“Your hair-” Carter reached out to brush his fingers against the much shorter locks, feeling only spiky ends where there was once fiery beauty.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Cee.” Artemis stared at him, her voice taking on a cold, hard edge, her eyes going blank. She made no move to push his hand away, but instead reached up to grasp at his wrist. Everything was so wrong, so backwards; and yet it was she who was the one that had changed. Everything else had stayed the same.
She lowered her head, and blew out a sigh, finally gathering up the resolve to bat his hand away, while her own dropped into her lap.
“I don’t know why you keep looking for the woman you lost. She’s gone - dead and buried.... in the wind. The original Artemis isn’t coming back. Why do you keep trying to find her in me? You’re smarter than that.”
“Maybe I keep hoping that the Artemis I once knew is still in there, somewhere.” Carter turned his own face away from her, and his voice was soft, although his words they did tremble. “Because the Spartan I loved... she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked. And maybe I do see her there, in your eyes.” Grudging, accepting. He knew this Artemis before him was not the same as the one he had fallen in love with what seemed like an eternity ago now. And yet some foolish part of him still hoped that she was there.
That she would come back to him - back to them all. Even hurt, weary, war-torn Artemis was something they could deal with. Better than this... whoever this Artemis was now. Someone new; someone cold; someone different and oh-so-wrong.
He could not help but love her, too. After all, he’d promised to her that he would not leave her, and it was still her. The same, yet different. And even if she never seemed to return that love... maybe someday, she would.
Artemis shifted, sagged, leaning into his sturdy frame. “I don’t know what... who... I am any more. And I don’t need any of that bullshit rhetoric that I know is on the tip of your tongue. I’m tired of it, and it doesn’t even.... It can’t make me fit the bill of who you’re all expecting me to be.” She didn’t fight when his arms came around her.