[ The bravado is easy. At least the words. Nothing else chooses to stay still. The frayed edges that burned at one end and squeezed too tight at the other. He is right in that she needs little validation to know how she looks. Movies and magazines sales in the millions proved it for over a decade, and the new contract here, too. Which still wasn't the same. Billions of people who didn't matter, weren't ever quite real.
And Luther. Whether Luther agreed. Whether it even mattered to him or was just an indispensable, ledgered fact. (And that somehow forever sore realization it really did matter to her if it did or didn't to him.) Except she knew that wasn't it entirely either. She wasn't stupid. She didn't miss the few seconds. Here and there. Still. Ornate dresses and Swear-Ins. Luther dumbfounded, Momentarily wide-eyed. Tripping over his tongue. The tension the prickled slowly tighter and tighter in the greenhouse, that was as familiar as her old costume would have been.
But it was tangled up so much deeper. It always would be. In this place. In home. In.
In whatever they were becoming. Might be so long as they were all thrown together, here, and saving the world back home. Being made, again, of the two people who had lived the lives that proved they could live without each other. The strange new shape, that they were building from, with so many ghosts of those once upon a time children around them, and so many shards of those lives that broken around them too recently to avoid stepping on easily. ]
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[ The bravado is easy. At least the words. Nothing else chooses to stay still. The frayed edges that burned at one end and squeezed too tight at the other. He is right in that she needs little validation to know how she looks. Movies and magazines sales in the millions proved it for over a decade, and the new contract here, too. Which still wasn't the same. Billions of people who didn't matter, weren't ever quite real.
And Luther. Whether Luther agreed. Whether it even mattered to him or was just an indispensable, ledgered fact. (And that somehow forever sore realization it really did matter to her if it did or didn't to him.) Except she knew that wasn't it entirely either. She wasn't stupid. She didn't miss the few seconds. Here and there. Still. Ornate dresses and Swear-Ins. Luther dumbfounded, Momentarily wide-eyed. Tripping over his tongue. The tension the prickled slowly tighter and tighter in the greenhouse, that was as familiar as her old costume would have been.
But it was tangled up so much deeper. It always would be. In this place. In home. In.
In whatever they were becoming. Might be so long as they were all thrown together, here, and saving the world back home. Being made, again, of the two people who had lived the lives that proved they could live without each other. The strange new shape, that they were building from, with so many ghosts of those once upon a time children around them, and so many shards of those lives that broken around them too recently to avoid stepping on easily. ]