A/N: My next project will be a collab GerIta with Dantefic that I'm really looking forward to, so if you enjoyed this keep an eye on both our profiles, it's gonna be really different but really great :)

Otherwise, thanks for everything guys, seriously I've had a blast with you all. Thanks for reading What We'd Do Without Gravity.

Epilogue Two

Forever At Last

Two years went by before I even realised it.

It was amazing, the time without Lovino was four times what I had with him but I was still in pieces. It worried everyone I knew, Feli, Francis, Gilbert... Well they were all I had.

The first time I pulled myself together after Lovino's death was for his funeral a week later. If there wasn't a funeral I honestly don't think I would have gotten out of bed that day. But I needed to be there for his sake, besides he had asked me to say something.

I only knew one other person at the funeral, Feliciano. He didn't pay much attention to me but I understood. Everyone there was trying to talk to him – he was someone who had grown up closest to Lovino, it was like the funeral was as much closure for him as it was a celebration of Lovino's life. Feli looked worse than I had ever seen him. He was pale and looked like he was about to be sick, not that I looked much better. When he reached out his arm shook and when he walked hi legs trembled.

The ceremony was in a beautiful church that I would later learn was the same church Lovino was christened in. There were flowers, lots of them and it was obvious Feliciano had a big say in how it would all look.

It went by all over my head, I couldn't listen to what everyone was saying, my eyes were fixed on the coffin.

There he was, it was shut and covered with bouquets, but the same body that I had beside me in bed one week before was there.

Before I even realised what was happening my name was being read out. It was my turn to take the stand and say what I had to. I rose slowly, still looking at the dark wood that contained the thing that had become so precious to me.

I could see everyone aside from Feli and Lovino's Grandpa wondering who this guy could be, and who he was to be standing up and addressing them all.

I had a speech ready but I abandoned it, I left it at home that morning. It was an artefact of another time and had no meaning here.

"Lovino was a person worth knowing." I said, recalling what he wanted this whole thing to be about, "In life, things happen to us that can change us. They can be any shape or size, but though all of them do the same thing – they change our whole recipe of ourselves so dramatically that they leave us wondering how we ever were before."

I took a deep breath and tried to swallow down the lump in my throat. I didn't plan on crying here, Lovino wouldn't have wanted it, I could just tell,

"Lovino Vargas was that change, and now his mark his has been made it will never fade, even now that he's gone." I looked amongst them all and thought back to how hurt Lovino had been by these people, all his insecurities because they couldn't see past his health to the gem he was, "You'd have been a fool not to let him leave his mark on you. Thank you."

I didn't stay at the service long, as Lovi had requested I didn't talk to anyone, I didn't let them in to what the two of us had so when I left none of them were any wiser to who I was.

You would think that funeral was my chance to let go but it wasn't. Or rather, I didn't let it be that. I held on to my feelings for him tightly and all the pain that came with them. As a result I was paralysed.

While the months passed and Feli managed to stand up on his two feet again and see the light again, I was just as bad as the day Lovi died.

The cafe didn't open again. That was something that through even all my misery I was able to be remorseful for. I ran out of money and had to sell it. It became something gaudy and awful, a dollar store or something with harsh strip lighting and soulless workers... You wouldn't have been able to believe that place was ever charming.

Feli dragged me put the house once a week, he demanded that we met up regularly since we both were close to Lovi and so were two of very few people who understood each other's pain.

One and a half years managed to pass very quickly but at the same time very slowly. It's like I had woken up one day all that time had gone by but at the same time once I woke up it felt like I had been asleep forever.

I didn't try and that was my fault. I only hoped that Lovino couldn't see me how I was, lying in a dusty bedroom watching the plants I had worked so hard for wither away. He would have slapped my hard if he was able to and yelled at me until he was red and breathless, and if he didn't need to breathe would have kept going days.

