A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, B24 - write about a single canon scene.
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two-piece jigsaw puzzle
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He was a dark silhouette in the sun. I froze. I wanted to run towards him. Grab his hand. Hug his waist. Cry and beg for an explanation, for a return.
But when I moved, I ran away instead.
I was afraid of what could have changed if I'd gone the other way.
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The shadows haunted me for days after. They snickered at my cowardice. They reached for me until I backed away or I stumbled and then left me to deal with the aftermath. Strangers in the streets giving me odd looks. Gates or rails or walls having to support my weight until I gained my senses.
This wasn't just a fleeting, sporadic fear.
That image, of him as a dark shadow in the sun, was all I remembered of him. It visited, occasionally, in my dreams. Vanishing before I could even think to move.
So why had it, this time, come with fear?
Was change that frightening a thing?
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I avoided the sun, and that place. I don't want to go back, to unleash another cascade. But the knowledge of having fled devours me in another way and, finally, I went back.
This time, the street was empty and the sun was high in the sky. Far from caressing the horizon. Far from framing that body, that back I'd so wanted to turn around – and also not.
And then something appeared. A small figure – that grew into two as they came closer. An animal – a dog, perhaps, judging from its size – and a person. I thought they'd grow taller still but once I could make him out clearly I realised he was my age.
And wore my face.
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The dog barked.
A door opened in the street and a man came out. The sun was in that direction. High in the sky but still more visible behind the roof of that double storey house than looking straight ahead.
And I froze again.
More discerning than a reflection on the horizon was that man, again, a shadow framed by the sun.
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I knew who he was, of course. That one memory I had of him I'd clung to and I had seen many shadows before and since. After all, in this dark world lit only by the sun it was impossible to never stand in shadow, to never see another standing in shadow.
And it was only the image of him, in the shadow, that had burned itself into my mind.
Why? Why did this fear stir in me?
Then I looked at my reflection and I understood.
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The dark silhouette was a symbol and nothing more. The half of me I had lost. That I had grown without – and now there wasn't enough space for that other half to return.
I hadn't understood, but I'd known that.
This broken family, this broken self, could not be put back together.
This time I walked. I didn't run but I left that scene anyway.
This was a dream in the shadows that would vanish when I awoke.
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It would take something more. I saw, but I didn't understand. Nor did I seek an explanation. Fear and impossibility and daresay despair kept me wrapped. Ill-fitting jigsaw pieces would never stay, even if once they'd been part of the same puzzle. The edges frayed with age. Became moulded, or they broke off, broke apart. Their shapes changed with time. They ceased to fit together.
Unless something cataclysmic came along and stripped all those changes away, leaving the barest bits, the scaffold originally made to fit them and the two pieces, returned to their primitive state, that could now fit.
But this was reality, and things like that just didn't happen.
Even if one of us turned around in the end, it would just be a pitiful, incomplete, imitation of what would have been if the pieces had never been pulled apart to begin with.