A/N: It's been a while since I've posted something, and my endings seem to be destined for crappiness, but here I am, back again with another one-shot!
This was inspired by a review I got kinda musing upon something else I'd written. I started writing because my thoughts suddenly went crazy and although I wrote the end several times over, here we are. Hope you like it – despite the ending.
We're fated. We've always been fated, apparently, but I've never had a full understanding of why it has to be so.
I don't know what we are or what we're supposed to balance out to. We're so wrong for each other. We can't have a civil conversation to save our lives. Every time we need to talk seriously, forge a conversation that'll fix everything once and for all, we screw it up.
Whenever we were together, especially in fourth year when our wild teenage emotions got the better of us, the very worst of our souls were put out on display: my stubborn and unreasonable side tearing into his hostile and equally stubborn side.
It was like watching two unstoppable forces battle it out in the middle of downtown London – blinding light fills the sky, other people get hurt, and things crash and burn to the ground.
Yet, at the same time, no one can deny the fireworks that go off above our heads when we're in the other's company. We have chemistry, even in the rush and blaze of our wildfire. The passion has never been a problem. Everything clicks, we know what the other is thinking without even considering it twice, and my feral animal instinct latches to him, without any rhyme or reason or rationality behind it.
If that isn't passion in its rawest, most unrefined forms, then I don't know what is.
I've always known living with him is hell. I've said it a million times over. Yet, as I'm discovering now in sixth year, living without him is hell too – a hell I never expected to have to experience.
When he was in my presence, it used to be hell that scorched me, flames licking my body and fueling blood that pounds relentlessly in my ears; but when he's gone like now, it's a hell that does the same with ice – ice and despondency and loneliness and this odd sort of restlessness, washing through me as relentlessly as ever.
It's as though I'm lost – as though I'm searching for something to live for again.
I can't let go of him. We're in too deep for that. I don't like this, and I don't understand why it has to be this way, but the fact still stands that it's all I can do to survive when I'm around him – live, breathe, exist with the same ease I usually do this with. He makes me feel vibrant in the worst ways, with my body on high alert and my senses sharpened with harsh, lacerating clarity.
I don't know what about him binds me to him, what dark and murky bond exists under the surface of our complicated relationship, but whatever it is, it's there.
For better or for worse, our delicious friction exists, and the tension between us is almost tangible, thick enough to taste bitter and heavy on the moistness of my tongue.
No matter what path I choose – the path that includes him or the path that shoves him roughly aside – I know, with a sense of dread deep within my bones, that it will never be easy.
It's impossible, when two people are so wholly compatible simply because they create sparks and rile each other up in ways no one else can; but in the same breath, I cannot deny that he is the only one who could ever make me properly happy.
I've seen the most intense sides to a relationship – the aching and anguish that skinny-dips in the realms of physical agony; the fury so black it defies intelligent words to justly describe it; the perverse longing that wrenches my gut into unspeakable shapes; the sense of belonging, the sense of being tailor-made to fit into the intensity of our companionship.
After seeing what I've seen, feeling what I've felt, doing what I've done, pushing myself to the levels he's encouraged me to reach and promptly surpass, how can I possibly settle down for a domestic relationship? How can I possibly accept something that doesn't exercise the high levels of endurance he has revealed me to possess in such vast quantities?
I just can't. He's the only shot I have – and he is the only shot I never want to take.
As always, he is the biggest and most mystifying contradictions in my life; and now, when we're at the hard-hitting impasse with this mad dance we've been performing for years, I don't know where I'm supposed to go.
I've never been able to settle for ordinary, and now here is my chance, to reach for extraordinary. Yet, being extraordinary has its own baggage attached – of course it is better to be big, but where is the limit? How far can I mentally and emotionally go? How far will I allow myself go?
How much can I keep pushing myself for him, he who is always so demanding when it comes to what he wants from me, before I crack?
I don't know what I'm doing. Giving up and backing away a short distance is no longer an option. The only way to go is forward – and with all I've fought through, forward is probably too much more daunting than falling back into the gentle, easy abyss of mundanity.
And that's why he's so wrong for me.
But it's also why he's so right for me.
Nothing has evened out yet, in this dreadful impasse we're stuck at in the quietness of this sixth year, but there's something there, something glimmering at the end of the horizon.
It might be something wonderful, but it might be something terrible. I don't know. I never will know. Neither will he.
The only way to know is to find it.
And although I'm confused and turbulent and full and moody and exhausted by what he is and what he represents, I have every confidence that we will find it.
Somehow. Somewhere.
Together.