A/N: Whoa. I just...don't know...

Thanks: To be posted onto emsscraps. Otherwise, thank you to everyone for such a hearty welcome to this weird little bit of vignette writing-ness on my part.

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Echoes
by Em

"Did you know I was lost until you found me?"
- Garbage, Stroke of Luck

Lost (04: Lost)
Em

Sometimes, he thinks he's lost her.

Not to the darkness she had been so afraid would consume her throughout most of their adolescence, but to inanely regular things like books, chocolate, or coffee. She wasn't the kind of person to make shows of what pleased her, or what she craved. One learned about her preferences through careful and devoted observation.

It was in the little things that Raven found pleasure: A cup of rich, sweet smelling coffee after a particularly ugly night. The bitter tang of dark chocolate melting on the tongue late at night. The first scent of herbal tea as it eased knots of tension and calmed worries. The anticipation inherent in the turning of the first page of a new book.

He can see it in her eyes, the small ways he loses her to a new book or some expected or anticipated taste, it is in those little pleasures he catches the distance in her eyes, the way she huddles into herself with each gratifying sensation. Still, he's patient and waits because he knows that from these little pleasures, she always comes back. As soon as she notices him staring, she returns to him with a smile or the raising of a brow, or just by meeting his gaze and she's back with him, just like that. Then, he sees her, he knows she sees him and he has her again.

Sometimes, however, he loses her to her to darker places. Places where she does not go willingly – places that speak of the pain of her past or the memories of her life before him and he knows he cannot follow her there. Those times he feels as if he were the one who were lost and he realizes that although she always mentions how he has saved her from her darkness, he knows that truthfully, it is she who has saved him.

When she laid eyes on him, she found him. With her kiss, she breathed him into life. With her touch, she showed him how to feel. Before her, he was a puppet going through the motions of living and after her, he was not only alive, but had something to live for, to fight for, to be for.

And when he loses her to those places where he cannot follow, he always feels destitute, and cold, as if he were dying slow deaths and he has to fight against every primal instinct inside him that demands he snatch her back from that place any way he can and that he bring her back to where he can touch her again and where he doesn't feel as if she might never return.

Sometimes, he gives in and kisses her, his mouth demanding her return, calling her back from those places into the present and into his arms and later, when they've both satiated their need of each other, she looks at him and smiles that soft, barely there smile of hers and touches him, and thanks him for bringing her back from the clutch of her memories, for finding her.

He holds her, feels her heartbeat steady against his ribcage and tells her the truth: that he'd be lost without her.

Sometimes, she believes him.