Everything that you were born to do -- you don't have to do it. Someone else was born to do it too

[out_of_realm]

The rain, at least, had become a familiar constant. Everything else might be shaky, sliding into the mud, but the rain came and kept on coming and Tom let it bead up and roll off him. There wasn’t really anything else he could do

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[little_moons]

It's dark, murky with rainwater, but even in the dismal gray, I see the shape of him up ahead, crouched in the mud, and I know that it's him. There's a part of me, a nasty and childish part, that wants to just keep walking. Things with him are so hard lately, and I'm tired of not knowing what the fuck to do.

But he's Tom, he's my fucking husband, and it really wouldn't matter how strange things were... I always want to be around him.

I'm close before I say anything, seeing the glint of something in his hand, and my brow furrows, a frown tugging at my face, and I clear my throat and say, "What is that?"

[out_of_realm]

Tom didn't startle. It took him a while to look up, face wet with rain water and his eyes refocusing on the present.

"It's...the wedding band I got for Sophie," he said, finally looking up at Neil. Heartache, confusion, but under that the simple, bewildered love that he'd felt since the start. "Mike took it off me...jesus. More than five years ago. I just found it..."

He closed his eyes. Island tricks. It never really ended.

[little_moons]

"It's pretty," I murmur, immediately regretting it -- I mean, how fucking stupid does that sound, but it's not like I've got any fucking clue what else to say.

Sophie's ring. Yeah, great fucking timing, Asshole Island Gods or whatever.

[out_of_realm]

"Yeah," Tom said, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I, uh, went to Tiffany's in New York City to..." He trailed off, looking at the sparkle in his hands. That world felt like a fever dream now. With a link like this in his grasp, it should have felt overwhelmingly sharp and close, and yet... The smell of the City in the summer, Sophie's face as he'd dropped to one knee -- they scrolled by like stills from an old movie.

Love doesn't go away, but it changes. Eventually, you loose the regret.

"Neil, I--" he started, stumbling to his feet.

[m_pinocchio]

"They never made it there." A little of the feeling has faded out of his legs, so he's just standing, looking down, waiting for it to return. He knows this isn't held against him, this above all other things, but his stomach still clenches with guilt at that dull sparkle.

All the things he'd thought he'd never have. The good life that Tom had left to come to Hell and harrow it for them all. And he hadn't known. He'd just kept trying to go back. So some of it had been a kind of nasty, instinctive jealousy. A desire to drag him down to the level of everyone else. And a horror at having even tried.

"Remember? They all got picked up after. I tried to get it back for you. But I couldn't find it." Lost, taken by the Guard, traded for something else, who the fuck knew. He clears his throat, deeply uncomfortable. "I'm sorry."

[out_of_realm]

"Yeah, I remember," Tom said, looking up at him through a veil of rain. That compound, Sophie's failed rescue, the start of everything and the end of something else.

"Wouldn't have done us much good," he said softly, almost inaudible over the noise of the rain. "A few months of gas at the most."

[m_pinocchio]

He laughs softly, because that wasn't the point and because Tom knows that, and even then, if he would have gotten it back, he would have handed it over without a word and said nothing else about it.

He reaches down and lays a wet hand on Tom's equally wet shoulder. "We did okay anyway."

[out_of_realm]

Tom grinned and leaned back into that familiar sturdiness.

"Yeah. We did, actually." They'd even found that much gold and more, in the end.

He sighed, water seeping past his lips and into his eyes. Little rivers formed on his waterproofs and ran out onto the boardwalk. He felt like he'd been squaring his shoulders for days.

"I've really fucked things up," he said softly, an admission.