Many Happy Returns
The flight cross-country to her mother's house gave her time to sleep. The previous night had been less than restful, even after returning home. It had been difficult to find any sleep after that conversation. In her rush to comfort him, she had nearly told him that she loved him.
She hadn't said it, because it had felt too hasty, and maybe inappropriate for the moment. However, this impulse was something she knew required further introspection. She hadn't even known him very long. She had never met anyone close enough to truly know him well. However, what she had known of Orm himself was mostly positive.
He was not perfect by any means, and if he had appeared to be perfect, she could never have trusted him. His gradual willingness to be honest with her in difficult situations was, as she saw it, his greatest strength. But, after learning more about his history, she felt she was no match for his internalized rejection. How would a man like Orm even respond to a declaration of love? With a life like his, she wondered if he could ever trust even the most sincere words of affirmation. Orm struck her as more of an action-minded person, and she could think of no single grand gesture to prove that she admired him. She wanted to be there for him, in general, and she enjoyed the time they spent together. Despite this, she worried that the level of commitment required by genuine love might exist beyond her own capacity. They were in an impossible situation, where neither of them could join the other long-term. What did she even know about running a kingdom? How could she possibly contribute to his destiny? Or, conversely, how could Orm exist outside of Atlantis? Orm would have to reshape his entire life in order to join her on the surface. She had ruled this option out long ago. She was afraid to think about keeping him in a place where he should not be. It was painfully obvious that living in her world would break his spirit. She knew that he could not abandon his own people—especially after hearing that his only sibling had already spurned the throne. And, deep down, she knew she couldn't afford to get attached to the idea of Orm as a well-adjusted land-dweller. She knew she would never stop wishing for that version of reality if she began considering it.
These were the thoughts which plagued her tonight, and most other nights. This had not been the very first time she had wanted to tell him she loved him, but it had been the first time she felt so sure about it. Even in light of the new development, her thoughts always circled back to the obvious divide between them.
The future had never been something for Orm to grasp at; he felt that it was something he already held. Prodded towards the throne from all sides, his upbringing had guided him towards his place as the one true heir to Atlantis. Even his half-brother felt far enough away that the disgraceful consequences could not really touch his path: no surfacer could find his way to Atlantis. Despite lingering paranoia, Orm knew that his brother's decision to abandon the royal half of his lineage was not likely to be swayed. His mother's treachery had been expunged from the public's consciousness, to the furthest extent possible, preventing any other objections to his role in leadership. There were no imminent obstacles. Orm had been born with a purpose. The future was a constant.
Observing the vicious removal of yet another untrustworthy noble in his father's court today, Orm considered this. Of course, uncertainty had presented itself with (Y/N), but it was a chosen uncertainty. The risks he took for her yielded beneficial results; he was happy, she was happy, and his father's gaggle of advisors and informants was none the wiser. He felt the pull towards her strongly, and he knew that he wanted (Y/N) for her own merits, and not the surface world or its trappings. What he had seen of her world had failed to impress him so far. In fact, she had shown more enthusiasm towards things he had brought from Atlantis than things she had shared with him of her own. Before his attention was called away from this train of thought, he felt the fleeting wish: if she could exist independently of the surface in his heart, why couldn't she exist independently of the surface altogether?
Throughout the day, as always, he was ushered back and forth between courtly meetings and meals and appointments. In the echoing throneroom, sitting at his father's right hand on the white pedestal, or in the claustrophobic, hidden corridors between conference rooms, thoughts of her followed him. Even if she were a commoner in his city, it would be impossible for him to meet with her now. Even if she were the princess he was all-but-promised to, she would live leagues away, in another kingdom entirely. Of all the misfortunes possible, he still preferred these alternatives. There would be a ball tonight, and he would be expected to attend. He recalled her wonder at the concept of an underwater dance; he wondered how much entertainment a dance on land even had to offer her. If surfacer weddings were anything like Atlantean weddings, she would perhaps be participating in some sort of dance later tonight. Somehow, knowing that they would be doing the same thing at the same time did not comfort him, but only punctuated the distance between them.
