A/N: We don't really celebrate Halloween here in Australia, but I thought I'd post this early to commemorate the day when the year's main plot always kicks into action.
They are explorers without a map, braving unchartered territory with nothing but curious minds and wide eyes and each other. Relationships are nothing new to either of them – they're old; so old, in fact, that the pair have no hope of ever truly understanding the full historical and socio-political context of them – but this is new and exciting and unknown and theirs. Somehow, despite being something that others have gone through before, it feels utterly unique and idiosyncratic to them. They traverse the flat plains of frustrated silence and the rolling hills of emotion. They swim through the river of tears and the lake of hopelessness. They peer from the outlook of happiness and through the telescope of contentment. And, at every turn, they name things and sketch them and promise to remember, forever, this wilderness of a region. Whether they return home, separately, to sign up for new explorations or they stay and inhabit it together for the rest of their lives, the map they are drawing and the memories they are creating will stick with them until the very end.