There's a special kind of hurt that you feel when you find yourself laying next to the stranger that you spent your life with.
The snow drifts and dances outside of your window, and you lay together and spoon. You are the big spoon; he is the little spoon. This is how it has always been. It's a perfectly familiar feeling that feels so foreign, and for the life of you you're not even sure why. It's always been this way. Ever since he has first crawled into your bed, it has always been this way.
Your arm drapes around his waist, this time thinner than you remember it. You feel his ribcage pressed against your arm and it makes you sick. You hate yourself for letting it happen. He hates himself for letting you think that you had a say in whether it happened at all.
The guilt is mind numbing, and maybe that is why you live in a constant fog anymore. Maybe that's why, for all his starlight, you can only just barely see his glow. But still, he is the only light piercing the fog, the lighthouse in the sea that is your thoughts, and you hold onto him because if you don't the tide will sweep you away.
He turns to look at you, his violet eyes boring into your aquamarine. He cannot smile tonight, but nor can you. How could you? How could you smile when you are in the middle of the crisis that is questioning is love alive, and if it is why am I so cold and why is he so scarce-
You know from the look in his eyes he is questioning the exact same thing.
It's the death of something precious that you two are mourning, tragic as the death of a child. The death of the creation that you made together, nurtured- loved.
He still stares at you and he grips you tighter while you both surely think this. He has no other home to go back to, and nor do you. Those arms, bony and fragile as they are now, are the only shelter you know. Your warmth is the only thing that keeps him from freezing.
You would almost dread him leaving you if he had somewhere to go, but you both know better than that. You'd been condemned to a life together the moment your eyes first laid on one another, and there's not a force in the world that could change it. Even after he'd been pulled away to hell, he came right back in the end. And you waited the whole time, even though you held your breath until your lips turned cold and pale.
Now you're both back at the beginning, two perfect strangers staring ahead at one another, but now you've already built an empire and watched it crumble at your feet and the dust from the ruins is clogging your lungs so bad you're not sure if either of you will ever breathe again.
Before you know it he's leaning up and kissing you, heatedly, desperately, and maybe he's trying to breathe oxygen into your lungs or maybe he's wondering if his lungs can actually still burn without the air, but it doesn't really matter why because you kiss back just as hard. You kiss until your lips and his both bruise, and yet you don't feel any more or less something than you did before. It's absolutely nauseating.
You're not scared, though. If there's one thing you know, now more than the night he vanished into a swirling white haze, it's that you will never lose him. Even if you lose yourself, your life, that feeling that cried out in your chest when he was torn from your arms, you will never lose him.
At least you haven't lost that if nothing else, and you hold him and succumb to the dust as he curls against you and does the same.
Author's note: Written to 'Winter Song' in half an hour. It just kind of came out, and I'm not even sure where from.
Reviews are always welcome and appreciated, my darlings.