notes: i have fallen for this series. hard.
other: ack, this is actually kind of angsty. eh.
i own nothing.
Dissonant Synthesis
They are twenty.
His hair is brown and messy. His eyes sparkle far too much for a man, and his handwriting does no justification to his ambition. He knocks innocent pebbles against her windows and pushes experiments into her hands; his smile too wide, his laugh too high. He stands a head taller than her and laughs over the top of her hair. He watches her hesitate and question his own dreams, but he never falters, he never sits. The mixture of layabout ingredients and half-asleep eureka's build up and up and up and oh just look at how giddy he is with those no-nonsense dimples and careful delicate fingers. And maybe, just maybe she won't call him crazy just this once, because what are you supposed to call a breadwinner who makes his own bread?
Her dresses are too pretty and her heart is too low. She wants to play back and forth with would-be suitors and chase someone else's dreams. She doesn't like ravens and rude people and a certain man especially, but she was never one to speak out and he was never one to ignore. His creations are far too wonderful for her to admit, and she vows with extensive determination that her cakes are far more delectable. She is the woman who never believes with her eyes or her low low heart, but maybe, just maybe that is not the way she speaks to him and they both can understand each other's incessant beatings of the bush. To others it is romance, to them it is a dance. A risky business that somehow works for themselves.
They are thirty.
Their cottage is too small and their ovens are always breaking. His nonsensical explanations are enough to drive her up the wall, but somehow her feet never make it that far. The customers are happy and always pick apart his creations without any hesitations, their faces warm and stomachs full. No one ever eats outside for the ravens always take mister breadwinner's bread and besides it was just so warm and loving inside anyway. They keep their dreams and arguments in a careful little box that is displayed for the entire world to see, secured in a wall of collected fruit stickers. He replaces the photograph inside every month, and with it leaves a scolding about her cooking scribbled in, but it's not as if she could ever decipher his too-ambitious handwriting as long as they lived, in any case.
He tells her not to cry because her sweets shouldn't become salty. He pulls her in an embrace while he's sitting in bed, and suddenly she's looking down over him while his far too-bright eyes slowly begin to dim. Women are strong, he says to her. Women are strong and beautiful and independent and they can do anything they want and oh darling please don't cry. He holds her and she refuses to look down over him and suddenly that little white stickered box was rather worth the years of competition. But she can't be satisfied with only that case of memories alone, never in a million years will she ever be and she lets him know with that voice that once never dared to speak out. He smiles and holds her, his hair now a dreary gray and neat, never again to toss bothersome pebbles or create miracles with delicate hands. His eyes have stopped their sparkle, and she knows that her food can never be as warm as him.
She is forty.
Her cottage is too big and her ovens are never in use. The forks and knives are dull and the people are always eating outside while they ignore the harmless ravens. She would rather sit and watch those old customers she used to love, sit and watch and pretend that that heavy stone marker in the backyard was not really there. He called her strong, he called her beautiful, he called her independent but heaven almighty he didn't know about that parasitic red in her chest. It wraps around her and slowly eases away some of the cold but it never truly helps her, no matter how hard it tries, no it can never truly help her. Her cooking is as delicious as he said it would be, she just knows it, and it's all because the crimson just numbs her terribly but even then she doesn't want to think that her cakes could ever best his. It has been years since she's shifted through that preciously decorated container, because god no she can't read his words again, not yet.
She has never been a dancer. She only wants to cook cook cook, and be left alone with that irreplaceable filling in her chest because there was nothing else that could ever make her feel differently, not in a million years. She churns out the dishes one by one, and slowly they obediently eat, but there is a girl. The girl wants her to dance, and she just knows that it's because of that red, that red she cannot bear to lose. She yells at the girl, yells at her because she was now the breadwinner and could speak up on her own, because it has been years since she's had a scolding, because that little box could never give her the fill she needed, because she was never the woman to believe with her own eyes or her low, low heart. But oh that girl, that girl just would not listen, and she's suddenly dancing as if everything was spilling out from her worn-away consciousness, dancing as if she was being told she was strong and beautiful again. The crimson has gone and she doesn't quite know what happened, but suddenly she finds herself sitting over that little box and confessing unwhispered 'I love you's and feeling as though she can finally make her own spontaneous eureka.
.
She is fifty, and she is always carrying a little box.
End