secrets challenge, by omphale

[omphale]

Title: Season
Author: [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]
Pairing: F/K
Rating: PG
Length: 500 words
Notes: Thanks to [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] for her insightful and helpful beta.

This is angst. My OTP is still broken. Fair warning.

Snippet: I want to be strong enough not to answer.



He’s going soon. I can feel it in the way he grips my chin too hard and stares at me as if I will, as if I can, convince him to stay. It aches more each time he gets on a plane. I want to tell him no, want to go with him, want...I want so much that I’m not sure how to begin.

Macabre, hopeless. Terrible. The way that, each time he arrives at my door, he’s paler, thinner, a tiny bit less of himself. The knowledge that he’s fading even as he’s standing before me, promising that this time we’ll succeed. This time he won’t leave.

I want him to stay and I fear I always will. I want to be strong enough not to answer. He’d wait, although eventually he’d concede defeat. He’s learned patience with time but the cold and the dark would be too much in the end. Maybe he’d break the door down. Maybe he wants to freeze to death. Maybe he’s waiting for me to refuse.

We’ll never know. I open the door.

I allow myself to believe that he could love my home and not just me; he tries to be content. The first winter he tried so very, very hard. I’d return to a warm kitchen, the smell of cooking, eager hands pulling at my clothing and dragging me into the bedroom for a thorough evaluation of my condition.

My protests were brief and ineffective, half-hearted. I was too eager to renew my acquaintance with his body, mapping out changes on his skin, the lean lines of his shoulders. Sex couldn’t work forever, although we tried.

It was the closest we came to permanence. He went the next fall, returned to streets that meant home in a way that I would never be. He asked me to leap with him again, to believe that what we shared would survive the noise and dirt of a life that merely tolerated me and never belonged to him. I couldn’t.

He asked me to trust, and I refused. He said forever and I looked away. I told him godspeed on a runway and set out for a posting as far away as I could run, reasoning that if I must be alone, I would do it without human interference to remind me that my heart was 3000 miles from my home.

I didn’t seek death and didn’t avoid it. He wouldn't ask if I was content.

We spent two years that way. One afternoon I opened my door and found him waiting on the other side. I suspect I’ll never know how he got there. As for the reasons...perhaps I’ll never know those either. He always arrives with the spring, and leaves at the threat of winter. It seems strangely fitting.

Ten years, and I’ve never asked him to explain this. Next time. Or never. I think he knows. I think he whispers secrets in the summer half-light to buy my silence.

Comments

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

to believe that what we shared would survive the noise and dirt of a life that merely tolerated me and never belonged to him.

This whole thing is lovely, but I find I like this line the very best, because it gives a sort of permanence to the whole thing, the sense that it *is* unfixable. Because sometimes in angsty post-CotW stories, there's the feeling like if they could only talk, only stop being stupid BOYS for one second, it could WORK -- but this feels like an acknowledgment that they did try, that they did the things they could, and they're still in this place. And that is achy in the best way.

[omphale]

the sense that it *is* unfixable.

Oh, yay. That's exactly was I was trying for, the idea that it doesn't work. It won't work, and they've tried and are trying, because they're both stubborn and they can't walk away.

So glad you liked it.