"A clock ticks 'till it breaks your glass and I drown in you again…"
Time, frozen for Tessa for so very long, seems to kick start into rushes of tightly held hands and laughter, smiles and new steps with unfamiliar strength hidden within them. It's happy, after so much sorrow and agony, after all of the tears and memories that would be nothing more.
After all of the graves she walked past, her eyes caught straight ahead until she collapsed at the one that mattered the most, too weak to resist the call of the long dead. After nights spent alone and wishing she wasn't, longing for the forgotten feel of a quickly pounding heart fluttering at her back, like the erratic beat of a bird's wing. After everything she can remember, the leaves in the fall meaning nothing more than another year already fading from her memory.
Jem, the scars across his cheekbones wrinkling when he smiles at her, is new, a different boy than the one she saw so long ago, swathed in tender moonlight as he played the story of his soul with careful fingers, and Tessa is perfectly fine to rediscover all of the ways her heart can pick up speed, or all of the ways her soul can open up to the love she hadn't known in so many years, or even all of the ways that Jem, in all of his miraculous goodness and stark differences, is utterly and completely the same.
Please R&R! ;)