There was a question asked to him once upon a time, when he’d been dog-eared auspiciously as the line-up of the reality dating spot that the couple to-be for the second time had found each other: Are you afraid of falling? He said no, but that he didn’t believe in love, in an unblemished sense of romance. Dustin had witnessed his parents interfused in an ardency for one another, and there was nary a speck out of place within their adoring, albeit transient, space of raising children — and yet, this notion had accrued in his early, liberal studies of the sciences and crunching through general subjects, that the love that could be offered to a partner was not absolute and indomitable, but an ephemeral and codependent attachment for serving their natural purpose. Loving his siblings unconditionally held an entirely juxtaposing merit, that he was in a bantam desideratum, driven to adore them, without pause and without quandary, for the blood and the early roots that they shared together. Dominating the fickle challenge of gravity in his adolescence from the highest perches and performing tricks from phenomenal spaces, aspiring in his early career to launch away in a starship for the space station or to take the first footsteps on planet Jupiter, he could confidently answer that it was not a phobia that nestled into the nettles of his wounded chest. Merely, it had never cupped his cheeks as the fairies watching over their fountains within the trenchancy of caverns would, kissing the concaves of his countenance and blessing him with their virtue. Yet, against all odds, it was the sound of Sera’s voice from behind blockaded walls and pulchritudinously decorated rooms, that he thought that a deity had descended from sight unseen to flutter heartstrings like the cords of those high above and deliver a message. A fantastical conclusion of one rigidly secular, tithed to the ecstatic belief of the extraterrestrial.
But, they were only human. A determinate that could be borne from trialing hardships with them, ones so Galgameth that he was brittle in the pessimism whether two who were but normal people could never conquer. With hyperawareness to the snapping of his own synapses within his skeletal casing and mildly hitched breaths, he was stripped of his breaths at what his gaze befell when their entrance was announced. Yulan magnolias clutched tightly at the breadth of his chest, an unmatched set of eyes thieved by the iniquities of life shaded behind them as if a shyness were to cleave his ebullience, the shades that warmed his cheeks matched the exotic flowers that his hands were diligently wrapped around. Instantly, his heart quickened, thinking not of their son passed to Zeliha’s vigilant clutch, a record stop-gapped on the bolide enchanting his vision with their sublime smile and the gleam within the depths of their eyes that everyone would frequently dismiss as apathetic pools if they never bothered to ask of what Sera was passionate about. Don’t you think they always look so empty? was a query he’d received on a handful of occasions of other surviving couples of their reality stint, and he found it arduous to ascribe what he saw as a dedicated astrophile. You’ll never know the worlds that I see in the darkness if you don’t fall into the black hole. For their vastness was indescribable, intangible to those who refused to venture that far past the shallows of the stratosphere. Frozen in time, an exhale escaped and deflated the tense hitch of his shoulders encased in the striped suit jacket and expensive, white Chanel undershirt once they were before him, holding out the bouquet for them to take and awaiting to release it until their petite digits stroked over his. Crooked fingers of his grace the edge of their veil, a sharp inhale to stifle the tears ready to prick the corners of his eyes already. You are ethereal, he signed.
Speak on marriage and what it means to you.
