Long handwritten note deep in your pocket
Words, how little they mean when you're a little too late
I stood right by the tracks, your face in a locket
Good girls, hopeful they'll be and long they will wait
Rose stood on the balcony, looking over Hong Kong. The lights of the city winked back at her, bright and beautiful. She closed her eyes, letting the night air wash over her. Memories began to wink across her eyelids: the life she remembered living and the life she recently learned she lost. She let her knees give out from underneath her, curling up against the railing, hiding her face in her arms. What was she supposed to do now?
She couldn't continue on as Rose without thinking about who she could have been; who she was supposed to be. She couldn't tear her mind away from Jake, and all the truths that he had told her. Before he had left to return to his home to New York, he had come to see her again, and she had only been able to push him away, too addled by her own thoughts to even consider talking to him. He'd nodded, saying he understood, and had handed her a letter that he had written, describing everything he had come to say that she hadn't been willing to hear.
The note was still in its envelope, crumpled deep inside of her jeans pocket. She hadn't been ready to read it yet – she'd opened it the night she had received it, but had been unable to read anything but 'Dear Rose'. After the picture had fallen out – the one of them at the dance that she'd tried to give back – she'd lost it.
She couldn't live like this. She was an American teenager, recently relocated to Hong Kong. She lived with her parents and she owned a goldfish and she'd never been anything else. Except she had been something else. She had been a feared figure, wiped from history but not from Jake or herself. She wished she didn't know this; wished she was ignorant of Jake and his love for her and from her other persona.
Now that she knew, it would haunt her.
She stared at her hands and wondered what acts they had committed in her other life: acts that she couldn't bring herself to face. She'd never so much as broken her bedtime. Yet, in the other life, she had been a known killer. She clenched her hands into fists and felt her own strength; her muscle memory remained. She knew how to fight, knew how to kill, and it was something she would never be able to shake. She dug her nails into her palms until she saw blood and all it reminded her of was the red of a dragon.
We had a beautiful magic love there
What a sad beautiful tragic love affair
She didn't only remember her fearsome time as the Huntsgirl. She remembered loving Jake too: it was him that brought her back to herself. She remembered the purity of their young love; hearts open, arms spread, kisses deep. She remembers finding out his true identity; her heart still aches.
They had been something for the romance books, hadn't they? The forbidden love between two young teenagers who couldn't close their eyes and walk away from one another. It was Romeo and Juliet except, somehow, more heartbreaking. Romeo and Juliet could be together in death. Jake was living day to day knowing that she was the Huntsgirl – someone he couldn't have had anyway – and she was the oblivious girl in Hong Kong – one who couldn't bring herself to love him back anymore.
And she, well, she had to live with the knowledge that she loved him but couldn't. An echo of who she had been loved him and he loved that echo. Even if she was in New York now, he would be seeing the Rose that fought him, not the one who hadn't held a weapon until just a short time ago. To deny she wanted him would be a lie, but to what end? What cause, what heart, drove her to want him? She couldn't know.
And the ignorance would kill both of them.
In dreams I meet you in warm conversation
We both wake in lonely beds, different cities
And time is taking its sweet time erasing you
And you've got your demons, and, darling, they all look like me
She dreams of him.
Specifically, Rose dreams of when they had met in dreams. It's only in sleep that those conversations come bubbling to the surface – the only time they could see one another and hold one another during that period in time. She's always taken aback by how Jake looked at her in the dream-memories. And when she wakes, all she can see is his adoring face.
She won't ever see him again. The thought makes her taste loneliness and it makes her bed seem much wider, much smaller, and much colder. He's in a completely different bed, waking to a complete different sunrise and nothing is connecting them anymore. Nothing but a life neither of them can bear to remember.
Rose lives her day to day. She waits for her mind to completely fade him away; lose him back into the place of not-really-lived memories. She doesn't know how long she'll have to wait but someday he'll be gone. This crushes and relieves her. She's not sure what emotion is stronger but they're both there, breathing in tandem. Someday he will barely be remembered and that's the day when she can go back to being Rose – not this strange mixture of Rose and Huntsgirl (who she's trying not to remember either).
Sometimes, though, in her dreams, she thinks she's stumbled upon that connection again: the one that allowed them into each other's sleep in the first place. It's not like it was in the dream memories but it's an echo. She can feel his heart beat instead of her own, can feel his emotions leaking into her, an ocean away. She feels the longing in his chest – the one that hers imitates – calling out for her to be near.
Sometimes, she hears him say her name.
It's at times like that she thinks that trying to rid herself of him is selfish. She is still haunting Jake the way he is haunting her. She's still an active part of him, one that he can't see her touch or talk to, but she is still there. This kills her because of how little she can do. She can't explain anything to him because she can't even explain anything to herself.
Rose only hopes that someday, Jake will forget her too. She won't be the girl he loved and lost but, rather, the girl who never really existed at all. She hopes he won't be able to recall the exact colour of her eyes or the way she made him feel. She hopes that he will sit in his chair and not even be able to think of her name.
She doubts it.
They'll haunt one another until they die.
'Cause we had a beautiful magic love there
What a sad beautiful tragic love affair
Hands shaking, she trips onto the subway. It has been over a year since she has seen Jake, since the awful time when the dark memories returned and she stopped knowing how to think. It's been even longer since she has been in New York. But she's here now – her father having been transferred back to the city – and she owes it to Jake to seek him out.
Somehow, she knows his address.
