AN: Special thank you to emerson023 for writing the nicest, most encouraging reviews, I am so grateful. Thank you as well to everyone else who left reviews/read the shorts so far, I hope you all enjoy reading this one as well :)
#2
Juliet was aware of her quiescence.
She knew how it poked and prodded him like sharp thorns that traveled down his throat, how it burned him from the inside until he became unhinged, unscrewed, and disassembled. She was opaque in his world of colors and whenever he felt her coming apart, becoming more transparent and less elusive, he would find that he was wrong.
He couldn't stand the quietness. He'd hear distant whispers and voices, not loud enough to discern what they were saying yet not so quiet to ignore. In time he realised it was his own voice that was beckoning, his own voice that kept nagging at him, trying to get his attention, and often it would meld with his father's, littered with hints of judgment and disappointment. His voice, at times, wasn't even his. It unnerved him, caused him to feel the need to fill in any emptiness where silence fell so that there were no blank spaces and only spaces that are no longer blank which left no room for the whispers. It muted the ghost of a voice playing like an endless record in the back of his mind with the throaty one that had a physical voice he could hear was his own. Ever since, he would find the euphony in noise.
Juliet's voicelessness was, hence, cacophony in contrast. The silence drilled into him, caused the distant whispers to spill out and start shouting words meant to ail. Husband and wife they were, yet the two were more like two sides of a glass, never quite touching despite the same reflection, always so distantly close, just barely out of touch. It became apparent then why he never quite had her back as they stood on opposite sides, detached from each other. They were empty shells of one another that were once effervescent, once ebullient and full of life until the life wilted from them. Trailing behind on departure's path not too far away was her voice, leaving to show how the fight was no longer in her. Around the time she had started remaining silent, and the time she discovered how it drove him absolutely insane, she realised she had lost the love as well. They struggled so hard to find a way to be the anchors of their relationship that they'd forgotten why they were trying in the first place to the point that they could no longer recall the reason no matter how hard they tried so she had conceded and given up on trying to repair what's beyond saving while he was transfixed on trying to save what he couldn't.
At times, much like this one, they'd just be too exhausted to fight, words not reaching one another so they'd use their touch to make sure the other was still present, still there with them, but no matter how close, no matter how pressed up against each other they were, or how much they'd explored each other, they would never really find each other in the dark. The warmth in their touch felt cold, the pleasure they used to find was lost, and their minds tried to empty, to remove itself to no avail. It didn't stop them though, only fueled them further. A gentle graze of the skin turned to desperate grasps trying to grab hold of each other as they're slipping and slipping from the other's hold as they come and come again until they're washed up on their bed and slowly dragged into slumber.
When she wakes beside him the next morning her fingers play with the ring on her finger, turning it mindlessly as she watches him breathe. For a reason she can't say, she could hear a small voice in the back of her mind with a stubborn thought; it was less so like his susurrus and more akin to a knowing presence voicing a truth and it only told her one thing.
One day she would die and Jack would be the reason why.