Love Letters

by The Last Letter

As teenagers, Jake and Rose were dreaming about what could be and if it could be happily ever after. As adults, Jake and Rose are looking back at how they got to where they are now.

Happy belated birthday, Caroline! I hope it was everything you wanted it to be.

Content warnings:

The song mentioned in the text is Have We Met Before by Sarah Barrios and Eric Nam

Don't forget that you can find me on tumblr: we - are - all - of - legend - now and that my ao3 account is wearealloflegendnow (even though I haven't posted there yet)!

~TLL~

Dear Rose,

How has it only been two weeks since the last time that I saw you? The you that I knew and loved and who knew me and loved me. I can't stop thinking about who you are now and what would happen if we properly met again? If you weren't you anymore but I was still me, would we end up together in the end? It's haunting. It keeps me up at night.

Mom bought me this journal because of that. She thinks I need to vent my feelings and I think I'm going to try because either she'll stop bothering me about it or I'll actually feel better. This isn't a journal, though. I'm going to use it to talk to you. There's magic in the world. Maybe, if I write it down, somehow, somewhere, you'll know.

(-.-)

"This is not all mine."

"Sure is, bud," Jonathan said, dropping the last box on Jake's living room floor. "You mom and I saved everything."

"Our first baby," Susan said wistfully. She ruffled Jake's hair. "I wish we could stay here and go through it all with you but we have to take Haley's over to her and then the movers are coming in the afternoon."

Jake had felt sad when his parents had announced they were selling his childhood home and downsizing now that he and Haley had moved out and gone on with their own lives. He had walked through it as they started to pack and it had made him wistful, thinking that it might be fun to go back in time for one night to being a teenager and not having to worry about all of the adult stuff. Now, though, when his parents were dropping off boxes of baby photos and school reports that Jake hadn't ever wanted to see again, he was just feeling annoyed. He hadn't asked his parents to keep all of this and where was he supposed to put it, anyway? His and Rose's apartment was spacious but not the kind of spacious where they could just keep sentimental things from his childhood in a box.

Jake sighed. He wasn't about to pick a fight about it now. Well, not all the way. Leaving the house was hard on his parents and he didn't want to make them feel worse. Still, he couldn't resist one jab, "I swear, if you kept any of my report cards –"

Before he could finish, Rose was shouting from the kitchen, "Who would want to?!"

"You need to spend less time with my sister!"

Rose was just laughing as she came around the corner and into the living room. "Don't worry, I'm going to look forward to going through it. Maybe we'll find something super embarrassing."

Jake just groaned. "My whole life is super embarrassing. What else could you possibly need to know?"

Rose just grinned. "Guess we'll find out!"

"We'll leave you to it." Susan hugged Jake and then Rose while Jonathan did the opposite. "Tell us if you find anything fun."

"Oh, I will."

Jake didn't doubt that as he let his parents out of the apartment and then locked the door behind them again. When he got back, Rose was already sitting in the middle of the living room floor amongst the boxes.

"What? Now?" Jake asked.

"Well, we can't just leave it on the living room floor." Rose's blue eyes glinted. "What are you afraid I'll find?"

"Nothing," Jake said, taking his spot beside her. "You already know everything."

Rose opened the first box. "Let's find out if that's true."

(-.-)

Dear Jake,

I suppose I shouldn't write this down. I guess I should say it to your face because I know you again now. I could email or call or anything and you'd be right there but I don't know if I want you to know everything I'm about to write down because I don't know how I feel about what I'm about to write down. So, here goes:

You creeped me out so much the first time I saw you in Hong Kong because I remembered running into you the day before we moved to China. We had a three second conversation and your face felt like home and everything every romance book had ever described and I was terrified of you for it because I didn't know why. I thought I was crazy having that kind of reaction because I knew it wasn't because you were like hot or something because I've seen hot people before and never felt like that. And then you were there in front of me and you shouldn't have been and you said all of the craziest things!