A part of him felt like combusting as much as the first time, for contrasting reasons — for compared to their first, how was he to describe just how he felt for them now? He stood silent for what seemed centuries, his throat turning to sandpaper and consuming the saliva available to traction his words. “Sera… Is love truly blind? We opted into a social experiment together… not knowing where it would take us. I never thought I would meet someone there who shared so much with me — from the personal, of losing our parents and growing up alone, and the superficial, vast ambitions and yearning for something bigger than ourselves. We were so young, eighteen and twenty-one, I didn’t imagine we’d be expecting a baby in our world within less than a year after that. I thought…” He blinked, doe eyes downcast when he sought for their hands to interlink with his. “When you saw me for the first time, you would be disappointed. I was sure that no matter how you looked, my heart would wait for you, with open arms of whatever the outcome. Speakin’ to you through a wall, how ravenously I craved someone like they were from the heavens, like you were this… magnificent and untouchable creature, I still can’t wrap my head around how smoothly our union was, to this day. And somehow…” Another breath was inhaled to steady the execution of his words, the tremulous markers that he had long enclosed behind the ivories of his teeth against lonely bedsheets, or the ones that they had occupied at his side in his brother’s townhouse, fingers stroking through their agrestal locks and pondering how they could wish to strip themselves of what made them appear as stardust trickling through his fingertips. “I have these memories that will be burned into my brain always, of those early years. I can’t forget the way your fingers ran across every ridge of my spine and every freckle that you would kiss when I laid in our bed in the summers, appreciatin’ every inch of me without my clothes on as no one ever had — comparin’ me to stars and space. How you would… listen to me so eagerly, try to grasp what I was rambling about and look up what you couldn’t. Wake me up when I fell asleep waitin’ for you on the couch and ask me to come to bed… you’d hold me so tight, I would replay your breaths on my neck when you weren’t beside me, breathin’ me in as if you couldn’t get enough. The awe in your voice, tellin’ all your friends in your hospital bed how Jungwoon looked just like me. I couldn’t understand how someone could be so — taken by me, when all I was was… some nobody with a dream, but you jumped out of the porch swing when I brought my car for your things. I believed in fallin’ in love, bein’ in love, because someone showed me what it looks like. It think it’s my greatest discovery.”
His gaze lifted, looking into theirs with feverish attempts to still the intrinsic shaking of his amblyopic eye, and resist the longing to press his forehead against theirs as if no one else were present with them at the fairgrounds. See, when it was them, embracing as mundanely as their hands, how he longed for it to be a moment where they could suck one another into their orbit relentlessly, so fervidly that no one could understand. As composed and aplomb as they could both be, one with an antisocial personality disorder and the other an inherent empath, there was an unraveling of cosmos when Sera was near. It demanded to be felt. “We’ve changed, haven’t we? I would have waited for the rest of my days, hopin’ you’d come back.” The bittersweet twinge was fleeting, squeezing on their hands taut and imploring as he permitted himself a step forward, “You push me away and we’re runnin’ back like we can’t breathe, like I abandoned you into open space without a helmet. My hands can’t get enough of you, I’m the dark matter and you pull me in like the black hole, I am so desperate, always, to be consumed by your love. I could get on my knees and beg for it, I probably would have if you had not broken our separation first, you’ll never understand — the way that…” Dustin swallowed, recapturing his words and pressing his thumbs against their knuckles, searching the depths of their amber hues. “There is an empty space without you, how cold and unforgivin’ space feels when you had to be distant. I have… never felt like someone pulled me out of the grave and put the fucking breath back into my body than when you invited me over and stripped me clean right there, barely a step through the door and you’re revivin’ me with your kisses. The first thing I saw was you when I woke up from the coma they put me in, I didn’t dream of ever being without you. I was freezin’, I was scared, couldn’t see out of half my face or move my hands and you were there — you didn’t pack your shit and leave when I became half the person that I was once. You gave me your embrace and all the words built up inside you, how happy you were, scared, you —” His nose screwed up, a rapid fluttering of lids dispelling tears blurring his vision and sending them trampling down his face. “You’ve never looked at me differently. Not once. You would defend me every time someone told you differently when you were… famous. Do you know how much that means? I lost a tooth for you, but you? I didn’t ask you to. You did. And after we lost our son, and you wanted me back, I remember lookin’ in your eyes one night and seein’… nothin’ but… nothin’ but want for me, hopin’ that you satisfied me, unconditional yearning for me and so…”
He sniffed, curling his fingers through theirs. “If you’ll have me… with my damaged brain and broken body, after all our counselin’… I’m yours. Every atom and speck of matter within me, I belong to you. You are the only person I have loved, and ever will. The love that I have for you, it transcends time and space itself. I couldn’t write a book about it, but I know that I will always be the keeper of your secrets. Of who you long to be, what you want to be. There’s somethin’ that will always be true for me, no matter what life puts us through.” Untangling their hands, the words were pierced together in FSL to accompany the firm mantra embellished in English, “I’m with you always.”
Will you take this person to be your wedded spouse?
