How far would you go for love?…I don't even know the answer to that question anymore…
The cold breeze of the Piltovian night grasped at my visage as I let out a steamy breath. The mischievous wind of winter creeped its way into the room through the open balcony door, and slithered silently across the floor to reach the bedside, where it found my figure and enveloped me with if frigidness, sending a violent shiver running down my exposed spine. I shuddered powerfully at the sudden contact, but I did not bring myself to put an end to the wind's invasion. I didn't bring myself to lumber my way out of the bed to which I seemed to be magnetically attached to.
She had let the door remain open hours before, when she'd barged in demanding to rest at my side. I couldn't bring myself to undo anything she did. Thus, I laid awake, continuously reawakened by the cold.
I held my sleep-deprived eyes wide open, staring intensely at the shaded, plain ceiling of the room. At the nothingness it represented when shrouded by the dark of the night. I stared at it to find my focus, to cleanse my mind of all though save a single, pressing question that I could not bring myself to answer. At least not in a fulfilling manner.
How far would you go for love?
Such a simple question; I carefully revised the long list of answers I had developed during that night: "Anywhere, wherever we want, to the end of the universe…" I revisited each and every one of them in hopes of finally finding the right piece of the puzzle, but at same time knowing that none of them were ever close to approaching a true resolution.
Because in all truthiness, the simple nature of my question was only but a pantomime, behind which a complex and impossibly deep landscape was awaiting to be tackled.
My features acted with a mind of their own as they transfixed my expression into a sight of annoyance, of frustration, as I delved deeper into my innermost thoughts to continue my search. I wouldn't notice this until later, when the beeping of the clock resting on my nightstand brought me down to my senses, and I found my brows furrowed and my lips pouted. I undid the work of my mind to settle into a neutral, peaceful expression, and I turned my eyes to peer at the time-measuring contraption to find out the night had already approached its third hour past midnight.
Such a discovery stirred something in me that brought me to press my gelid digits against my eyelids and to sigh once again a steamy breath into the night, in an attempt to expel the building irritation from my chest. But something I did not expect came to happen then, to break the monotony and the silence of the night.
I felt a slight rustle to my side.
I had all but forgotten about her, lost in my own contemplations and platitudes. About her, who had barged into the bedroom hours ago, and who had since been sleeping peacefully at my side. Until now.
The rush of the breeze was pierced by a throaty whine, product of the slow awakening of my bed companion, the cause of which I could only assume to have been my excessive and exaggerated self-complaining antics. The rustles continued then, as the figure struggled against the bedsheets that enwrapped her in a manner akin to a cocoon, twisting, turning and trashing without ultimately managing to dislodge herself from the warmth the covers. Without putting any sort of thought into the action, I drove my hand towards her form and I posed my palm gently over the small of her neck, which I found silhouetted in her nigh-air-tight prison.
All of sudden, the nothingness of my thought was replaced by the flood of emotion that oftentimes washed over me when she became the center of my attention, and my chest surged with the warmth of feelings I could and would never dare to hide. The corners of my lips curled themselves into an unwitting and silly grin, which I did notice forming, and welcomed wholeheartedly.
Slowly, I started to peel away the sheets.
The first thing that came into my view was her hair, an impressive azure mane, and then her eyes, two outstanding marbles that shone with their bright pink coloration as much as they did with their mischievousness. Such beautiful genetic wonders started into my faded brow gaze as any form of movement from her part ceased instantaneously.
We stared into each other for a minute or more, shrouded by a complete and absolute silence we each allowed to nurture and grow, as neither of us wanted to disturb such a magical moment. But tranquility was never to last, for she was quick to grow bored of the staleness and she allowed a brief, high-pitch cackle to ripple from her throat, as she crawled her way up the bedside until our noses were mere inches apart from each other.
Once again, her overpowering pink gaze stared into my own, allowing me the privilege and pleasure of admiring every mesmerizing and almost imperceptible details of her eyes, from the many shades and tones of their vibrant coloring which mashed together to form her irises in a manner that was chaotic and orderly at the same time, to every single eyelash the curled perfectly outwards, with not two of them being equals, to the many, many other miniscule things I could spend several lifetimes describing if given the chance. But all sort of thought vanished from my mind when one nimble hand was set against my cheek, spreading a sense of utter coldness in my face and freeing my gaze from its fixation to allow it to see more so than just her eyes. I discovered then the face of my lover, which was as beautiful and brimming with perfect details as her eyes were, but that I now found contorted into an expression of concern which it was never meant to show.
"Hey…you alright there, partner?" She started whispering at me, drawing my eyes to stare at the motions of her tantalizing lips. "I know I don't usually say this…but I just heard you sigh there and, well…I kind of got a bit worried" she concluded in a tone most awkward, which she must have found as unbefitting to her upbeat and frenetic self as I found it. I tried to think of a proper answer, but I, myself, didn't even know what had driven me to such lengths of frustration.
