A/N: This is for a friend. :)
Disclaimer: Yep. Nothing's mine.
..
Nothing's perfect, and I wish you'd stop trying.
We've been arguing for an hour, throwing insults and slinging cuss words like neither of us will regret it the moment we're left alone.
You say something to me, but hell. I can't even remember how this started. I'm looking at you; pink lips match your hair, thick and luscious and god you're so beautiful. You still don't have much of a bust, but innocent curves can be just as alluring as the sharp, angular curves I possess myself. The ones I caught you looking at just yesterday.
Your eyebrows knit together in frustration with me, with the situation, with keeping up your noble, holier-than-thou façade, with yourself for being attracted to me, with me for knowing it. You're eighteen and I can see the forming wrinkles on your forehead from stress, and it just reminds me that you're so mortal and I'm so not.
.
Sexual tension is like pot of water on a stove.
It starts out manageable, but quickly goes to lukewarm. It heats. Starts to bubble, and soon it's hissing, spitting; a distressed kitten that drank its milk too fast.
Eventually, it boils over and all that's left is a mess, a puddle on the stovetop.
Guess what stage we're in, lying hidden in your damn candy garden, half dressed and heated and moving against each other like we're grating cheese with our midriffs. Your face is contorted, but you're not angry, and it's new to me.
Exciting.
We experiment for at least an hour.
.
Living together is pretty hard when I'm not exactly living.
That's my response when you ask me to move in, and it's a yes. You get a bigger bed put in your palace chambers, and have I ever told you how repulsively fluffy your room is? Seriously. That bedding looks like you pureed a bunch of candy people, ate them, vomited them back up and molded them into a quilt with Barbie's Dream Sewing Machine.
The awkward feeling the sight of it gives me makes me think that maybe this wasn't such a good idea.
Nevertheless, I set my guitar down by the closet door—not quite hidden but out of the way, because I'm definitely not playing tonight.
Not with the guitar, anyway.
Looking around, your room holds the general look of a sickly girly gossipy teenage mom, but it's a false pretense. Looking closer, your bookshelf is stuffed with purely nonfiction—surely nothing I could borrow and get more than a page into without drooling all over into the binding—and most of it's in another language.
A pair of old, rounded reading glasses sit, lonely, on top of your laptop, which perches on your nightstand, plugged in and left in hibernation.
When I lean my guitar against the wall, the strap caressing my leg like we're parting lovers, I get a glimpse into your closet, which consists of almost no clothing, but several notebooks of different sizes and colors, all stacked neatly in several labeled boxes.
Christ.
You see what I'm looking at, and you smile and I'm not worried about the bedding anymore.
.
You like cats, right?
I sure hope so, because it's your twentieth birthday and I'm making it special, no matter the cost.
The thing is pretty cute, I guess, if you're into fluffy with fangs, and I know you are. I found it wandering somewhere outside Finn's place, and when you see it cradled awkwardly in my arms when I land on the windowsill, you take it and hurriedly check the gender.
You're quick to name him. Your first choice is Tiny Heinrich Himmler, Ricky for short, and I'm a little flustered when I admit that I don't see the meaning and you explain that Himmler was one of Hitler's main henchies in Nazi Germany.
I love your morbid moments.
.
You're not getting any younger, which is cool except for the fact that I'm not getting any older.
I want to turn you into a vampire, but you think it'd be irresponsible since you've got duty to your people or something. I say Goddamn your candy nobility and let's run off together, but it won't happen because you're too attached.
Or something.
I don't understand your point of view and you don't understand mine, and that's what starts the argument tonight.
I try to reason, say you can be a vampire and still rule the stupid fucking kingdom that's apparently more important to you than me, but you counter smoothly and intelligently, pointing out that being an immortal ruler is just about the same as being a dictator, because eventually your people would want a change.
I say fuck you and slam the door, and I don't see you for a week.
Make up sex is my new favorite thing.
.
Twenty-one, and still going.
Another year's passed and your birthday sneaks up behind us. This year I score us a case of beer and few bottles of sangria because I know you've never been drunk before and I want to pop your alcoholic cherry myself.
You stick to the sangria and I stick to the beer, and we talk until we're shitfaced. Then you pass out and it's no fun anymore, so I give in to sleep, using the small of your back as the perfect pillow, except when you wake up the next morning with hangover and spend the hours until midday hiding in the bathroom.
.
Waking up next to you is still the same.
We fit together just right, I think, filling each other's nooks and crannies and making a flawless puzzle under the candy-barf bedspread. Our scents linger, and your sugary shampooed hair in the crook of my neck is the best part of the morning.
Except for every other part involving you.
You try to get up, but I lock my fingers together at your waist. You have work to do, but I don't feel like losing my heat source just yet. I know you understand, and you giggle and nuzzle your face on my chest, just above my left breast.
I can look down and get a glimpse of your still beautiful, but wrinkled, pale face. Catch a stray lock of hair and notice more gray pieces than yesterday. See the fading light in your eyes, even though you're only forty-nine years and 177 days old.
I feel like your grandmother (even though our appearances would suggest the opposite) looking down at the child whose birth I witnessed what could only have been, what three, four years ago? I feel like you're growing too quickly because every time I blink, you've got a new wrinkle. A new gray. A new complaint about aching bones and arthritis when it rains.
I'm losing you and it hurts so much that I'm sure we'll die together, even if my body physically can't.
.
I'm holding your hand when it happens.
Your breathing is ragged and uneven and labored and all those medically bad things that make my un-beating heart clench up. I wish I could help you, but you say turning isn't the answer, and that Lemongrab's been training for this since his not-birth.
You apologize and tell me that you didn't want me to change you because you were a coward when you had the chance, and then it passed and you hated yourself.
But you shouldn't hate yourself because I love you enough for both of us.
Tears fall, and your pillow is soon soaked with our mixed eye fluids. I don't want to waste your last moments with my tears, so I kiss your forehead and squeeze your hand. I can feel your pulse fading, slipping through my fingers like raw Jell-O.
I kiss you again, this time on the tip of your nose, then short and sweet on your chapped, time-thinned lips.
You ask why I never left you.
I answer with another kiss, lasting this time. I let the kiss linger until I feel your pulse stagger and trail off, and then we're physically the same; dead and cold and still.
Emotionally, I envy you.
.
Your funeral is what gets to me.
I spend the entire time forgetting that you're not next to me and then remembering and breaking into tears. It's a big deal, having the queen die, so your people held this big shindig like they even knew you.
It takes forever for everyone to trail off, to go home drunk and sad and not nearly as drunk and sad as I am.
I plop down on top of your grave, makeup running down my face because it's so tragic not having you here. The last thing I remember is getting burgundy lipstick smeared all over your gravestone, hugging the thing even though it's not warm like you smiling like you smart like you entertaining like you loveable like you.
And then it's morning and I'm opening my eyes to a headache and nausea, lying in the grass facedown like I'd just barely made it to my lawn after a hardcore party. When my vision focuses, the first thing my brain can process is the impossible pallet of pink and white and yellow and more pink flowers surrounding your name in grand, cursive font.
A picture of you—the you that should be half-alive now, drinking red with me and torturing mortals—stuck in your youth, smiling with teeth and thick baby lips that always tasted like peppermint. Your eyes were bright with joy and possibility and hope and adolescence, and not a gray or wrinkle marred your lovely pink anything.
And I actually smile a little, because nothing's perfect, but, damn, you were always so close.
..