AN: Hello everyone! I have been reading other stories here for a while now and I thought I should share one of my own. I do not own Chuck, but I wish I did.
She's been here before.
Her feet traverse the well-kept grounds in a precise routine, and even the most uninformed outsider could deduct that she never strays from this path. Orderly green lawns mowed into perfect symmetry crunch beneath her heels and spring back up, laden with fresh morning dew, as she makes her way to the site of this morning ritual.
The book tucked beneath her arm is a familiar companion, its weight a steady comfort on this difficult pilgrimage. She comes this way morning after morning, sunrise after sunrise, and yet the knowledge that he rests somewhere like this never gets any easier. The unquestionable finality of it scares her, sometimes.
No one but her comes this way at such an early hour. Dawn's rosy fingers have barely crept over the horizon and yet she still rolls out of her warm bed in which her dreams end too soon to come here. She tells herself that it's to pay her this final respect, this final courtesy. It's the least she can do.
She's the only one here, but she knows she's not alone.
She reaches her destination in no more and no less time than usual, sits down in the same fashion that she always does. The blades of grass beneath her are dewy and irritate her skin as they penetrate her stonewashed jeans, the shade of the oak behind the familiar stone enveloping her in an unnatural cold that causes her to pull his jacket a bit closer about her shoulders.
She wants to say something, but she can't find the words. Sometimes they come; broken, candid, and completely unrehearsed as they stumble over her lips with unexpected ferocity. Sometimes, she talks to him just as they had talked before it had happened.
Anything to keep him real, because she isn't real without him.
But, there are days where the words never come. Days where she doesn't say anything because she can't figure out what to say. Even if she does figure it out, sometimes the words never come because she can't put her thoughts into them. Somehow, the words seem too empty to express what she's feeling.
She loves him so much that it hurts, but she never tells him. He doesn't know how.
She means it so much that it cuts like a knife that she doesn't want to remove because she would miss the weight of its absence, means it so much that she can't tell him because she can't put it into words. Means it so much that, even if she could describe it, she doesn't want to say it. She wants it to be private, to be one of the few things that she can share with him anymore.
She folds his legs pretzel style and opens the book, staring at the pages stained with raindrops and tears, wondering where to begin. It's a love story, one that he had always wanted to read out loud with her but had never gotten the chance before he was cut down in his prime.
"Were we at chapter six?" she questions in a shaking voice.
It never gets easier. The hurt lessens, the pain heals, the resonance diminishes, but the memories never go away. She's read this book so many times that she feels like she can read the ink with her skin, but she reads it again. And again, and again, and again, because she knows it's what he would have wanted.
Before she starts, she wants to tell him that she loves him, but she can't. He doesn't know how, but it's okay. She knows that he knows it as much as she does, but she wants to make it real by saying it out loud.
Anything to keep him real.
She had learned a lot about love.
From him.
Through him.
Because of him.
She hopes that he understands the gravity of what he's done for her.
She hopes that she did the same for him.
She hopes that someday, she can find the right words.
But someday is far away, and even though she wants to give him every sunrise of her life, today is all she can promise. She hopes that today is good enough.
She turns to chapter six and begins to read in an unsteady voice that gradually gains confidence.
She reads and hopes that he's listening.