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Post by Teja on Dec 28, 2014 20:31:03 GMT -5
"I don't know, Loki. Are you asking me how weak I think you are? Because I truly don't know."
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 28, 2014 20:44:26 GMT -5
He'd been smiling, but the smile had frozen now, and something had broken behind his eyes.
"...I see."
He turned away from her.
"Well, that's my doing."
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Post by Teja on Dec 28, 2014 20:54:40 GMT -5
"It hasn't been a good few months for us," she said with reluctance. "It would have been hard on anyone, and we didn't have a solid foundation to start with."
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 28, 2014 20:59:13 GMT -5
"Also my doing, " he said, with a carefully agreeable head tilt.
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Post by Teja on Dec 28, 2014 21:02:50 GMT -5
"Well... you're lucky I don't have issues with the fact that we had sex before I knew who you really are, actually."
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 28, 2014 21:13:49 GMT -5
"In my defense, I wasn't entirely sure I was Loki anymore at the time."
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Post by Teja on Dec 28, 2014 21:37:24 GMT -5
"Is that something you want to defend? Really?"
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 28, 2014 23:31:08 GMT -5
"Never mind," he groaned. "Even if I would outlive you, is that- is it really such a problem that it negates the time I would have with you before that?"
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Post by Teja on Dec 28, 2014 23:33:09 GMT -5
"It's different for me, you wouldn't understand. With someone else like me, I wouldn't think of spending the rest of my life with them as dooming myself - I wouldn't think about that passage of time as being short. But you do think of it as short. It's not your fault - but it upsets me."
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 28, 2014 23:57:10 GMT -5
Or perhaps, he considered, you've made such an infantile fool of yourself that a considerable portion of her idea of herself rests on the idea that she has to tend to you, and she's grown bored.
It was the most vicious thought he'd ever had about Teja, and he almost chastised himself over it before he realized that it was probably true. It was impossible to keep the look of sudden aloofness from showing on his face when he looked at her again.
"Well," he said. "You do have a point."
The challenge was now to not show it if he began slipping toward some internal precipice again. If he could make it through that- weak? He'd show her weak .
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Post by Teja on Dec 29, 2014 0:01:10 GMT -5
"I hate it," she said feelingly - she was unable to remember if she'd opened up about this before, but even if she had, she doubted he'd remembered. What was it to him? "I never used to think about mortality. I never had that fear of impending death. I mean, I feared the idea of my life being over - like I had wasted it - but now all the time, when you're talking about staying with me until I die, all I can think of is me dying."
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 29, 2014 0:09:17 GMT -5
"But you're afraid," he said, devoid of tenderness now.
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Post by Teja on Dec 29, 2014 0:17:04 GMT -5
She looked up at him, feeling - perhaps selfishly - shocked. Of course she had been herself emotionally unavailable for him for weeks now, and she knew it.
But the idea that she would tell him she was afraid of dying and he wouldn't care - that it might be alien to him -
What did she expect? Loki was functionally immortal; it would be thousands of years before he'd have to consider dying; he'd lived a thousand years already.
A worse thought occurred to her, and too insidious - too probably true - for her to banish before it took root. That Loki did know that asking a mere 80 years of her was asking her entire life, but that it was such a measly frame of time that he couldn't understand why she cared. To his perspective, it was barely a commitment.
Her eyes stung with tears.
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Post by Loki Odinsson on Dec 29, 2014 0:30:20 GMT -5
"You're afraid that if you turn your back on me for five minutes, I'll go burn down an orphanage or expire from despair -"
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Post by Teja on Dec 29, 2014 0:41:25 GMT -5
"Oh, for heaven's sake, that isn't what this is about!" she cried, losing her temper all over again with a frustration that would lend itself easily over to tears. "Now it's a crime of mine that I don't want to hurt you? I don't want to break your heart! But it's not because I think you'll go kill somebody if i do-"
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