Her anger is all she has. Without it, she is weak. Pathetic. The girl who couldn't stop herself from saving the child who would destroy her happiness. The daughter too weak to have a life of her own. The lover too dangerous to love.
She has not even seen his face, and yet she can feel it between them. A pull, a tug, as though that hand with the lion tattoo has found hers and is reaching, grasping, enveloping.
His laugh is full and warm and booming, even from the door, his strong jaw shaking with it, and she can tell he would take it all from her, lift all of that weight. Smile and smile at her until she smiled too, and she would forget her pain and her anger.
She doesn't want to forget.
Even the thought is overwhelming, nearly destroys her. To forget the thing that defines her, the revenge that has kept her on that perilous edge and not throwing herself off her balcony. The anger that has given her fraying mind something to hold onto amidst the loneliness of existing as a lifeless possession of the King, the taunts of her magic tutor. If she gives in to this pull, he will take all of that from her, and then where will she be?
In the stables, again. Watching helplessly as love transforms to dust, powerless to stop it. Weightless, ungrounded. Weak.
(Terrified.)
She runs.
—
She was wrong.
She does not find that out until years and years later, more than thirty of them.
But now she knows it without a doubt. She was wrong.
She'd thought—she'd all but known—that loving him would've been light, freeing, that she would've forgotten her anger and fear and pain.
And yet, few things in her life have ever felt so heavy as their love.
She lo…has feelings for him. Of course she does; her soulmate, the man her battered heart is fated to love, no matter when, or where they meet.
But Robin, oh Robin, and the way he confesses his love as though it isn't something wrong and shameful, as though it doesn't contradict everything he believes in. That is a burden heavier than she could have imagined.
Forget about me, she begs him, her heart splintering like the tavern door she nearly broke. Stay away from me, she pleads, all while her traitorous heart pounds at his nearness, at his rich, broken voice and his sea blue eyes. It's that same feeling from before, the pull between them, but for every time they have touched and spoken and connected they have made it heavier, and now she fears he will not be able to escape.
—
I—I know.
She could not look at him at first, tried to stare at the paint instead, the meaningless, inviolable line that will soon separate them more surely than even her fear and that paneled wooden door once did.
He cannot leave without spinning back around (that bond, he cannot escape it, they cannot escape it, she had always known), holds her and kisses her one last time and looks into her eyes as though he could search out something in them that will save them all.
He fails.
The town line severs them, cuts them cruelly apart, a barrier forever.
She can still see him as he backs away to his family, but he cannot see her. He looks still, missing her eyes, of course he does, he will never know them again.
She turns away before he is out of sight. Why bother watching? She can feel already how the weight between them changes, the bliss of I choose youmorphing. Like page 23 as she tears it up and leaves it to the wind, to blow away like she thought she would back when they might've had a chance, when all it really does is haunt her still, torture her with possibility.
And as she sits at the counter at Granny's, sloshing cold, half-drunk coffee around the corners of her mug, that old weight settles in. Not the heavy, comforting weight of Robin and his love and his faith. Not even anger and hatred and the desire for revenge. The weight is her pain, the pain that has never really left her, for she was granted only those very few seconds today in which she believed she might have a chance at happiness. It has been decades since she trusted that, and she has been proven herself wrong to do so. (She does not believe that. She is still helplessly glad that she met him, and loved him; that he loved her.)
With all of her being, as the pain sinks into her limbs and fills her lungs with her every breath, she wishes for the weight of his presence instead.