Dustin’s smile was vibrant, however shaky, and immediate as the day that they had first conceived their union. “I do. Always. Every time you ask me.”
With instruction from the officiant, Dustin straightened his posture and carefully repeated, “I, Duck-young Graves-Seong, take you, Sera, to be my spouse, my forever friend, confidant, and my love. I vow to honor and respect you always, and I will give you my love freely and unconditionally. I pledge this to you with all of my heart, for all the days of our lives.” Taking the wedding band they’d temporarily removed in favor of the ceremony, he slid it onto their ring finger. “I give you this ring as a reminder of my love for you.”
Sera first learned of love from its edges in lieu of its beauty. A muffled demise, a shared table between veiled faces, and back then, love had implied naught but a means for survival — a hymn to be sung to many in order to maintain appearances and keep themself above the surface. Love, in more ways than one, had not been violent but rather meaningless, a concept so complicated to comprehend and questioned for its sincerity when all who pleaded for it hoisted some sort of selfish intention. It wasn’t until later in their life that it had made its shift, however, leashing as if a barbed vein when they had least predicted it — like nectar consuming the chasms of their pale-mucked mattress, their flesh, and when they had been overly fresh-faced by the notion of attachment. That night when they had soaked in the festivities of a circus for the first time — their hues landed upon a person so beautiful, so alone, and poked and prodded by what they had concluded to be naught but egotism. There, they had thought, coated in suspicion and fascination when he had approached them as if they had not been a prize to be won, but rather an individual he would then share his thoughts, And his thoughts, Sera believed in no Gods, but his thoughts splayed just as vast as the bridges of Milky Way itself, filled with ambitions and caricatures that one could not have possibly imagined. Sera could remember as clear as crystal, even today, with decades had whirled before them, the way their chest had carried a sense of implosion — the way their eyes would not drift away from his lips, his gestures, him, and him, only. He had been able to engulf them in his universe before she had been able to even float in space and he had carried her with every vocable. To think back of all those times where he had been regarded as not attractive, the concept enough to make them retch these days, it still stupefied them how the hues of the world were so wrapped in conventional pulls, that they had missed out on something more beautiful than anything that the galaxy could offer. There was nothing that they hadn’t fancied, and others could say that their extreme shift to adoration and — in a few ways — over-attachment, had a thing or two with their morbid diagnosis, but Sera had never cared back then, would never care right now, as it was the most realest fragment within the debris of fabrication.
And then, as if flourishing petals, hushes of summer whispering across wintry lands, the sun encapsulating the moon in an embrace so broad, so merciless in its hold, the value of love amplified into the one thing that had bestowed them ambitions and a true sense of safety. Granted, there was nothing about their journey that could be deciphered as a walk in the park — no, a little too far from it, with their own slips and flaws and separation that had exhausted the both of them, a grief so deep that it had yet to, and never would, fully stitch the vacant rims ever again. That was when they realized that love carried both penetrating edges, and fluttering dews, but if anything it had shaped Sera into something they had never thought they were truly capable of being. It made them human. The contorted, mucked up perfection that the world had chiseled them to be dissolved — what they had once predicted to be the long-end of the dim tunnel, disintegrated, as mangled as the downfall that had wreaked havoc in the first place. The recognition did not come as if a slap on their wrist, it bludgeoned them, both of them, and left no place for air to be absorbed as hit by hit shattered them across the powdered tiles, with their dusted palms and guilt scampering over their senses. To call it an actual nightmare would have been an understatement, and yet to mull over it now, gave the black-and-blue beauty some kind of resolve — that the destruction had perhaps summoned in order for them to adhere themself back with lost pieces that had always meant to be there. Those bantam crooked shards that had never been as extravagant as the promises they had so gullibly devoured, him, and him, and his gravity that had meant more than those flashing lights or ceaseless sceneries of packed-suites, and his embrace had been the one that actually completed them. Their love wasn’t necessarily brimstones and fires, but there was an abundance of agony with sturdy arms, learning and developing both as individuals through harsh learnings that eventually ripened them as people. And the beauty of it all, Sera would often hum, merriment springing despite the horrendous flickers, was that they had managed to entrust each other again, a testament of how deep and how put-together, their adoration, their need for each other was. They were fortunate, they supposed, to have learned about all of those things — with him, even when he had not been present, a piece of their mind that could never dissipate.
