. He’s lost at sea, looking into the distant sunset with that expression that settles to shroud his features when he is completely and utterly at ease, when he makes no effort to be or do or act anything other than himself. It’s a deeply sad sort of look, like old wounds that ache in the winter, contemplative of secret things and secret scars.

She looks out, chasing his gaze across the vast waters and into the sun, which hangs old and dim over the horizon. Something in her chest pulls away with its gravity, with the receding wave, and a strange longing descends upon her to walk into the sea with him and forever disappear into that great blue mystery—lost to the depths, never to be seen or heard from again.

(It would feel closer to home, at least, than she ever has here.)

He squeezes her hand then, reeling her back to shore from the hiraeth and the ocean. He’s studying her when she turns to take him in again—loose, fluffy curls, the barest shadow of facial hair, the slightest upward curve of a gentle smile on his lips that grows when she angles herself towards him, rising to her tiptoes and tilting her face upwards in a silent plea.

He makes no sound as he obliges, excepting an amused huff, and releases her hand to cup her jaw, scooping her upward to capture her lips with his. It’s a chaste kiss, warm and dizzyingly tender, smooth and soft like the sand further up the beach, away from the water. Gentle like his touch, like the way he brings his other hand up, buries it in her hair.

She pushes further into him, deep for the briefest of moments, before breaking away to stare into his eyes, burning hotter shades in the sun’s dying reds, weeping blue with that eternal sadness. Her bones ache in her chest, with love, and with that bane of a gift she has been bestowed—with the ability to perceive that pain, and to feel it as her own.

His hair tickles her face when she leans in again, and his laugh, as she peppers fluttery butterfly kisses along his cheekbone, tickles her soul.

-

He lies still with her for the rest of the hour, arm and leg draped across her, and drifts to and fro from a half-sleep as she strokes her fingers through his wild locks. For a short while the room remains quiet and tranquil, save the intermittent hums and clicks of the air conditioner and his soft snores, and the muted, rolling roar of the ocean outside. It’s nearly enough to lull her, too, into a gentle sleep, but her mind races with thoughts of breakfast in the lobby downstairs and the day’s plans to follow, splintering away on unpredictable sidequests in between.

The daylight leaking around the curtains’ edges, tinged pale blue by the western sky, is strong and bright when he stirs at last, roused by the muffled commotion next door of their neighbors’ preparations for the day. His arm flexes to curl around her in some hybrid of a hug and a stretch, and when she shifts her gaze to rest on his features, she finds that he’s watching her sleepily with those almond doe eyes, dark like the earth, soft and sad.

Time stretches rubbery in the moment that they simply remain like that—looking, but allowing the silence to hang, trading a hundred thousand thoughts and feelings, unspoken words that refuse to coalesce into sentences. He blinks, slow and gentle, when she brings her hand forward from earthy waves at the nape of his neck, drawing it in a soft stroke along the coarse stubble on his jawline. The corners of his mouth pull upward, a faint smile that just barely meets his eyes.

Something rises from the pit of her spirit to settle in her windpipe, thick and heavy, that spurs her forward, pressing a kiss to his forehead that is light only in delivery, laden with emotion too obscure, too fathomless, to be expressed in any other way she can conceive.

He draws in a breath through his nose, holding her close to rest the tips of their noses together even after she’s pulled away. Against the edge of her shoulder blade, she can feel his fingers brush her skin, tracing an aimless pattern back and forth, back and forth. “Morning,” he mumbles, voice still draped in sleep. It’s reminiscent of old leather and warm musk, deep and cracked at the edges. Deep in her gut, she feels a nerve thrum upon registering the sound.

She leans in to plant a messy kiss on his top lip, suppressing the giggle that wells up when he smiles into it. “Morning,” she whispers back.

-

“Are you taking requests?”

“Sorry?” His brow is creased in evident confusion when he looks over to her from his elegant fingers, messing about on the fretboard. The sky behind him, a faded turquoise on the horizon through the inky silhouettes of towering conifers, looks cool and distant in contrast to the warm glow of flames on his face.

She smiles cheekily, edging closer to the campfire against a suddenly chilled breeze that rolls from looming granite cliffs. “Are you taking requests?” she repeats, blinking at him coyly. She gestures to his guitar, a well-loved Simon & Patrick Luthier that, he has emphasized on multiple separate occasions, he cherishes over his own life. “Song requests, I mean.”

“Ah.” The grin that he tosses to her in return is roguishly lopsided, pulling further into his right cheek than his left. His eyes sparkle in the dim firelight with a twinkle so mischievously boyish that it’s a genuine effort to resist collapsing pathetically into a giggly heap at his feet. Damn him.

“No,” he says, after a moment’s faux consideration. “No, I don’t think I will.”

She purses her lips in a melodramatically exaggerated pout.

His smile softens, evening into something gentler, and he moves to begin experimenting with the frequency of the D string’s tuning, toying with it by practiced ear. “What do you want me to play?” he asks, tone warm and affectionate, comforting like his guitar’s voice. Something sweet and light blooms in her chest, like a daisy on a sunny spring afternoon.