I still think it's crazy. I was a dragon hunter and this isn't my real life except it has to be because the other life isn't there anymore. And you're a dragon. And we're so young. And there's so much. I don't remember it all perfectly, little details keep coming back to me all the time, but the big details I remember.

The biggest detail of all is that I'm in love with you and I know I'm always going to be and we're so young but wow there it is. I'm in love with you and I'm pretty sure I'm going to marry you someday and I haven't even really dated another boy and yet …

This is so embarrassing.

I'm definitely not sending this to you.

(-.-)

Rose nervously stepped off the plane, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that she was back in New York City. This was home and she felt it all the way down to her bones. She shouldered her purse and followed the flow of traffic toward baggage claim, feeling her feet start to slow the closer that she got. Which was insane. She should be running to baggage claim just so that she could see Jake standing there and then she should throw herself into his arms and pull him close so that she could kiss him and feel his heart beat. It was everything that she had been dreaming about since her parents agreed to let her fly back to New York and see Jake for the first time since he had left Hong Kong – a full year ago.

Rose wasn't used to feeling nervous but she was. She was worried that Jake might be different than over the phone and in emails. She was worried that she would be too. She was worried that being back in New York would bring up the past that she tried to forget about and it would become too much. She worried that she and Jake hadn't really gotten to spend that much time together when he was in Hong Kong and maybe, just maybe, he wasn't seeing the Rose that she was now but he was seeing her ghost instead.

Rose made it to baggage claim, feeling like her stomach was in her throat. She scanned the crowd of people waiting and then she felt like melting into the floor.

Jake wasn't there.

Rose didn't know whether to laugh or cry as she stumbled over to the carousel to wait for her suitcase. Either way, she knew it was going to be a hysterical sound and she fought to keep all of her feelings down inside of her. Maybe it had been too much, to think that they could keep up a long distance relationship when they were teenagers and they were each other's first serious relationship and the time that they had actually gotten to spend with each other was from that other life. Rose's thoughts spiralled as she waited for her suitcase to appear. They should have stayed friends, she decided, until she moved back to New York for college. Things would have been so different in college.

Rose hoisted her suitcase off the carousel, trying not to feel like her heart was breaking. This wasn't how she imagined it happening at all. Jake was supposed to help her with her suitcase and take it to the taxi like a gentleman and they were supposed to get lunch alone together before going back to his parents' house and she moved into the cot his parents had put in Haley's room for the duration of Rose's visit. Rose tried not to cry, thinking of the humiliating call that she was going to have to make to one of the friends that she still had here to see if they had a couch. And, worse, to her parents, who hadn't wanted her to go at all, because they knew something like this was going to happen.

Rose turned around, desperately trying to keep from crying. And, then, like he'd been there all along, there was Jake. He was sweating so she could tell that he'd been running here. He had balloons in one hand, a large teddy bear with a heart in its mouth in the other, and between his teeth, was the most beautiful bouquet of flowers she'd ever seen. Rose wanted to cry for a whole different reason, then, because Jake was here. And she never should have doubted him. Of course he loved her too!

Rose rushed toward him, letting her bag hit the floor as she threw herself in his arms, just like she had imagined doing. Jake spun her around and then he maneuvered the balloons to pull the flowers out of his teeth, even though the stems had left a green stain on his front teeth.

"Welcome home!" Jake cried. "I missed you! I love you! How was the flight? How was –"

Rose grabbed him by the front of his shirt and kissed him. For now, at least, they had time for everything else later.

(-.-)

Dear Rose,

I don't think people like me talking about you anymore. I think they expect me to be at the moving on stage and I feel absolutely INSANE telling them that there's no moving on from you because you're it or whatever but you are and I know that except no one's going to take that seriously because I don't even have a driver's license.

I've been talking to this girl at school. Her name is Danika. I don't know if you remember her. She's cool and all and she's cuter than Trixie but I have to be honest, I think I feel the same way about her that I do about Trixie. I know I don't feel about her the way that I feel about you but that's such an impossible bar I don't know if it's fair. You're probably moving on, with your new life, and I should too. We can't be together again.