She wonders if he'll say anything when he sees her. Rose certainly doesn't know what to say to him. She has nothing that she can put into words. Nothing that will make either of them feel any better. She thinks about all that could go wrong, how it could crash and burn, and she almost chickens out. And she probably would have, had she not already been on his doorstep. She knocks once and waits.
Thankfully, Jake is the one who opened the door. Rose didn't know how she would react to one of his parents or his little sister. They stood and stared at each other for a long moment, both of them covered in words they couldn't speak.
"Do you want to come in?" Jake offers after their long moment of silence.
Rose nods. He looks more like a man now; stronger in features, holding muscle better. His hair is a bright green, still peaked at the top of his head. She's glad this is the same; in the sea of unfamiliarity it's something she can grasp at. He leads her to their living room and she sits in the armchair. He sits on the sofa and they stare at one another again.
"I missed you." He begins.
"We moved back," she's quick to blurt.
"I still love you."
"But you can't."
Their eyes lock. Rose feels as though she's being drawn into the depth of him. She can see the questions, the fears, the wants that reside deep within his soul.
"I'm not the girl you fell in love with," she manages, in way of explanation.
"You'll always be Rose – who you are didn't change, the circumstances that built you did."
Rose pauses, drawn up short. She traces the outline of his face with her gaze – so foreign, so dear to her. She'd never really considered this possibility, that she could be the same person in both of the lives she'd lived. It was impossible and preposterous.
It made so much sense.
Distance, timing, breakdown, fighting
Silence, this train runs off its tracks
Kiss me, try to fix it, could you just try to listen?
Hang up, give up, for the life of us we can't get back
Jake moves so that he's over her. She can smell his cologne; feel the warmth from his body. She's locked in place as he takes her face in both hands, cradling her as though she is made of glass and his hands are made of china. They're both on the verge of breaking; the final pieces they still possess flying to all corners of the room.
When he kisses her, it's not like they are delicate. They are passion anew. They are gripping limbs, tugged hair, fused lips, and in the middle of it all, a smile, a laugh, at just how it all could have turned out. They kiss until they're breathless; until they are unsure where they end and the other begins. They are twined around each other, and even though so much time has passed, it feels like none has at all. They once knew each other inside and out – who they are didn't change, the circumstances just built them differently.
He's got sadness from losing her that will linger forever. She's got confusion at who and what she was that will never clear. They can't even begin to know one another. They have fallen into too many pieces for them to be reshaped.
"We won't work," she says, though quietly. She's spent too long telling herself that they are too far gone to last; that parallel lives and different worlds have changed them to the point where their Romeo and Juliet affair has fallen from grace, has become old strangers whose memories grow dim.
"We can," Jake says with conviction, kissing the top of her nose. "If you believe it."
"Why do you?"
"We were made to love each other. It doesn't change." He reaches around the side of her body, pulling out her forearm. The dragon birth mark glares at him. "Destiny is flexible."
"The other life –" Rose begins in protest.
"Is in the past. Who we were then is like who we are at the age of five – someone we learned from. We won't ever get that life back, what we had between us then. I know that, and so do you. But we have this life to make something beautiful – something wonderful."
She looks up at the face she dreamed about for so long. The face she knows she loves and that she can't leave again. He kisses her and she kisses him back.
Her answer is yes. She wants to create something wonderful.
A beautiful magic love there
What a sad beautiful tragic, beautiful tragic, beautiful
The next time she cries over Jake is six years later. They have been wonderful years – just like he promised. Now, it's dark out, the city lights blotting out the stars. She looks up, face shining with tears. Her breath is caught in her throat and she feels like her heart is going to stop. The world is beautiful around her and she pushes her blurry eyes to Jake's face, pale underneath the moon and streetlight.
He's on his knee in front of her, the most beautiful ring she has ever seen in his hand. He's watching her, eyes dissecting her every breath, every reaction. She smiles at him, pink lips curving up.
"Yes."
And just like that, they're going to get married.
What we had ‒ a beautiful magic love there
What a sad beautiful tragic love affair
She lays Jake to rest sixty-seven years after they say 'I do'. It's a peaceful place, nestled near his grandfather and parents and the child they lost when he was seventeen. She kneels next to his gravestone; hand on the earth that is still loose. It has been a long time since she has been without him –since she was a teenager, trying to relearn America after Hong Kong.
They were so wildly different then. They had both been freshly scarred from everything they had lost in the years before that; identities, loves, and certainties about the future. But after that kiss, none of it mattered anymore. They weren't echoes from the past – they were here and now, in this life.
They weren't Romeo and Juliet. They were never meant to be. They had loved each other and needed each other perhaps just as badly; they had been separated by time and by circumstance. But it didn't stop them. Somehow, they had managed to tumble back into each other's arms and it had been as wonderful as Jake had promised in his living room, when her legs had been shaking from the mere sight of him.
"I always loved you," Rose says to the ground, though she's certain Jake is somewhere he can hear her. "No matter what life it was – I always loved you."
She stands, leaving her heart buried. She steps into the New York taxi, looking at the skyscrapers that dominated the skyline of her childhood. Here, in this city, she loved him, she lost him, and she loved him again. Here, in this place, she would love him always.
We had a beautiful magic love there
What a sad beautiful tragic love affair
I don't own anything recognizable. Thanks to my epic beta: Noble6. The song is Sad Beautiful Tragic by Taylor Swift.
~TLL~