Though somehow it took a lot more than just thinking about him to pull together again, it didn't even take a bad night and a bottle of pills, it took two of them.

After nine months I tried to kill myself. That time it was romantic, I had an idea that I just wanted to see Lovino and if I died then it'd all be perfect. I was surprised when I woke up in a hospital bed with both Gilbert and Francis next to me.

Gil' and Francis stayed with me for almost two months after that. They tried their best with me but any time I did something productive it was because they had talked me into it. Gilbert got pretty mad at me and I couldn't blame him.

Actually first he was angry at Lovino, saying to Francis when he thought I couldn't hear him that he wished Lovino and I had never met.

But soon he just got frustrated with me. He was kind, he was one of my best friends but I could still see the patience was wearing thin. If I was being difficult he'd leave the house and come back hours later smelling of beer, but just slightly. He would have been sitting in a bar with a single drink sipping it as slowly as he could.

Francis I think secretly enjoyed playing nurse a little. He was a guy who was really perceptive in some areas but in others he was pretty oblivious and this was one of them.

They tried so hard so when I attempted suicide a second time, after two years had gone by, it was worse, far messier. It was so awful that it over shadowed the first one completely. It wasn't romantic this time either; it was simply because it all hurt too much for me to live with anymore.

But this time I saw someone, spoke to a woman.

I woke up for the second time after it happened; the first was a dizzy, disorientated blur. This time everything was clear, especially the nurse who was by my bed.

She had a soft face and kind eyes. Her hair was same colour as Lovino's... In fact so much about made me think of him that I almost just reached out to her.

We talked for hours, it was just so easy and by the end I had changed. She had told me what I had known all along, that how I had been living was wrong, not something that Lovino would have wanted. I needed to treasure what he didn't have. If I threw it all away , maybe I didn't deserve him after all.

When I asked for the same nurse the next morning no one else knew who I could possibly be talking about

The rest of my life started then. Before even I knew what was going on I had gotten a job, had replanted my garden, and was getting back into shape.

I was pulled together by thread. Maybe not even that, spiders web perhaps... But rather than looking at how weak it was and I built it up, I faced forward and made the thread into ribbon, the ribbon into string, the string into thick ropes, then chains, and finally big metal braces held me together, fixing around me tight.

There was still enough pain and heartache to make me fall apart again but I didn't let it catch up. I was running and there was a cape of grief that had caught the wind and flowed behind me. It went where I went, I couldn't shake it, if I was going somewhere bright it was coming too. There was nothing could do. It was there.

All there was left was running more, running on and on and keeping the black cape on the wind behind me. It was hard at first, I had to wonder in the beginning what it was all for if I couldn't stop running then I didn't want to start. Still, I forced myself to take the first few steps and realised quickly that I was gaining momentum and soon it was like I wasn't running at all.

One day I vanished.

It was like I had died this time but in a way that was totally different. Three years and five months since Lovino died and Feli had an engagement party. His life had changed completely too. By some feat the Vargas family was free of debt. Lovino's Grandpa had started a small time maintenance company somewhere in Sicily and Feli was doing what was asked of him the last time he spoke to his brother and really living his life. He and Ludwig were engaged and Feli was going to study art for four years in Toronto after the following summer. They'd return here someday but a change of view is what they both needed.

It was what I needed too. Without warning I left the morning after the party. I took very little.

Ha! That was something new to my life, 'I took very little'.

Memories were always better than the junk I had held onto for years and when I left gutted my house ready to let it be sold to whomever I realised that I wasn't going to miss that stuff.

I took some clothes, a framed photo of Lovi and me (one thing that even the reformed me couldn't bear to give up) and I piece of paper that was torn out of a notebook so long ago.

I landed in Rome but didn't stay long. I felt like I was unlocking and uncovering each small town as I went through it, they were like little secrets that I was learing. It was an easy life, I'd travel until I was running low on money then I'd get a bar job until I had it back again.

