tenderhearted.

it’s really really important to me that shane and ilya get to grow old together and their bodies get to grow soft and a bit shapeless and their hair starts to grey and their skin grows thin and starts to sag and maybe shane’s prescription worsens and maybe ilya gets hearing aids down the line and maybe one of them uses a walker, and their bodies aren’t what they used to be. but more importantly, they have the same smile lines around their mouths, the same crinkles in the corners of their eyes. maybe their laughs sound similar, the way laughs often tend to when you spend your life with someone, when your joy is their joy, too. shane a near perfect mimicry of ilya when he says davai, ilya almost indistinguishable from shane when he says jeez. tan lines on their ring fingers. evidence that their lives did intersect, that time did pass, that they did get the future they so desperately wanted. that they lived past the end of their myth, and they did it together.