She stood up. She didn't care that everybody in the room was staring at her, it was better than the looks she'd previously gotten from them.
She couldn't decide what to do. She could hardly breathe. He was there, standing in front of her, looking back at her with the same blank expression. How can a blank expression hold so much emotion?
They moved together like the barriers had suddenly been let down, still silent, still calm, but like liquids being poured into a bowl, fluidly merging as if they had never been apart. But they both felt that they had been apart for too long.
With her head on his shoulder, and his arms wrapped protectively around her, the tears fell. She breathed great rasping breaths, and he felt her chest rise and fall heavily against his body.
She held him and didn't want to let go.
They silently admitted how sorry they each were for having been apart for so long.
His chin leant against her head. She'd forgotten how tall he was.
Despite imagining his arms around her every night for as long as it had been, she had forgotten a lot of things about him. She'd blocked out how comforting his arms felt.
She'd forgotten how thin he was, as well. How her head fit perfectly into place, and how his jacket felt smooth against her cheek.
Now she felt it all again, and all the pain from the months without him was released. He could feel it. He felt her pain in the way she clung onto him, in the way she sobbed, in the way she felt smaller against him than she had done before.
He stood there with his arms around her, protecting her from the onlookers who were judging her, wondering why she was clinging onto this man as if he was the only thing left, wondering if he had anything to do with why she had been so silent in the months since she'd appeared.
He wrapped his arms around her, clinging desperately to some sort of hope.
He didn't want to let her go, but knew he'd have to again.
------
Blinking back tears, feeling as if her heart had just stopped beating, with pain that started in the back of her throat coursing through her body like a thousand shards of glass, she entered the room she'd avoided for all that time.
A cold, hard floor. Posters around the bed. Smooth sheets that still held old smells. And two pictures. Two small, long pictures on the wall about a foot above the pillow.
She tried to make herself smile by thinking about how she got those pictures, but memories of why she got them filled her head instead. She'd gotten them to remember him, something to look at for a few days before he came back. But he never did come back, and those pictures had been left shut up in that room to be forgotten about.
She put her hands over her eyes and breathed deeply whilst she fought back sobs. She mustn't cry.
At least this time she knew not to wait for him.
------
Those two pictures got taken down, and put in a box of things to be moved to safety.
The person moving everything didn't even register them, they just came in a group of 'paper crap'.
That upset her more. The photos of the man she was still waiting for just shoved in a box with magazine cuttings and drawings from when she was a kid.
In the new room she put up the pictures. She needed something from those times, those times when he'd only left her once, before the war, to keep her sane. Or somewhere close to sane. She hadn't been properly sane since she met him. Since he whisked her away and showed her how to live. And how to love.
------
There was a place, not far from where she'd been living back in the days when she'd only lost him once, where people actually considered her somebody to respect. But it was a place with a view of the sky above the city, and pretty soon those people would realise that it's because of her that threats and death fill that sky.
She watched day after day as people died under attack, knowing that if he was there he'd know what to do. As it was, she didn't even know who the enemy was.
But she knew that the entire goddamn thing was her fault.
Until one day, in that room with the view of the city's sky, she saw him. He was standing behind the person she had been talking to, just watching her.
And she ran.
She ran and ran and ran until she reached the cold room with the memories of him. And she cried.
And he sat on the bed next to her, their fingers intertwined. She realised the war was over. They were finally together.
"I love you."
