vigorli

I know it has been a hard week but there's light at the end of the tunnel! Thank you everyone for keeping with it, even if it meant having to stock up on tissue. I cannot tell you how much your positive comments have helped me through this week. Today is my last day of work, and tomorrow I'm driving back to NH, but there shouldn't be any breaks in my regular Mon/Wed/Fri schedule. As for this fic, its the one that started it all. I wrote it almost immediately after returning home from seeing "PotC: At World's End" and the three previous fics were written afterwards. I hope everyone likes it, and it does end much better than the others, but you'll still have to wait until Monday for the return of my usual happy/silly fics. (And believe me, they're silly... ^_^)

Title: Four Years
Author: Ranmaru
Rating: R
Summary: (Orli's POV.) The senses remember, especially when you cannot forget.
Disclaimer: Don't know, don't own, just playing.

Four years.

Four years since I’ve last seen him.

Four years since I told myself I didn’t care. That it hadn’t mattered as much as…

Four years of denial and pretending.

I haven’t been unhappy. I haven’t been alone.

If I woke in the night and turned to slide my arm around a waist that was too curved, a back too small then I just closed my eyes and willed myself back to sleep.

When it’s over, it has to be done with. It has to be a part of the past. And if it didn’t matter then it shouldn’t hurt.

Fours years is ample time to soften the edges of memory.

The skin of my fingertips that touched him has since sluiced away, dead cells returned to nature. The skin of my back, my face, my cock, my ass; it’s all the same. Dead skin, dead cells, gone. There shouldn’t be sense memory. There shouldn’t be feeling left.

My lips have chapped, peeled, burned. They’ve been bitten. They’ve pressed against other lips, they’ve touched places not found on a man’s body. On his body. My tongue has tasted, the taste buds have tingled and been drowned in juices unlike anything his body could have produced. Yet my mouth waters in remembrance of him.

I’ve betrayed no one, not in body, not in thought. I loved him and I’ve loved since him, I’ve been devoted and obsessed. I’ve merged with another until I couldn’t tell our limbs apart, and I’ve wept at its ending. I’ve let myself be consumed and reveled in the flames.

I’ve missed him.

I’ve shivered when hearing his voice, impersonal over the phone or in character coming from speakers big and small. My eyes have burned his image into my brain, superimposing the new over the old until I cannot tell them apart and sometimes mistake the stranger on-screen for the man who held me so tightly at times I thought I’d suffocate and die…and be happier for it.

And now… it doesn’t matter.

Four years become seconds and eons and I cannot speak, just stare. Drinking him in, smelling him with my nose, opening my mouth to make it even more real. Sweat and horse, leather and grains. He steps closer and there’s a faint layer of acrylic paint and maybe I smile.

He whispers my name, his eyes squinted nearly closed because he’s facing me and my back is to the hot sun, but he’s also confused and surprised and afraid. I’m afraid.

I hadn’t meant to come here.

I had loved and lost, and maybe it is a pattern I’ll be doomed to repeat until I get it right but now I am looking at him again and I don’t want to stop. He’s older, there are more lines at the corners of his eyes but he’s beautiful.

We’re going to hurt each other again because we can’t help it. We’re going to say it doesn’t matter because it matters too much. And as I reach out to touch him, he holds his breath and I think that this time, I won’t suffocate alone.

The End