@serendpitous ft. allison: don't you remember what happened last time?
pained rumbling is his immediate response — a noise isaac recognizes as the sound of his own laughter lodged in his throat. because of course he remembers. he remembers cautious optimism as, after seasons of touch and literal go, they found themselves on the threshold of a mutual understanding. no risk, no reward! don't we owe it to ourselves to try? back then, he'd been fresh off a year of failed soul-searching and just self-destructive enough to damn himself to inevitable suffering for just a crumb of nirvana. and allison — she'd been just self-destructive enough to let him.
then, the unthinkable happened. it worked. turns out, all that practicing domesticity wasn't for nothing. their fractured pieces, together at last, formed a contentedness he hadn't thought either of them capable of. contentedness. even now, he was reluctant to use the word happy, but hadn't they been? it was a question that haunted him in the years since, every time he — slightly less self-destructive, but still human in all the ways that count — found himself on her doorstep. looking back on that time, it was hard to pinpoint where it all went wrong. they were something ... not stable, they had never been stable, but solid. consistent. and one day, without realizing it, isaac stopped holding his breath. as it turns out, a little asphyxiation can be good for the soul.
so, yeah, he remembered.
coming from anybody else, he'd interpret the reminder as a taunt, a weapon poised to kill. but even at her lowest, her cruelest, her most spiteful, allison had never been the type to use his heart against him. for a while, he thought it was out of pity, that she was trying to spare his feelings from her lack thereof, but no — this was something they both had to live with. unlike his other affiliation, this one didn't come and go with the full moon. " hard to forget one's greatest hits — or maybe i just don't want to. " something between a smile and a scowl plays across his lips. so much had changed since those days, but this, this was constant. " isn't there some saying about people who don't remember their pasts being doomed to repeat them? "
