@lexibramptonrpg / lexibramptonrpg.tumblr.com
Jeanann Verlee, from “Bridge Song,” Said the Manic to the Muse (via lifeinpoetry)
He’d put it off for weeks, months even. Ignored that nagging feeling that told him he knew better; the immortal restlessness in his bones marking an impending deadline he could not change. Or maybe just one he wasn’t ready to change.
It was time to go.
The silent clock seemed to function of its own volition; asking not what he wanted to do or what he hoped to achieve. A line drawn in sand and yet as enduring as if it had been carved in marble. He saw it with every sunrise and with every sunset. There were days when he welcomed it, when the blood and the bile in his stomach told him No More. There were hours when he would walk the same street, see the same buildings and resent each and every one of them. But then there were the mere minutes… Seconds when he looked into his sister’s content eyes, or shared some common space with Alexandre, a story with Amber, or a drink with Erik - the briefest kiss with Lexi - and he willed that line to disappear and wished only to be granted another few seconds of p e a c e .
Victoria was the first to notice it, as was her way. Then Alexandre, then Erik… Finally, it could be put off no longer. He’d asked Lexi to meet him in their designated spot, only tonight it wasn’t for an indolent evening in her company, or some extravagant surprise that he’d planned. Tonight was a night for goodbyes.
“You know, if you scowl any deeper your face is going to stay that way.”
Lexi quipped from where she reclined against a tree. She hadn’t known what to expect when Nic asked her to show up at their usual spot, and tried ardently to keep her thoughts above water until that afternoon had come around. She had a pension for overthinking, a habit Erik hypocritically condemned when Lexi was at her worst, but lately, as her affections would have it, the times she spent preparing for the worst case scenario had grown few and far in between. Still, that didn’t mean the newborn had buried her head in the sand.
She’d felt it, like a knot between the shoulder blades, like walking carelessly over black ice, that something had changed in the last several weeks. Silences lasted longer, gazes ran shorter. It was a distance that Lexi had put into practice all her life, she just hadn’t wanted to accept it was there. Even then, as she studied the frown on Nic’s lips, she kept her mouth from mirroring his own, still holding onto a bit of what she knew was there.
A chance at getting him to smile.
Kinder, you're kinder than me I'm broken, don't know what you see I'll give you all I have to give, my love I understand you thinking ohh Our lies are better than the truth But I can't live it like I'm living I can’t live a lie I'm giving up more than I should Forgive me for my frail love
Future!Lexi - or - Lexi seeing London for the first time.
Faye Chamberlain in Every Episode of The Secret Circle + 1.12 – “Witness”
“You’re acting like idiots.”
“Oh.” Theo grimaced at the pain slightly but didn’t complain as she continued to sew up the gash in his leg. He hadn’t thought about the lack of difference in Lexi actually. If anything, it was nice to see a familiar face after years of ones just a war torn as his own. Even if that familiar face was only familiar because of what she was. Long dark hair, striking eyes and cheek bones…she was still the girl all the guys freaked out over in high school, but he wasn’t the hapless freshman anymore. “Twenty-six,” he grunted in response to her age assessment, his right hand gripping the counter top tightly.
“You didn’t even recognize me.”
“I didn’t exactly think the guy shooting bullets from behind the bushels was the same guy who...” Once Lexi looked back at him, the comparison fizzled out. She had a handful of memories of Theo, but she hadn’t known him all too well before that one fateful year in Arcadia. And even then, it wasn’t so much a particular memory that defined his character, but rather, his outlook. And that was something that felt like a hands-free zone then and there. Lexi pressed her lips together.
“Thank you for saving my life.” A beat later, Lexi looked back down at her handiwork and fixed her attention on it, pushing the needle through a particularly deeper part of the wound well aware it would sting a little more. “Don’t do it again.” She pulled the thread along the wound and kept going.
“Similar souls wander in similar places. They may not know each other, but often they touch the same winds, they step on the same leaves, their looks are lost in the same horizons.”
