[fic] never forever
Title: Never Forever
Notes: Post-Hogwarts graduation by about five years. Original characters belong to Joanna and I; thank you for bearing with me all these long years. It's been hard on us both, but I will never regret a single tear I shed or a moment spent in pain with you - you are always worth my very best and more.
Summary: No one knows quite how it ended up this way, the two of them. No one knows quite how they never were, when they were always an almost-forever.
He insists, from time to time, that she calls him by name. In between his skin and hers, dropped in the space of his hand hot on her hips, slipped into the soft, too-forgiving line of his lips, she will often forget and he collects these moments as a lonely fisherman might shift for pearls in the sand, waking early each day to walk the ebb and swell of the tide in unspoken hope. It feels as if he is constantly trapped there, in the shadow of her words and her voice, in the afterimage of her touch lingering sharply on his tongue - it feels as if he is always on that shore, toeing the lines between them, sinking in the grains of every discarded confession.
Bell steps from one place to another and never quite notices the change. From there to here, she floats as easily as driftwood from old shipwrecks, one minute passion and song (darkness and laughter and burning escape) and the next, gone (mist and iron and foam beneath the sun). Professor, she still calls him, though she has long been out of school and she has crossed chasms and laws that no mere student has ever breached. They spend enough of their days together that he knows that she likes to sleep in on summer days and sleep not at all if it rains. He knows how to hold her when her bones lock together with old pains and timeless fears; he knows how she falls apart in places no one sees.
She resents him a little for knowing and he knows this too. She pushes him away with small, dangerous hands - of all people, he is intimately aware of the destruction those slender fingers can leave in their wake - she doesn't want him here, next to her, around her, knowing things no one should know. The contours of her wounds, red lined and crusted with the salt of regret; why does he know them, when no one else did?
Why is it him?
In fits of reasonless anger, she is not gentle. A woman of paradigm shifts, her beauty strikes as a blade, edges kissed with a nuanced poison: she is all white skin except where she is not (where blood rushes to thin surfaces and paints licks of red and plants seeds of roses), she is all fair golden curls so fine that sunlight sets them aspark and eyes like a lost primal creator had stolen pieces of the first sea and set remnants of their wonder in her gaze. And one afternoon in particular, she is beyond the touch of anger. Dainty, manicured nails dig into the muscles of his back and she leaves marks more viciously than ever before.
Afterwards, she curls into the curve of his body, small and adamant, worn faded glory fraying at the edges and doesn't say a word. She never says a thing to him, but once upon a time she would have told another boy all the demons that ate at her heart.
He found the roll of parchment on the bedside table in the morning, its rich blue ribbon carefully tied, as if the contents had never been read, the seal never quite broken. Addressed to a certain Belladonna Ashton in neat, tidy script that was disturbingly familiar, his large hands had shaken ever so secretly with restraint.
In a thin, imperceptible line cracking from edge to edge, heavy wax belies the illusion.
(It had been opened, oh yes. The perfect little bow untied, the ribbon touched - held in speechless elegance and nostalgia, it so viscerally pulled at girlish daydreams. It had been read, but it sat there, innocently proclaiming its integrity, so meticulously put back together that surely, no one would know the difference.)
It is still too early to ask of it though. She will rise from her smoking ashes and hoard her secrets, gathering them at the bottoms of her depths, where light is less than a memory and every bleeding echo is cauterized in biting pride.
*
Over dinner, with fear clouding her good sense (often, she refers to it as merely superior intelligence), she asked him to a party. It was a rather large social event and though she thought such evenings dull and impossibly boring compared to what she could be doing, she was obliged to make an appearance.
He assured her that if she didn't, every poor bloke there will be shattered by the loss. Nay, it would be preferable to lose the moon in the sky - here, she stops him, annoyed. Flattery is something she condemns as distasteful, but for the briefest of glances, she had smiled.
"Or, we could just take the night for ourselves," he offered blandly, a casual foray onto crackling ice. "Make our own event of it."
When she waved away the idea, something withered inside.
*
For the next week, that damnable scroll remains unerringly the same, a testament to her lie.
As if, should she pretend hard enough, should her will be strong enough, anything can be true.
*
"I never thought... you always said that there was nothing. That you and him, that it was something different, but not that. Not... that."
"I know."
It hurt everywhere and nowhere. It was a phantom pain and perhaps it had been there all along.
"So, what about now?"
Quietly, she like a butterfly pinned to board, frozen and dying, and he like a man tired from the daily promise of fruitful bounty, rejected at each turn of the waves.
"We were - not that. And now, I don't know what we are, but surely, we were never more than what I said."
They were a shock to him, the cold spots appearing upon his hands, the tears from her eyes. Bell did not cry. She did not wallow. He held her at those not-moments, but she had never asked for the comfort or safety. Perhaps she had never wanted either. In another story, she had, but not in this one.
"You don't need to go."
"I do." And she tempered it by leaning her head upon his shoulder, by letting him wrap an arm around her waist and pull her closer, but her gaze remained fixed on the edges of a blue ribbon.
*
Belladonna Ashton dons her gown like a warrior sharpens his sword (intently, solely, I-might-die-today-ly) and braces herself for heartache. Is it strange how hollow she is, even as she anticipates the end of a dream? This is one she has held onto for far too long and its expiration date had passed years ago. Only rot and bitterness there now, with the ghost of sweet maybe's in her yesterdays.
