i'll hold your hair back, when the world gets overwhelming (halo 4/5)
four. the past didn’t go anywhere
Embry fell in love with Jenny on a Tuesday.
Almost two years ago, now. Shy girl stumbling out of Billy Black’s, her messenger bag loaded down with sketches and dreams. He remembers her small hands grasping his wrists like something he conjured out of a dream. One look - that was all it took. It had been an earth deep shock, like he had looked into a stranger’s eyes and found himself staring back at him.
Their courtship had been slow, and hesitant. They were both very quiet, intensely private people. With her, he had found a peace that he could find nowhere else, not in his mother’s tired eyes, or the continual rough housing of his brothers. There was a blessed silence of his head, and the extraordinary comfort of being with someone who did not wrench his secrets, bleeding and rusted, from his heart, but who seemed to find the quiet just as soothing as he did, with enough sensitivity to know when to leave well enough alone.
He began to watch her, and was continually amazed at the tiniest details of her, at how she drew the cloak of herself around her so tightly that she almost disappeared - unless you knew where to look. Unless you began to spend all your waking life looking at her, the way Embry did.
He called it “a coincidence” when they began to run into each other at Billy Black’s house more and more often, and ignored the knowing smile that he could see out of the corner of Billy’s eye. Then Jenny started to work at Crazy Horse, and Embry simply showed up one day and said he would walk her there - after days of agonizing over Should I? Shouldn’t I? It wasn’t always safe, early in the morning, late at night, for a girl to walk alone. That was his excuse.
And then when her brothers phased, that was almost like a gift. He thought he would hate it, if Jenny stumbled upon this world, where all the secrets he tried to bury were laid out wide in the open. But no - Jenny still took care to steer clear from any open wounds. In fact, it gave him more of an excuse to be with her. He asked Sam if he could have the duty of training of Brady and Collin, and Sam agreed, and suddenly, there was this other connection between him and Jenny. There was another reason to see her. Another way that she fit into his life.
He had to fight Sam, to stay with Jenny. He fought with everything he had, everything he knew, I am not you and she is not Leah - and Sam lifted his injunction. Sam was softer than he seemed; he hated to forbid them anything.
And maybe, Embry thought, bleakly, maybe Sam had been moved by hope. That a love that wasn’t imprinting could flourish, and grow. Could last.
It’s too bad that both he and Sam were wrong.
So now he stands on the front lawn of the Tillery house, in the middle of the night. What time is it? One in the morning? Two in the morning? All he knows that Jenny is inside somewhere, sleeping, or maybe not sleeping. She has the oddest sleeping habits, spends hours of the night awake and drawing, or painting, feverishly. He can see her now, large eyes glowing with lamplight, her fingers splayed out against a cream coloured page, one pencil in her hand, another behind her ear. It almost takes his breath away, how clearly he can see this.
There’s a low growl - and there, at the doorway, is Alan Tillery, twin brother to Jenny’s best friend Anne. Alan, the newest of the wolves.
“Get the hell out of here,” Alan spits.
Then Alan turns to look behind him, and his face opens… His face opens. Key meeting lock, the lifting of a lid, your heart spilling out like smoke.
There’s a snake curled around Embry’s heart that says, I know that look.
Jenny emerges from behind Alan, her face drawn and pale and unhappy, her eyes huge. Embry wonders, distantly, how she can be so blind to the fact that Alan Tillery is in love with her.
Maybe, Embry thinks with a pang, it was only that she had eyes for someone else.
For someone who betrayed her, in the end.
“Embry,” she says, those two syllables floating through the night air, dim and wavering. They hit his skin and he almost hisses.
“I want to - talk to you.” The words have to fight to get out of Embry’s chest. “Can we go for a walk, or something?”
“Of course - ” But Jenny is stopped by Alan, who practically tears the grey hoodie off his own back and places it on Jenny, thin and shivering in her nightgown. It’s almost ridiculous, hanging all the way down to her knees; she has to fight to get her arms through the sleeves. She is so busy struggling with the sweater that she doesn’t even notice the starving, anxious look on Alan’s face, the look that asks, Are you coming back?
Jenny misses this. Embry doesn’t.
“Where - shall we go?” Jenny asks, her voice unsteady, as if words have legs and those legs have fallen down.
