I have no words left. I am running on vapors. But it actually feels really, really good.
The following drabble is about 50 percent of the reason I have not gotten more than seven hours of sleep for the past month. It is also what has kept me going through tortuous, eighth-period Algebra 1. For that, I am grateful. Also, it would not have been possible without the amazingly insightful input SylverEyes offers, free of charge, guilt and time restraints. That's the best gift anyone anywhere has ever given me. You go, dude.
And now, without further ado, I present to you…Starfire and Red X. Because I love them dearly, and they put up with all the abuse. Amen.
--
Prompt #23: Journey
From the very beginning, she knew that their course wouldn't be easy, wouldn't be happy, wouldn't be the stuff of fairytales. She knew that their train would probably careen off the tracks and they would be left with a smoking wreckage of what-could-have-been. But she knew, too, that their personal catastrophes would be beautiful in their chaos, and so she purchased a train ticket and let her cares blow away with the wind that swept across the desolate tracks of what used to be her life.
And later, when it seemed it might be the end, she could not bring herself to regret the ride that brought her there.
--
She first met him when he wore a mask and suit and belt. His voice was low and amused; his body was long and lanky. He trailed a finger up and down her jaw and called her 'sugar' and 'dollface'; mocked her team, mocked the very world.
She hated him fiercely. She also wanted to rip the suit from his body and crush herself against him, devour him whole, gorge herself on the taste of his mouth and skin.
She made herself sick – sick with shame, sicker with longing.
--
The truth is that she likes the way he pins her arms to the wall and leaves her helpless against the ravishing crusade of his teeth-mouth-hands; that she is not a glass figurine underneath his palms, but instead an unconquered land, a realm now scuffed and worn by the countless battle-marches of his lips. She likes the way he is never sated, that he is always lean and hungry; he feasts upon her lips and drinks in her gaze.
He presses threats and kisses in equal measure against her taut copper skin, and in his arms, she loses sight of herself.
The feeling is not good or right, but it is all she has.
--
He calls her ribs xylophone keys and plays music on them with not-quite-careful fingertips.
--
She lent him her heart for a day. He never gave it back. To this day he's unable to decide if it was his inner pickpocket talking, or just his fondness for bright, shiny toys.
--
The day she met him, she reminded herself to clench her fists tight and her heart tighter. He did the same. They buckled on their protective shells, using wit for swords and sarcasm as shields, and then their hearts and minds clashed, sprays of sparks burning their lips and eyes.
His armor was stronger than hers. She bruised herself on him without knowing why.
--
At the very beginning, she required nothing of him, and he required nothing of her, and they were fine – they were good, great, wonderful, tired, bored, happy, struggling. They were any adjective that filled the silence.
They might have woken up early and maybe she cooked eggs or they could have opened the refrigerator and seen nothing there and drank watery, distractedly-made coffee and gone their separate ways. Their separate mornings stacked higher and higher until a wall formed between them, silence and suppressed emotions acting as bricks and cement. She didn't know which subway he walked to and he couldn't have traced her bus route on a map.
Their wavelengths touched, but were never the same.
They always met again as the sun breathed a goodbye kiss to the sky and the moon glimmered with stolen radiance. They might have sat down and pretended to be a normal couple; perhaps they made and ate dinner – perhaps they flirted over fettuccine – or they might have just thrown away the make-believe and shed their second skins, rubbing away at their outside masks until maybe a glimmer of something, something real peeked through.
But by then, the day was already starting over again.
And their chance of connection was washed away by a river of bad coffee and distracted tears for her long-dead lover – a lifeboat that capsized on their ocean of separation. It was never to be seen again.
--
Eventually, they learned to make their own opportunities, lifeboat be damned.
--
The night they first found themselves making love – meshed deep within in a smoke-laced haze of thrashing dance-music and splintered lights and fragmented sightsoundsmelltastetouch – she didn't realize she had soaked the pillowcase with tears until he tilted her chin up with careful fingers and kissed all the jewel-drops away. His face was vulnerable for a breath of a second – so helpless she was ashamed. His eyes were liquid topaz; his hands gentle against the curve of her waist.
"It's okay," he whispered, and – bewildered – he held her as she wept. "We can stop."
But it wasn't okay, and she didn't want to stop.
She shivered in his arms until she found herself nodding as she sobbed, fighting the strange, crushing grief and memories of another face, another body, different dark hair; but their masks of secrecy and silence were so much the same, and she couldn't find the border lines where one man left off and another began.
She let him cradle her head against his bare chest, whispering pleasepleaseplease – it'stoomuch – you'retoomuch – I'm notgoodenough – notstrongenough.
(She wasn't strong enough for either of them, was she?)
