A/N- So I think that what I'm going to do is alternate between chapters filling in the time gap between season 2 and 3 and chapters going back to older scene. What do ya'll think? Let me know!
She couldn't help but think that they were like ivy, not the poisonous kind, but the kind that grew on old buildings and cascaded down brick walls until you could no longer see the brick because it was so covered with ivy. She had always thought that there was something beautiful about ivy, but at the same time there was something intimidating about the way that it engulfed everything around it.
But in a lot of ways that's what they were. Their relationship was frightening, the way that it covered her heart. She had never felt so much before, and never felt compelled to. Sometimes she tried to shake it off a little bit, get her heart back to the lonely, but rational, place that it had been in before him. But he always seemed to latch back on. It was the scariest thing in the world.
But it was also beautiful. It was so beautiful that at times when she was lying in her bed pondering her life she wondered how exactly she had ever lived without it.
She tried not to think back to their past a lot. It was so jumbled and distraut now that it was painful to even think of the good things because they eventually lead to the bad ones. She tried to focus on their present, and how perfect it all was, but sometimes her mind couldn't help but wander back...
It had all started with a vine, trickling down her heart when she saw him crying in the alley that one day. It was so small that she had barelly even noticed that it was there, but it was the start of something that would grow to be the biggest think in her world.
And then things had really happened. They talked on his porch, they kissed in front of the hotel, she realized for the first time in her life that she had somebody that she could trust with her whole heart. That she could love.
Somebody that she could love so much that she would pawn her sisters wedding ring just to make him happy. Someone that she could love so much that she would willingly break both of their hearts if it meant that he would be safe. Because her heart was completely covered in ivy, completely covered in love.
And what she had never realized, but now seemed so obvious, was that that ivy had never gone away. It had never left her. Even at her weakest moments when all she wanted to do was march over to the Cavanaugh house and scream in his face about "how could he take back Jenna" or "why won't you just listen?" Even in hte moments when she wanted nothing more than to shout, and scream, and punch, and kick until she was red in the face and couldn't breathe and had nothing else to lose everything she did, said, or thought regarding him was influenced by love. By the ivy covering her heart.
And now, with him back in her arms she was learning for the first time that maybe she shouldn't take a weedwacker and cut the ivy down. Maybe she shouldn't miss the brick heart that she had once known, but rather relish in the beauty brought about by ivy.