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“I love you” means many things. “You are my love,” as well, holds gravity and sincerity and sometimes the truth.
With Razz, love was a foreign concept. Love was the dream that strayed just out of reach, taunting him, seducing him with its promises and whispers of happiness unfelt. Love was the rush of emotion that swept him away like a furious current, one that he was happy to allow to consume and drown him.
The only thing swallowing his being at the present was a terrible aura of crushing guilt with a pinch of hope. Hope that threatened to dwindle every passing moment, every stolen breath, every reassuring stroke of bone on bone that admittedly did nothing to reassure him at all.
“It’ll be okay,” the whisper in his head hummed thoughtfully. If he could focus hard enough, he might be able to put a voice to the words, maybe conjure up the face that gave them life. Life at the present didn’t quite agree with the concept of time, pouting at a stubborn halt and driving a stake into his soul further and further as each second caught up with him.
If time stood still long enough, would it be possible to go backwards? He contemplated the benefits and curses, in his timeless pocket of dulling emerald and blaring red.
For one, he could step up to the breeze and guide it elsewhere, waving it on its way.
He could take back the words he didn’t mean to say, and with that, the robotic motions of his body as the strings of fate jerked his body to and fro.
He could shake the sleep from his eyes and tug at the collar of string around his neck. He wasn’t sure when they’d appeared, maybe they’d always been there. They gleamed a beautiful azure, much prettier than the ugly crimson scratching at his ribs, his soul, his eyes. Blue was the color of hope, of promise.
He remembered the first time he had truly come to appreciate the color blue. Blue had wrenched his eyes open from slumber, splashing murmured violets and gleeful pastels that forced away the monochrome haze that clouded his eyes. What a beautiful color it was, full and round and dancing with muted joy and hushed futures.
Unfortunately for him, blue was also a bubble.
Bubbles do what they do best—
—they pop—
and as the veil between the horrors of reality and a soft sheltered comfort hisses away,
so does
his
self control.
He was not in control of the haunting howl of loss that would echo throughout the core of his mind for many years to come in the timeless wasteland of his physical prison.
He was not in control of the surge of magic and energy buzzing through the open air, the sun a neutral witness as light brighter than white-hot confession rained down and scorched away his sins.
He was not in control. He was not in control. He was not in cont—
perhaps a little inkling had shuffled its way to the front of his mind, turning a What If to a Remember When.
perhaps he deserved it. perhaps they deserved it.
Did Razz regret it? He’d like to think that he did. He knew what love was, a torrent of passion that demanded more, more, more.
“I love you,” a scream daring the world to defy it.
“I love you,” a series of whimpers as snow drifted through the popped beauty of blue.
“I loved you,” a whisper with no particular voice as it swept away with an unpitying breeze.
As he watched with gray, sullen eyes,
the color bleeding out as he fell more in love,
a breeze kissed him like the color once had, sweeping away their past, their present, his future. And he knew in that moment, more than any moment before the time stood still,
that he loved them,
and they—
—had LoVed him too.