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The grass; soft and welcoming, brushing gently against her calves. The scent of summer is thick on the air.
The hillside; rolling up from the beach and all the way back to the forest, blanketed in that beautiful green grass. She can hear the trees rustling in the light breeze some ways behind her.
The ocean; neverending, stretched out before her like an infinite canvas. Jewel-green at its shallowest where it runs up onto the sand, and the deep blue of an abyss out where it meets the horizon.
Viola has never been so present, so content. She’s here on this hillside, sitting in the grass with everything she could ever have dreamed of laid out before her. After all this time, she has peace. She can hear it in the birds’ chirping and the gentle roll and crash of the waves on the shore.
The only reason it’s all so beautiful, though, is because of Todd. Todd. Just thinking his name makes her heart ache, but in a good way. The way that reminds her that it’s all real, because sometimes she doubts it. Even after all this time (a year and a half, she thinks, give or take a few months) she still wakes up in the middle of the night terrified that she’s anywhere but with him. They’ve been forced apart far too often, sometimes of their own will and sometimes not, but regardless of the circumstance it hurts her. It’s a rubberband that gets tighter and tighter the farther away they get, cinching around her heart. She can tell Todd hates it too; he gets this low, worried buzz in his Noise whenever he’s stressed about her, a loop of ViolaViolaViolaViolaViola in the background of his mind. But when he sees her again - god, when he sees her, the emotions that rush to the forefront of his Noise are all bright and happy and so overwhelming and painted so clear on his face that Viola can’t think of anything but how much she loves him. She loves him. She loves him.
This - the hillside, the ocean, the cottage nearby where they live - it’d all be worthless without Todd. It wouldn’t mean a damn thing without him.
She’s brought back to the present by a thumb slowly tracing over the top of her hand, almost reverently. She looks down to where a head of dusty brown hair is spilled across her lap and has to fight back a smile. It’s pointless, though, because Todd makes her smile wider than she ever thought possible, and there’s no reason to hide it.
Viola, Viola, Viola.
Her Todd. The one she started and ended a war for. The one she lives and breathes for. The one she will die for, without hesitation.
“Yeah?” she says in response to his Noise, lifting her free hand off the grass and tangling it in his hair.
“This is…” Todd takes a deep breath. “This is it.”
She knows what he means. This is everything they fought for. Just her, him, and Ben, in a cottage they built on a stretch of the coast that doesn’t have anyone around for miles. After Todd woke up and things had settled down, they rode until they found this place. They didn’t know what they were looking for, of course, but they knew it when they saw it.
Todd squeezes her hand. His Noise is swirling with images of her laughing, splashing in the shallow surf, eyes alight and on him. She tightens her grip, her heart just absolutely aching.
“Todd,” she breathes. He sits up then, bringing his free hand to her cheek. She feels herself smile, sees him smile, just absolutely beaming at her like she’s the only thing that exists in the world.
“My Viola,” he says, blushing a little bit. After all this time he still does that. Still says effing, too, rather than the actual word like she does. She loves it, though. It’s him.
She drifts forward until their foreheads are pressed together. Todd runs his thumb over her cheekbone, his Noise just full of love. It’s at times like these that she wishes she had Noise of her own, because she’s feeling the exact same things he is but she can’t express it with words. She feels so much for him and even though he knows, he knows how she feels, she wants to tell him herself.
“Viola.”
She takes a deep breath, gripping onto his shirt and pulling him close, breathing him in. “Todd.”
“I love you,” he says. Plain and simple, something he tells her a lot lately.
“I love you, too.”
Words will just have to do for now.