EVER AFTER w. hayley of course
send me ‘EVER AFTER’ and a dynamic and my muse will tell you truthfully how they see the best possible ending for them, the worst possible ending for them, and the ending they think is the most plausible.
It had been brought up between the soft touches of dawn and her smile that seemed to radiate through the ether and cause one of his own. So delicate, so meaningful because it was a smile only reserved for H E R. “Dare I say you’re being rather…PHILOSOPHICAL this morning.” It was said with softness, with a chuckle that seemed to brew from such a place of love that he often forgot he could chuckle in this fashion. “I have never enjoyed an ending; there is something so final to it…something so UNJUST.” He hummed for a moment, fingers playing with the petals of a dead flower merely out of convenience. “To be with you, to be as H A P P Y as we could possibly manage and to know that in turn the family remained so too…-perhaps we’d live a quiet life, in a Bayou, married if you’d want that..children too I suppose; adoption has always been a progressive option.”
This came in a time of grieving, in the blissful reminders of all he’d caused. That he was in fact the WORST person he knew, that he had let the person who represented one half of him die..but he’d needed this. He needed to imagine that she could hear him, that she could feel everything he was feeling in this moment. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt her loss, by some MIRACLE she’d been saved the last time but this felt…F I N A L (and all too real). “It doesn’t need to be said; perhaps there is some irony in saying the words when you aren’t truly here to receive them…but to have loved you, to love who you were and what you gave me and OUR family..-I’m unsure i’ll ever love another the way I love you. I’m unsure i’ll ever stop seeing you in my dreams, longing just to hear you laugh one last time…” it was easy to sob, easy to let the tears fall because they were for her. “..but I think I shall perish before I ever forget you: before you become but a footprint on a bigger path..and to not know you. To not know what it is to have had you in my life is surely a burden within itself.”
A conversation born in a time when such an option seemed in reach, when his niece was but a child untarnished by the Hollow. They’d found a quiet moment, perhaps limited within the presently family dynamic but it seemed as if they could all live albeit far from New Orleans and under the condition that his brother had been freed, willing to be a father rather than the KING he had once vowed to be then was it such a bad thing to offer the idea. “I for one fail to believe this family will ever not be C H A O T I C but within the resent months, it seems clear we no longer have to exist within a place of violence and turmoil…-I’d like to imagine we could be HAPPY, that we could find peace together.” He hummed almost, so quietly barely audible to anyone besides her. He knew she was well aware of how tied he would always remain with his family but it seemed REALISTIC that he could manage both. “I think it’s about time I get to know my niece. So she can understand one day, why I love her mother so much.”