Just a one-shot that popped into my head at about midnight last night. I wrote it on note cards while listening to Four Winds by Bright Eyes. Please review or even flame!
The first time he kisses me was against my will and he didn't really mean it, so it doesn't count. The second time we kiss is prompted by me, after all the craziness caused by Samuel, after I see that he's changed from the hell in his own mind. It takes him by surprise, but he knows better than to waste it.
The first time he tells me he loves me is about three decades later, because minutes, hours, days, years, don't really matter to us. I move in with him twenty years later. Yeah, we take it slow, but given our history together, we're both fine with it.
I catch brief flashes of it throughout the years in his face, in his movements, but it never really surfaces. It's approximatley our one-hundredth year together when I start to see it physically effect him. I see it fully late one night in his back room filled with hanging clocks and the ticking of his intricate mind. Through the barely open door I see him shaking, grasping the wooden table like its a lifeline, so hard that it cracks and splinters beneath his hands. There's a crazy gleam in his eyes, and he's sobbing, actually sobbing. I never thought I would see him sob.
His head shoots up suddenly, sensing that I'm there and I immediatly slam into the wall. He advances with a feral look in his dark eyes. He raises a finger adn it feels so much like the first time this happened, except for instead of feeling fear, it was pity adn heartbreak.
"Gabriel," I choke out, barely a whisper. He stops, a tiny bit of him coming back at the sound of his real name.
Before the monster can come up again, I find myself thrown out the door. I crash to the floor and see him standing before me clenching his fists, blood dripping down from the nail marks in his palm that were already healing.
"Get out," he hisses at me.
"Gabriel," I say louder this time.
"Get out!" The door slams shut by itseld, leaving me trembling on the floor. It crushes me to thuink of him like this.
The next morning he comes out, composed, and we don't talk about it.
I see drastic changes over the next year, He lies awake next to me, shaking, holding it in, and my heart clenches. He's kept it in for so long, it can't come out now.
One night I can almost hear him break inside. He gets up and leaves, not even bothering to try to be quiet, but I don't move a single muscle.
That morning I sit at the table in our little kitchen and he stumbles in, beautiful eyes wild, hands covered in blood. I don't say a word, just stand and embrace him, my head resting on his chest. He cries in my arms, leaving red trails of his crimes on the back of my shirt, but I don't care anymore. I've realized something important.
This is his eternal adversary, not Peter, not me like I would have guessed when I was a lot younger, not any person. This is who he is and who he hates being. This is the thing that will always be with him, next to me.
This is his Hunger.
And he will never win.
