A/N: I wrote this one night on an impulse. It's in Alfred's POV, and I would consider it a mix between a drabble and some form of poetic prose. I've never claimed to be good at poetry, but I'm pleased enough with this.
There are ways that I've pictured love, Arthur.
Like my birthday fireworks, burning bright and fizzing out quickly,
I thought loving you would be the same.
We've always had intensity, you and I.
Our love, our anger and frustration-filled words;
All of it was quick, and like fireworks, it never seemed simple.
But to see, it was a bang, a bright frenzy of caught-up emotion and unsaid words;
Of things that needed to be done,
And things you couldn't accept.
So when it came to now, I thought that was how it would be.
Or a Catherine Wheel, spinning round and round and turning us in circles until we became so confused that we just
Stopped.
But it seemed, although our love lit like a sparkler, it burnt like one of those candles that you can never blow out.
It stayed on, even though,
I think,
We both tried to end it, at one time or another.
The flame always thought it premature
And kept burning.
I found myself wondering if all my pictures of love were lies,
If this was how it felt:
A slow burning of your heart beside mine
A body of heat and your breath a whisper that I cannot imagine being taken
By a puff of air on a candle.
I found myself in your arms and not minding that our sparkler candle had turned to a kindling,
Embers in a fire that wouldn't die.
For every so often we'd relight it and I'd think
Now
Now are the fireworks,
The bang and the end.
But the show goes on forever, Arthur.
There are ways that I've pictured love,
But the answers are in your eyes.