for the three sentences fic: andylind + marriage of convenience (yes i'm quite late to it)
Quite late but I don't care in the slightest -- seriously, for this or for any other such ask meme, there is no wrong time. I love prompts basically always ... and unlike some of those others, I'm not taking a trillion years to fill this one for you. 😘
Their vows had been said in a small, utilitarian room, their marriage born of practicalities and realised on paper alone for contingencies that might never come to be -- not when he lives now a world away from where their too-brief time together had been spent, wearing a different name and a different identity and the past hanging a stubborn millstone around his neck, far heavier than a simple ring and an equally plain chain have any right to be. She had eyed him askance when he’d bought that ring and his own, when he’d insisted on marking what meant far more to him than he was willing to give voice, but she had slipped the unadorned band onto finger nonetheless, the brush of her skin against his far softer than he had imagined it could be, and he is glad of it in hindsight, when the shape of it smooth beneath the pad of his thumb is a tangible reminder not just of what was but of what will be, the promise she had sworn to him when he’d seen her last, before blood and lightning and fire rent his world asunder.
(He imagines, sometimes, what might have been -- imagines her here with him, fair head bent close to Bea’s dark one with lightning crackling above their cupped hands, imagines discovering what other softness she might have hidden -- and he knows those possibilities owe more to dreams than any sense of realism, knows her far better than perhaps anyone else alive, all too aware that she would consider sentiment an aberration and that this is a matter of convenience, but that does not stop him from dreaming, wondering, hoping that one day she will return and that, one day, this will mean more, though he knows she would call him a fool for it; even if it means nothing more to her, those vows, along with all of the others he has given her, remain everything to him -- and how could they not, how could she not, when he gave everything up for her?)
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