Cycle, an inkheart fanfic

She was reading under a tree when she heard groans of agony and, she discerned, a call for help. Cautiously setting her book down, she rushed over to where the noises were coming from, pulling her skirts as she ran.

With a shock, she saw that it was the vagrant boy, Dustfinger. Blood covered his face and clothes, and she took an involuntary step back. "The strange wandering fire boy," her mother had called him, always with a note of scorn in her voice. He looked messy and unkempt and a little dangerous, and she wasn't sure whether the blood was his own or someone else's.

Ready to turn away, she took one look back. His sandy hair fell over his eye, and he pushed it back in an effort that made him groan. But once she saw his eyes and the pleading inside them, she was caught.

"The boys in town," he explained, seeing her hesitate. "They attacked me." When she said nothing, he added, "I'm Dustfinger. And you're Roxane?"

She nodded. "Just wait here," she said.

Every day, she would meet him in the field where she had found him and he would show her his tricks with fire, and they would talk about the meaning of truth and why beauty exists. She should have known not to fall in love when he told her, with a gleam in his eyes, that he was only happy when he was wandering, but she had always thought she could change him.

She didn't believe him when he said that he would always be moving, because she didn't know anyone who was always moving. The adults she knew settled down without any kind of visible discomfort, and she always assumed that someday he would do the same.

He would tell her stories of the places that he had been, and where he wanted to go, and what he had heard about them. She would listen with an astonished look on her face, for she had never been nearly as far away as he had been in some of his travels. Everything was magical to her, in those days, and she would hang on his every word.

He would leave sometimes, occasionally without telling her, but she forgave him once he returned and apologized and gave her that shining smile that could charm her so easily. In those days, she thought she could forgive him anything.

Once she reached the age of thirteen, the girls in the village began to talk, and it traveled to the boys in the village, and then their parents, and then, finally, hers. She could recall for years the exact sting of her mother's slap and the resulting fight that ensued, the words that could not be taken back and the final choice of him over them.

She raced out of the house into the field to meet him. He was there, as she knew he would be, and she raced into his arms and let him hold her.

"I want to live with you," she told him, tears staining his shirt. "I want to move with you and wander and travel and see all the things you tell me about. I want to be with you." It was the last part that was the most important, and also the truest. The rest was only because traveling would bring her closer to him.

He didn't say anything for a long time, but when he spoke, his voice was hollow. "You should go back home," he said, finally.

She pulled away, her eyes wide with hurt. "What do you mean?" she asked, feeling like the tears might come all over again, except even more rapidly.

Without looking at her, he scuffed his bare foot on the ground, dislodging dirt. "Being with me won't make you happy," he told her, with a note of bitterness in his voice. "And more than anything else" – and here his voice grew softer – "I want you to be happy." The implication, she realized, was that he didn't think that he could do that for her, but she knew, instinctively, that he was wrong.

She took his hand in hers. "Being with you is what makes me happy," she whispered, and this time, he didn't protest.

They would travel together now, she accompanying him on his journeys. She didn't love the migratory existence as much as he did, but she loved being with him. She loved listening to him talk, and the long hours spent in each other's company. Sometimes they would travel with others, with the people that he called his family and especially his friend the Black Prince, but some of the time it was just the two of them, living on nothing but each other.

And so one day, after two years of moving around together, after he tentatively reached his hand out to her face and leaned closer, they kissed. It wasn't flawless, and her teeth brushed his lip once, but in later years, she would still recount it as perfect.

She would never forget the heat of his breath – he tasted a little like fire too, with a hint of danger and some sense of burning, but she loved it. She loved him.

There was an uncharacteristic shyness in the way that he unlaced the back of her dress, his hands trembling slightly. The moon illuminated their naked bodies in the middle of the field.

For a moment, they stared at each other without moving, drinking in the sights and the moment and the odd feeling of destiny and importance. Then they moved towards each other, as if in unison, clasping the other, moving to the ground, his body moving on top of hers.

"You're the first girl that I ever did that with," he admitted after it was over when they were lying naked in the field, and she wondered if it was true but didn't challenge him, because there was an earnestness in his eyes and she knew in that moment that he loved her as much as she loved him.

That next day, he left her.

They had gone back to the village she was from, having slept in the field, and then he had left. He had not told her where he was going, or when he would be back. It was as if he had never been there. She awoke with messy hair and a feeling of loss that she had never before felt.

She moved back in with her parents, who took her back after seeing her disheveled and ragged appearance. She seamlessly transitioned back into her old life and tried to stop thinking about the boy who had stolen her heart.

She would dream that he was in exotic places and she would wake up crying and wondering why he had left and why, if he loved her, he could forget about her so easily.

When she next saw him, there was blood on his face again and he was scrambling to her door, hardly able to move for pain. "Basta," was all he could say, citing the name of the boy in the village who had bullied him the most as a child and now seemed determined to take it further as a man.

"It was because I loved you," he said, then, "and you loved me" and suddenly it became her fault and she cried and took him in, and all was forgiven. The next day, after he was cleaned up and rested and his face was bandaged, she left again with him.

She tried to forget the sting of abandonment and the loneliness of solitude, of wondering where he was and if he was thinking about her and how he could care so little about her that he could just leave. He never spoke of it, and she followed his cue, and hoped and prayed that it would never happen again.

