AO3: fading light (harry x chris) | marvelouscaroline
The aftermath of Chapter 6 of EllisMais’ wonderful and ongoing fic “i’m stuck in the middle (frozen in a fire)”. If you haven’t read it yet, you absolutely should, this scene wouldn’t exist without it. This isn’t a continuation of her story, just my interpretation of what could’ve happened next.
TW: drug relapse, limb amputation
ukytblr note from g: ellismais is not a member of our server but I still strongly recommend reading the first six chapters of her fic before reading caroline's!
꣑ৎa/n: i dont actually write angst often so this probably sucks sorry !
The first time you warned him, you were sitting on the edge of his bed, legs folded tightly beneath you like you were trying to disappear into yourself. Your fingers trembled as they toyed with a loose thread on your jumper, tugging at it over and over, like if you just kept pulling, you’d unravel the part of you that felt so impossibly knotted up inside. You couldn’t bring yourself to meet his eyes. Couldnt risk seeing the way they always softened when they looked at you, like you were something precious. It made it harder. Made the guilt press down harder.
“I’m not ready for anything serious,” you said, barely louder than a breath, your voice fragile and uneven, like it might break in your throat if you said too much. And then the silence came; thick, aching, and unbearable. It settled in the room like grief. Like truth. Chris didn’t flinch. He just nodded. No sharp inhale. No flash of hurt across his face. No anger. Just something heartbreakingly quiet in the way he looked at you, like he’d already prepared for this answer. Like he’d known all along.
“I know,” he said. And there was no resentment in his voice. No sadness. Just a kind of unwavering gentleness that only made your chest tighten more. “I’m not asking for anything you can’t give.”
You think that might’ve been the moment he made the decision. The quiet, devastating choice to love you anyway. To take what you could give, even if it was only fragments. To be patient. To stay soft, hoping that if he was careful enough with you, if he never pushed, never asked for more, maybe you’d find your way to him in the end.
Maybe someday, you’d be ready.
But you weren’t. Not then. Not when he needed you most. Not even at the end, when all he wanted was for you to choose him back. And that’s what haunts you now. That he loved you in whole, while you only ever gave him pieces.
And still, he stayed.
Until he couldn’t anymore.
He loved you quietly. Steadily. Without expectation. Like loving you was something he did instinctively, not because he hoped for anything in return, but because it was simply the most natural thing in the world to him. He never asked how you liked your coffee, he just remembered. Always placed gently beside you before you'd even spoken a word. On the days when your chest felt too tight and your hands wouldn’t stop shaking, he never told you to breathe, never tried to fix it, he just sat there, grounding you with soft words and softer eyes, anchoring you back to yourself with a hand that never gripped too tight. When the world became too loud, too cruel, too much, he didn’t try to drown it out, he just sat beside you, shoulder to shoulder, wordless, present. And somehow, that silence said more than anything else couldve.
And still, you kept your walls up. Carefully constructed. Reinforced with fear and old wounds and a quiet voice in your head that whispered you didn’t deserve something this gentle.
Every time he touched you, it was with permission. A brush of his fingers against yours, a hesitant arm around your shoulders. He never assumed. Never pushed. Every kiss he gave you felt like a question. Soft, searching, waiting for an answer you never quite knew how to give. You let him hold your hand, yes. But never your heart. Not fully. Not freely. You always held something back, like you were trying to protect him from the part of you that was still broken. Or maybe, trying to protect yourself from the way he made you feel too much.But he waited anyway. Patient. Unmoving. As if some part of him truly believed that one day, you’d choose him back. That maybe love, if offered gently enough, could teach you how to stay.
The decline wasn’t obvious at first.
It didn’t come in shouting matches or dramatic exits. It came quietly. Softly. The slow, creeping kind of heartbreak that slips in unnoticed, like a draft through a cracked window, until suddenly everything feels colder, and you can’t remember when the warmth left.
It lived in the pauses. In the messages that went hours, tgen days, without replies. In the plans you cancelled last minute with half-formed apologies and vague excuses about being tired or busy or just not in the right headspace. You told yourself it wasn’t a big deal. That he understood. That he’d always understand.
And he never said otherwise. Never snapped. Never accused you of pulling away. But you noticed the difference in his silences. The way his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes anymore. How the lightness in his voice dimmed, little by little, until it sounded like he was just going through the motions. How he stopped reaching out first. How he started waiting for you to call. To text. To care.
You kept telling yourself it was fine. That you hadn’t promised him anything. That he knew what this was, what it wasn’t. That he’d agreed to the unspoken terms, you never said forever. You never said love.
But the truth sat heavy in your chest, even then. Because he had known. And he had stayed anyway. Not out of ignorance. Not because he misunderstood you. But because he hoped. Quietly. Hopelessly. That one day, you might change your mind. You saw the shift in him long before he ever found the words to say it.
