strangcrdoctor —— STEPHEN
Finally, he hears the words he’s been waiting to hear from her since their last parting. He’d been broken, upon not being able to return to her. Meeting pirates at sea had seemed like one of the many risks they took on simply as a matter of course. He’d cared more and more over the years, increasingly for every risk he took that might put their future at risk. But he had to keep going, because among them all, there was no greater risk than that of him choosing to settle for his fate as a well-paid farmhand. Forever suffering, watching the woman he loved through the windows of her manor with a husband who could never conceive of nor appreciate her brilliance. And he would have kept going until the edges of the earth, risking pirates and God himself if it had meant being able to reach her at the end of all things. He had stood face to face with the dread pirate, the Sorcerer Supreme herself, defending those values he had chosen to uphold to the one he loved. And he would have taken that death over any defeat any day, so long as it mean the wouldn’t have to live with her being disappointed in him.
Mourning him, yes. Perhaps he could live with that, so long as she could survive it well. That’s what he’d told himself in his first years working as a slave to the most ancient wizard. But they hadn’t been true, those falsities. He couldn’t survive her living with less than she deserved. And even if he was not the pinnacle of all she deserved in the world, he knew more than anyone else that she deserved more than she would get with Baron Mordo. But when she puts her hands on his face, recognizes him for the first time in so many years, he can’t deny how gently her warmth returns to him. How much he wants to tell her about all the years they’ve been missing from one another. How much he’s learned, how much he has to teach her from everything that he’s been able to experience.
And then that soft touch turns into a fist, and a part of him is, if possible, even more thrilled that he’s managed to awaken the fiery hellion that is Christine Palmer. Because she was never the type to take tragedy sitting down or crying, but she was exactly the type to take it with a punch to the face of whoever provided it. And when her knuckles connect with his jaw, he is still smiling. Smiling for the fact that she was still all of the woman he remembered, if not more so for having years of loss and trauma unconditionally feeding into the moderated fire she kept hidden in her chest. “I am indeed, my dear,” he says once she’s obviously satisfied by the solid sock she’s given his jaw. And he obviously did teach her to punch well, otherwise he wouldn’t be so sure he would end up with a bruise on his jaw tomorrow. “I came back for you.” He shakes his head, doggedly, as if wishing it hadn’t taken him so much time. “I know I’m late.” He chokes a little bit on that statement. “I know I’m too late, probably. But I didn’t die. I didn’t ever give up on getting back to you. I just had to find new ways to get back to you… ways that both of us never would have epxected.”
A dull, throbbing pain radiates from her knuckles up to her wrist. It’s been a long time since she’d landed a solid hit on someone, sparring was no longer a part of her life, it would be unseemly for the future Queen to be seen with calloused hands and throwing punches. It’s a satisfying pain, because she knows whatever she’s feeling, he’s gotten at least twice the amount of pain. All this time, she’d mourned him, had cried until tears refused to come anymore and all she had was the gaping hole in her chest from his absence and a silent loneliness. And he had been alive, every night that she had pictured his death at the hands of Sorcerer had been for naught, each torturous though that had consumed her to the point of sickness that first year seems like some sick joke now. She won’t stand here and listen to this ——to this ——drivel that is running off of his tongue as he shamelessly calls her dear. A burn from behind her eyes and the tightness in her chest are all pointing towards the inevitable fall out of her emotions rising up from the pit of her stomach, which seems to have dropped miles.
“Came back for me?” Taking a step back, trying to put distance between them, the sword lowered but still gripped loosely in her hand, dragging along the grass and kicking up cut blades as a breeze picks up along the side of the ravine. “After all of these years of letting me believe that you were dead, letting me mourn you, and you came back for me?” A hitch in her voice makes the last word come out as nearly a sob, but she brings the heel of her palm to wipe at her cheeks, more out of instinct then because of there being actual tears present just yet. “You could have told me, written a letter, sent a messenger —— you have magic now —— anything to let me know you were alive. Only you didn’t, you let me suffer!”
Dropping the sword, she turns away from him, picking her way along the rocky hillside, needing to get as far away from him as possible. Hands still bound, she trips and catches herself for several steps. Stopping, whipping around, curls flying and dress swirling along her legs, she points and accusatory finger at him. “I loved you, I wanted a life with you and I waited, prayed for your return every night so that we could be married. I...I was such an idiot. All this time I’ve been holding on to the memory of your ghost, wasting away my youth being in love with a man who left and then never came back. Who made me promises that he apparently had no intentions of keeping.” Reaching for finger, she rips away the delicate metal band and holds it out to him, that band had been laying against her skin for years, since the day he had given it to her, along with his word he would come back and that they would be married. “....I never loved anyone else, there’s never been anyone but you, and now...now there isn’t even you.”