STANDARD DISCLAIMER APPLIED.

that which lingers
by: pixie paramount (1/28/2008)
Kingdom Hearts, Roxas/Aerith & paint the roses red, red, red, darling

hush now, its okay, dry your eyes
dry your eyes; soul mate, dry your eyes (x 2)
soul mate, dry your eyes because soul mates never die
(placebo, without you I'm nothing) "sleeping with ghosts"

I sense there's something in the wind that feels like tragedies at hand
& though I'd like to stay by him, can't shake this feeling that I have
the worst is just around the bend
(danny elfman, the nightmare before christmas) "sally's song"

She hears the news, sits herself by the radio each day, and listens for a word—praying, hoping, and waiting for him to come back to her.

It's the waiting that hurts the most, no knowing if one of the hundred injured and killed where him, until she holds in her hands another letter comes, his hand writing scrawled messily:

I miss you.

He left in spring; he was just a boy, then. Barely old enough to go to war—too young, she thought, you're too young to fade away from me.

She was so selfish then, too. Comeback to me, she said, smiling despite how much it hurt to do so. (Because he told her that he thought her smile was beautiful and that he loved to see her smile.)

But he knew her too well, could tell that she was lying, and smiled softy—that small, beautiful smile that warmed her heart—in turn, promising that he would write her everyday.

I promise, he told her even when it felt like such a transparent lie. I promise.

But it was good enough.

There is a small—tiny, voiceless—part of her that believe he will never come back to her, that with each letter she writes, there will one day be a reply that begins with we are sorry to inform you and will end in our prayers and thoughts are with you.

But each day that goes by and by with out a letter, a tear, an I miss you, I will see you soon, and I love you. It quiets that part of her, until there are delays in his letters.

They become in frequent, sporadic, as the war furthers. His letters begin to smell like gun powder and blood and death.

And she dreams of him bleeding, dying, and writing: I will come back.

News spreads of the casualties in London, about how France is lost and how Germany might not fall.

Of the bombs, the bombs, the bombs that fall upon London, how they pop like fireworks in the sky, bursting on the ground.

(She dreams and dreams and dreams, painfully, of a bomb falling, falling, falling and him, on the ground, staring at it—awaiting it.

She always wakes before the contact, before that last good-bye. She wakes hoping, praying, that it isn't an omen.)

She takes up smoking after three months without a letter, without a war. She feels selfish and human with every drag, because some have it worse (like Kairi, who hasn't heard a word from either of her boys in a year).

She makes it a bad habit of taking any minute of sleep that she can, between work and the house and the worry.

Her hands are callused—like his, she imagines, though not as war-worn or cracked or blood stained—from work.

Zack writes to her more often to her than Roxas—dear, sweet, beloved boy; why won't speak?—and each letter she sends begins and ends the same: Have you heard? Have you heard? Have you heard?

It begins to hurt less and less with each reply. I haven't heard a word. I haven't heard a word. I haven't heard a word.

It begins to hurt less and less, staring at the now-empty house next door and the garden still thriving, growing wild with the roses they planted and the weeds that infected and the produce they grew to survive this new, dangerous world.

She's watering the garden they planted when they where kids, tending to the roses and forget-me-nots tenderly, and the sunshine's brightly above, warming her skin and her knuckles warn raw from all the weeds.

When a shadow falls over her—a lithe, skinny-boy

I'm back, his voice is soft in the wind. His body worn from war; he looks like a ghost.

And she smiles, hugging him to her, I know.

And they lived happily ever after.

author's note: for mahou, for writing daydream, daydraw for me.