Title: Familiar

Summary: He is something she will never reach and somehow that is comforting. B/A future fic

A/N: Written for 15minuteficlets. The word was tattered.

 

 

 

She turned the worn pages carefully. Years later and this was her most treasured possession. It hadn’t been at first. She’d thought it a silly gift, something he’d had lying around; maybe a last minute thing when he realized it was her birthday and he didn’t have anything to give her. She was in Rome, years apart from him and miles away, when she noticed that one page was more tattered than the others, more worn, the words slightly faded. It was if he had marked this page as one marks a card. She trailed her fingers over the words, whispering them as she read them.

 

“With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,

  Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,

  I shall but love thee better after death.”

 

She wondered if he’d always intended to leave her from their first kiss until their last. It was something she’d never asked, never wanted to know; until now, now when her thoughts turn to the things she’s left behind, the people she has left behind. And those that have left her.

 

She picked up the phone to call him a dozen times and hung it up as many. She didn’t know what she’d say to him and scarier still, she didn’t know what he’d say. She needed that reassurance, the knowledge that he would respond and react the way he had always done. In her mind, he is her constant. The world may crumble around her, lovers may leave her along with father figures and sisters, but he remains hidden in some crevice of her heart. A light always shining.

 

A light that is forever on the horizon, never getting closer, never fading away. He is something she will never reach and somehow that is comforting. It’s a familiar and she can live with the familiar.

 

And so she is surprised when she picks up the ringing phone and his voice comes down the line.

 

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”