A/N: This is dedicated to Rachel (PenguinsWillReignSupreme) for her beta-ing, critique, and all around awesomeness. The title is inspired by the song No One's Gonna Love You by Band of Horses. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
It goes a little bit like this:
He is seventeen and in love.
He is also in denial and in doubt and in accord with the fact that, in a way, he is carved (painfully, beautifully) in half.
(Interesting side note: both pieces belong to her).
But mostly it is just love.
—
It goes a little bit like this:
Her hair is made of moonbeams. Every spring, crocuses sprout from the tips of her fingers and when she looks at him, he sometimes forgets that oxygen isn’t just an ‘optional thing’.
(Inhale. Exhale. See, it’s that easy, you moron).
His head is just so filled with possibility, with what ifs, with coulds and woulds and
hope and he feels like he is on the brink of something brilliant. One step - one glorious, blind step - is all it takes before he starts to fall.
—
It goes a little bit like this:
They are sitting on her grandmother’s porch swing, swaying barefoot in the fresh spring air. Just beyond their reach, April rain drums against the earth in a perpetual staccato, flushing the world anew. He can see flecks of green grass peeking through the damp soil almost bashfully, and maybe if he weren’t so nervous, he would think about symbolism and new beginnings and the fact that her eyes are green too and shouldn't that mean something? But then she's leaning her head on his shoulder and all of a sudden his mind is wiped clean as he catches the faintest hint of nectarines on her hair.
He looks up and through the rain he can see the sky. It is an eternal echo of pale grey, a yawning canopy of not yets and not quites, a blank slate of never ending possibility. (And it's a funny thing really, because even though it's raining, he can't see any clouds).
"Remember when we were kids?" she says, dragging her big toe across the floor. "We would sit here and drink lemonade while Nana told us stories about the war. Neither of us paid attention." She looks at him slyly. "Well, I didn't anyway."
He can practically taste the air, sitting fresh and sticky atop his tongue, and he can see colour everywhere: golds and greens and blues, glistening, glistening. Everything glistening. When he is around her, it's like a camera lens is focusing - crisper lines, sharper contrasts, the world blooming into brilliance. And even though cameras and technology and the like are a Muggle thing, he can't think of any better way to describe it. There is no wizarding equivalent. (See, even magic cannot do her justice).
Really, he tells himself,
it's now or never, and if you want it to be now, you better stop thinking and just do it.
He takes a long, deep breath.
And steps off the brink.
"I—"
But it's almost as if she knows because all of a sudden she's standing up and pulling him back to safety, back onto the brink as she runs off the porch and into the rain. Before he can even begin to get properly annoyed, she's dancing and laughing, soaked to the bone and once again, oxygen isn't a necessity anymore. It's nothing but a mere afterthought.
He follows her. Of course he follows her.
The soil is wet underneath his feet. He's a little surprised at how much rain there is - already his clothes are dripping and he is shivering. But it doesn't matter really because he's got grey above him and green below him and in the middle, where sky and ground kiss, is her, twirling in circles as if she's been waiting for this rain forever. And he's no poet but it is beautiful and stunning and for Merlin’s sake, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale: it's not that hard.
He calls out her name and she stops spinning (she isn't even dizzy - he's got enough vertigo for the both of them). Tilting her head, she grants him one slow glance of burning curiosity and then, before he can even catch his breath again, she's running away from him.
It's not elegant. It's not graceful. It is feet slipping and mud spraying, the world smearing into nothing more than a blur of running watercolours. And soaring over everything is her laughter, which has always caught people by surprise because it's loud and throaty and big and screw them,
she’s not beautiful, she's
alive.
Instinct takes over. It's like they're seven again and it's just another game of tag. He remembers she had always been the slower of the two, except sometimes (and not a word about this, you hear?) he would let her win. Just because (the way she smiled after she tagged him made his chest ache—even back then).
His lungs burn with emptiness. The rain sluices down his skin. He reaches out (almost there, just a few more inches) and the world seems to lurch directly beneath his feet as he tags her, right between her shoulder blades, just like before only this time, he doesn't run away.
She turns around, eyes brimming with defiance, and before he can fully comprehend what he's doing, he's holding her face in his hands and nothing really matters anymore: nothing except her and the air between their bodies, quivering with tender uncertainty, with one, evanescent chance.
All the edges blur into nothing. His nerves thrum with excitement. She is unfurling like a flower in his hands and he can see everything: pale hair matted to dewy skin; the slight pepper of her freckles; small but pouty lips... and lastly her eyes. Dripping with rain water, they could start wars and cure cancer and bring the world to its knees. Her eyes dance and laugh with possibility, with dreams that had long been forgotten by many others, dreams that children held and kissed stars for, dreams that she refuses to let go. Her eyes - they never stopped believing.
"I know," she says.
He kisses her and it is everything, exploding. It is life. It is gasping breath and bursting colour and the real reason why the sky is blue. It is her and it is them and it always has been.
The rain is still falling and he can taste it on her lips — it tastes like honey and victory. It tastes like new beginnings. Like promise.
(It tastes like heaven is breaking).
—
And it goes like this:
He is seventeen and in love.
She is sixteen and inevitable.
Together, with the grey sky lying shattered and dripping at their feet, they are forever and invincible.
(He loves her, and it is startling, glorious, and all kinds of enough)
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