i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
What if, what if, what if.
He knows better than to hinge his heart on what ifs.
But he’s never had a lick of sense when it came to her.
Still, the expression is plaintive when he finally forces open his eyes and searches her face. The heart is useless anyway, he thinks. Because it beats now, even when it doesn’t have to, and he cannot remember a time when it did not belong to her anyway. He knows that he will gladly gamble his heart on this what if.
She does not plead, there is nothing in her tone that betrays any weakness and it makes his own heart ache. Because she has never needed him and he has always known that. And perhaps it speaks volumes that she wants him. But, for the moment, he merely goes on studying her face, committing all the new shadows to memory. He does not allow himself to wonder what she has done or what has been done to her in all the time that has passed. He does, however, allow himself to believe – perhaps foolishly – that they have time. They will have time. She can tell him what she wishes and they will keep their secrets.
“Then I won’t,” he says, plain. Because it really is that simple. If she does not want him to let her go, he won’t. Ever. He has carried her with him this long, he thinks, and he knows he’d gladly carry her with him to the end of the world. The memory of her, the quiet moments they had spent together, is perhaps the only worthwhile thing he’s ever had to carry.
He drags in a measured breath, remembers the way he had smiled at her once, how he’d touched her and wondered, who is there to look after you? In time, he would come to learn that she did not need looking after.
You are not the only one who has lost everything. Panic seizes him by the throat, arrests the air in his lungs. And then. And then he closes up what little space remains between them, brings his forehead to rest against hers. Touches her as if he has any right at all.
“You are the only thing I have ever loved,” he murmurs, acutely aware that the breath falls heavy and sweet on her skin. There is no shame in this, heat does not pool in his cheeks. He is not embarrassed to admit it. He has loved others, of course, his family but it was a different kind of love and he trusts that she knows the difference.
@[Anaxarete] leave me here to die