a/n: this fic is a standalone work, but it does briefly revisit a moment with bunny & charming from 'unbeing dead.' snow's pov. i think the rest needs no commentary. title/summary is from e.e. cummings' 'all nearness pauses, while a star can grow.'
It's hard to know what to say about him, this boy (still a boy, in your mind) whose breath has lingered upon your lips since you were sixteen—if not in reality, at least in your pulse, just there beneath your skin, leaking from the fluttering valves of your heart. You see his hands around a glass and the callousless touch of them is suddenly there at your wrist. He gazes in quiet mortal awe at a sunset and all you can see is his blue eyes as they trail painstakingly, chokingly along every crevice of your young face.
It is not a doubt in anyone's mind that you love him, or that he loves you. You can practically hear Daphne Grimm exclaiming cheekily into your ear: So what's stopping you?
Corpses. That is the short answer—and the long answer too, if anyone cares to think about it.
Dead bodies between you like a rotting forest, moldy, mottled, shadowed. Your own lie among them. You do not know the exact number of lives you have lived and died, how many times the world had to be throttled so that you were not—but your mother's estimate is "not more than a dozen." Not more than a dozen. But perhaps a dozen. Twelve times over your heart stopped. And his too, maybe, maybe—no one wants to ask about it, no one really wants to know. More than half the time, you wish you didn't know.
Dim night, television sinfully bright, video game halted but the music still running. Behind the pause menu, some poor man's guts burst graphically, splattered all over the screen in high-definition crimson. You're sleepy, a little; drunk, a little. He's definitely had more than his fair share of the scotch.
"She said she could make me forget."
"What?"
Your lamp burns almost lavender. He could be smiling. Or weeping, or both. "Bunny said—she could make me forget—everything—and I told her, I can't, I always forget, I don't want to anymore, I can't take it—and she said—"
He is not the only person in this town whose sorrow, in weight, matches your own, but it is the nature of the sorrow—that haunting loss of personhood—which binds you. You see it in him now, in the tightening of his chest and shoulders and hands, in the lost look in his eyes which goes beyond inebriation. On his face, which is normally so stoic. His age, fear, uncertainty, grief, vulnerability—all apparent, and all worryingly reflected in yourself. When did you both get so old? You almost want to press your thumb to the space between his eyebrows and smooth out the wrinkles that form there, make him young again, make him yours again—that boy you loved so hard and fast and fallingly.
Never has the desolation of immortality has struck you so violently before.
You lean back on your hands, tilt your head tipsily, try not to match his slowly forming tears. He has not finished his sentence, is too busy staring at the floor, breath choked like a decapitated gasp between you.
Watch time stretch. The seconds are so long, even when they occupy the space between millennia.
"She said," he whispers, "She can't help me, nothing can help me—not magic, not—"
"Billy," you say.
"It haunts me."
You just watch him, hurting, wanting. You want to touch him, but the tension in his shoulders and back and hands—
"What are we going to do?" he asks. And he looks at you finally, anguished. "I feel like an echo of a person, all the time."
"You're not," you whisper. "We're not."
"Don't you feel it?"
You wince, turns her face away. "I—I do. Of course I do. But—"
"Well, then—"
"But they're just feelings. It's not real, Billy. None of it's real."
"That's what I mean."
The silence is heavy. Ugly. Suddenly you feel nauseous.
Upon seeing the look on your face, his expression melts, distress almost visibly seeping out onto the floor. Exhaustion takes over his person like a well-worn coat.
He holds out his hand. Hesitantly, you take it.
"You and I," he says. "In spite of everything."
You can feel your lips forming the word, the vibrations in your throat as you speak. But the sound of it does not reach your own ears. "Always," you say.
He pulls you close, embraces you. He is flushed, warm, wonderful—but this has been over for a long time now. You tuck your head beneath his and press your ear to his pulse, squeeze your eyes shut. No tears anymore. Not tonight. You refuse to mourn the living.
"I wish," he says, "I could say you're all I'm certain of."
You sob and you wonder: If life can be written, rewritten, pulled apart, stitched back together, why can't he and you do the same? Why is it so hard to build yourselves from the ground up when there is paper and ink right there in your hands?
