borrowed time
the future belongs to those
who believe in the beauty
of their dreams
.eleanor roosevelt.
The sun shines feebly from behind blurs of grey, grains of wet sand are stuck between her toes, and James lay beside her on the ground, his face buried in her wild red curls.
"I hate this," he whispers into her hair.
Rose peels her eyes off of the clouds and sees his furrowed brow, his closed eyes, his pursed lips. And she can see his amazement at the simple notion that for once his feelings for a girl aren't as fickle as they always are. And she can see the pain on his face, the anger, the defeat.
But she doesn't know what to say, how to respond, why she should even bother. She could dream a hundred thousand dreams of them together, happy, free. Maybe under different, circumstances, dreaming would be enough. But just not under these.
She reaches over and brushes his hair out of his face but he doesn't acknowledge her. The tide's coming in, water and foam lapping over their bodies, oblivious to their plight, oblivious to the fact that they died a little every day, stuck in this fantasy bubble where they just lived in the moment with the future hanging over their heads like a death sentence. A small sphere of blue sea glass washes up on her other side, the edges perfectly washed off, and she wonders if it could be easy enough to just lie on the shore and let the waves rub away all the imperfections and all that was wrong about them, to make them ready to be let out of dreamland and into the world.
"I hate it too," she ends up saying. But 'it' was just a word, just two letters, just nothing in relation to what they are supposed to be to each other, and what they really are.
-end-
A/N: This fic was written for the October 30th, 2011 post under the Prompts, Oh, Prompts thread over at the NGF forum, with the main prompt of ocean, additional prompts of sea glass, moment, and fickle, and the pairing jamesiirose.