Tear into my heart, make me do it again;

[grimvisaged]

The rose itself surprised him less than the name on the note. Not hers, but his own, the one he's coming to share with Barnes a begrudging inch at a time, nudging into a neutral ground. She's the one who pins it upon him—Rogers remains too skittish, too fiercely optimistic to insist upon a name at all—and he accepts the compromise because she bestows it with such surety. He has to have a name, to her, because it's an anchor when her memories fail her as readily as his own. It puts them on equal footing.

The flower he dropped dutifully into a cup filled with water, but the note he neatly folded and slipped into his right pants pocket. Days now he's been carrying it, reaching down to feel the outline of the paper through the fabric. There's so much written between those two lines, so much he is incapable of deciphering. It tugs on him like leash. He thinks, dimly, that perhaps it always was that way with her.

And so he's waiting again, perched dutifully in the far-flung shadows of her room, the note an ember in his pocket as he watches the door.

Comments

[regimes_fall]

Fire split open her insides as he spoke her name, her real name, first so softly she was sure she was mistaken, and then clearer as his lips brushed against her ear. It was a single word, one she’d heard often enough even if it was not the name she claimed for herself in this new, tarnished life, and somehow from his lips it was more than enough to have her crumbling before him - a confirmation where there had only been vague memories and hazy speculation before.

She sobbed out a breath against the side of his head, unaware that her cheeks were wet until she felt the resulting dampness of his hair where she wound it around her fingers in her feeble attempt at holding him against her. Unbidden, her heart began to pound, pushing her through sensory memories of what it had been to fall twisting and lightning quick into love with him, and the slow, years-long agony of his loss and their combined suffering. The fight or die instinct in the back of her skull, the same, red blaze that has kept her alive more times than she can count, told her to run. To leave him. That no matter how much she thinks she still needs him, he is as good as knife at her throat for all he will cost her in distraction and inevitable damage.

“Lyubov moya,” she whispered instead, forgoing his name for an endearment that rolled easy and familiar from her old tongue, sounding just right to her own ears, muffled as it was by the scratchy flesh of his jaw. “Stay. Right here. With me.”