Abstract and partly influenced by St Val's Day...and partly not. XD

A tingle in his palms and flowers in her hair. That was the way it was meant to be. He can still picture her, running up a slope with a carefree laugh hurtling over her shoulder, impressionable youth etched on her grinning face as she turns to glance back at him. Because that's how it always was. Her above him. She was always higher up on the food chain.

Of course, she never ran up many slopes ahead of him,. She explored temples and cumbered over cliff faces and the gardens of Oban with him but he can't recall her physically racing ahead of him with petals trailing through her scalp. But he can visual it just as certain as he could with the many other memories he has of her snarling face and triumphant flush after a griping churl at the handles of a star racer. And he can see it precisely now, the green sway of the grass as it parts between her rippling feet, the way nature enhances her every whim and tangible breath. Makes her alive; and though it never really happened he knows how the event would unfurl. And in that way she is still his.

He frowns, renews his focus. Spreads his hands throughout the soil and they flutter. He is not really here, can never actually be here but still he tends, he cultivates. Just like on her wedding day when she stretched her face out to the wind and her voice lashed out for sun and perfection. And he had obeyed, like always, pulling back the clouds for her, puffing out a few dusty sunbeams and stroking the barks of the oak trees to tilt them upwards in a stern arch above the pulpit. And she smiled.

And so now he has a real memory of her. And it hurts, pains him, even as he unfurls the last bud under his fingers. He gazes at them, apprising their pale white under his eye. He chose them specifically, noting how they were descended from the flowers he slipped into her father's hands accidentally so very long ago. Their same transcendent state rings true in his imagination, their scattering scent of Oban still being reflected in her red hair. Never really happened.

He was nervous; he wasn't sure how well the flowers would fare here, down on the polluted soil of earth. And he had never placed them in her ebony and magenta fibres as he had promised himself he would one day. He had made the sun shine for her instead.

Unconsciously he noticed her other half standing there, staring at the flowers in silent awe. The other half that had swallowed him up and spat him out of her heart, keep it red and raw. It made him choke, fist clenching in metaphysical space.

Bastard.

"Thank you Jordan."

He started, wavered at the gentle voices and recognised the pathos littering the speech. He slowly unclenched his fist as Aikka bent down and ran a finger over the stalks with the respectful air he had always been associated with. The finger was whittled to the bone, withered with the dry rot of aging.

Jordan sighed, feeling the turmoil wheal up inside him. He still had a long way ahead of him, a long era in which he could no longer gaze over the woman he loved and arrange the weather to her liking. The creators had frowned upon it he knew; but since when had an avatar ever been in love?

He guessed it was his destiny to be alone. Soon, he would be unable to direct even his malice on the last remaining member of the Great Race. They all had such short lives and he sentenced himself to the most painful existence of all.

But he stayed, lingered a little longer, watching over the man he had always hated, envied yet felt a grudging respect for the way he recognised and understood his presence. Aikka's thank you had signified a lot more than the broken tatters of a dream.

But even now, as Jordan analysed over the choices he had made, he couldn't help wondering. Couldn't stop think. Stop visualising. Because even as he had seen the thrones of death wreck her body in spasm, even as he had poured his power into persevering her bones and let his golden form melt into her now grey strands of lazy hair, he had wondered if she still remembered him.

There was nothing here. Just some stupid flowers he had offered as a monument of honour to her and some silly little mound of granite stuck into the ground. It wasn't nearly enough.

Aikka glanced up sharply as it felt a bead of water drop onto his finger and slid agonisingly along the curve of his hand. But he failed to see a cloud in the sky.

For some reason, it felt unnatural to make Aikka her husband...but I did it anyway as it helped elevate Jordan's sense of loss. I just wanted a lot of focus on the poor avatar's feelings I guess.