The only thing I did know was that the mere sight of her resting figure had nearly managed to make me forget about my scuttling worries. I answered with the truth of my mind. "Yeah babe, I'm alight. Just thinking about stuff. Uh, deep stuff. The kind I don't really know how to explain" We both giggled lightly at my words and blinked a few times, before I adverted my eyes for a moment and I continued. "And well...let's just say that it got a little too intense for me, and you know how I don't function all that well under pressure" My lips quirked into a quiet smile as I looked back at her. "Though everything's alright now. Seeing you there wrestling with the covers made me forget about my worries, love"I told her.
She reacted in a manner I predicted she would, as she snickered loudly and distracted her eyes towards the ceiling, all the while she gave me her answer and tried, quite ineptly so, to hide the blossoming blush tinting her cheeks."Pff, you're so corny sometimes, you know?" I stared at her intriguingly, enraptured by her every movement. But again, my thinking was not to last, for she turned to face me and she closed the distance between us, uttering a few final words as she did so. "Come here, you big sweetie…"
Our lips met in a tender kiss that managed to dispel any trace of cold from my body. The sudden gesture briefly took me by surprise, but I soon found my body complying and molding to her form all on its own, while my mind tried fruitlessly to reel itself from the state of blankness she had left it in. It wouldn't be until an unseen jolt of electric warmth shot right through my body when I would regain control of my motions and I pressed more into her to deepen the kiss. One of my hands found its place at her waist, while the other reached for the back of her head, intertwining my digits with her silky, blue locks, pushing her lips as so ever closer to mine. Thus we kissed, driven not by a lustful flare but by a soft and slowly escalating explosion of love that spread from our chest to the rest of our bodies, interlocking our lips in a manner that was as symbolic as it was candid. It was a kiss meant to show the full glory the love we professed for the other, to send multiple batteries of shivers down the other's spine, both aiming for that tender spot we knew existed in our hearts.
I was so enthralled by the sensitive nirvana the kiss had elevated me to that it took me seconds to register that her warm, soft lips had escaped from the grasp of my own ravenous meat folds.
I groggily opened my eyes then to gaze again at the seas of pink electricity that inhabited her pupils, finding happy and appeased tides washing over the shores of her irises. Such a sight made me smile, and elicited a dainty giggle to creep its way through her petite mouth. A quick peck to my cheek grounded me back to her face as a whole.
"I love you, time guy…Never forget that…" She huskily whispered against my face, warming up the frozen tip of my nose with her breath. It astounded me how such a small gesture could remind me so powerfully of the sole reason my world revolved around: Her. My smile grew wider as I gently began to stroke her hair, and she cuddled into me to allow my digits to trace her locks all the way to the small of her back, posing her own slender hands on my chest and resting her cheek against my warm collarbone. We stayed like that for endless minutes, the both of us staring at the though-voiding ceiling of the room in a comfortable silence, with only the soft blowing of our shared breaths as our soundly companions. It took me much longer than what I'm willing to disclose to realize I had not voiced my affection back to her, pushing me to drop my gaze to meet hers as my lips parted to speak. The way I held her gaze must have been very intense, for it managed to resurface the ghostly blush of her cheeks. "I love you too, rocket girl. I got kind of stalled by your beauty a moment ago. Couldn't have risked blurting out some incoherent blabber, right?" She tried to play off her flustering by leaning up to kiss my neck. But she couldn't fool me.
"That – that's alright…you don't have to say it back all the time…" She started, speaking into the flesh of my shoulder, her warm breath making goosebumps arise all throughout my arm and back. "It's not like I don't know what your answer will be…" She finally let out with a string of voice I almost lost in the sudden roar of a rebellious breeze.
I found it unreasonable, the levels of curtness she could reach. "That, you do, babe…that, you do…" I whispered back, placing a quick, chaste kiss on her hairline in which she relished all too much.
Silence settled between us again for a long time, as the minutes whisked away and our breathing got steadily calmer and slower. I was finally at the brink of dozing away when my unforgiving mistress, the wind, called back to me, prying me away from the gates of the dreamscape when a razor-sharp breeze sneaked its way under the covers and past my back, sending more jolting shivers up and down my spine. My eyes shot open in a matter of instants, and it was then when I noticed that I wasn't going to get any sleep any time soon. With my peace of mind shattered and my relaxation undone, I figured I might as well go out to take some fresh air.
