whoops miserably sad post-canonish fanfiction because i can’t keep it in
You can still remember how it felt to breathe sunlight. Impossibly long ago, but somewhere inside you they still exist, the few fluttering pieces of time that you caught gently in your hands and tucked inside your heart. They have always sustained you. They still shine, immortal, brighter and brighter the longer you live, details gradually fading into a haze of warm nostalgia. Until all that remains is a breathless feeling and a blinding glow. Until the day comes when these memories bleed into the light that saturates all of time.
They had once been real. And they were yours.
~
Sometimes, in your dreams you still find yourself there, with the tiny hand of your brother clasped in your own. Pattering footsteps, laughter that floats like soap bubbles in the air. The hedges are taller than you, bright with blooms that stretch up to a sky impossibly large, impeccably blue, white cotton clouds suspended in your rose-colored fairytale. Vincent is smiling. You feel as if you could lift off of the ground just by closing your eyes and wishing for it. Anything feels possible. This world must be made of magic, you think, and of miracles, and immortally so.
~
The light that finds you next has a different taste to it. At the end of day, the sun hovers just above the horizon, spilling through tree trunks to throw shadows across the estate. It is thick, this light… a rich, deep gold, and you like the way Oz looks bathed in it. He is stretched out on his back, in grass as green as his eyes, lost in thought. You sit crosslegged beside him, and wonder quietly about the relationship between shadows and light; if the existence of one is necessary for the creation of the other.
…Oz sighs.
~
And then for some time, you don’t know much about light, aside from what is still left in your dreams. You look for it in your past, you pray for it in your future, you stare at the way Elliot’s fingers move over black and white keys and wonder if he knows how much that sound makes you want to cry.
You step outside into the chill of an autumn night and strike a match for your cigarette, fixing your eyes on the stars above.
They are a thousand tiny silver hopes, a thousand reasons not to give up yet.
~
Light does come back. For a few desperate months, your life is a wildfire, one which terrifies you while it rages, sets your heart aflame again, claims your entire soul and finally spits you out in a singed and tattered heap.
Embers, once again.
In full perspective, it stands as nothing more than a brief intermission in a wait longer than you could have imagined, but you know that this blaze has shaped you more than any other.
A part of you stands up and continues on, but most of you stays there, in that place, in those months, waiting.
~
The next long phase of your life you spend facing that same old question, ever-present in the faces around you.
Can you really be so sure…?
(Only Vincent doesn’t doubt you. He simply accepts, understands, for the first time in your life.)
And of course, when your proof finally comes, your friends have already left, and you wish they were still here to see this, to see your hope blossom again into so much love as Oz comes back to you piece by piece. By the very miracle you asked for, he does remember.
He is always your brightest light.
~
The final stretch passes in dreamlike contentedness, and you think about what a privilege it is to finally watch him grow up. He stands eye to eye with you in just a few years, and as you will your own existence to push on, you cherish every new day more than the last.
(When the first thin cracks appear on the back of your hand, you let him bandage them. His touch is gentle and sure, though it trembles, and when he looks up at you, there’s bravery in his tears, honesty in his silence.
You know he’ll be okay.)
~
At twelve years old, Oz had taught you how to skip stones.
You’d watched the sharp flick of his wrist, and the pebble’s flight across the pond, leaving ripples in its wake each time it touched the surface. He’d made five or six skips look easy, but it took you many tries before you were successful. Three splashes. You hadn’t wanted more; just that was enough to make you happy.
…You can’t say you haven’t wished for longer years.
But if ten in shadow are worth one in light, then you suppose there exists a sort of balance after all.
