In The Sun

The laugh, though it was mirthless and hardly more than a harsh snort, slipped out after that, and he took a step backwards, turning to stare at the doorway of the club rather than the woman he had once loved."Writing that song doesn’t sound like you’re okay with a bloody bit of it, I was actually listening to the lyrics, thank you kindly. If you’re trying to convince me you’re not blaming me for what I did, you’re not doing all that well." He shoved his hands in his pockets when he swung a foot back over to stand facing her again, biting the inside of his lip for a moment while he sorted through all of the things his mind had thrown up in its flurry to snap back at her words. "Aye, I went home after they’d let me out of lockup and tattooed me, I’ve gotten a green card too, and a flat of my own. I go to therapy like a good little boy, go to the gym now, but go on, tell me why I shouldn’t have gone and changed myself at all since you saw me last." 

He stared at his shoes for a long moment, batting around the last thing he had wanted to say to her long before they ran into each other, something he’d thought about after a few too many after he had come back to the States. It didn’t really matter, did it? She wasn’t going to want to talk to him ever again after this, he may as well say it before his captive audience threw a punch at him and left. “D’you want me to be brutally honest, Kaye? No sane person goes and runs away with someone they’ve known half a year, especially not when it’s to hide away in some stranger’s flat. We’re not living some fluffy romance novel, thank you kindly.” Perhaps it was a bit too harsh, but it was true enough, the few friends he had trusted enough to explain the whole situation to so he could ask their opinion had pretty much said the same thing he was saying to her now. ”I may have loved you once, maybe part of me still does, but you really don’t know me if you thought I would have done something like that, even with the kind of man I was a year ago. I’m not angry all the bloody time by the way, I’m just angry at the fact that you seem to think I’m some sort of vicious, selfish bastard who went and hurt you on purpose when you didn’t even bother to give me the chance to explain myself or fix anything later on.”

"I don't blame you." Her tone was softer this time, in hopes that he will realize that she meant it. For Kaye Sillar never said things she never meant. And she might have appeared to be Jenny Rachels, but she was speaking for herself. "I couldn't have blamed you.And I'm sorry for asking you to come into hiding with me. Sure, I was upset. A little bit more than upset. Just because it hurt doesn't mean I blame you for it. It was as much of my fault as it was yours, if not greater." It was she who was running in the first place, and she still was. Who was she to expect him to just drop everything and follow her to the ends of the earth?

She had once had the fantasy of their lives falling back into place once it was all over. But now that she was facing reality, she realized that what she gained from seeing Reese again was something else entirely. Closure. They needed closure. And Kaye just knew there wasn't going to be a chapter two to their story-- at least not any time soon-- because whatever was here, wasn't here anymore. And that was when Kaye realized, it was too good to be true, to dream of something that would last. Nothing was ever constant in her life anymore and Kaye had a feeling that that was the only thing that was going to last at this point.

A car had pulled up behind her, one she recognized to be Daniel's old car. She raised her hand at the driver to tell him to wait, although she couldn't exactly see him through the tinted glass. "Are we done here because Walter's waiting."

The Guy That Says Goodbye To You Is Out Of His Mind - Griffin House

You don’t need to change a thing about you babe I’m telling you From where I sit you’re one of a kind Relationships, I don’t know why, they never work out and they make you cry But the guy that says goodbye to you is out of his mind

The laugh slipped out as she gushed about him being alive and well, he couldn’t quite smother it after all, but the sharp little sound suited how he felt about that remark better than anything else. "Aye, I’m alive. Okay’s quite a stretch though, don’t think I’d go pushing your description that far. Six months of lockup tends to go skewing your definition of okay, believe me." An exasperated sigh followed not long after, brought on by her litany, and he raised a hand to the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a moment against the combination of beer, exhaustion, and this mess of a conversation. "I’m not after asking you to, I’m just wondering why you’d go letting yourself suffer like that when I’ve got bloody business cards, I’ve a phone number you could call. I’ve gotten a Facebook page, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know what you want, Kaye. S’not my place to go speculating, neither is it my place to ask anything of you other than to tell me why." He let his hand drop to his side after a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose wasn’t going to stave off the headache he could feel building in his temples. "You didn’t have to wait, but you could’ve sent a postcard, a text, something. I had a good enough reason for vanishing, but I’ve had a proper phone since even before I went home for a bit."

She swung her guitar case in front of her, grasping the handle with both hands now. "You went back to Wales?" she asked, honestly curious of how that went. He finally did what she had wanted him to do so long ago. She would've smiled if she could bring herself do so.

She was completely aware of how cold her fingers were and the crispness of the night wasn't responsible for that. "Look for you?" she shook her head. "I could've very well done that, true. But I would never ever look for someone who so willingly just walked out of my life. I didn't do so with my biological family and I wouldn't do so for anyone else. You might call them abandonment issues, I just say that's just my way to make sure I don't get hurt again."