The joke between them was fleeting. Theo had expected the usual flirty and embarrassing teasing from his oldest friend, but it was cut short as her eyes trailed off to a couple of bruises around his rib cage. He seemed to have made her uncomfortable, which was a task within itself, but he wondered what had triggered it. Was it his change in appearance? The scars from his lifestyle? The time that had passed between them?
His body tensed as she began to sew up the wound. It hurt but he had been through worse. His eyes followed her steady hands as she stitched the skin together, but flickered up to meet hers as she spoke up. Theo frowned at her question, spitting out the gauze so he could answer her. “…freaked out by you? What do you mean?“
“The aging thing.” Lexi clarified, rolling her eyes at her own vagueness. She hadn’t run into a single human from Arcadia in the last several years. The change threw her as she looked at Theo now. He wasn’t just physically different, that much was obvious, but still, there’d been a part of Lexi, as melodramatic as it sounded now, that years ago believed she’d never see him again. The image of Theo Matthews in high school was still branded in her mind, distant but there, and now he was technically older than her. He had a beard! If there had been just an ounce of comfort left between each other she would have gone as far as to tease him about it a half hour ago. But all the vampire found herself doing was stitching up his wound and cutting at the corners of all the questions that wanted to escape her mouth.
“You’ve got to be...what, twenty five now? Twenty seven?”
Phoebe Tonkin for Unconditional Magazine (November, 2013)
Yeah, well you’re still human. Yeah and he had the scars to show it, but it didn’t seem to altering the path he had chosen for his life. When she hesitated, he looked up from then gauze and tried to gauge her reaction. “What? Not like you remembered?” Theo asked with a subtle grin, the first air of humor passing between the two as he referenced the time she had walked in on him - one of the brighter moments between the two of them. “None of them hurt anymore.” He followed her gaze as it swept over his damaged body, reading her mind just by her expression. Lexi’s worry for him was always clearly written across her face, even now.
He watched her as she methodically cleaned his wound without a word - barely even sparing him a glance unless it pertained to the injury. When she pulled out the needle and was prepared to sew up the wound, he held up a hand to stop her. “Almost,” he replied and pulled out a flask from the medical kit, taking a long swig of whatever was inside. Sucking in air through clenched teeth before exhaling, he gave her a thumbs up as he placed the gauze back in his mouth so he had something to bite down on.
When Theo’s quip clicked in her mind, Lexi gave a reluctant chuckle. Walking in on him post-shower was a memory of their youth they had both tried to move past at the height of their friendship, but recalling it now, it was funnier than it was embarrassing. At least back then his body wasn’t marred with war wounds. That somber thought wiped the smile from her face fairly quickly. The brunette cleared her throat, and kept her hand steady. She heard his assurances, Lexi just...wasn’t sure they made her feel any better. Once he told her he was good to go, Lexi nodded. “On three. One...”
And then the needle was in, better sooner than later. With careful hands, she began to sew up the arrow wound, though she couldn’t be too empathetic to the pain. She hadn’t ever had to get stitches before, not counting the time she was in the hospital thanks to another old friend...Jacob. Lexi didn’t let his memory linger at the forefront of her mind for too long, something about it always reminding her of a grief she hadn’t wanted to feel, not then and not now. Looking back up at Theodore, Lexi tried talking of other things, lighter things.
“Does it freak you out?” she asked, before looking back down at his wound. “Me.”
A post shared by Chloe Bennet (@chloebennet) on Jul 22, 2017 at 9:31pm PDT
chloebennet; Actual angel babe. @phoebejtonkin 😇
Theo’s jaw remained hardset and clenched tightly around the gauze as she applied pressure and sanitized the wound, both of which hurt almost as much as when the arrow initially pierced his skin. His hand gripped the counter, knuckles pure white, as he did everything to brace against an all too familiar pain. Only difference was he wasn’t having to patch it up himself for once.
He met her eyes momentarily as she apologized for the antiseptic and for a moment, despite the pain, he was transfixed. With the one thing - the one person - that remained constant through everything. Even the house had changed, growing old and vacant with dust and empty rooms, but not the woman in front of him. There was that familiar smile….but in a fleeting moment it was gone and she broke the closeness between the two of them. Maybe he really was unrecognizable after all. The boy she had known swallowed by the darkness that always crept into his fairy tales.
