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The truth paints her face in multicolored shadows. Dark around the edges of her eyes, porcelain white across her cheeks, and twilight blue haloes her head as she walks closer to you. The waters rage behind you, a steady presence.
“Finally, I can face you without pretending.”
And the truth, all of it, messy and ugly at times, raw and yearning and wanting, impossible to contain, comes pouring out. Rushes from your lips like a waterfall. You have loved her. You have loved her for lifetimes. You love her now, can’t help but love her now, love her always. You love her like you have always loved her ever since she first saved you as a cub, wounded and bleeding and soothed only by gentle hands, and it is your curse, but also the sweetest blessing. Su Xiaohuan listens as flakes melt against her fair cheeks, melting and dripping like tears down her face. You wipe them away with your thumb.
You build a fire and watch as the flames paint her face golden. The sunset on your horizon. Fated to set, fated to rise, but always fated to leave you in the darkness for some time, even if you know it’s fleeting, so is the light. Fate is a cruel mistress but she is yours - both of yours. You find you cannot completely hate that which draws the two of you together like moth to a flame, but you also find it is impossible not to inevitably shed tears at the scorch marks left behind.
You think, but do not say: Do you know how many times I have cremated you? Just once, you would like to wake up to flesh and blood, skin and bones, warmth , instead of an ashen, fleeting memory.
Su Xiaohuan gives you that and the curse snatches it away, every single time.
You didn’t want her to fall in love with you, but for her, you are weak. You cannot control how eagerly kindling burns. You are cursed with love and without it.
“Even if it was just for one day,” you say, the mad truth of it all. Su Xiaohuan looks at your lips, and then at you.
“You’re too confident,” she tells you and you bite back a smile because yes, maybe, or maybe confidence and desperation share the same face. “I won’t fall in love with you.”
She tells you that you killed her father, you tell her you would kill anyone if it meant keeping her inside your arms for just a moment longer. You would move the heavens and the earth, if you could, if it meant she could be spared from bleeding out in the snow.
Su Xiaohuan listens to you tell her you wished to change the world, to protect her completely, and then asks, though it is not a question. “But fate still could not be changed?”
No. You look at her - you can’t help but look at her - at her rosy lips, her fire-lit eyes, her snow-white cheeks and her love that she cannot hide. You look at her and drink your fill, and this is salvation, this is your salvation and it is why you do not fear the void you must seal yourself inside of, to sate fate.
Yet, it is the same void she has saved you from every single time.
The water is dark, fathomless all around you.
“Perhaps, this is fate, isn’t it?”
You felt that void, that absence, aching inside of you for so many years. Too many years. It was a wound festering, rotting, which would not heal.
But tonight she closes it for you. “Would it be cold there?” She asks, her voice softening. You pull her close because she alone keeps you warm. She tucks her head into the crook of your neck, like it belongs there. She belongs there.
“The world without you,” your gaze gets lost, staring at the steady rise and fall of her chest. “Is hell.”
It is quiet, it is so quiet, the only sound that pervades your ears is the faint hush of the winter wind, as she raises her head to look you in your eyes.
“I truly cannot bear another separation from you,” you tell her. “I’d rather you forget me forever.”
“Idiot!” Su Xiaohuan tells you right back. “There must be some way to change fate.”
Your heart squeezes painfully inside of your chest.
She’s lucky, she says, she won’t die so easily, she says, and you-
You do not fight the urge to kiss her when the falling petals revive her past, dead memories. Because she is alive and warm beside you.
And oh - her lips are warm, and soft, and part easily, eagerly beneath your seeking mouth. She keeps coming back for more, and more, your lips catching and parting, always requiting. It is the apex of divine paradise. You push her down and she goes willingly, pulling you down with her.
You devour her, but not in the way she once feared you would.
Yet she trembles against you, and you her, and you will for her to be right, that there could be a way in this world that will not force your paths to diverge ever again.