A/N: Wow, I'm really cutting it close here with round 3! This is Beater 1 of the Ballycastle Bats reporting in. I used the first bit of the prompt "Write about a truth that is hated OR write about someone being dared to confess their hatred". My prompts were the (object) lamp and the (word) difference.
Dark shadows mold together, back and forth, morphing into unintelligible shapes and figures. George watches in quiet, feeling his eyes dry with the intensity of his vigil. His girlfriend shifts - George is hyper-aware of her movements, the thin hairs on his back standing on end. He believes she can sense his sleepless awareness, that he is looking, staring up. Perhaps she can feel the tension coiled tightly, buried in his back when she brushes against him. Maybe She can feel it. The tension, the frozen fear, self-loathing, and pure misery that likes to find him in the dark of night. Tangibly in its intensity, his misery will eek out of one of his many cracks and brush against her unfettered being, her easy laugh. His emotions want (need) to punish something (someone) and George would die before that something became Angie. His grief would shock her awake. (shock her away)
Maybe then, faced with his toxicity she will realize him for the despicable being that he is. She will see, truly see the rot that lives inside his heart, his mind, his body. She will leave him as he rightfully deserves. He (hates himself for wanting) wishes that for even an instant, she would know the struggle of waking up alone in every way that matters and she too would finally leave him. (please don't leave me)
But he doesn't (can't, wouldn't) wish that upon anyone. So he looks up the ceiling and contemplates the differences in dark and light, the shifting in the wind outside, and wishes for sleep.
George knows his girlfriend doesn't like it when he stares, fixates on the arbitrary moving shapes that animate their ceiling and walls. He just can't bring himself to care enough to stop.
Fred (would probably) calls him crazy. George likes to think of it as extreme boredom. (crazy)
George thinks of himself as a considerate man. He does his part in running his startup, he keeps the pranks out of the bedroom. He makes a lot of sacrifices (his rest) so Angie can sleep. He liked to play games with himself (Fred) in his head. He liked to superimpose a little avatar into the lighter patches of the ceiling and chart its course, navigating from the left side of a water stain to the left.
Finally sleep takes hold with its tenuous grasp, and drags him under into the subconscious.
George awakes at noon. It is Alicia's wedding day. The shop is closed. Angie left the bedroom door open.
She is bouncing between rooms, going back and forth between her closet in the bedroom to their living room where their gifts and outfits are laid out.
Winter sun comes in through the window, bright, hopeful, and utterly blinding.
"Ah, Babe, you're awake," Angie greets, smile sweet as honey.
Her eyes are tired but she walks over to the bed, sets down her tube of coconut oil, and takes the time to give him a proper wake-up, languid and sensual. (don't ever leave me)
It is times like this that George wonders why he exists (why he drags her down with him).
He's too selfish to be the first to leave.
He pulls back, knotting his left hand in her hair and his right around her hips giving the skin above her waistband his careful attention. "So what's on the agenda for today?"
"Oh you know, show up, congratulate Ali. Maybe set of a firecracker or two, take advantage of the open bar," Angelina responds with a smirk. (god, he loves this women)
"Sounds good" He mumbles, pressing his face and his tired eyes onto her shirt.
Her laugh reverberates though her lungs and expands in her chest. He feels it on his face though the warm fabric across her stomach. He is sitting up now and she has her hands in his hair, tilting his face up and out of its hiding place. She leads him with practiced care out of bed and out of the bedroom.
George has lost focus again, he does so often since the end of the War, disassociating himself from his body. He watches as she leads him from the room and carefully dresses him. It's when she kisses him lightly again that he is recalled to life.
Suddenly, in a way that only Angie can manage, his lips are his own again and he is smiling as if nothing had happened.
The wedding is relatively quaint. It is quiet yet audacious in a way that only the former Spinnet could hope to accomplish. The chandeliers were gilded and floated, suspended above the three tables of close family and friends. George was comfortably situated a wooden chairs, his derriere happily pillowed in a hand sewn cousin.
He held Angelina's hand under the table (unlike Fred. He treated Angie as a women, not a human lifeline). George wills his thoughts (resilient little buggers) away. However, like the elusive ceiling shadows, they always return. (Some days are better than others)
It was night when Angelina switched on the lamp on their bedside table. She had her head propped up on her palm, elbow digging into her pillow. She watched him for a while (probably noting the many differences between himself and his brother) as he watched the ceiling.
After a solid moment, she sighed (hopeless, worthless) and shifted. (she knows the truth - as George sees it, knows it)
(Fred. Always Fred.)
George was hoping that she was just going to revert back to her previous position, that she would fall back asleep (don't leave me) and stay with him through the night. But she kept shifting, she first switched off the light and then she shuffled across the large expanse of crisp, cold, bedding that separated them.
Ever since they got together (two months) since the end of the war (three months) they slept with a divide. Neither party mentioned it (too broken) but beyond intercourse, they rarely ventured out across the pale cotton desert.
Angelina was crossing no-man's land. George pressed his eyes closed, braking off his stare, hoping that if he feigned sleep that she would return to her normal position. The shifting didn't stop.
A tentative hand came to rest upon his head, sweeping down from his hairline to his nose, eventually resting lightly, only the tips of the pads of her fingers, upon his lower lip. He tensed as her face came closer but relaxed with each chaste kiss she pressed into his skin. Up his jaw, on his nose, lightly over his thin eyelids.
After May first (Fred) George was so (damn fractured) in need that he coerced his brother's ex-girlfriend into moving in with him (kissing him). They shared each other's misery, each other's hurt, for weeks.
And then she just never left.
And he never asked her to.
A/N: Did anyone get the A Tale of Two Cities reference? Please drop a line on your way out!