INEVITABILITY
Decidedly H/N, as I always am and always will be. Could be considered part of the Chronology/Realisation sequence, but as with those two, you don't need to have read either of the others.
Disclaimer: I own nothing
SPOILERS for Change, 16x01/02.
It's been sitting, totally stagnant on the floor for weeks. She took it off Jack ever so quickly in those first moments, but since then it hasn't moved. She doesn't like to think about it, because when she does, it's almost like it's watching her. Like going through his things will be a sort of finality, almost like closing a last door on the previous eight years of her life.
Eight wasted years, if she looks at it in the pessimistic way she's taken to looking at everything in the last months. Eight years she spent hoping, even before she admitted it to herself (and that wasn't that long ago), that something would grow out of what's turned out to be nothing.
She sighs at herself then, because she promised herself that she'd never look back on those years with Harry as wasted, no matter what hadn't come of it. She decides, then, that it's time to go through his drawer. The box on her floor's easy to start. Maybe today's the day.
The first few things are easy, they're silly little office tools; a stapler, a hole-punch and some Tippex that could have belonged to anyone. He's taken what had mattered, a few pictures, most of his stationery, a couple of obscure touristy ornaments from various places either of them had been.
Then she finds an old diary, a planner type leather bound thing, 2012 screaming from the cover, nearly ending up in the bin. As she's about to throw it away, however, a few things fall out the back, and she picks them up to look at them, for moments, her discarding paused.
There are three pictures, and she's in two of them. The first one's of him with his mother, one Christmas assumedly from his ridiculous head gear, and the second one's of him, her and Leo, glasses of champagne at the ready at a Lyell centre function. It's the third that makes her stop breathing for a second, reminiscing suddenly and almost violently about her counterpart in the picture.
It's just the two of them, and he's got his arm around her shoulders, and she's leaning her head slightly into him. It's in the summer, they're outside; the grass is green and then sun is shining; more than anything they look like a couple. They're slightly closer than you should be with a friend, their smiles are a little too wide, and her head's almost resting on his shoulder, his arm wrapped around her.
She pauses for a minute. She feels sick. Anyone who didn't know them, looking at that picture, would have said they were together, and she supposes she'd thought they'd end up as they look in the photo one day. She's not even sure why they never got there, because she supposes, with hindsight, there was a time when they both felt the same way. She guesses they were both too scared of what they were risking, and they were both waiting for the other to do something.
And they never did.
What she's seen as an inevitability, no matter how long it took them, had now become something more out of reach than a distant memory, a dream, a hope, an unfulfilled wish.
She puts all three of the photos in the drawer beside her bed. They all remind her of something that's both painful and essential to remember. The first, just Harry in himself; the kind of man that he is, was to her; his ridiculous sense of humour. The second photo is Harry her best friend, sharing in so much importance in her life, always by her side. And then third… the third is the Harry she's wished for for an awfully long time, and the Harry she'd never have.
Sorry it's angsty, there's nothing in SW at the moment to give me fluff!
A review's always much appreciated.
