the-puddinator is celebrating her birthday this week, which of course calls for Mericcup. Happy birthday, Puddin! :)
More than once she’d wanted to utter the words “This is impossible,” or some variant thereof (perhaps while banging her head against the nearest wall or hacking a training dummy to splinters), but the phrase never made it past the tip of her tongue; even in the face of her mother’s impenetrable, unyielding enmity, even in the midst of her brothers’ increasingly-deadly traps, even surrounded on all sides by sharpening steel and sparking words and stupid stubborn pride and bravado, she never spoke the thought to life—no matter how frustration and futility battered at her heart, she could not abandon hope in the possible.
Or, to be more precise, she could not abandon hope in him: the man who believed enough for the both of them, whose mind had been grinding away at their options since before they’d known they’d need them, whose doggedness recognized no bounds, whose resourcefulness rarely failed to amaze her (“Don’t ask,” he’d told her time and again, with a shrewd set to his mouth and a laugh and a sigh tripping over each other in his tone). There was no way she could doubt the words he said when his eyes blazed and danced like the wild lights of the winter sky, her pulse thumping in time with his; at his behest she would destroy or build, fight or flee, knowing that he would be beside her all the while, steadfast and solid, smirking at danger and talking back to death itself.
When one night in the long late dark he confessed, “I couldn’t do this without you,” the words so soft against her throat that she at first took them for a sigh, they stunned her the way no sigh ever had; for wasn’t he the bowstring, the sword hilt, and she only the arrowhead, the honed blade? In response she drew his hand to the place above her heart, and then to lips that kissed the lines crossing his palm, and then flush against her own hand, folding her fingers between his and holding on for all she was worth; lest he miss her meaning she repeated it aloud, and it was not the first of their vows and would not be their last: “I would do this with no one but you.”
