an. Wouldn't get out of my head as I was trying to write for other fics, useless drabble!
Canon. Standalone missing conversation episode tag 4x07, after the hand holding scene the burning question is finally addressed. In a very angsty, non-communicative, unresolved Tomsha way.
.
.
It shouldn't hurt this much.
After all, they'd perfected the art of careful avoidance for almost a decade. Hadn't actively worked together since a joint operation in Kosovo. Successfully called time on their undefined mess, settled in their lives separately, and moved on. Yet still, there were the whispers of moments that haunted. Fondness that lived in the deepest recesses of hearts. Thoughts stolen in stillness before being returned to that dusty shelf called 'past'.
And then there was the end of the world. A random collision of events that had delivered him again to her door. The slate wiped clean, and their reasons for that careful avoidance deceased. It had felt like a gift. Like the pain and the suffering could mean something again. Like the universe really did have a plan.
What a monumental mistake it had been.
Somewhere in the months that followed, she'd accepted her part. The foolishness of her heart inferring meaning where there was only circumstance. Pretending that they were ever meant to be more than unfinished.
"Why did you kiss me?" There was no anger, no malice—the opposite. Contemplative. Tired. Real.
Beside her, he breathed. Didn't have to look to picture that considering squint of his eyes. Waited stoically while he formed a response, wind whipping at her hair as their ship sliced through the night.
"Because I love you. I've always loved you." The words were quiet, breathed softly. Perhaps the most truthful he'd ever been with her, and the thing she'd been most afraid of hearing. Her lips drew into a regrettable line as she peered at the black ocean.
She knew, of course. Their mutual inability to stop falling any time they were near demanded to be defined as something. Had tested many a word for it over the years.
Addiction.
Stupidity.
Obsession.
Lust.
Love.
It wasn't his words themselves that touched, but the simplicity with which he'd said them. Like it were the most natural thing in the world. Like they hadn't spent decades ignoring it. Like love always ended up together, when in reality—it did not. And perhaps that was the most heartbreaking thing about it. That this thing between them was so much more than lust.
Lust faded and did not forgive.
Love on the other hand…
"Why did you stop?" he countered gently. And the saddest, most ironic smile pulled at her lip, the action causing that scar to pucker, and the stubborn moisture which clung to her lashes to fall.
"Because I love you," she echoed. Torment swimming in beautiful blue as she confessed, crushing him. "And I don't want to anymore."
It was strangely cathartic, to be so frank and so free with her thoughts. To share with him that which she'd wished every day for sixteen months. A way to expunge him from her soul. To be free again. To live without the shadow of his memory, and the torture of his lips.
To be finished.
A calloused thumb wiped at the tear on her cheek, the tenderness burning her skin. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
Her heart did forgive.
But her mind had moved on.
And it shouldn't hurt this much, but it did.