His face hardened in that moment – accepting the rejection – and a forged mask of indifference covered his eyes like shutters.
She had guard rails against devotion. It only stood to reason that his would be better.
--
Eventually she slept with him. It was only a matter of time.
When she reached ecstasy, she screamed the wrong man's name.
--
After a year, she imagined that she was wiser than the day they met– ("You always were a quick learner," he whispered as they sank into both his sheets and her body) – or maybe she was just more jaded.
Maybe she didn't know him at all.
She didn't know his mind. He kept it carefully guarded, forever shrouded in sarcasm and secrecy. He locked his privacy inside years ago and made quite certain to throw away the key.
But she knew his body as well as she knew her own.
It was a small consolation, but she liked that she could trace the topography of the muscles along his back and not lose herself along the longitude of his shoulders. She knew the way his spine crrk-crackled when he was cautious, the way his voice turned soft and smoky when he was sleepy – like smoothing a velvet comforter across a bed – and the way he relaxed his hands, joint by joint, as they sat entwined on the tiny couch shoved up against the wall in their two-room apartment.
Most of all, she knew to expect nothing from him. Because she knew that the moment you expect things from someone, you are bound to them: you belong to them, in a way that no amount of sex could produce.
She told herself that she would never belong to him. She would never allow it.
She tasted that lie on the tip of her tongue, and found that she did not mind the taste.
--
The first thing she learned about him was that he kept his face blank and hid away his eyes, covering them like they covered their apartment's windows with venetian blinds. She hated it. (She still hates it.)
She is a creature ruled by sunlight and sensation, and her thoughts and feelings are volatile. Fiery. She blistered him with emotion before he realized his ice shell was thawing; after that, he made sure to keep his distance.
--
Some days – rare afternoons – she couldn't hold back the rage. It poured from her, like shafts of sunlight breaking through the pores of her skin. She screamed; he trembled with contained fury. Her rage was fierce and pure – sunbeams – but his anger was darkness she regretted every word she flung at him as soon as she let it fly, sharp-edged and meant to bruise.
He rarely shouted back, and she was terrified for him to. She knew his words could be time-bombs, tick-tick-ticking in her chest until the explosion, leaving her scarred and changed.
--
No matter what they do or say, though – no matter how terrible, no matter how appalling – one truth remains sacred and unchangeable. She will never leave him. He is her only link to the man she lost.
--
For three years, she did not surrender to him.
Her ribs were xylophone keys, but he never played a true melody on them. She turned away from his touch before he found the chords, and he was left with a broken cadence.
Her skin bruised on contact with his, but she was left with the fierce satisfaction of marking him in the exact same places. (When they woke every morning after, they lined up their fingers to matching blueberry stains on each others' skins. The ache never faded, and pride was satisfied all around.)
Her body was a conquered country, but her heart was an island. She never allowed it to float away.
But what she didn't realize was that time was slowly eroding away at the guard rails around her soul and his careful boundaries were more than a psychological Band-Aid over the wounds of her heart.
--
"Give me a year," he told her once. "Three-hundred and sixty days, give or take. I bet I could make you happy. I bet…"
She leaned against the counter, wearing only jeans and a bra, and filled a glass halfway with water, took a few sips, and dumped the rest down the drain. "Do not," she said. "Do not speak of this." Do not speak of him.
"It would be easy," he said, moving closer, letting his fingers trail up and down her neck in slow, tingling circles. "Natural. Like breathing."
This was an uncharted territory, and she found herself skittering away from the boundary lines. Happiness, fulfillment, understanding – their maps of these lands were blank, filled with nothing but empty oceans and the broken wreckages of failed voyages.
She shivered involuntarily as he painted strokes of fire up and down her skin. "That is what worries me. To be happy is…betrayal. It would not be fair to him."
True, but not an entire truth. She was more afraid of his motives. Why did he want her happiness? It was simple. He didn't want her to be happy; he wanted to win. She was a challenge he had yet to overcome.
And another unwieldy truth: underneath his hands and mouth, she knew she was a challenge he was capable of conquering.
He replaced his fingers with his lips, kissing her skin into a delicious rawness. "I never promised to fight fair." He pressed up against her back. The warmth of his lips was a drug. "He would want you happy. Bird Boy could see the sense in that…I'm what you need. I'm where you need me."
He was always one to fight dirty.
"That…is wrong," she murmured, holding herself rigid, away from his body. It was too easy to let go, she reminded herself – too easy to forget the past; too easy to forget previous mistakes that belonged to both of them, mistakes like late dinners and forgotten appointments and long nights on dark streets and the whisper of bat wings brushing gently against the sky lights as she wept over the broken body of her love…
She counted seven kisses before he had an answer for her.