“Hm,” she hums softly, considering. In the moment, she doesn’t have a particular preference, she supposes—she simply fancies the thought of indulging herself in those mellow, imperfect tones, sitting by the campfire and losing herself to him again and again and again. It would be nice to hear one of his original songs again, perhaps. Or, maybe…

“‘Underground,’” she decides aloud, drawing her eyes back to him from where they had wandered to the neighboring campfire, surrounded by a rowdy throng of college students.

“‘Underground’?” he echoes, staring absently into the night’s shadow and brushing his fingers lightly across a chord—testing a key, she presumes. There is a knowing smile in his eyes when he looks back to her, an airy laugh on his lips when he asks, “‘Underground’ by Cody Fry?”

“Yes,” she affirms, a giggle she cannot successfully quell bubbling into her voice. This is not the first time she has requested this song of him, and they both know it will certainly not be the last. “Please.”

For a short moment he remains silent, plucking at his strings in light thought, and then he shifts, settling the guitar more comfortably against himself. “I gotchu bae,” he says, in a comically terrible mockery of an American accent, and then he begins, voice shifting to texture effortlessly into those flawed earth-tones, that grounding song. A pleasant chill catches in her ribcage as the sound swells to fill her ears, mingling with the crackle of flames, and the mysterious rustle of the forest, and the lazy chirping of crickets.

“I woke up underground

Not a light, not a sound

Threw my voice into the dark

But the dark had no remark

Just repeated what I said…”

-

She buries her face into his chest, inhaling the scents that have soaked into his light sweater—a bit of sweat, a sheer spot of cologne, a wave of him. It’s a vaguely intoxicating combination, one she knows she will never tire of, and peculiarly bittersweet, as if the sadness in his eyes has spread over the years to saturate his very pores.

Or, perhaps it only seems that way now that it’s being torn from her grasp.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she mumbles into his sweater, fingers curling into the fabric around his back. It’s a golden sort of color, like the sun warming them through the windows, hanging low over the western horizon.

He hums, nose buried in her hair, a rumbling vibration in his chest that she can’t hear over the roar of jet engines and airport traffic. He squeezes her tight, just for a moment, and then he’s pulling away, bringing up one hand to rest on her cheek.

In the golden hour’s utopian glow, he suddenly looks more breathtaking, impossibly, than he ever has before—ethereal, as if he never completely belonged to the Earth to begin with. Those brown eyes, that warm skin; that perfect nose, those perfect lips; that carefree, frizzy fringe of browns and caramels and honey-golds.

Her heart, lodged obstinately in the hollow of her throat, wrings pitifully.

“Well, no need to be so dramatic about it,” he quips, caressing his thumb over her cheek in sweeping strokes. He laughs lightly, a deceptively high-pitched giggle so contagious that she finds it impossible to resist the pull of a smile on her lips.

“I’m not being dramatic,” she argues, without heat. On impulse, she reaches up to grip his hand, tilting her face to place a gentle kiss against his palm. His demeanor softens visibly at the gesture. “I just...I don’t want you to leave. I’m gonna miss you so bad—”

He pulls his hand away suddenly, and hers with it, pressing his lips against her wrist as she instinctively reacts to cup his jaw, faintly bristled with day-old stubble. “I’m gonna miss you too,” he says softly, against her skin. Her heart, caged in her windpipe, leaps at the sensation. “But this isn’t the end, right? We’ll see each other again.”

-

She writes to him, fingers slaving over keys until the tendons in her wrists ache, eyes poring over the spidery black of virtual ink against the cottony white of virtual paper until they burn worn and weary in their sockets.

She writes to him about little nothings, the odds and ends that make her days unique in their mundanity. She tells him about her next-door neighbor’s new husband, how he reminds her a bit of him, or the weather as of late, or the Netflix series she had binge-watched the night prior at the expense of assignments due the following morning. Simple things, requiring little investment, that fill the gaps in life, for all their lack of any appreciable impact.

She writes to him, too, about the deeper things, the things that fall closer to the center. Roughly 5000 words, one golden, hazy morning, on the futility of cliques, how deleterious they are for all their vanity; another 500, a couple of afternoons later, on her most recent preceding crush, how he hadn’t been aware of her existence for half a year, and shunned her when he had. An entire essay, quite possibly the longest she’s ever written, on divorce, and men, and that tragically magical thing they call love.

And sometimes, when her walls wear thin and patchy under the fatigue of her own emotion, she writes about him. She writes about his earth-tones, how they draw her in, reflecting in dark hair and golden skin and sad, sad almond doe eyes. Writes about his elegant fingers, his elegant features, the whimsical sophistication to his charmingly boyish smile. Writes about his voice, warm and textured like a country road washed gold in the light of an aging afternoon, and how she loses herself to it—how she loses herself, as a whole, to him.

(She writes because there is not much else that can be done, after all, when months have passed and she loves him no less than she did at the very start.)

-

“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). He doesn’t look up immediately, features concealed by a fringe of artfully-disheveled, earth-toned hair as he fiddles with a button on his shirt. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.

“Hi,” she replies, not allowing herself even the liberty of a steadying breath before she speaks. Her tone is stable, at least—disinterested, almost. It’s a façade, one that grates against the truth, the way her heart pounds ruthlessly against her breast.