"I love you," he says; you can feel his lips at your scalp—"I love you so much, Snow, and I know—"
He hugs you tighter. You feel him shudder against you. "I know it won't be the same," he says.
"Us?"
"Anything."
To call a town war-torn implies a certain physical destruction—crumbling buildings, wounded children, ashes in the street—and it is true that Ferryport Landing has seen its fair share of ruin. But everything is supposed to be better now. Just that day, you saw the surface of the river glittering in the sun. This town is beautiful again, clean and full again, swelling in the spring warmth and ready to burst into summer. The war has been swept beneath the carpet along with the dust. It has been buried beneath hard-packed earth under the grass, all your friends immobile with it. You are left with distant memories, subdued bouquets. Once in a while, you get goosebumps even when it's warm.
These are the entrails of a dying thing—a dead thing. One of the many corpses left on the side of the road while you fought and fell your way through to a merciless king. Checkmate: Deposed if not decapitated. (Atticus, Mirror, isn't there always a villain to lurk?; isn't there always a knife in the hand and an expanse of tender skin at the throat?) What happens to the survivors on that board, the few and the trembling?
All the repairs have been made to the buildings. Children are in school or the park or their parents' arms and the streets are whole. But this town is still war-torn. See the little breaks in everyone's skin like needles threaded through translucent palms. Eyes glassed over, shoulders taut. A person recoils from the touch of a loved one or throws up at the sight of a paper cut. Sometimes it is as simple as an admonition: Nothing has returned to itself, or will again, no matter how much the after photograph looks like the before.
To say nothing of that constricting grip of dread. It is a particular and unrelenting sickness, knowing that your personhood was once—and still might be—someone else's plaything. It does not matter that someone loved you deeply enough to orchestrate fate in your favour. Any orchestrated fate is still the work of a faltering human playing god. And the consequences…
Here are the consequences, two famed long-since lovers folded up in each other's arms, weeping and scared. You are fighters by nature, veterans by time. Still, nothing staves off the symptoms. And still, you cling to love and life and hope, not knowing if to do so is more stupid than courageous.
The most courageous thing, you think, would be to embrace the path your manufactured destiny has set for you without any regard to what that might mean for your self-sovereignty. But you are not that strong. Not yet.
So yes, feelingly, you love him—but you cannot, in action, do the same. And he knows this. He has said it himself. The ache of it, the truth of it, sit heavy in you both.
Everyone has dreams of falling. The why of it is not as important as the fact. But awake, asleep, intoxicated: How long have you existed now in that feeling of infinite pull to a distant gravity? You know he feels it too. He holds you now tightly, so close to his heart.
He is the only person in the world who will ever really know you, and suddenly you wish—a careless and stupid wish, the kind mothers warn their children to never make—you wish you could live forever in this hot open comfort, the silence of his understanding, the tenderness in his gentle hands.
"The things we cannot change," you recite, closing your eyes, clinging fast to him. The world around you so erratic and his pulse still beats steady.
"And the things we can," he says, pained. "What's the difference?"
You splay your right hand across his heart. This is where you do not quite see eye to eye—for here, to you, is the only certain thing. It doesn't matter. In the morning, this entire moment will be scraped from lucid memory. Everything real is always washed away in the pale veneer of daylight: The promise of such is what gets the world through the night, as if sincerity is injurious.
Well, be forgiving. Honesty is difficult when life is so honestly paralyzing.
That is all you can say about the boy. Forget the stained glass memories, or what it was before the whole world went off to war. There is only the now and the knowing. There is only the giving up and into each. Here is everything sacrificed; see it bleed, clot, stiffen. Here is every grotesque, beautiful flower growing in the dirt of what has since decayed.
He kisses your head, the love of it distended with finality, and covers your hand with one of his own. Your heartbeat in your ears is a tenth of his second off from his and the loudest thing you've ever heard.
Idle, the television screen flickers off at last. You let yourself be close to him in the blue and shallow dimness, in the black of the shade of your eyelids and the curve of his broad person. How honest. How destined to die.
Even the moon, you think, has dreams of falling forever.