Notes: Post-Hogwarts graduation by about five years. Original characters belong to Joanna and I; thank you for bearing with me all these long years. It's been hard on us both, but I will never regret a single tear I shed or a moment spent in pain with you - you are always worth my very best and more.
Summary: No one knows quite how it ended up this way, the two of them. No one knows quite how they never were, when they were always an almost-forever.
He insists, from time to time, that she calls him by name. In between his skin and hers, dropped in the space of his hand hot on her hips, slipped into the soft, too-forgiving line of his lips, she will often forget and he collects these moments as a lonely fisherman might shift for pearls in the sand, waking early each day to walk the ebb and swell of the tide in unspoken hope. It feels as if he is constantly trapped there, in the shadow of her words and her voice, in the afterimage of her touch lingering sharply on his tongue - it feels as if he is always on that shore, toeing the lines between them, sinking in the grains of every discarded confession.
Bell steps from one place to another and never quite notices the change. From there to here, she floats as easily as driftwood from old shipwrecks, one minute passion and song (darkness and laughter and burning escape) and the next, gone (mist and iron and foam beneath the sun). Professor, she still calls him, though she has long been out of school and she has crossed chasms and laws that no mere student has ever breached. They spend enough of their days together that he knows that she likes to sleep in on summer days and sleep not at all if it rains. He knows how to hold her when her bones lock together with old pains and timeless fears; he knows how she falls apart in places no one sees.
She resents him a little for knowing and he knows this too. She pushes him away with small, dangerous hands - of all people, he is intimately aware of the destruction those slender fingers can leave in their wake - she doesn't want him here, next to her, around her, knowing things no one should know. The contours of her wounds, red lined and crusted with the salt of regret; why does he know them, when no one else did?
Why is it him?
In fits of reasonless anger, she is not gentle. A woman of paradigm shifts, her beauty strikes as a blade, edges kissed with a nuanced poison: she is all white skin except where she is not (where blood rushes to thin surfaces and paints licks of red and plants seeds of roses), she is all fair golden curls so fine that sunlight sets them aspark and eyes like a lost primal creator had stolen pieces of the first sea and set remnants of their wonder in her gaze. And one afternoon in particular, she is beyond the touch of anger. Dainty, manicured nails dig into the muscles of his back and she leaves marks more viciously than ever before.
Afterwards, she curls into the curve of his body, small and adamant, worn faded glory fraying at the edges and doesn't say a word. She never says a thing to him, but once upon a time she would have told another boy all the demons that ate at her heart.
He found the roll of parchment on the bedside table in the morning, its rich blue ribbon carefully tied, as if the contents had never been read, the seal never quite broken. Addressed to a certain Belladonna Ashton in neat, tidy script that was disturbingly familiar, his large hands had shaken ever so secretly with restraint.
In a thin, imperceptible line cracking from edge to edge, heavy wax belies the illusion.
(It had been opened, oh yes. The perfect little bow untied, the ribbon touched - held in speechless elegance and nostalgia, it so viscerally pulled at girlish daydreams. It had been read, but it sat there, innocently proclaiming its integrity, so meticulously put back together that surely, no one would know the difference.)
It is still too early to ask of it though. She will rise from her smoking ashes and hoard her secrets, gathering them at the bottoms of her depths, where light is less than a memory and every bleeding echo is cauterized in biting pride.
*
Over dinner, with fear clouding her good sense (often, she refers to it as merely superior intelligence), she asked him to a party. It was a rather large social event and though she thought such evenings dull and impossibly boring compared to what she could be doing, she was obliged to make an appearance.
He assured her that if she didn't, every poor bloke there will be shattered by the loss. Nay, it would be preferable to lose the moon in the sky - here, she stops him, annoyed. Flattery is something she condemns as distasteful, but for the briefest of glances, she had smiled.
"Or, we could just take the night for ourselves," he offered blandly, a casual foray onto crackling ice. "Make our own event of it."
When she waved away the idea, something withered inside.
*
For the next week, that damnable scroll remains unerringly the same, a testament to her lie.
As if, should she pretend hard enough, should her will be strong enough, anything can be true.
*
"I never thought... you always said that there was nothing. That you and him, that it was something different, but not that. Not... that."
"I know."
It hurt everywhere and nowhere. It was a phantom pain and perhaps it had been there all along.
"So, what about now?"
Quietly, she like a butterfly pinned to board, frozen and dying, and he like a man tired from the daily promise of fruitful bounty, rejected at each turn of the waves.
"We were - not that. And now, I don't know what we are, but surely, we were never more than what I said."
They were a shock to him, the cold spots appearing upon his hands, the tears from her eyes. Bell did not cry. She did not wallow. He held her at those not-moments, but she had never asked for the comfort or safety. Perhaps she had never wanted either. In another story, she had, but not in this one.
"You don't need to go."
"I do." And she tempered it by leaning her head upon his shoulder, by letting him wrap an arm around her waist and pull her closer, but her gaze remained fixed on the edges of a blue ribbon.
*
Belladonna Ashton dons her gown like a warrior sharpens his sword (intently, solely, I-might-die-today-ly) and braces herself for heartache. Is it strange how hollow she is, even as she anticipates the end of a dream? This is one she has held onto for far too long and its expiration date had passed years ago. Only rot and bitterness there now, with the ghost of sweet maybe's in her yesterdays.