If we were to be together, I would have to tell you about dragons. And if I told you about dragons, I would have to tell you about who you are. And if I told you about who you are and what you did and why you are who you are now, well, it defeats the whole thing, doesn't it? After so much, after what you sacrificed, you deserve to live in peace. And, I know that. I have to respect that. I have to let you have that because it's the last thing that I can give you and it's all you've ever deserved.

But, I heard this song the other day and this is what the chorus was:

Have we met before?

Maybe in another life I knew you

Maybe if I try I'll see right through you

And I'll remember who we were

Have we met before?

Maybe in another time I loved you

Maybe you're the one that I would run to

Don't know why it's all a blur

I think I know you

I think I know you

And the whole song is just about this guy and this girl are sitting down in the same coffee shop but not together and then they look up and it's like oh! There you are! I've been waiting for you! kind of thing and that's my new daydream. That you come back for university or something and we walk into the same pizza place and you see me and I see you and you just feel it in your soul and maybe I won't have to tell you anything, you'll just know.

But, that's unfair to you too.

Just know I miss you. Know you're always loved, somehow, some way.

(-.-)

"We are not going to be these kinds of parents," Jake said grumpily, pulling out a lock of his baby hair.

"Oh, we absolutely are," Rose said. "Except, maybe not the baby teeth. The baby teeth are weird."

Jake laughed and then he tilted a box of paper toward him. "It's all school work, I'm just going to torch it."

"What if there's something in there that's important?"

Jake let her take the box and start rifling through it while he got up to refill their water glasses and maybe fix a snack. They'd been on the living room floor since Jonathan and Susan had dropped off the boxes. It had been a little fun, in the beginning, hunting out old concert ticket stubs and notes that he and Trixie had traded in class – even an old beer bottle that Jake had hidden in snow pants in his closet so that his parents wouldn't know that he'd been drinking it.

Now, though, Jake had stopped thinking about the past. He was thinking about the future and it was making him hopeful and sad. Because, even though it was decades away, he could picture he and Rose doing this with their own children someday, all of the things that he and Rose considered vital childhood memories something to be laughed over on the living room floor and sorted into keep or discard piles. It was making Jake philosophical.

What made a life anyway? Mementos? Memories? Feelings?

Rose let out a screech from the living room and Jake darted back in, afraid of what she'd found even though he could think of nothing that he didn't want her to know about him and nothing he would care too much about her discovering. And then, he saw the one thing already in her hands.

His diary.

Jake had forgotten about it because from the moment that he had met Rose again in Hong Kong, he had never written in it again. Instead, every thought that he had, no matter how stupid, no matter how sappy, it had gone into an email to her instead. By that logic, Jake shouldn't care about what she read in the diary because he'd said worst to her face. But, Jake didn't know if he wanted her to read it. All of that teenaged angst, all of that real pain, all of that desperation.

"Rose, give it."

"But it's addressed to me!"

"Rose."

Jake took a step toward her.

"What is it?"

"I wrote to you after you moved to China, about how I felt with Homecoming and losing you and what we were and it's … a lot, okay? It's just a lot and you already know how I was feeling so you don't need to read the words that I wrote you then."

Rose squinted at him. "Do you not want me to know what it says?"

Jake sat down on the arm of their couch, because it was more complicated than that but he wasn't sure how to put it into words.

"I really didn't think that I was ever going to heal the pain that I was feeling then. It might sound really emo or really cheesy or both. You knew I thought I was never going to get over you. Then, things in Hong Kong turned out the way they did, and you looked at me and I knew you knew me again and I was fixed. I knew it wouldn't be easy or anything and I didn't know if it would work but we had a real chance to try and that was enough. It was more than enough." Jake slid onto the floor and put his arm around Rose. "And now look at us. We've been together ever since that day and now I'm about to turn thirty-one! We're married, we're going to start our family. It's the past, Rose."

"One of them," she said and she frowned. "One second."