Finally, finally the last item on the bucket list was scored off. I had explored that vibrant country north to south. I did it while getting a ride in the trailer of a farmer's pickup.

I didn't have Lovino's ashes. He had asked them to be scattered in Italy but they went with his grandpa and now blew around over an incredible blue sea and sweet colourful houses.

But I did have his bucket list. In a way I felt like it was as much a part of him as his ashes were... This had his hopes and dreams and even though it meant little to him when we met by the time he passed away it was sacred to us both, whether it was because it contained all the things he wanted to do or because it brought us together I wasn't sure... Maybe it was precious for both those reasons.

Whatever it was, it was him. Now here I was in the beautiful rich Italian country side, with the smell of tomato plants around me and the warm breeze going through my hair, and a bucket list in my hands with everything scored off.

I held it up, the air took hold of it and pulled at it like it was trying to gently take it from me... I lowered it, kissed the paper, flattened it, and before I could change my mind I let it go. It sailed away, up and up and up... I liked to think it would never land. It would just keep going and going.

I never married, in my mind I was already taken, but when I eventually settled down in the south of France I knew a life alone wasn't for me. So I adopted two boys, Francis and Gilbert and raised them as my sons – they were a handful but I loved them both.

I opened a new cafe. Somehow I liked it better then my old one, maybe here in the small village where I knew almost everyone and had too many friends to count it felt more like the charming coffee shop I had aimed for. Besides, I had two little rascals to really add life to the place! I considered naming this place after Lovino but I never did, I gave it the same name as the old place. I had two tragedies in my life, and my cafe was one I still needed to pay homage to.

Francis grew up to be the feisty, smart mouthed one and it was Gilbert who became the showman, desperate to please. With the names I had given them, I had already assigned them a character in my head so seeing them grow up so different to the friends I had named them after seemed so crazy! When I told other people this they always said I should have named them the other way around, but I knew I had named them right. Those boys were their own people and grew up into their own men, not like my old friends at all.

When I moved back to Spain, it felt right. Francis came with me, Gilbert lived up North by then, he was married and I had a grandson on the way.

My sons were told so much about Lovino that they had never questioned why I never married. I think Lovino became part of their lives, I had spoken about him since the boys were toddlers. They never tried to convince me to get back out there, though they never said anything, I was pretty sure they understood that Lovino had a place in my heart that couldn't be given to anyone else.

By the time they were adults they spoke of him like he was alive. I'd do something silly and they'd ask "What would Lovino say to that?" like Lovino might just come into the room at any second and tell me how dumb I was and tell me off. Or maybe I'd see something pretty and they would ask if Lovino would have liked it, like it was something that I could bring home and give to him. He was the invisible member of the family that had just as much power as the rest of us and was just as loved. In a way it was odd, thinking I had sons older than Lovino when he died. Francis and Gilbert were ageing, we all left Lovi behind, eternally frozen at nineteen. He was the youngest of all of us but none of us ever thought of him as a teenager.

I kept my cafe alive in Spain until I was physically unable. I didn't pass it on to either of my sons, Francis was still in Spain but he and Gilbert in France had their own lives to live. I sold the building, scared that it would go the way my old one did and become something ugly that would make me wince every time I passed it in the street but I was spared. It became a shoe shop. Nothing amazing but after the last one this satisfied me.

When I cried over Lovino, I let myself cry. This didn't stop until the end of my days but I didn't hold it back, I kept running, letting what had destroyed me before stay flowing behind me.

September 4th was his day. The anniversary of his death.

That day was a hard one every year, I didn't go out on that day most years and the cafe always closed. That was the day I let it all brush against me again and I touched the grief that had devastated me for two years again, in some ways I shouldn't have every started to dwell on that day but I knew I wasn't going to stop. I tried so hard for him for 363 other days; September 4th was like something religious for me.

I lived for 68 quiet September 4ths more after he died. It seemed mind boggling when I thought of the sum, warm in bed one Sunday afternoon.