Words rarely emanated such influences to the core of their soul, once determined as vacant and fissured under the pressure of limelights, but here, in this second, his behaved as a buckler securing around the craters of their pale flesh — hoisting them to cloud nine, or any place where they hadn’t thought possible for serenity to befall. Now that they were soaking this all in again, it felt precisely like this first time, and yet so different all the same. The ornaments garnishing such exquisite corners tasted liberating in their own way, not for their grandiose, but rather, the sensation of relief and gratitude for the second chance that was bestowed upon them. There had been a time where they had thought it could never be something that they would deserve after all the shit they had pulled, deserted, craving for a life of the wildstorm which had given them not only emptiness but also the realization that they had been harming their spouse all along. When their tears were shared in those intimate nights, smelling of cracked nicotine and other substances that they had failed to resist, the batters in their chest had been raucous — reminding of the heart they had ruined, and the joints too young to be engraved below the soil. The recovery and refusal to forgive themself had been as equally long, desiring to ignore their own needs for him for they thought that Dustin’s life would have been better, but it was later, then, when they realized that it wasn’t their choice to make, nor their right to establish. What made this all different was the fact that they carried these ruminations in their mind now — as opposed to the mere enthusiasm of young, budding love, and this time, in the altar, there was some kind of ripening that had been emboldened in the way they presented themself. A trickle, slowly but surely, of certainty, and a love that went deeper than one based on lust and bursts of excitement alone. Like he said, they had grown, as people, as their own selves — and to think they were blessed enough they had discovered each other again, instead of residing separate lives, perhaps Sera would have been consumed by the aridity that had been daunting their senses. Living in sheer luxury, but without even a drip of joy. Here, with him, they were showered in it — in the house that was so mundane, but they had purchased together, a flash of memories where their dreams had been sure pure and ambition-laced before it consumed the former star.
( The massive star might have collapsed, bristled to the ground, but the fragments were garnered by the astronomer — ironically — and ladled into his arms with ease and simultaneously awkwardness that Dustin presented, which they had grown to relish, and now it had disintegrated into specks of stardusts, hovering and warming around them. Sometimes, the star may have to fall for the nebula to truly embrace them and not consume them into the obscure void. )
A smile, one which weighed none of their anterior fabrication, stretched across lips. To allow tears to fall where eyes could witness was a thing they oft refused to allow, but now, ripples whirled, swirling those orbs when their soft hues landed on his, as if the world only spun for them and them alone. “Ducky.” They began. “When I think back of all the times I had thought that love was not meant for someone like me, that it was nothing but a glorified notion, I could not help but realize it was because I kept thinking that there would never be love that could truly match what I had seen, felt, and touched with you. I remember the dimmed moonlight of the circus that we first met, and I remember how after we spent the night together and how you spoke of me of your ambitions, with those endearing, awkward smiles of yours and the way you brushed my skin — I felt something new, an attachment, like a thread connecting us together, something that at a moment tasted more bizarre than what others’ descriptions of love would be. It took me years to realize that it was only because of what everyone kept attempting to tell me, to explain to me, what they meant when they mentioned the word — none of it had been enough to properly elaborate what I had for you. It was, indeed, love, but it was so strong, and so intoxicating, and so unbreakable. I would speak of you on the nights where things were quiet and my old workers would be in awe — they expected tales of a prince, and yet, I described the story of a person who touched the constellations with his lips and fingers. And it was you, it has always been you, through all of those times we spent for the competition, when I heard the way you spoke through those stupid, thick walls, I already that you were the one that I was yearning for. I stopped believing in love — until we met again, because yours was the one that mattered, and came without even any comparison.” If there was one thing that quite irked them about these wedding customs, it would be how they would be leashed away from any opportunities to leap forward and touch him, as they would have, and oh, they would have skated those digits across the supple and coarse lines of his features, strewn across his lips when he spoke and they paid attention to his vocable and his only, the living and the dead around them silenced with a muffled hush. “The last thing that I felt when I saw you was disappointment — I care so little about appearances when they have been tossed around in such a shallow manner for as long as I have lived. But you? You are not just not like any other, your eyes speak billions of words that the universe cannot even comprehend, your lips, the softest that I taste, the ones who keep me bristling for your touch without an end, and your nose — the way it scrunches when you laugh, it gives me the littlest bouts of happiness whenever I see it. You are striking, and you are undoubtedly the most beautiful, magnificent person that I have ever known — and I will remind you of that, every second, if I have to.”