“To the playground,” Embry says.
They used to walk in the mornings, sharing tea in a Thermos, one of her hands tucked into one of his pockets, to keep her warm. Such small hands… But now there’s a distance of three feet, two weeks, and the ghost of a silver-white girl between them.
They walk in silence all the way to the playground. Jenny breaks away from him, and perches on a swing. Her sneakered feet dip up, toes pointing to where the moon would be, if you could see it through the clouds. The swing carries her all the way up, up into the sky - then it brings her back down to earth. No chance of flight or escape.
Embry settles on the swing next to her, and she slows.
It’s almost easier, to sit beside her like this, instead of having to face her. It’s almost easier. It’s still torture.
“I missed you,” he says.
She laughs and it’s the most awful laugh that he’s ever heard, because it sounds like a sob.
“Don’t - ” he says, and stops.
“Don’t? Don’t?” She kicks up the sand, a spray of stones that have been ground down by time and weather until they’re mere grains. Can time do the same to hearts? Wear them down so that they are unrecognizable?
I thought I knew your heart so well, he thinks. I thought I knew mine, too.
“I lo - ”
“Don’t.” Except this Don’t isn’t mocking, it’s just desperate, and maybe that’s why it’s so much harder to take. “Please, just… don’t.”
He doesn’t. He remains silent, and for the first time, he wonders if this - his ultimate tactic, fall back, comfort, remaining silent - hasn’t been crippling him the whole time.
I had month, months and years to tell her I loved her. I could’ve told her every. Single. Day.
And I didn’t.
Then Jenny says, with a strange fierceness that he’s only heard from her once or twice, “That little girl needs love. Do you understand me? She needs so, so badly to be loved. You don’t know what her life has been like, she - ”
“Jenny. Jenny, what are you saying?”
Her swing stops, and she looks at him. Just looks at him. That hazel-green shade stops him dead every time, like there are leaves growing behind her eyes, in the space where she dreams.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jenny says. Her voice is raspy, almost a whisper. From crying, Embry realises - and then he wishes that he didn’t. It’s a curse, this knowledge. “I’ve been thinking, all these hours. And I thought that if I had to choose someone for you to imprint on, and I couldn’t choose me, I would… I would choose her.”
Jenny’s shoulders hunch over, and she looks about twelve years old, no older than that pale moon-faced girl in Crazy Horse, the one who has brought this whole mess crashing down on their shoulders, the one who is now the center of Embry’s world, even though she’s destroyed this precious, precious thing that he and Jenny share.
He wants so badly to cross the distance between them, between him and Jenny, and hold her. Just hold her.
But he can’t do that anymore.
He can’t.
Jenny says, through her sobs, “She is so precious. She needs so badly to be loved.”
“And you?” Embry says, feeling almost wild, feeling the Wolf snapping at his heels, cramming against his skin and pushing outwards, snarling, Letmeoutletmeoutletmeout. “Don’t you need to be loved?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she’s still crying, if only I could be the sun, the old refrain runs through Embry’s mind, he’s eighteen and in love and completely dismantled and mad old nursery rhymes are wreaking havoc with his brain, and burn away your pain. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re killing me.” He doesn’t know any other way to say it, to name the insanity pounding away in his skull. “You’re killing me.”
“Stop it, just stop it - ”
But she won’t stop crying and he won’t stop hating himself. He doesn’t think he ever will.
“I love you,” he says. And she’s crying so hard that he actually gets to finish this time.
~
When Embry brings her back to the Tillery house, Anne and Alan are waiting for her.
She thinks she’s got the tears under control, but as soon as the door closes behind her (is that a wolf howling behind her, chasing her like the shadows of old love? She doesn’t want to know) she feels them coming again.
“And it’s not me I’m worried about,” she sobs, holding onto Anne for dear life, knowing that she’s not barely making any sense, “it’s not me, it’s Collin, he’s so young, and you should see the way he looks at Diana - you should see - ”
“He’s young.” Alan’s voice seems to have to cross oceans to get to her. So, so far away. If it sounds strange, or stranger than anything else that she has heard today, she doesn’t notice. “He’ll love again.”
“Will he?” Anne’s hands tighten around her, and Jenny doesn’t know why this question is suddenly so important, only that it is. “Will he?”
“Yes,” says Alan.
end part four.