Moment
Somebody told her, once, that there was a difference between loving a person and being in love with them. She had smiled and nodded indulgently- was it her mother that had told her?- but she had been far too young at the time to understand, too young even to think that love was anything other than a joke. She had probably gone to school the next day, still giggling about it, and told her girlfriends in the playground, and the girls had probably rolled on the ground laughing about it together, until something else distracted their fluttering attention spans.
But the words stuck, somewhere in the corner of her mind, and despite her original reaction, she is grateful to the person- it was her mother, wasn't it?- that told her the phrase. She remembers it completely separately from the childish hysterics that accompanied it at first, which she sees now is something to be thankful for, as really the saying manages to sum up so much in so few words.
She has always loved him: when they were tiny kids, and she laughed at the prospect of marrying him, and made him daisy chains which she forced him to wear, and coaxed him into the river when he was too scared to jump, and wheedled him up a tree to fetch cherries for her; when they were older children, and she grew extremely jealous of his brand new penknife until he carved her name into a fallen tree trunk for her, and copied his Chemistry homework in exchange for a look at her answers to the Physics paper, and taught him the way to catch fish with his bare hands, in theory, and found herself with an inexplicable hatred for any girl that so much as breathed in his direction; when they were teenagers, and she threatened him with violence, and screamed bloody murder at him, and constantly criticised his actions, and cried herself dry for him.
But when she puts her mind to it, she can also recall the precise moment she fell in love with him: somewhere on the brink of adolescence, when he took her hands clumsily in his own, still inept at using his new, stumbling, clanking body, and told her no less clumsily not to worry, they were going away for a while, that was all, while the lake sparkled achingly brightly behind him, and the dust kicked up during the spar between the two brothers hung heavy and choking in the air. We'll be back, he said, we'll come back soon and we'll have our bodies back and things will be perfect again- and he pressed her hands tightly between his as if trying hopelessly to reassure her, and the bottom fell out of her world in one shattering second.
There is a difference, somebody told her once, between loving a person and being in love with them.
She couldn't have put it better herself.
Author's notes: This story got rained on. Extensively. I lost about a quarter of the words on the second page D: Luckily, it was still reasonably fresh in my mind and I could rebuild it. But- gah.
Yay for vague references to my other fanfics! Subtle self-promotion, see? (The reference is to my oneshot "Proposal", by the way)
Also, two almost insanely long sentences for your enjoyment :D