None of those syllables were a reminder of Sera’s olden speeches, none that one would capture behind a thin-glass screen providing a make-shift rumor mill, rather sincerity that crawled and flowed without an end. Those little chasms in the exhales, the cracks, they were but a glissading entourage of the ceaseless, ceaseless amor. “We have indeed gone through a lot, sometimes it does feel like we have gone through the most — with our grief, with our separation, I believe it is safe to say not everyone’s love could be resurrected after everything that we have endured. We might not have come unscathed, no far from it, there are scars within our souls that have been marred so deeply that they will never mend — but despite all of that, we have each other, we found trust in our familiarities, faith when we thought we were hitting our rock bottom only to see the other one standing at the edge of the tunnel. We crashed, so badly, Ducky, but we soared back from it just as beautifully as the first time if not more. When you were absent from my life, I woke up every day, relieved every second, with this huge emptiness in my heart. It was as if carrying a weight that was intangible, something that could crush me within seconds, but when we started to familiarize ourselves with each other again, it almost felt like you had never left You collapsed so perfectly into my arms, and I, yours, we were two souls enlightened again, two kindles of a bigger flame that warm instead of destroy.” By now, the wetness which sprang to their cheeks was almost blurring their entire vision - shushing their surroundings even more. For a moment, they pondered, with a fragile, unseen digit, if Jungwoon was peering over them. He would be joyous, they thought, he would chime in with his endless giggles at how bright the smiles on his parents’ faces were. They could recall the cusp of his hand, and it was almost as if it was there again, in a dim light, ultimately fading because now every piece had returned, and he could leave with the knowledge that his parents were together again. He could rest, and he could be at peace, the way Sera was now after years of battling numerous demons. “And I am happy, I am the happiest when I’m with you, people come and go in my life, each carried a piece that shaped me into the person that I am today but all I know, despite our flaws, despite the nights we longed for each other, you have always been the one to bring me the greatest joy, and I’m utterly aware without a lone doubt in my mind that you are a wonderful parent to both Jungwoon and Jungsoon— Jungwoon grew up to be such a beautiful, lovely child, don’t you remember? He would always talk about you, what he would give to be someone like you,” their breath hitched at that, it was safe to say that it edged close into an emotional breakdown, but not necessarily in an agonizing manner, not at all. “You are a good role model and I know that our newborn will feel the same. They are both fortunate, to have you, and I am fortunate to have you and have loved you all this time.”
“And of course, of course I will have you — so long as you will have me. I have loved you, from the first time I laid eyes on you, and I will continue to love you through thick and thin. I will be here to support you while you reach for your dreams, and I will be here as we share our most wonderful seconds together. I have written songs about you — and you know I will continue to do so. There are not enough words to describe what you do, and how you are, and so I will write and sing them until we both breathe out our last breaths. I love you.” And so, they return the gesture, although their fingers shake, and so were their lips. “You and me, always.”
Will you take this person to be your wedded spouse?
They had to tear their eyes so they could fully take in the officiant’s words, but their voice was as definite as ever. “I will. I always will, without even a doubt.”
And with that, with adoration and certainty, they continued.“I, Sera Graves-Seong, take you, Duck-Young, to be my spouse, my forever friend, confidant, and my love. I vow to honor and respect you always, and I will give you my love freely and unconditionally. I pledge this to you with all of my heart, for all the days of our lives.” Raising their dainty hand, it took everything in their power to not shatter as the ring was slid into their finger.
You may now kiss your spouse.
Leaning down just a bit, they blissfully met his lips, tears unabashedly wettening their features. When they pull apart a smidge, they whispered.
“I love you. I’ll love you forever.”
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