Authors note: My first Ada and Inman fic. They're sitting out by the fire up the mountain. Inman's thoughts.
Dedication: To Jeremy, you can keep me.
'You are all that keeps me from sliding into some dark place.'
'But how did I keep you? We barely knew each other. A few moments.'
How did she keep him?
She is like an angel. More than that even, a saving grace – if such a thing does really exist as something separate from an angel as a thing of it's own. She is a presence; so much more than a memory or a crinkled photograph carried across the country in the pocket of a wounded solider. The truth is she never faded as once feared. The faces and voices of all the other residence of Cold Mountain crumbled and fell away from mind until they were just familiar outlines and colours, but she was not like the rest; if anything she grew brighter by the day, the very nearness of her as he dreamed was enough for him to wake and expect to see her there. The very nearness of her in a dark sleep was enough to stop him from never waking.
It was the almost intolerable longing for her that made him cry, it showed him that he still had life in him enough to shed tears. It was the hesitation in her voice as she handed him her photograph that kept his legs moving on over swamp and rocks, one after the other. Her promise to wait for him, to remember his name, her request of him to come back to her, that kept the fire in his heart from going out on the coldest of nights. It was that kiss he tasted in every moment of every day that stopped him from being put in the ground bloody and broken, the kiss that left open the doors to everything, all possibilities, hope when there was none and love in the harshest of circumstances.
She kept him because she gave him the ability to dream of happy things and sweet desires springing out from that kiss to shine a little light on him in the darkness and death of war. It didn't matter if he made it all up, or if they were the tiniest little things some mightn't even notice. What matters is she was made up of a million beaming spotlights blazing down on him, the spots of white heavenly light in the sea of blackness and blood.
'A thousand moments. They're like a bag of tiny diamonds glittering in a black heart. Don't matter if they're real or things I made up. The shape of your neck, that's real. You were always carrying a tray.'
That's how she kept him. The shortest and briefest of real moments that created the journey of made up ones.
'You wouldn't come inside,'
'I wouldn't come inside,'
'I had to carry a tray to come out and see you,'
That's all it was.