He stopped lingering after your kisses, no longer letting his lips linger against your skin like he couldn’t bear to pull away. The gentle, familiar brush of his hand tucking your hair behind your ear, the one that used to feel like home, became rare, hesitant, as if he was teaching himself not to reach for you anymore. Instead, he began pulling away first, before you had the chance to, retreating quietly into himself like a wounded animal.
And still, he never said a word. Not a single complaint. No desperate questions. No bitter confessions. Just silence.
Until the night it rained.
You knocked on his door, soaked through to the bone, the rain running down your hair and dripping from your sleeves. You didn’t even know why you’d come. Maybe you thought you could outrun the ache twisting in your chest, or maybe you just knew there was only one person who’d ever come close to making it stop.
When he opened the door and saw you standing there, shivering and soaked, he didn’t say a word at first. Just stepped back quietly, like your presence was both a weight and a relief, and wordlessly let you in. The door closed behind you with a soft click, like a barrier locking out the world. But also like something invisible was closing inside him, too.
You stood there in the middle of his flat, rainwater pooling around your feet, arms wrapped tightly around yourself like you were trying to hold together what was falling apart. The words tangled in your throat; fear, regret, want. All desperate and raw, but you couldn’t find any of them. You just stood, broken and silent.
He was quiet. Too quiet.
After a long pause, he asked, almost like you were strangers, “You okay?”
Your throat clenched so tight it hurt. The lie caught in your mouth and shattered. “No.”
He nodded slowly, like he’d been bracing himself for that answer all along, like he wasn’t surprised to see you like this. Like the cracks had been widening between you both for a long time.
“I warned you,” your breath hitched, trembling uncontrollably as the silence stretched between you, heavy and suffocating. The rawness of the moment clung to your skin, every word a shard piercing deeper than the last. “From the beginning. I told you I wasn’t ready.”
His eyes held something fierce but tired. “I know.”
“And you stayed,” you breathed, the words barely more than a broken confession, soaked through with pain.
Because staying had been the cruelest kind of love.
The kind that slowly burns you from the inside out.
And now, you both knew it wasn’t enough.
Chris looked at you for what felt like an eternity. There was no anger in his eyes, only a raw, aching grief that cut deeper than anything else. The kind of grief that belongs to someone who has loved with every piece of their heart, only to realize that the person they love can never meet them halfway, never give back the love they need.
“Because I thought maybe, just maybe, one day you would be,” he said quietly, his voice trembling with the weight of that hope.
Your breath hitched, fragile and uneven. “I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t,” he whispered, the words like a knife twisting in the silence.
You shook your head, tears slipping unchecked down your cheeks, blurring your vision. “I didn’t know how,” you admitted, your voice breaking under the weight of your own failures.
And then, so quietly it barely felt like sound, like a confession whispered into the dark after months of holding it inside, he said the words that would never leave you.
“I would’ve loved you forever, if you’d let me.”
The words hung in the air between you, raw and aching. His voice was low and trembling, but every syllable was laced with a fierce sincerity that cut through the quiet like a knife. You could hear the weight behind them. That hope and patience, all condensed into that single, heart-wrenching confession. There was no pretense. Just pure, desperate truth.
His eyes held yours, wide and unguarded, as if pleading for a chance that you couldn’t give. The faintest tremor flickered across his jaw, betraying the strength it took to say what he did. You wanted to reach out, to catch that fragile moment before it shattered, but your limbs felt like stone, and your heart was a knot of something too heavy to unravel.
And the cruelest part was this:
You didn’t deserve it.
You didn’t deserve him.
Without another glance, he turned and walked to the door. His footsteps were heavy but steady. He opened it and stood there, waiting silently for you to leave, waiting for you to close the door on whatever was left between you. You didn’t stop him.
Your throat was too tight, words lodged too deep to surface. You couldn’t meet his gaze again. You couldn’t face the part of yourself that was breaking in his absence.
You genuinely couldn’t. So, you fled.
Because running away was the only thing you ever really knew how to do.
You thought about him for weeks afterward. Every time you caught a trace of his cologne on someone walking past, your heart twisted in a familiar, hollow way, like a ghost brushing past your skin, reminding you of everything you lost. Every time you laughed at something stupid, something small, your hand instinctively reached for your phone, only to remember, with a sinking ache, that he wasn’t yours anymore. That he never really had been.
You replayed those moments endlessly. Almost like a broken record stuck on all the almosts and might-have-beens. Every silence you filled with fear instead of honesty. Every choice you made that pushed him further away. Every time you didn’t choose him, even when your heart knew you should have.
You found yourself wondering if someone else would. Someone braver. Someone who wouldn’t flinch at the gentleness he gave so freely, who could hold him without breaking, who could meet his love with a certainty you never had.
And, through the dull ache that never quite faded, you hoped, against hope, that he’d let them. That he’d find the love you couldn’t give.
Because he deserved that.
He deserved someone who would stay.
Someone who would not run from the softness he offered.
Someone who wouldn’t waste it.
