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About a month in, Gaia returned to Auckland. She dropped her bags in Zeb’s unsuspecting arms and claimed it was time to drink. Like that, reality slid into a dream, an old furbished dream of them being together, being friends again and Axl had to blink several times during the course of the day to get his mind working.
He inhaled the world. The smell of apples was gone. He turned to her with a smile as she defeated Zeb at Injustice: Gods Amongst Us and thought to himself, this is my home.
Zeb left to do groceries (and work). Axl lounged on the sofa like a content cat in his kingdom. The roof still bore the scratches of a long-forgotten tree and Axl revelled in the lack of pain that knowledge brought (no wells, no eyes, no blinding lights). The downside was he had to relearn who Axl Johnson was; where Odin stopped and Axl began and whether there was any difference at all.
There was, but it took a while for him to find that out.
Gaia slipped into the room, slipping through Axl’s vision as she sat on his thighs (that brought a rush of pain to his head). For a minute, he considers pulling her to him, kissing her, letting his hands tremble through the orchard of her hair, letting her sink into him like sand and dust and all that is finite. His hands grapple at his sides.
She smiled at him, trailing a finger down his face. She asked him the things he could never say to Zeb, though he tried to force the words out, tried to stop Zeb from throwing away the red Freki shirt he had, tried so hard to let it all go but he was a stumbler. But he could never let Zeb go, never leave that part, that part that belongs to Zeb and Zeb alone go.
Gaia kissed his palms, turning them over and pressing them against her face. She doesn’t cry because she is Gaia once more and her shredded life was mending. He considered telling her that he still loved her but that’s what made her cry to begin with.
Instead, he took her in his arms and kissed her orchard of hair and forehead and they clung together, remembering the gods lost.
The ring lay buried under covers of shirts and underwear. It sang to him in the dark.
Months later, he took Gaia to bed. They curled into each other in the dark. He had yet to tell the others that she had returned and the bitter twenties part of him would never tell. Sometimes, she whispered her tales of the outside; France, England, the red forests of Spain, the greens of Norway… He listened to her stories as they lulled him away from the empty. Lighter does not mean better and he lived too long under the shadow of a God. They both had.
Gaia stroked his brow, sweat clinging to the tips. She licked it off and continued, a voice in the black. Axl wished he had his own stories but they were too tangled in the myths they wished to ignore. He knew how it cost her, from the way her hands crinkled, to the downturn of her mouth. Her veins were full of sap juice and her eyes seemed green pinpricks.
Axl wondered how he looked to her now. It took being Odin to notice her after all.
Gaia found the ring in his drawer one day. Without a word and under his scrutiny, she placed it back in the drawer and closed it. There was no sound, but Axl manufactured one in his mind, the deep emotional sound of a thud, of finality. His life was finalities now.
She took him to bed and all thoughts were banished but Axl can’t banish the imagined sound of a closing drawer.
Halcyon days became more permanent. They bickered at each other, Axl brought home free pizza, they went to get drunk. Liquid gold was in his veins now and he felt young again. And when he looked at them, his friends, his heart-shaped world where nothing can hurt them, Axl remembered why he never let go.
Gaia twined their fingers together, like branches in the wild.