Gilbert was in the kitchen with Francis, there was some drama in the kitchen downstairs over buying a couch for Ada, my eldest Granddaughter for her new apartment. Both the boys were fussing so much it'd embarrass her but she was leaving home for the first time. She was Lovino's age now...

Never ever did I forget Lovino. Barely an hour went by that I didn't think of him.

He was the voice of reason in my head, the reason why I woke up extra early to watch sunrises, the reason I was still alive as well as why I had touched death in the first place.

Six months meant nothing to most people and these days for me they seemed to pass in a blink of an eye but I never let myself think that any time, no matter how little was worth wasting. Six months had given me something so magical that it would consume my life until the day I died. Six months of one person had given me enough for me to think of our time together and never be bored of recounting memories.

There was a cheer downstairs, the perfect couch had been ordered.

I smiled with them, glad I had lived to see the day that my two grown up sons were able to drink wine and order couches. It was such a normal life those two lived but it was such a happy one.

I wondered if it would be any different if Lovino were there.

In a way it wouldn't be, it would just give the Lovi living with us already a body and a face, but at the same time it would all be different, so, so different. I thought of an alternate world where the bed I lay in was big enough for two and I had my arms around his waist, face in the crook of his neck and warmth on me. I smiled lightly, letting myself stay in that fantasy world as I took a few last breaths, we had been here before, long ago but this time we were ready. I clung to him back then, trying to wrestle him out of the hands of death but this time as I conjured his image one last time I was content for him to take the final step into the unknown, equally I was fine going first, because one would follow seconds after the other, with no time for sadness. Our bodies would cool like machines that had been switched off at last but the warmth that once possessed them ran together, to a place warmer than ever.

.oO0Oo.

I woke up on a beach, I was lying on wet sand with my face up to the sky.

I sit up slowly, blinking and looking out to a blue sea, one that I just instinctively know has no end.

I stand up, reuniting with my limbs like it's the first time I've used them in years. It's the easy way my body moves that gives it away but looking at my hands hat confirms it – I'm young again. I run my fingers through a curly full head of hair and then over my face which has skin on it tighter than it has been decades.

This place is timeless, only the tide is subject to the moments that pass it.

I stretch; it feels like I've been lying there for so long even though the place that I'm in isn't one I've ever seen before.

I turn my head and freeze. I am not alone.

At the other end of the beach someone wades in the water, trying to jump over waves, they're energetic and so lively. I know them.

"Lovi!" I cup my hands over my hands and yell out his name, the sound carries on the wind but doesn't sound harsh. It's loud, I yelled it out with all my might but as it hits my ears it doesn't hurt, it's like it goes past my ears and settles gently in my brain.

He's there and I'm there. He's there and I am too. It's been so long, and I wonder how long it will be before I get so overwhelmed with joy that everything goes white.

I start to run, tears streaming down my face. He has looked up and seems to be locked in place. He's waited a long time... So have I.

Slowly he started to move, the waves crashing at his knees as he tries to run in the water. He falls after a few steps, and looks up at me face red on his hands and knees, a familiar feisty expression. I'm close enough to see his face now, big eyes that never did get paid justice in photos, and I don't even want to blink; I just want to drink it in.

I laugh, I laugh hard. He got over excited, he shouldn't have tried to run through the waves.

I move into the water too, it's cold but doesn't bother, "Oh Lovi, I love you." I muse, and it's like we were never apart. I don't run anymore. I savour the anticipation of seeing him stand up and reach out for me, it's all in three dimensions, and it moves. These are arms that can curl and bend, wrapping around me. This is a body I can lift and squeeze tight, that I can seize the lips of and become part of by lacing our fingers together.

There's no need to rush now, here we don't need to hurry, we can take it all one step at a time.

I'd keep walking over to him forever if I had to, because finally we have forever to spare.

The End