Usually, staying in her childhood home felt somewhat claustrophobic. It was like taking a forced step backwards in life, trapped in the past. This time, it felt more like visiting another world. Over the years, the place had faced minimal change, but now the house was transformed into a warehouse for wedding trappings. Boxes of decorations took up space in the garage, and the fridge was sparse in anticipation for reception leftovers. Family members had begun to occupy any available rooms.
(Y/N) had met her mother at the airport a day after everyone else had shown up, but her old room had still been set aside for her. She was grateful for the privacy once she had arrived at the old house; relatives came pouring out of the place to help her with her luggage and ask for life updates. Aside from Orm, who she would mention under no conditions, she was without any news to report. On the way from the car to the house, two of her aunts had expressed surprise and disappointment that she had not brought a date to the wedding. An uncle asked if she was lining herself up for a promotion at work or not, and then criticized her lack of ambition, not seeming to understand that the café was so small it only had ten people on staff. There was nowhere for her to be promoted to.
Her ability to deliver boring responses to questions ensured that interest had died down by the time she'd reached her old room. Left alone in there to unpack, she set her suitcase at the foot of the twin bed and collapsed onto it, lying on her back and gazing at the old popcorn ceiling. The room was mostly bare; she had brought everything that mattered when she moved, and had donated most of the things she left behind. Still, a few remains of her old life lingered. Biology textbooks sat stacked on their sides in the top shelf of her bookcase. A snowglobe from the Monterey Bay aquarium sat on her nightstand. She hadn't necessarily wanted to keep it, but her mother had never given it away. She didn't want to unpack her things, and she didn't want to leave the quiet room, but she knew she couldn't stay in here forever.
After a few days, (Y/N) had somewhat acclimated to sharing her living space with the rest of the family. One perk which living alone had not afforded her was that she hadn't had to cook for herself all week. Even though she hadn't had many stories to tell, there was plenty for her to listen to. Some of her cousins had gotten married since she'd last seen them, and they drifted in and out of the giant reunion more freely—they had gotten hotel rooms in the city to avoid crowding the house further. Nearly everyone encouraged her to move back into the house, or at least to move closer to the rest of the family. After all, one of her mother's friends had recently gotten a job at some sort of research lab nearby, so couldn't she come back home and work there? Several times throughout the week, this topic kept reappearing, the conversation always a near duplicate of what it had been the last time.
The concept of living so close to family again didn't necessarily bother her, but she didn't feel a strong pull towards returning to the places she had already been. (Y/N) deflected these requests as well as she could, although she couldn't share her most concrete reason for staying on the coast. Insisting that she was happy with her current job and had friends on the coast would have to be enough of a defense for now. Her relationship with Orm was what really kept the little town from feeling like a dead end. Any moments she had not spent in conversation this week, she had spent missing him. She was terrified that he would be gone by the time she came back, and that she'd have to continue missing him for however long he was away. She was certain of her feelings for him, and of his reciprocation, but too many other variables were uncertain in this equation. Whenever they discussed the future, it was with respect to either one of them individually. She had been afraid to formulate any expectations for their relationship, because so much of it felt out of her control. She suspected he felt the same. Even so, she wished she knew where and how their story would end.
Amidst this uncertainty, it was impossible to ignore why she was away from him the first place. The wedding was a few days away, and the main topic of conversation. She hadn't been to a wedding since she was a child. She usually thought about them in the same way she'd think about frogs turning into princes or magic wands. They seemed like fairytale events, the trappings of some idealized world which existed totally separate from herself. This was not to say that she didn't want to get married, it was just to say that the concept was outside of her expectations. To live in a house that was also occupied by boxes of physical wedding decorations took away from some of the mysticism that surrounded the subject. Tangible objects and real, living people would populate this wedding. It wasn't a work of fiction, or something to experience secondhand, but something that was actually happening to herself and to people she loved. She wasn't entirely sure why, but the reality of it filled her with apprehension.