EAST OF EDEN ( anakin s. ) ✔️

030 | How Far He'd Go..

Unbeknownst to her, it was not only the language of the soul which they mirrored in each other instinctively and in perfect understanding, but the language of the flesh as well. Tears have strived their way into Eden's sight as well, turning it to a merciful blur less than a second after she's taken her first two small and faltering steps forward.

Fortunately for both of them, the distance between them was closed before either of them could collapse under the weight of the dark thoughts that have laid siege to their minds while apart from one another. In a breath's notice, Eden's open arms greeted Anakin on his return to the place where he belonged. He wrapped her in his warmth and molded closer to her until their hearts could almost touch through their chests in a matching rhythm echoed in a plethora of vibrations drumming through their ribcages, through their skin and their clothes. In that thrum, they found the strength to at last sigh relieved.

To inquire about what had happened would have been a viable choice for either of them to start that conversation stuck in their throats like a knot begging to be undone. However, both had some higher understanding of what had driven them back to each other's arm before their duties had been completed, making words all the more futile as a medium of expression.

A better means of communication was that which naturally came wrapped in a silence respectful of their ragged breaths: the tenderness of Anakin's touch climbing up to hold her face and feel his thumbs onto her cheeks or across both her temples, the despair riddled into Eden's hands clinging to his tunic's margin cut across his chest, all the way into the gravitational attraction between their lips. Their breaths met as ghosts in the caressed sanctity of a kiss which, in its birth, put to shame the dreams writing love as a conduit of lust; between Anakin and Eden, the connection the kiss painted was of the same fabric as the one stirring the galaxy in its spiral.

There, at long last, despite it being but a short peck in its nature, they've found a canvas for all their emotion, letting it release from their wary vessels and allowing healing light back in. They had recalled: the night was dark, but their souls were radiant. 

Eden's right hand raised in the narrow space between them that formed when Anakin chose to rest his forehead on top of hers; he enjoyed a sparse moment of true safety, as her gentle thumbs wiped his cheeks clean of tears.

"I'm not leaving your side ever again," Anakin proclaimed, his tone a defeated whisper that as soon as he caught the whiff of a shiver underneath her caring touch, he had to bury someplace else, where his vulnerability had some dignity left within it too. Eden felt where his motion was leading, anticipated his half step closer before it happened, and thus was able to lean her head to the side and offer Anakin her shoulder, a home he gratefully collapsed his tears into in a moment of such imprudence that he even dared hold her firmer now that his arms wrapped around her once more. 

She needn't hear the explanation she was sure he held attached to his uttered words; not just yet. Not while she was still putting in order her own thoughts to explain what she had seen as a reason for her to feel the very same way: they should never leave each other's side again. A bad feeling coated the possibility of going their different ways a fourth time. 

The minute spent regaining his composure in that position restored enough of Anakin's resolve to inhale sharply. His nostrils filled with her scent, the only aroma of gentle strength, without definition in the realm of perfumes -albeit he did think Eden smelled of the desert sometimes, if the shine in the grains of sand was made out of vanilla petals grinded and frozen into a perpetual waterfall of incense-, that he could get drunk on instantly. This drunkenness was not the usual kind: it did not numb everything, but only a select few of his more irrational emotions, compelling him thus to admit that he was holding the most precious heartbeat in his world and she needed him to be strong too.