"It's not right, but it's good," he told her, finally. An eighth kiss – pressed gently between her shoulder blades –and then: "I'm all you've got now."
She stiffened, lightning bolts searing at her skin, fingers curling taut against his wrist. She squeezed harder than she could have. It brought her an irritable satisfaction.
"I do not depend on you," she reminded him, the words stilted and angry in her mouth. "You have no ownership of me."
He was silent for a moment. She could imagine the steel blades in his mouth, ready to cut her down with jagged, truthful edges, but instead he laughed quietly.
"I never pretended to own you," he said. His voice was bleak, but he gave another prickly laugh. "And I'll be damned if you have any claim over me. But I swear to God, I'll make you happy. I owe that much to that bastard of yours."
He is not mine anymore, she told him in her mind. No one can govern the dead.
But because she was free – because she had no place to be except the loop of his arms and, startlingly, because the thought of her dead fiancée was one she no longer found herself cringing from – she found that the equation was simple. He was warm and she was cold and it was easy to relax into the taut muscles in his stomach and curve her spine to fit against his chest. She didn't turn to face him, though. She didn't let him see the truth in her eyes, because the truth was that yes, it would be very easy to let herself be happy again…and yes, it would be very easy to sink into his warmth and never surface.
"I do not want to forget him," she told him instead, filling the water glass up again.
"I'd never let you," he promised, pressing slow, drugging kisses against her skin, ready to lead her into their bedroom. And, really, he was warm, and she was cold, and the bed was soft and the path to a moment of happiness was blocked only by two zippers and a button-down shirt…
And really, would he – the final remnants of her life Before, the guiding force of the Titans – have begrudged her happiness? Would he really have grasped her so tight?
Would he have allowed her to sacrifice her future for the memories of their shared past?
No, she answered her past. And then – as she reached for her future with hands that trembled with both exhilaration and apprehension, terror and triumph – she looked her future square in the eye, and told it Yes.
--
That afternoon, she let her both her reluctance and her remembrances wash down the drain with the rest of the water in her glass. In his arms, she found what she had lost. The bittersweet chord of rightness sang, melodiously, just inside her ribcage. And in the darkness of their bedroom with faded venetian blinds, against the pillows, where he couldn't see, she let the tears well up and spill over for the second time.
But this time, they set her free.
--
Three years later – years that meant something as they passed, years that saw her grow and change – when she had let the train run its course through her life, she found that she could open her eyes and unclench her fists, let her head rest against the seat back, and open her eyes fully to the rush of sun and wind. She no longer felt as if she would blow away with the slightest breeze; she had found her roots and planted them deep into the soil of the present.
Two years after that, she found that the great ruins of her life were not so much gaping skeletons, but instead souvenirs of simpler and sweeter times. She picked up a piece and carried it with her always, but she did not again make the mistake of clutching at gossamer shreds of the past that soon evaporated in the sunlight.
On the sixth year after they met, she found that she was just as strong in mind and body as her lover. She was no longer a broken bird that he had picked up from the side of the road. She had grown her own wings and regained her will of steel.
And nine years after the day they met, she discovered that as much as it hurt when his train left the station, it was infinitely more painful to wait in limbo for him to return home. She would no longer sit on her suitcase and weep, she decided willfully. Instead, she picked herself up and dusted herself off, carrying her suitcase with her own two hands. She walked straight-backed and strong along her own path, carving her own way. And when his train pulled back into the terminal, she welcomed him with an unrestrained joy.
--
From the beginning, she had known that their shared train was not one meant for blue skies and lush valleys. It had crashed and burned along the way, leaving a relic of smoking wreckage. Their train tracks were littered with the debris of their chaotic pasts, and the paths along their mountains were steep.
Yet strangely, when they reached the end of the winding tracks, she found that she was grateful for the tumultuous ride that had brought her there. But she knew unquestionably – deep inside her heart and mind – that the journey was not yet over.
And so when the train lurched into the final station, she found his hand – calloused and rough, a hand well-versed in the hardships of travel – twined inescapably with hers. They stepped down from the train that had brought them so many miles, and watched it swerve into motion, carrying more broken souls on their own personal paths.
Together, they turned their backs on the world of known and familiar. She felt the blessing of her past lover as a cool kiss on her forehead. And at the same time, felt the warm lips of her present and future love against her own, meeting her passion for passion, doubt for doubt, love for love: a promise on this uncertain path.
Miles stretched in front of them – painful and long, they held another promise, one of chaos and doubt. But together, they found that they did not mind the extra distance. Their journey was not yet over. And, as she strode willfully out into the blessing of her future – matching his every stride, muscles singing beneath her skin – catastrophes and chaos be damned – she knew with all her heart and all her soul that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
This was a journey she was going to finish.