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“Before I go, can you take care of my diving helmet for me?”
Freminet looks at her, tears roaming in his ocean eyes, blurs away the image of the person in front of him. His right hand tugging on the sleeve, such small action to expose his stressful status right now.
“Why? Aren’t you coming back?”
Charlotte asks, her voice trembling. Her eyes sob, she’s confused. Freminet is lying, she knows it. She assumes she can read him like a book, all of his actions, words are exposing him. If he’s coming back, why does he have to give her such a heart-breaking goodbye like he’ll disappear forever? She knows it, but why. Oh poor Charlotte, if you knew he was lying, why do you still believe his lie? Why are you lying to yourself that he won’t leave you? How fool has a person become when they fall deep inlove?
“I will Char. But I don’t know when.”
He looks away as words slip out of his lips. He’s too afraid to see the anger and disappointment in her eyes. A second of silent passes, which feels like centuries to him, Charlotte gives him nothing but a long sigh. Her soft hand finds him, not wanting to let him go. Even if she knew it was his choice, to leave her, to go into a dangerous mission in Snezhnaya.
“Do what you want, as long as you come back.”
“Please promise me, you will come back to me.”
Her heart beats faster and faster as each minute passes, waiting for an answer from him. But there is no answer, nothing but a familiar painful knot twists in her stomach, causing her to growl.
Rain.
Suddenly the sky turns dark, crystals drop down from the above, disposing everything around her. Nothing left, nothing is there from the start. It was just a dream
-
Charlotte wakes up, her forehead is full of sweat, eyes brimming with tears as the alarm sounds fill the silent atmosphere.
“Fuck.”
She curses, tears start to trim down her pale face as she covers herself with a cotton blanket. Her hands are messily looking for something on the bed, a picture. A picture of a blonde boy, standing in front of the Lucine waterfall, smiling with a pack of Lumidouce Bell in his arms. Her chest tightens as she looks at the picture. The happiness and persistent desire to be suddenly satisfied made Charlotte not know whether it was him in front of her or really just an illusion she had painted herself so many times
“He won’t come back, stop waiting.”
Murmurs to herself, Charlotte cries out louder. Carrying the pain that no one knows and perhaps even Freminet doesn’t. Should she be angry? Should she hate him for lying and abandon her?
How could she? She loves him so much that she has to comfort herself by living in those days of nostalgia and unfinished memories, longing for him quietly until the pain fades away.
“This is so miserable, how longer am I supposed to wait for him?”
-
Charlotte looks at herself in the mirror one last time before she leaves the house. Despite how nice she dresses, her tired eyes and pale face cannot fool anyone, that’s why she starts to avoid small conversations with the acquaintances she meet in the town or else they would drag her up, and ask her about her well-being, which she has been avoiding these days.
Working as the reporters for years, Charlotte made herself a habit. Always carry monsieur Verite with her, to capture every mesmerizing moment in her life. Such as right now, she is standing in front of Lucine Waterfall, where Freminet confessed to her before. She takes out her camera, pointing it to the exact angle where he stood. Memory runs in her head, just like a mini movie, in which she remembers every little detail in it. It is still the exact same place, the exact same angle, the Lucine waterfall hasn’t changed anything. So why does this place look so remote, so strange compared to how it used to look like in her collectives?
Still the place she took this photo, but Freminet isn’t here anymore.
Charlotte enjoys listening to the sounds of water splashing out, the sounds of those pigeons flapping their wings and the sounds of the wind. But why does everything to her sound like a choked farewell right now?
“Freminet, are you sending your farewell to me into the wind?”
She gazes upon the sky, the loneliness covers her mind, leaving her nothing but the soaring sky and the pain in her heart. Suddenly, she remembers about the letters she sent to him. In those letters, she asked him so many things, “are you eating well?”, “is Snezhnaya that cold? Please wear your coat, stay hydrated.”, “are you coming back to me?”. But no matter how many letters or how long she wrote, Freminet hasn’t replied to any of them. No one can wait forever, she doesn’t have the courage or reasons to stay. Charlotte could leave, live her normal life, with a new love. But she wants it to be Freminet so badly that she’s afraid that she has to live her whole life, pretending that she is not waiting for him.
“Is he even alive?”
As the thought runs to her mind, the monochrome world falls into silence.