I have always been hideous. People lament their looks, call themselves "plain", and sigh, as if it is the worst curse ever bestowed upon a human being. I would give a lot to achieve "plain". My features twist like angry knots on my face. I rarely smile.
I am as green as the Emerald City.
Who would ever love that? Even Nessa, prim, zealotous Nessa, armless and angry about it, is a prettier concept than I.
So how is it that I ended up entwined with this ruggedly handsome prince, who was good, and strong, and who wanted me?
I had made an effort to be separate from the rest of the world, from my former existance. I had become an unperson, I was invisible, I didn't exist. Somehow, from my lack of life, he has now lost his? In what universe is that even remotely fair?
If I was too much of one thing to him, it wasn't on purpose. I feel often that I was cut off from him, or that I was too attached. Either way, I should have shown him more love, or sent him on his way. Either way, my actions shouldn't have led to this.
But they did. They have.
As I gape at the sticky pools of blood on the floor of my home, I feel the cold running through my veins much more icy than the chill in the winter air. My brain feels like it is imploding, my heart straining against sinews of the truth that there is only one person whose blood could have been spilled in this place.
The lack of a body makes me ache with hope, which in turn makes me tremble with rage.
He is gone. I told him to go, I told him to leave me, to run away from the danger he was in simply by being near me. He won our debates with his hot breath on me, his mouth tracing the curves of my body, his dark, beautiful body one with my own wretched form.
Now, he cannot go, because he is gone, beyond the act of walking away from me.
The idea of never looking upon him again breaks apart inside of me and floods me with a pain like being on fire and filling with water at the same time. The future screams ahead of me as the murky loneliness of reality clouds my vision. I wish my skin would melt off of me so I could escape myself.
I think back to warm nights spent in heated discussion, heated bliss, heated attempts to create heat in the deep freeze. I was difficult, I always am. I was unsure one moment and too sure the next, leaving him constantly scrambling to make sense of our tryst and our discussions and my cryptic words, my lack of detail about what I was doing, because I simply wasn't sure what was involved.
He was with me, he held me and loved me, regardless.
No good deed goes unpunished.