She grew sick of the traveling.

Not of him, never of him, but of the way they never had a real home or a place that was their own. They never went back to the village, and she didn't want to, but someplace that was theirs would be wonderful for her.

Every time she would tell him her hopes, he would shrug and tell her that maybe someday, this fire inside him would burn out and he would be ready to settle down. If she pushed the matter he would ask her if she would truly love him if he wasn't so migratory and restless – if he wasn't himself.

And she would remain silent, but would always want to tell him that yes, she would love him if he would only love her more than he loved fire and the open road, that she had given up everything for him and hoped that he, too, could make a sacrifice for their love.

When she was pregnant, she told him to marry her, delivering an ultimatum. She threatened to leave him forever if he did not, and find another man to raise her child. She pretended not to see the pained, trapped look in his eye as he agreed. She instead focused on the fact that he did love her, enough to give up what was so important to him. She tried to suppress the feeling of foreboding inside of her that this was an inauspicious note to start a marriage on.

So when they found a farmhouse and settled down, and she asked him, "so we're done with moving, love?" he agreed, without meeting her eyes.

Of course, one month before the birth he disappeared, and she had to bring Brianna into the world by herself, plagued with misery and despair and worry over where he was and if he would ever return.

When he did, he explained that it was his nature and someday he would settle down, and that above all else he loved her and that he would always, always come back, and that most of all he was so sorry, she knew that there was nothing she could do to change him.

Their marriage was a series of coming and going, just as their past history had been. She would wait for him with the worry of a prisoner before the jury, and welcome him home with all the joy in the world.

She knew that he was gone for good when he missed her birthday. It was something that he had always been there for, a tradition he had kept alive for years, and when he wasn't there she knew that he had broken his promise and that he wasn't coming back. The pain was uncontrollable as she imagined him with another woman or a prisoner or dead.

That day, she decided that she had lost all vestiges of the child that had loved him. He was gone, and he wasn't returning, and there was no place in her life for a yearning that could never be satisfied.

She wore black for mourning for a year, and then when another man came along who told her that he would never leave her, she welcomed him into her house and her world. She was done with passion, with men who were worldly and restless. Stability was all that she craved.

Still, when he died, though she was saddened, it wasn't nearly the same pangs that attacked her when Dustfinger left.

There was a maturity in his face that he didn't have before, and lines, and a little bit of grayness, but it was him and she could never say no to him. Still it would never be the same.

Years had gone by where they had both grown up and matured, and they sat between them like a wedge. Love and bitterness mingled in her heart as she wondered when he would leave next, and hatred for herself bubbled to the surface as she realized how easily she had taken him back, setting herself up for heartbreak yet again, even after she knew the destruction he could cause.

"Do you remember when you found me in that field when we were eight or so?" he asked her, and she turned away. It wasn't because she found the question distasteful, or that he was clearly trying to weasel his way back into her good graces. It was that she remembered all too well the feeling of pure love that had coursed through her veins and more than that, the hope she had felt for the future, and it hurt to recall.

So she shook her head and said "no, not really" without meeting his eyes, and so missed the look of pure despair that was in them.

When he left again, she was prepared. She even told her daughter that it was a better reason for leaving than any of the others. At least, she said, with more than a hint of bitterness, that he cared enough about someone other than himself to die for them. But still, she wondered why that couldn't have been her.

But she couldn't help thinking that this was the end, that he would never come back, and that he was gone, and that thought was a barb in her heart. All the other times, simply knowing that he was in the world was a consolation. Now, he was gone, and she couldn't wrap her mind around it. He had been so intertwined with her world that she couldn't believe that he was no more.

Against all odds, he returned to her.

"I kept my promise," he told her roughly, his face buried in her hair as they embraced. "I always told you that I'd come back, didn't I?"

And for a moment, she forgot about all of their past and the misery and just for a moment, there was only thoughts of the present and of him being here and holding her and for a moment, she felt herself soar with joy.

"I love you," she told him. But then the world came crashing down, and she remembered who they were, and that they were not just any man and woman but Dustfinger and Roxane, who time and fate and human natures had conspired to keep apart, and she pulled away.

"But I can't watch you leave again," she added, unable to stop herself from crying, but this time she met his eyes. "I can't take that feeling of waking up and not having you there anymore. I can't be with you," she told him.

For a long time, he stood there, and then he spoke. "You've always been my anchor," he said, and there was such strong truth in his voice that she believed him, against all odds. "And now, after everything that's happened, after the whole world has been torn apart, I think I'm ready to be anchored." He met her eyes with a certain trace of shyness that she marveled at. "If you'll still have me," he added, slightly unsure.

Just like all those years ago in the field with the blood when they were just children, it was never really a question.

Time stopped being circular, and instead became linear. Her life was not a repetitive cycle of coming and going. Her happiness was no longer defined by whether or not he was present.

One day, he told her that he would like to leave again, and her heart started to rise but then he added, with a clever smile, that he would like her to come with him, and she tentatively agreed.

They made their way to their field, which she still thought of as theirs even though they had not been there for years. Holding hands, they journeyed back to the spot where she had first met him.

"I don't regret it," she told him, leaning in closer to his warmth. "All of it, if it brought us here."

He smiled and put his arm around her shoulders, kissing the top of her head, and together they watched the sun slide down the horizon.