“Song!Fic”
I never tried to take away your love,I never knew I had it.Don’t be a nightingale for anyone’s space to fill
(American Mary sung by The National)
"Why do you always have to fix everything?" the boy in front of her says, rolling his eyes, like it's a bad thing, like it's an awful thing, like it annoys the hell out of him.
Everything annoys him, Sunny knows. She most of all. But he lets her stay by his side, and sometimes she thinks, it's as close to friendship as a boy like him will ever come. Maybe it's as close as they'll ever be, standing shoulder to shoulder staring at the barren wasteland across the wall.
"Why should I leave things broken?" she says, flicking stones over the wall, watching the skip over the ground she may never thread again.
"Because it's none of your fucking business," he replies. "And it's nowhere near as cute as you think it is."
"I'm not doing it to be cute."
"Yeah, you are. You do everything to be something to other people."
She huffs, and throws a glass bottle instead of a stone, just to hear it shatter, just to hear it break.
"You do everything for yourself," she bites back, but he doesn't take it as an insults, just shrugs instead, and then for a long time says nothing at all, as she throws stones over the wall, as she waits for the images of their futures, the hideous deformed bringers of their death to come out of the forests.
"It's not a bad thing," she says at last, but it sounds too much like a question.
"It's not a good thing," he fires back. "They won't thank you for it, and you'll bleed yourself dry."
"Yeah, well, what do you care?"
The light is setting and something inside her stomach churns and she thinks of her father and the medals gleaming on her breast and she thinks how she's everything and nothing and she has nothing to hold on to at all.
"Yeah, well, what do I care," he says, with a shrug.
But it sounds too much like a question.
