Stories Never Told
Part 1 – a real ending
He thinks about it later when the monitor is off. His pen is poised above a form, and it remains as such until the sun rises; when he finally snaps out of his reverie, his coworkers believe he has been hard at work. Truth is, that's the same stack of papers from a good seven or eight hours ago. His pen's dried out, and he stands, demanding a cup of coffee from an underling. In a way, he believes in karma. His vigil will be rewarded.
His office is fairly large, and if he would only put his back to the computer, he could view the city almost in its entirety.
Instead, he remains immersed in a world—The World.
He remains immersed in the faerie tales that roll off her tongue. Today, she speaks of a romance between a warrior and a woman disguised as a knight—a Chinese story. She speaks of self-condemnation so poetically, he's confident that isn't part of the original tale.
A quarter of the way through the story, she choked. She cried and cried and cried…
Strange. If anyone else had been telling the tale, he would have thought him or her vain. So vain, for thinking of themselves so—so—
So what? Highly?
The girl who was mourning her comatose brother beside him, she…
He lowers his barriers, if only slightly, drawing her into his bandaged arms. He relayed in his mind the fraction of the story she was capable of telling him. He didn't dare to sympathize, to move dazed and confused from his initial antipathy to something more. He didn't want to be friends with her; he didn't want this to happen again. He didn't want her tears to rust his armor. She possessed no respect for him, and therefore it was only right he should feel the same way… And so, forcing into his bitter heart feelings of contempt and distaste, he let her cry.
There's a place, he realizes, that rare dare to tread. The snowy area, where she tells stories under the farce that he is a substitute for her brother—Kazu loved her stories—where the sun is overbearingly bright, but the frost never melts. It's a wonderland, their wonderland. And he wonders what that could possibly mean.
He wants a happy ending this time, and requests it one afternoon, beneath the gnarled shade of a dead tree. Whether it is a tale immortalized in hardcover children's books or one she herself has invented in her pretty pink head, he doesn't care. She looks at him, subdued and weary from battles past; something shifts beneath her gaze, like a calloused hand flipping the page of an aged novel. Something's changed.
She complies, substituting her jarring words of deprivation and pain for…for Prince Charming, for nymphs with no sense of trickery, for love at first sight and unwavering hearts. He refuses to respond, refuses to submit to the challenge in her eyes. She wants him to admit that this was wrong—he was wrong, and truthfully, he never liked being wrong at all. He bids her adieu and nothing more.
Later, he sits in his office again, the tip of his dried-out pen tapped weakly against the corner of his lips, white and bloodless.
Same rendezvous, next day.
"Do you want another happy ending, Balmung?" she asked, her tone as innocent as a siren's, and every bit as thorny.
"There was something wrong with that story." He never uses her name if he can help it.
"And what was that, Balmung?" she asked.
He hesitated, and she caught it. "…It was…unrealistic. The hero…he…was…weak."
Her hesitation was more deliberate than his. "Do you want another happy ending, Balmung?"
"I…no."
"Do you want a tragic ending, then?"
"No," he said, annoyed, wringing his hands for emphasis, "I want a real ending."
She smiled mysteriously, as though she knew something he didn't. "Sit down," she commanded, plopping onto the snow, shoving aside a rotted branch of the dead tree. He obeyed, for some reason unaffected by her smugness, and for some reason unaffected by the manner in which he embraced her in that same comforting way. Sort of like when she burst into tears a quarter of the way through that Chinese story a few days ago, except this time, she isn't crying.
He needs it every bit as much as she does.