CW: major character death
"What is wrong with you? You've been so unavailable, and now you're just leaving like this? How could you?" I shout.
"I...I..." She can't explain herself, and her breath comes out in heaves and sobs. I would have comforted her were it any other time, but this has been going on for so long that I can't take this anymore.
"You've got nothing to say. Get out and stop acting like a child."
And so I sent Theo off to catch her boat, angry that she was distant and becoming a million worlds away from me.
It was supposed to be a one-month trip, but after that month was up, one week passed. Then two. She still wasn't home. When the nights are dark, sometimes I picture she is coming home to me. Other times, when I'm more hopeless, I picture her with someone else. At my worst, I'm imagining her staying where she is, never to return. It's what I do, because without her, I can hardly sleep.
Tonight, I've lost all hope of her return. The rain batters down the walls and the roof, pounding, pounding, pounding nonstop. I like it a little, but not the way I used to. Before, it sent me to sleep. Now, it keeps my mind away from all the pictures flashing through it. There's a knock at the door. Wearily, I drag myself from the bed, open the door, and find a worn-out man standing on my porch. He hands me a letter, hands shaking from the cold. "I'm very sorry."
I read it, and the farther my eyes go down the page, the more tears come to fill them. It feels like glass shards have been driven into my chest, and my insides twist and untwist rapidly. I blink when I reach the end, hoping that this won't be true. It is. "No!" I shout, crumpling the letter into a ball in my fist and throwing it out onto the porch. "It isn't--it can't--not Theo! The ship was lost? She's been presumed dead? How? How? HOW?" This isn't happening, is it? I grab the man's arms, shaking them vigorously before I realize what I'm doing and stop abruptly.
"Sir, please. I don't know, either," he replies feebly. I slam the door in his face, not caring about anything anymore. The next thing I know, I'm shouting and running and throwing objects to the walls and to the ground, shattering them with varying degrees of success, struggling and gasping for air. Words are beyond me by this point. I cannot mend, cannot create with the words that once came so easily, so I tear down. I raze and ravage and destroy until the man enters again and says I'm making such a racket that I'm waking the street.
"If you were this broken, you'd get it!" I scream and return to tearing the house apart until I can no longer do anything but curl up and hide in the room with a too-big bed, crying myself to sleep out of regret that I never said goodbye.
The last thing I said to her lingers in my memory. Get out and stop acting like a child! Is that really the last thing she'd remember of me? If I could just have one last chance to say that I loved her, to say goodbye, but I can't change that, so I'll live with this welling up inside of me until I'm drowned from within.
I somehow survive the first month.
When they tell me to, I get out of bed and I bathe and go through the motions of life, which is now exhausting and leaves me drained.
And I pretend that I'm not as hollow and aimless as I am.
I didn't attend the funeral, but they say her father tried to sing an old lullaby, words changed because he had no other way to express his suffering. They say he got so choked up that he couldn't make it past the first two lines and collapsed to the ground in tears, blinking so delicately it destroyed them all.
More pictures flash in my mind these nights, ones of her drowning, and now they come even when I'm asleep. Did she go out peacefully asleep as the ship sank and filled with water? Or did she panic when she realized how low and waterlogged the ship was? Did she think of me? What did she think? Was I forgiven?
I sometimes wake with her name in my mouth. Theo. Then I turn over and reach out for her, but my fingers interlock with only air, and I cry inconsolably, shuddering in the empty darkness that surrounds me in every direction.
A/N: Angsty perspective flip of the infamous "Theo tries to convince Philip not to duel Eaker, but he goes anyway and dies" one-shot. We might write that, too.