@roguetm said: ❛ 03 . a kiss after a long time apart .
hope is a tarnished, forgotten antique. it’s somewhere in the back of a discarded closet gathering stringy clumps of cobwebs & a healthy covering of dust. in the early days, it was FUEL, the kind of shining, perfect thing he looked at in the corner. motivation to get up in the morning, to keep pulling through.
he knows searing pain, scrabbling bundles of thoughts that no longer have a rightful owner. he knows the lightless interior of the room where his captors keep him & his fellow prisoners.
so, seeing her again is like catching a gleam of silver creeping through blackened, oxidized rust.
his heart squeezes. he tumbles, down to one atrophied knee in a way so different than what he’d planned before all of this.
❛ i didn’t know if i’d see you again. ❜ wonder strikes him hard between the slots of his ribs. with the film of his callused, disconsolate exterior stripped away, he is all tenderness. the curl of his palm hovers outside the ridge of her cheek, almost as though afraid to make the connection lest she really be some product of his imagination, constructed or otherwise. but the warmth radiating from her skin touches his hand. he can see the little hazel flecks dotting between the bright green in her eyes in a pattern to difficult, too deliberate to be fully in his mind.
he knows he is broken, mottled in a brindle of bruises & shattered neural pathways patched back together again.
but when the square tips of his fingers finally catch on the angle of her jaw it’s like a spark. james tilts his head back, thumb daring to brush the bottom part of her lip, so much softer than anything in this place. it’s brief, as tentative as his near-touch, the static cling of positive affection electric when their mouths brush.
a dazed, half-smile curves at the edge of his lips.
❛ -------- should’ve known you’d rescue me. ❜
