Immortals | ✓

15 | aethera

A younger version of myself is laughing at me right now. It is calling me a hypocrite. And it's enjoying itself while making a mockery of me. I used to laugh at the idea of having 'last words'. What would one say, in a few seconds, that would change the entire narrative they had spent years building? How do you expect forgiveness in your last moments? How do you find the courage to express love in mere seconds when you have spent your whole life denying or hiding it?

I used to mock the idea of making amends and confessing to life's deepest secrets moments before it ended; until it happened to me.

I knew death wasn't an option, not anymore. I knew it from the moment I fainted. But before I had lost consciousness, I felt what I had never preached. I prayed. I prayed to stay awake, to see his eyes for a few seconds longer. I prayed to find the strength to mutter a few more words so that he would know I wouldn't be leaving him anytime soon.

I wasn't dying but slipping away from him, which felt equivalent to death.

Is this how life is going to be now? I asked myself when I fell unconscious. The pain from the arrow would leave, but his absence bothered me more. I couldn't feel his presence in the room when I began to gain consciousness, and it scared me to imagine that he, maybe, wasn't around. It scared me to know what had happened to that woman and what had happened to him.

I knew I would wake up soon; I felt how each of my muscles came back to life. It began with a tickle in my foot as Reah's fingers brushed against me. She had been visiting often. She could feel the pain; it felt like she was accessing it. She tried her best to heal it faster so I would wake up. She would whisper chants I didn't understand sometimes, but whenever she uttered those unfamiliar words, my senses would return to me.

But it wasn't until he entered the room that I felt myself return to the present. He moved slowly across the room, and I could feel him near me while my eyes hadn't opened yet. He didn't waste another minute to sit beside me, where Reah would often sit when she visited.

I couldn't understand why he was breathing erratically, but I wanted to calm him down. Tell him I was here, even if I hadn't woken up yet. That I could feel and hear him.

"I don't know," he whispered, and it was then that I noticed something in his voice. If I could see him, I knew I would see the most distressed eyes I had ever seen. "I don't know how this happened, Aethera," his hands found mine, and I could feel the back of my palm tingle as he placed a small kiss on it. His lips stayed on my hands, providing warmth to the frozen surface that my skin had turned into. "I don't understand how we went from strangers to this."

"I used to notice you, you know? I saw you on the first day. You...you were sitting near your window, and I just...I couldn't stop looking. I couldn't stop looking for months and years," I couldn't stop looking too, Art, I wanted to say but failed to find the energy even to move my lips, "Every time a book fell from your hands in the library because you were too focused to pick out another from the shelf, every time you muttered atrocities at yourself when your hair would fall over your eyes, every time you rolled your eyes at what someone said in class and every time you bolted from the corner of a room to find solace in the gardens, I saw you."

"I...didn't ever imagine how it would feel to talk to you, what I would say when I finally heard your voice. I didn't have a shitty morning that day. In fact, I had psyched myself to approach you, to bump into you nonchalantly in the library and say, if nothing, a hello," he chuckled, drawing circles on the back of my hand. "When you finally sat in front of me, I...I was struck. And I had no words. I don't think I will ever have words that will be enough for you, Aethera," his fingers brushed against my cheeks, and I felt the heaviness in my eyes disappear.