#complicated.

*

How easily they fell in sync, how natural their rhythm. When they were together it was as the movement of involuntary muscles, as easy as blinking, as breathing in and out. Their shared and quickened pulse, the weighted breath in time; the closeness was nearly unbearable in its depth--yet their hearts hammered the demand for more. They were pieces made whole, fragments that fit together perfectly, fractures seeking completion in frenzied harmony of their flesh.

...but not flesh. They were as a body and its shadow, mirrored, but never really touching. Parallel lines nearly indiscernible from one another yet never meeting. Any feeling of physical touch was invented by her lonely imagination, by her heart starving for contact. None of it was real, at least not physically. 

Despite the facts--such as they were, the ones that she had--some part of it felt like more. This warm and familiar impossibility brought her comfort, if ephemeral. The embrace of a phantom, that’s what it was: invented, created, willed into fraudulent existence by her desire for something other than the heavy emptiness this light had created in her. Despite the facts, in her heart, it felt real.

It felt real enough that Alyx felt guilty dreaming of him.

Ardbert was his own man, after all. He had--past and present tense--his own life, his own dreams and struggles, his own adventures and moments of uncertainty and loneliness. He had a life hauntingly similar to her own, but that did not make it hers. He knew things nobody else could, had experienced things nobody else ever will.

Except for her. 

He was the empathetic shade whose weight she swore she felt shift the mattress. And he was warm, somehow, either truly radiating heat through pure psychic energy or the strength of her imagination. 

“Alyx, is…” his voice was gruff from fatigue. (Was it? Was he tired? How?)

“Is this alright?”

She opened her eyes, unmoving. Blinking away spots of light she saw the wide-eyed but tired--yes, tired--concern on his face. He was beside her, not beside her, only a few fulms away. 

“I don’t mean to, well,” he fumbled softly, swallowing, “I know you’re--”

Engaged? Loyal? Cripplingly lonely and alienated by what’s happening to me?

“It’s fine,” she gave him a lopsided smile, shifting her weight. “Just don’t get handsy.”

Arbdert scoffed, clearly flustered and possibly insulted. “I’m not--I would never.” Not unless you wanted me to, his fleeting glance seemed to suggest. 

She didn’t, but she wondered if he knew what she was dreaming. She wondered if he knew the bizarre and strangled feeling of wanting him to know but also never to know, both in equal measure--the craving for understanding and the shameful fear of being misconstrued. These dreams were just dreams, same as any others, same as any other creation of her loneliness.

And this, this was just a girl and her shadow: sleeping but not sleeping, touching but not touching, parallel lines together and apart.