In the short pause that follows, an eon’s worth of imagination tracks across her brain as she envisions how the next several seconds will transpire. What will his reaction be when he looks up, she thinks. Revulsion? Disinterest? Or, nothing at all—an aching emptiness that stings more than hatred itself?

He looks up, barely before her mind can—

…

A light sparks in his eyes, dull and heavy with palpable fatigue, when she steps forward, putting forth a valiant effort to avoid his gaze but ultimately finding herself unable to contend with his gravity. It’s hardly more than a flicker, so faint and subdued that for a brief moment she deludes herself into believing it had merely been a trick of the eye.

But the way he sits taller, more attentively, is no illusion, nor is the unmistakable brightness to his smile.

“Hello,” he greets her politely, and though his accent rests thick and weary on his tongue with evident exhaustion, his tone harbors a distinct interest it had lacked with the others.

Nerves flutter into her throat, strung taut like rubber bands. “Hello,” she returns, voice deceptively stable, expertly concealing the way her heart slams against her ribcage.

“How are you?” he asks, and she cannot help but to notice the way his Adam’s apple bobs in a fleeting gulp before he speaks, or the way his gaze has hardly strayed from her features since her turn had come—

…

“Hello,” he greets her, clipped and polite, as she steps forward. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue with evident exhaustion, but his tone harbors a keen interest that it had lacked in his interactions with the others.

“Hi,” she returns, shyly, though her voice is deceptively stable, expertly concealing the bunch of nerves that flutters into her throat, strung taut like rubber bands.

“How are you?” he asks, and when she finally harvests the courage to lock eyes with him, she sees that his cheeks are flushed a warm rose, smile soft and shy like an autumn dawn. There is a spark in his eyes that had not been present before—faint, but simultaneously and uncharacteristically ardent. Heat pools in her core as she allows him to search her gaze, prying with a curious sort of yearning.

“Nervous,” she replies honestly, once she’s swallowed her surprise—too honestly, perhaps. The laugh that bubbles past her lips is a bit too shrill, a bit too loud, and far too annoying to be considered anything along the vein of attractive. She regrets opening her mouth before it has even died away into the surrounding hubbub.

She’s astonished when he giggles, too, high and deceptively shrill for his voice’s speaking register—

…

“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). His tone is clipped, polite in the most meticulously-crafted sense, but his voice is tight, accent resting thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.

“Hi,” she replies. The word escapes her mouth too quickly, too loudly (too desperately), and it does nothing to mask the sledgehammer beat her heart pounds into her bones, hard and ruthless and fast. Her body quite nearly betrays her, then, with a visible cringe, but he’s already pressing onward with a conversation so repetitive that it has long been bled of any genuine warmth.

“How are you?” he asks. Something about his inflections sounds incredibly forced, strained far beyond the extent it was designed to ever be.

“Uh—” Nervous, she nearly blurts, but thinks better of it at the last possible instant and manages in a faltering stammer, “I—I’m...I’m pretty good, how, uh, how are you?”

“I’m doing well,” he says, simply. He’s donning that lovely smile, naturally, when she at last brings herself to look him directly in the face, but it is drawn and plastic—cold, in a sense, though it’s clear he tries his best to conceal it with a cheap veneer of warmth. The softness that remains in his eyes is genuine, at least, but it is buried deep, clouded by layers of plastic and apathy and pain, and something hot and sharp that feels much like resentment, sizzling in unyielding opposition against the watery blue of that unending sadness.

She sees then that she does not make the cut.

A violent shudder tears through her as she places the origami heart she had brought onto the table in front of him, fingers twitching as his hand brushes hers in the briefest of strokes when he picks it up, marker poised. Nausea settles into her stomach, cold and dense like stone and horror; the dam restraining an apocalyptic deluge of tears springs a catastrophic leak as callous reality collides with her psyche and she realizes that she will never be anything more than a stranger to him.

Terror, panic, and grief strike in pitiless tandem, and she flees before he can even finish writing, wading through a blur of tears and voices and smells and sounds and perplexed stares until she finds herself in the end stall of a public restroom, pouring wracking sobs into the flimsy embrace of single-ply toilet paper rougher than truth itself.

He does not see her; he does not care. His soul is closed to her, just as it is closed to the others, and just as it always shall be.

Why is she crying? Why is she disappointed? Why does her heart ache, bitter and acrid and sharp against her bones?

(What else could she possibly have been expecting?)

Humiliation burns on the back of her tongue like bile. She hasn’t left any sort of impression on him at all, she thinks dully, pitifully suppressing a hiccup (with only marginal success) when she hears the bathroom door creak open—or if she has, it isn’t a positive one. Hers will be a face that he remembers, perhaps, months down his timeline. But certainly not for any of the reasons she might ever have hoped.

He thinks she is phenomenally pathetic. You are phenomenally pathetic.

She is phenomenally pathetic—to such an absurd degree, in fact, that she cannot even manage to deafen herself entirely to the ludicrous whisper of distorted hope on the edge of her cortex, to the voice that whispers maybe.

Maybe in the next life. ◾