#plot ?

You could have stayed with your friends. DC knew you might have been gone a while, and you could have stayed to celebrate, basked in the glory of being the man that brought home the head of the Batterwitch as the hero they all thought you were. But that’s not what you did. You went home to him, and waited for him, and when you saw his face again, it was the only face in the world that mattered. It was the face you were going to spend the rest of your life with, waking up to every morning, falling asleep beside. 

You could paint it from memory. You could place every freckle on his skin, and you could pinpoint the places on his cheeks that curve to let him smile. 

You remember when you made dinner for him. You remember feeling like you finally had a hold of it, you could finally love him, this could finally work. You weren’t even through the half of it. 

You can still feel how your body fits around his, how easy it is to hold, how his body curls right where your arm falls over his stomach. 

It’s been a long night. 

You’re happy, to finally see new faces. To hear stories and voices you’ve never heard before. It’s been a long time since that’s happened to you. It’s been a long time since you’ve been ready for it. The nagging voice in the back of your head promises that none of them mean it, swears to you you’re an object for their enjoyment, whispers predictions that they will project whatever broken man onto you they can fix so that they can fall in love with him. Maybe the voice is right. It’s too early to tell, surely too early to back out because of it. 

You’re trying anyway. For Richard, first and foremost, because you know your brother’s dying wish would be your happiness, and you’re prepared to die yourself trying to get there if it could bring him some peace. But it’s hard, too, knowing how badly you’ve ruined it all, knowing how brutally you’ve undermined the chances at happiness you’ve had up until this point. Undermined, beyond repair. Not in the poetic sense, not in the sense that tempts them back to be fixed again, but in the real sense, the true sense, the finished sense. You and DC aren’t a dying star, you’re a dead one, and he doesn’t want to see you again. 

But you still remember the look in his eyes when he’d cry for you, begging you to stay. 

You never did. Not once. Not really. Every time, every single time, you left, so he’s finally stopped asking. 

You’re trying to move on, for Richard, and you’re succeeding, slowly if surely, but every new face is a reminder of the one you lost. The ones, you lost, but his, most of all. The fighting, the screaming, the crying, and in all of it, the one thing you should have done, you never did. It’s impossible not to wonder how it would have gone. You think, sometimes, someone should have physically stopped you from leaving, and you wonder constantly what would have happened if instead of leaving, you’d clung to him. If in all the fighting and screaming and crying, you’d stopped, you’d cut through it all, you’d grabbed hold of him and held onto him so tight that no force in this world or the next could have pried you apart, if that would have saved you, or him, or whatever broken attempt at love the two of you so desperately wanted with each other.

It’s for the best you never did it.

You know John will give him what he needs and wants, a thousand times over, a thousand times more than you ever could, even if you had done that. It’s better that you left, like a coward, again, and again, it’s better that you screwed it all up, it’s better that you shattered his heart and stomped on the pieces so violently that he’ll never come back, because he’ll be happier with John than you could ever make him in this life or the next. You can only give him that broken love that will never, ever be enough, not a candle to all the stars in the sky that he deserves to have someone give to him.

But that doesn’t mean that on nights like this, when the company of someone else reminds you what company is like at all, and makes you long for a feeling other than the one of sleeping alone, you won’t still think of him.