Senzafine: #024 - Reality
Challenge at 30_angsts
Title: Reality
Author: lilhobbit
Fandom: Witch Hunter Robin
Prompt: #024: No Future
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: implied sex
Word Count: 1062 words
Characters: Amon, Robin
Series: Senzafine
It's easy to cry when you realise everyone you love will reject you or die. It’s easy to cry when despite every effort you’re simply not enough for them. You come to realize your feelings were strong, but based on illusion. The person you loved would’ve never let you down like this. The person you loved wanted to keep you safe at any cost.
He climbs on top of her, covers her naked form and for once everything is smiles between them. Kisses, caresses, his weight and the touch of skin on skin: everything melts into one. He’s having trouble finding her, but it only stings once when he does. She lets him do everything, is drained from the first moment and he uses that short time well. She’s shaking, overwhelmed, gasping. When the shaking stops, she’s seeing stars and he’s already laid down next to her. He holds her, pulls her close and she’s content.
But when he’s fallen asleep, her thoughts are flying, closing in on panic. Her anxiety won’t let her sleep. He shifts, changes the way he holds her more than once during the night. She’s cold and new, and doesn’t know why that is. She’s afraid of the light of dawn, of what it’ll bring along. She can smell the blood, has seen the stains, but knows for sure he hasn’t yet come to fully realize. Why is she so ashamed and afraid right now? This is what she wanted for so long, wasn’t it?
Her short periods of sleep are full of nightmares and she shakes awake quickly. He’s been calm and sated all night, locked inside a dream that she knows will soon end. She’s weary, now more than ever. He feels like a stranger beside her, though they should be closer now more than ever.
When he became still and tied his arms around her all those hours ago, she cried without knowing why. It could’ve been fulfilment, an emotional rush that comes with such enormous change, but she also knows it could’ve been something else. A lingering sensation of loss, as if she already knew what would happen: how the aftermath would go. The darkness covers everything for a little longer, but it doesn’t last.
It’s finally dawn. The light is vague, but recognizable. For once the thick curtains are left open and not covering the daylight that seeks to engulf their forms. He’s starting to wake up, regress. She just wants one more moment, but feels too weak to move or act on this desperate wish. The light affects them both, brings them closer to being aware. The delirium wears down, and the warmth underneath the blankets is escaping. How much longer can they lay like this, lie like this?
She hates herself for getting up, but finds the courage anyway, telling him she’ll take a shower. She picks up a towel. He sees the bloodstains. She cannot turn around to look at his face, to see the truth; she’d rather take the lie.
She’s alone in the shower, washing the blood, allowing the warm water to fix her new body. She just stands there, caresses the same places his hands wandered last night. It is all different now, isn’t it? Some intuition, perhaps just her fears, tell her this, warn her about the change at hand. She stays here for just one more moment, before drying herself up and going back.
She picks up her discarded clothes, sees a glimpse of him in the kitchen, cooking breakfast perhaps. He has a towel around his waist, a t-shirt covering his chest and his hair is on a messy ponytail. She’s never seen him like this. Slowly each piece of clothing finds its way back over her body and she walks into the same room with him, still drying her hair.
Her mind is on the sheets - the sight of crimson on them - that’ll never wash away from his or her mind. He’s polite, chats with her lightly and even smiles while he eats his meal and reads the paper. She knows he’s holding out, faking. This isn’t him and this isn’t the kind of goodbye she wanted from him. It hurts and makes her angry, but she doesn’t want to fight. She lets him continue his charade, surrenders silently.
Everything has changed. The change didn’t ask them if they wanted it, this alienation. She’s sure there was happiness between them before this moment; that the smiles and laughs were genuine. But can she regret being so happy for that one speeding moment? Not really. It was natural advancement and trying to prevent it would’ve easily caused a similar conflict. Some things simply don’t last for long, nor were they intended to.
When she’s already gone, he takes away the sheets from his bed, sinks them underwater and applies detergent on them. He scrubs the stains harder and harder, trying his best to rid both his mind and his hands from the stench and the sight. He never wanted this, never thought it through. He knows he should’ve, he was the adult even if she seemed old.
He doesn’t want to see her, to face his guilt. He doesn’t want to carry the responsibility any longer. What she wants after this he cannot give and doesn’t even want to. Her feelings and his feelings aren’t the same shape. Sure he appreciated her as an equal, spoke his mind to her and entertained thoughts, impressed with the way they fit, like partners. But to him she was never the missing part, the thing to complete him.
He fears she loves him. But he doesn’t love her.
He scrubs the sheets under red water harder, hurting himself in the process. He’s angry, a wild animal caught in a cage too small. She tricked him, tried to tame him. Why was he so blind? He blames himself, knowing he should’ve seen it coming. He let himself be tricked, caught.
This is why he sends her away, to escape her grasp. The act he holds is almost perfect, but she knows he’s lying from the little things. She doesn’t appreciate his attempts to soften the blow. She’d rather have it straight up. He owes her that much in her opinion. But their worlds are apart, even if she never realized it until now.
She almost forgives him.
- fin