"Where are you –"

Jake didn't bother. She was off and running and Jake just leant against the couch. That was supposed to be a nice, sappy moment, and then he was supposed to kiss her. But Jake supposed that he wouldn't love her if she was predictable, so he sat and waited for her to come back so that he could get his kiss.

Rose reappeared, his diary in one hand and a bright purple notebook that she threw the purple notebook at him. Jake caught it easily.

"What's this?"

"I wrote to you too," she confessed, "from the moment I re-met you to the day we moved in together. I'm sure it's just as bad, if not worse than yours."

Rose took the seat next to him and Jake snuggled her into his side.

"I love you," Jake said. "Do you want me to look at this?"

"If you want to, I want you to. I want to share it all with you."

First, Jake kissed her, and then he opened her diary and she opened his and they began to read to each other, because if there was one place they could trust their souls, it was with each other.

(-.-)

Dear Jake,

Wow, I haven't written in this thing in a long time. I guess that's a good thing because I was using this to get out all of my anxieties about the other life and this life and us being together and I realized I didn't need to doubt or be anxious. At least, not with you and not about you or us. You love me as much as I love you and I know that all the way into my soul.

I guess I'm just nervous again. Tomorrow morning, I'm moving back to New York permanently. Or, at least, four year degree permanently. I want it to be more than that. I want it to be forever because New York is home to both of us and we are each other's homes. But that means everything is going to change again. We're going to be able to see each other all the time and then it's like … what if life happens to us? Again? But this time normal mundane life instead of big star crossed enemies life stuff.

Like, what if it turns out that you actually hate how I leave my socks on the floor and it's the straw that breaks the camel's back? Or we can't sleep at the same temperature and so one of us is always cranky in the morning? What if we both hate to sweep and so we don't sweep and then we argue about the dirty floor?

I think you have the same faith that I do that it's you and me in the end but what if it's not? That hurts too much to think about but it's all I can think about. My thoughts are just going like somebody put my brain into a blender. And I know you would want to hear all of this but I don't want you to hear that I have doubts because I don't want to. I want to go in headfirst because I'm going into it with you.

I want to do everything with you.

(-.-)

Rose knew that she looked ridiculous, in one of Jake's oldest t-shirts and her rattiest yoga pants, her hair tied up, and big yellow gloves on as she scrubbed at her and Jake's apartment. Jake looked just as ridiculous as she did though as he danced around the apartment, belting out to the show tunes that she had put on while they cleaned, his dance partner the vacuum. He came close to her, even though he had already passed by the bathroom and then he took her into his arms.

"Jake!" she squealed. "I smell like bleach!"

"Dance with me," Jake said.

"Now? We're cleaning."

"We can go back to it. You're beautiful and we're together and you're going to dance with me to this song."

Rose stripped off her big gloves and then she took Jake's hand in her own. They did an awkward tango down their narrow hallway and then he spun her around once they were actually in the living room, both of them doing some sort of box step so that neither of them hit the coffee table. They were chest to chest, nose to nose, dancing like they were in middle school, which they both now remembered clearly. It made Rose's heart ache to think of all the things that they had lost to gain what they had but she pushed it all away. The here, the now, that was what mattered the most.

And what was here now was Jake's lips.

It didn't matter that they had been deep cleaning all day and they smelled like cleaners and hard work. It didn't matter that they had both looked better before. What mattered was that they were here together now and the time that they had together was stretching all the way out in front of him.

"Kiss me," Rose whispered.

And Jake did.

(-.-)

Dear Rose,

There are millions of people in Hong Kong. Billons, probably, in all of China. If your dad moved to China for his job, there's a chance you might have moved again. You could be anywhere in this world and I would never know. I hope you're in Hong Kong, still. See, we're all going on a vacation there tomorrow. My whole family. And, well, maybe I'll see you again. Maybe it won't be the romantic lock eyes and everything gets to be okay but maybe it'll be like that day outside of the school, where I can see you smile and know that you're okay and that your life is good and we did the right thing.

I'll be looking out for you, in every sense of the meaning, forever.