AN: Thanks for everyone who has been reading this, and a special thanks to those who reviewed. I hope you'd share your thought about this fic with me, reviews are so precious to me. But yeah, hope you enjoyed this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it.
From the very beginning, both Eleanor Guthrie and Charles Vane knew that whatever they would share, would not last forever. From the moment he ever laid eyes upon her on that beach, with that determined stride, with that fearless look, he knew she'd never be one for standing still. No, she would never submit to his will, she'd never be anyone's wife. And that is why he was fated to love her so much. No woman he would ever come to love could be anything less than she was. He could not love a woman who would do as he told her to, or who lived to please him. What he loved about her was what he also hated about her. It was that stubborn mind of hers, that fearlessness, that relentless pursuit of things. Without all those things, he could have never had loved him, but without those things she would have never casted him aside. That was his tragic paradox of loving her. He could not help but to love her, even after all the things she did. She lived forever with him, for that sort of connection they had shared, it could not be erased by anything, and not anyone, not even her.
Letting him go was like gnawing her arm off with her own bare teeth. That was how much it hurt her. Yet it was what she had to when she realized what was happening, how much he was holding her back. And she loved him, she loved him so much, but she would never love him enough to let go of the person she was. And the person she was could not live with the thoughts that entered her head. She was like this island, and he was like the sea, surrounding her, always with her, a thing she would not exist without. But the sea, it could drown her any minute. It would take her under and she would never resurface, it would drown her. That's what loving him was. It was battling the feeling of wanting to drown, but also wanting to save herself at the same time. That was her tragic paradox of loving him.
Life has the habit of throwing us around as it wishes, and it threw the two of them farther apart than either ever imagined. But it was not important where they ended up. No, what was meaningful, was what had been. For no one can erase the past. It was three years for them, three years of being with each other, loving each other and being able to show it. The love, it would never die, but the ability to show it did. Their beginning was what mattered. Their beginning was what they could have been forever if life had not been like it was. To them, life did not offer them the chance to be what they could have been, but it did give them the moment of love, and that was the most important thing. There were the first moments, their first encounters, and their first feelings of love. And nothing that would happen after those moments could make the first encounters any less significant, any less meaningful. The only truth that stayed in their lives was the love they shared with each other. It was tangible, it lived in their memories, it lived within them. And it would forever live on the island of Nassau, on its beaches, in the water surrounding it. It was the type of love that would forever be engraved to the living memory of that place. They both might have lost their lives, but the love, that still lived on the sands, in the sea. And that is why beginnings are much more significant than the endings. Eleanor Guthrie and Charles Vane were in love. That is what should be remembered, for nothing in this world could have taken that away from them, even if everything else had been.