Much to my stumped body's discontent, I commanded myself to rise from the welcoming bed to sit at its very edge, staring at the night sky through the door opened before me. I willingly allowed yet another breeze to sweep past me, and this time its touch did not cut my skin but soothed it instead, and brought a much needed cool to my insides. I sighed another time, not out of frustration but out of ease, as I turned to stare at my lover, for a moment, whom I found asleep already, dozing away with a calm unrivaled, in the exact same position she'd been in for who knows how long.
I took a moment to bask in her form, to contemplate her figure under the pale light of the moonlight. I allowed my prying eyes to glaze over her lithe, athletic frame, to appreciate the stark whiteness of her skin, ridden with a plethora of dashing bluish tattoos and to follow the flowing stream of her unending azure locks, which led me well past her quaint, supple feet. It was a rare sight to see her mane untamed and free from the complicated braids she always tied it into. In her natural state it formed a sea for her to float in which branched off into rivers that coiled around her legs and cascaded down the bedside and pooled on the floor.
A jolt of guilt ran through my body when I remembered the many conversations I had overheard or took part in where people had spent several minutes listing each and every one of her flaws and wrongness' instead of complementing the overwhelmingly longer list of good and beautiful things about her. They'd called her many a-names; 'crazy', 'demented', 'madwoman', and had been very adamant in comparing her non-too-bountiful attributes to those of other females. I knew most of their sayings were true, that she indeed stood for everything they called her out to be.
What irked me was not their venomous words but my own; spoken by a younger and foolish me who was then completely oblivious to the series of event that would unfold which would ultimately lead him to stand where I do right now, next to whom I can proudly and wholeheartedly call the love of his life. The same person I had thrashed-talked so long ago.
The twists a life can take are fascinating, aren't they?
But I snapped out my reminiscing when I knew that letting it linger wound only bring me sorrow, and I realized that I was still staring intensely at her. Such was the tipping point the revealed a realization to me. That she stirred feelings deep within my core just by the mere act of existing, that her very presence was without a doubt the only tangible thing that truly mattered to me. And just like that, the answer to my question began to reveal itself to me.
How far would you go for love?
I sighed my victory into the night, followed by my answer. "How far wouldn't I go…?" Simple, elegant, and fulfilling; I whispered those words once, and then I whispered them again a second time, slightly more reassuringly. All this time I've been looking for an overly complex, strictly poetical answer, when the graceless truth had always been there to begin with. All of sudden, I felt as if an enormous weight stared to be dispelled from weighting down on my shoulders, and how the intricately coiled knots in my stomach finally began to untangle themselves…All at once, I felt at ease with my conscience, slowly drizzling in a starry landscape of peace.
Very slowly, I turned my eyes and faced the balcony door, deciding then to get up with the utmost carefulness as not to disturb my sleeping lover. I trudged my way across the room which we had 'borrowed' for the night and I stepped out in the frigid winter, welcoming the swirling winds that came to play around my form. I stared out into the skyline of buildings as I let myself be swept away by the secret song of the city. The never ending roar of the car-horns, the bass drumming of a million, million voices shooting together into the heavens, the twisting, and turning and grinding of more machines than anyone ever could begin to account. I enjoyed the ever-changing concert of Pilover without adding yet another instrument to it, content with staring at the flummoxing light spectacle presented by the marvels of technology which thrived only here, over the bustling streets and bridges of 'The City of Progress', that only rarely managed to plummet down into the vast, dark pits that Zaun had turned into.
I remembered then of the time when even dreaming of witnessing these beauties was something that rarely passed through the heads of the Zaunite urchins like myself, confined to a perpetual existence in the oppressive slums. I was young back then – clever, but young, lacking the insight to stay far away from the trouble one blue-haired girl brought with her when she decided to take residence in our humble abode of a city.
Truth be told, I could never thank myself enough for deciding to stay, to rewind time as to allow the trouble to flow undeterred. To look at that grin she threw at me with her perfectly white teeth and her perfectly mad eyes one more time, and then another, and another, until I worked up the courage to go say something to her.
"…How did I fell in love with, as my fellow Zaunites call her, 'The Loose Cannon'?"
The memories or our early adventures and daring stunts came back to me as a flood, prompting me to laugh out loud as I remembered the thing I always used to say to those who asked the question of why and how we were together.
"Well folks, I don't really know how to put this…But let's just say it all started with a bang…" I whispered into the night as I turned again to stare at Jinx yet another time, like if I was trying to make sure she was sleeping, breathing, and that she was there. And then I turned back to the city, feeling the cold against my nose, as I let my eyes close themselves to give way for the memories to flow free.
A little something I just had there lying around which I've finally decided to 'enhance'. I've designed this not as a stand alone story but as the first chapter to a bigger tale, so maybe I'll come around to add some stuff into someday.
As for now, enjoy the heavy-handed and overly thick prose. It's been some time since I've gone and wrote words as pompous as these.