She looked at him for a second, breathing slowly, feeling the faint thumping of her heart against her chest. "Stupidly enough, I waited for you to come back. But you seem different-- and I can't say if it's the good kind. Guess when you lose someone-- it's never the same person who comes back. Tell me I'm wrong." Her eyes stayed on him as she waited for him to just tell her exactly how wrong she was.

Timing was everything, or so the cliche ran, and he took his time stepping forward into the light, careful not to stand too close to her with how she had jumped the last time they had ran into each other. Not that he had known it was her, but the pieces had all fallen together in his mind while he sat at his table earlier, nursing half a beer. "Hello Kaye." He said softly, just loud enough for her to hear in the rare silence of the street. That was simple enough, wasn’t it? Not any of that dramatic Nicholas Sparks crap, he felt no need to throw himself at her feet and beg forgiveness; months of therapy had taught him better than to think putting his mental health first was something you owed an apology for. "I was going to go saying something trite like what a beautiful song you’d sung towards the end, but I think you’d smell the lie out of that a bit too quick to make it worth saying. Chords were lovely though." A look of resignation took the place of any other expression on his face, though there was a hint of pain in there as well. "I’m not that hard to find Kaye, and I did come back, though I couldn’t even begin to find you when I finally got the chance to look. Assumed you didn’t want me to anyway, but I’m not so sure about that now I’ve heard your song. You can set me straight or walk away, s’up to you. But I wonder."

It was the song that gave it off, she realized. When she had written it, she thought she’d never have to see him again. But here he was, living, breathing right in front of her. And he knew. The song was meant for him, so it was only fitting that he would hear. And it was their story threaded carefully into the song, so it was only natural he would know.

"I don’t know," was what she managed to say when she found her voice once more. "I’m scared. I am. I don’t want to go through what you put me through again. And yet everyday… Everyday for the last year I wished I could see you."

"And now you’re here…" She closed her eyes as she felt warm tears against the back of her eyelids. She smiled although she was fighting every urge in her body at that point to just throw herself at him and hold him just as she wanted to at night when she was alone. "You’re here and it makes me so happy, that you’re alive, that you’re okay. But it makes me scared of the things I might do. Believe me, I have planned out an angry rant— and not even a single word can come back to me. And I want to be angry but I’m not. And that scares me. It doesn’t mean I’m willing to just rush into your arms and pretend the last year didn’t happen."

She opened her eyes again, and the yellow lamp light gave a bit of color to his skin. Her jaw tensed to a point where it was starting to cause her pain. “I wanted you to come back, but I couldn’t have waited for you. I moved out, moved in with Andrew.” She took a deep breath. “Kieth is very happy. And that makes me very happy. And I can’t,” she shook her head. “I can’t just jeopardize what I managed to make for him— a safe home.”

She sounded like…no, it couldn’t be, people could have singing voices that similar, couldn’t they? Entirely possible, that was the lie he told himself as he sat at his customary table in the back corner, and it held water until she launched into her last song. Instead you ran the other way, no, that was too much coincidence for one evening. He hadn’t felt like stepping out into the humid air to smoke before, but by the end of the song, he couldn’t stand to be inside the building any longer. Two cigarettes went by in the time that it took the rest of the crowd to walk past him as he stood just clear of the designated clear air space around the doors, but he still felt like a marionette with cut strings, hands shaking ever so slightly despite the fact that he could easily just go home and try to forget the whole thing. He didn’t have to wait around here to see if she’d talk to him, spurn him, throw a drink in his face, or just do something to acknowledge his existence, but that song…he wanted to know just how she really felt, in spoken words. Some sort of closure would be worth the slap he might get. So he waited.

Reese had come back, just as he promised her. Except he had nothing to come back to. Not when Kaye had dropped her life as Margaux and started fresh. He had no way of finding her— no one had anyway to find her. But he was back. And he didn’t know Kaye was Jenny. And Kaye didn’t know whetxher or not it was a great idea to change that. But it was only one time that he had met her as Jenny— what were the chances that they’d meet again with the population density and the area of the entire city?

As it turned out, the chances were pretty high. She set down her guitar on the pavement for a second to be able to move her hand and call the attention of a cab. But the first few attempts that she failed at just made her give up all at once. She was far too tired for that. It was already pretty late, so she couldn’t call Andrew to come pick her up. No, the best idea would be to call her butler, Walter. And when she had put down the phone, she began her wait.

It was the smell of nicotine that gave it off that someone else was there with her. She felt her heart stop all at once when she turned to see him standing there. This wasn’t another of her dreams. This was Emrys standing right in front of her, and that somehow made her forget to move.