Chapter Text
I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything.
Pyeongchang, 2018;
He is hugging Tessa so tight that they might be one being altogether. She knows there will be bruises in her pale skin later, but she couldn’t care less. He can mark her wherever he wants, for every atom in her body is already his.
The hug feels like it lasts both an eternity and a minute, just like the past two years have. She is not ready to let go, not ready to not go to the rink everyday and hear his laugh and feel his hands running though her body.
She knows he feels the same. She can hear it when he looks at her and in the silent hug they share before that last skate and “one last time” and “I love you”.
She thinks about the weird feeling she gets when they spend too many days without talking to each other – they have been there a few times, after Sochi and after her first surgery and after he broke up with her when they were too young to comprehend the depth of their relationship (not that they can understand it now).
Jordan laughs when Tessa tells her that and says they’re codependent and that they should discuss that in one of their conjoint therapy sessions. She’s not sure that’s the case.
None of that matters in this moment because she’s in a high of adrenaline and happiness and they just won the fucking olympics again. She cries during the flower cerimony and he kisses her shoulder and whispers in her year how much he loves her and “I can’t believe we actually did it”. It’s a lot and before she knows he is twirling out of the podium.
1546, somewhere in France.
They fall in love between furtive smiles and knowing glances. Their hands brush against one another sometimes, and it gives them both butterflies in the stomach.
They are 14 and 16 and it feels like something out of one the songs she loves so much, about delicate maidens and handsome knights. He asks for one of the ribbons she wears in her hair “for good luck, Tess” one time and she ties a green one (because it matches her eyes) around his wrist, and he kisses her hand. Hours, later she can still feel his lips pressed against her soft skin.
They kiss for the first time six months after that, a cast peck on the lips that turns into a deeper kiss and then another and another and another. She could spend her whole life kissing him and never get tired of it. They make marriage and eternal love promises to each other in-between kisses.
They never get married. She marries a very rich Italian merchant that is away most of the time and has rough, brute hands and he marries a pretty blonde Lady that his parents chose for him. They never see each other again other than in dreams.
1853, London.
She is a Victorian princess in a red ball gown and he falls for her green, gorgeous green eyes immediately. They dance and flirt and laugh during months and it’s innocent until it’s not.
They have sex in her room and in his room and in the gardens of the castle. And in a piano that is conventionally placed in a room no one really goes to. He leaves marks in her body but it doesn’t really matter because her husband is away most of the time anyway. He cannot comprehend how could someone have such a woman and treat her like a duty.
There are whispers everywhere about them and she can feel judging eyes burning her back when she passes sometimes. Neither of them care, all her friends have had affairs too and it’s only something to distract her of the monotony of the daily life.
It’s all fun and games until it’s not, until her husband comes back and finds out and says he is going to kill her for being a whore. She promises between screams and tears that nothing happened and she is never, ever, going to speak to him again. He leaves court and goes back to the countryside because seeing her magnetizing eyes everywhere and not being able to make her laugh is too much. He prefers to forget and pretend it never happened. It’s easier that way, and she was just a distraction anyway.
She gives birth to a screaming babygirl a while later and she is so happy and her husband loves the child so much. The girl has dark hair and hazel eyes and a easy smile, and looking at her makes Tessa’s heart ache.
1917, Yorkshire.
She is a nurse in a hospital full of men that were sent there to die. She knows there is probably nothing to be done to save them, so she tries her best to comfort the families and talk to the patients and minimize their pain. It’s hard and painful, but she does it anyway, because they are at war and everyone has to do their part. It could be much worse; no one in her family is at the front.
The doctor assigns her to a young soldier for the next days, telling her he doesn’t have anyone. He has a nice face and is cracking jokes to the guy who is next to him and, honestly, he doesn’t even look in that bad of a shape. But he also has dark circles around his soft brown eyes and grimaces when she examines him for the first time.
He asks her name, “your real name”, in the second day because he wants to know the first name of the last person who will talk to him before he dies. He is feverish and can’t stop thinking about “Tessa, Tessa, Tess, has there ever been a sound more beautiful than her name?”.
He tells self-deprecating jokes and makes her laugh so, so much and surprisingly survives the night and she thinks maybe this one might live. He doesn’t.
She cries a whole month for the young soldier that captivated her so much even though he is not the first one, nor the last she tends to. She falls sick with spanish influenza eight months later and does not survive.
Her family mourns her loss. No one cries for him.
1925, New York.
She is wearing a silver sparkly dress that is maybe a tad too short and he invites her to dance one night in a jazz club full of people and smoke. They end up dancing all night and they’re both drunk and don’t to remember to exchange anything besides first names.
He looks around the room for a girl with dark hair and bewitching eyes in the next few times he goes to a club, but she is nowhere, so he forgets about it with a glass of whiskey.
1996, Ilderton.
He takes her hand for the first time. She never lets go.