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You can be so unknowingly cruel at times. Just when I thought I’ve gone over things, gone over you, you suddenly decide to confess your feelings out of the blue.
“I know. And I’m sorry, Pidge.”
Oh, how I loathe these words. How I loathe myself for making such a choice. But it is one I’ve decided for the both of us. You simply cannot have me.
Someone like you, full of vigor, full of youth, full of life cannot have an old moldy rock weighing you down.
“She has the future in her hands.”
I tell your brother of your feelings, of mine. He has been a dear friend, once a formidable enemy, but now an even more formidable ally. And so, I dare entrust this secret to him: the secret of us, of what could have been.
“So you like Katie. So what?”
I pray and hope that he’d tell me to back off, to reaffirm my decisions, but he does not. He says he trusts you and your choices, like we trust him with our lives. He says I get to make my own calls too much that sometimes I don’t notice making pretty stupid ones.
“It’s not stupid! He’s your little sister.”
I frown at the answers I didn’t want hear. I want him to tell me to leave you alone. I want him to be your shield, to be that brother to you. But he isn’t. Matt isn’t so narrow-minded to be that and I knew deep down in my heart that he isn’t ever going to be that even for you or for me.
“She’s twenty-two, Shiro.”
And I am thirty-three. I know perfectly what Matt meant. You are old enough to make your own decisions. You are old enough to want to be with me. But am I still young enough to be with you?
“I can’t, Matt. I just can’t.”
That is his cue to leave and he does stand up and takes it but before he does, he tells me about you, of how you’ve liked me for years, years longer than I’ve liked you. He lets me be with only silence as my company. I ponder and ponder and ponder.
Was my decision the right one?
“Was leaving you to your own devices the way to go?”
I am terrified of myself. I’ve done and made it so that we cannot be and yet I still want you, as I’ve had for years. And somehow, miraculously, you seem to want me too. It gives me hope for us but it does not come without a cost.
“And the cost is you, your future, your hopes and dreams.”
But still, here you are in my room. Matt must have sent you. The red in your eyes are still imminent. The rasp of your voice, the cracks in them cuts through me as you reasoned that we won’t be wrong, that we still have a chance, that we still have hope.
“How about the hopes of your future?”
You, who’s been brilliant and enigmatic, daring but not reckless, intelligent and witty. You, who is brimming with life. I feel like I might end up holding you back. I am at the middle but you, you’ve still got the view of the starting line trailing right behind.
“You are my hopes for the future.”
And you break it all down. The walls I’ve built, the walls I’m still building. You crash through them and they tumble down, fall and crack and break like Humpty Dumpty, like little old me.
“I’ll only hold you back, weigh you down.”
I finally let my thoughts out, my thoughts of you, of us and of what might befall us. It’s been tearing me apart all this time. I wanted so badly to be with you, to be by your side, to hold your hand, to be intimate. And here you are, asking me for just that.
“You won’t hold me back. You never did and never will.”
Your words are sweet nectar, alluring and reassuring me, like a bumblebee to a flower. I try to find reason, to find a logical reason to say no, to refuse you again. But I fail miserably, even at that.
“What if we don’t work out? What if somebody opposes to us? What if--?!”
And you see right through me, through my desperation, through all of my what if’s, through my real feelings for you. You accept it. You accept me. And you offer more.
“Not us, Shiro. Not us.”
You say. We are strong, unshakable, unbreakable, tested by battles with fervent enemies, by time and space, by our own thoughts at sea. We can make it through anything.
Even more so, if we are together.
And we are.