And of course she wasn’t the same either, despite her constant appearance. “It’s like ripping a band aid off. I had to accustom myself to the pain and diving right into it always seemed like the best option.” He replied once he removed the gauze from his mouth .Briefly letting go of hiis leg, he pulled on the back collar of his shirt and slipped it over his head. “Do me a favor?” he asked, nodding toward the wound on his upperarm from where a bullet grazed him earlier in the fray. Not only did this reveal another fresh wound, but a multitude of scars and bruises that decorated his torso. Most healed but by the looks of them they were not stitched up prettily by a doctor.
“Yeah, well. You’re still human..."
Her point was proven when Theo took off his shirt. The sudden choice had caught her off guard, but her surprise was nothing compared to the feeling Lexi got when her eyes fell on his injuries, the old and the new. It almost knocked the wind out of her. Though she knew it wasn’t entirely within it’s rights, guilt started blocking her windpipe, making it harder to swallow. What the hell had Theo been doing all these years, to have nothing but bruises, wounds, and an abandoned house to show for it? Lexi looked to the bullet wound on his shoulder and blinked, any age-old instinct to demand answers or yell at him died on her tongue.
“Here.” She got up off the stool with gauze and some medical tape, strapping it to the injury. “This should...keep pressure while I sew the other one.”
The vampire went quiet, eyes on anywhere but his own as she sat back where she was and cleaned up Theo’s wound. Only when she had the needle between her fingers, and when her other hand was holding his leg steady did she look at him again.
“Ready?”
The nagging voice that told him he’d said too much - ruined a perfectly good moment, only grew louder when she stiffened in his arms. His own grip tightened around her; not in an effort to keep, but to safeguard. But he could not protect her from a truth that had been haunting him for every one of his years on this earth, throughout the ages. So instead, his gaze merely waited patiently on hers, fingers stroking feather-light circles against her spine.
Lexi had stopped dancing altogether. A fitting pause, as the track played its final notes and then lapsed into a soft, whirring sound before the next piece was set to begin. Reluctantly, Nicolas loosens his grip around waist. “You, your life - did not end that night, Lexi…” He begins, but stops prematurely as a sliver of awareness, cold and faint, runs down his spine.
Because the words he speaks, are the ones he should have said long ago.
On that night in her living room where they stood as close as they are now - c l o s e r , even. Before he’d walked out on her. Before pride and prejudice and self-preservation grew like a chasm between them; one that finally ensnared them both.
He wants to tell her that she’s safe here with him, that nothing can hurt her. But he knows that is a lie, and so in the end he tells her merely; “You’re dead. Nothing can stop you.” Which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true. “The dreams you had, they are still in your hands. How fortunate for you to have a second chance.” Looking down at her pale arm, he runs his fingers gently down the curve of her elbow, before finding her palm and bringing it up between his own hands. “ — There is no third chance.”
The Saloon won’t make her happy. If nothing else, he’s relieved at least to hear she knows that much. It shaves the unintended cruelty from his prediction; leaves the words blunt and barren - but not callously so. “Make something of yourself, Lexi. Give shape to your desires, to the life you wish to have… Build it with y o u r o w n two hands.” His eyes meet hers briefly before dropping back to her open palm. Somehow, it’s easier that way. “There are many secrets to happiness; most are masked even from me. But this one,” His index finger presses on one of the lines that runs almost down to her wrist. “This one, I know to be true.”
“You’re dead. Nothing can stop you.”
Lexi’s hazel eyes returned to his. She knew she was dead, had spoken it out loud to herself a handful of times, but hearing it spill from his lips was still disarming, made her feel as though she’d dipped her hands and feet into icy water. The words that followed after though, they were comforting. As if to say she couldn’t be trapped, if there was no cage. Lexi listened intently, brows furrowing softly as his hands moved to cradle hers. The gentle stroke of his fingers threatened to distract her. She’d never done well with affection or intimacy, had spent most of her life training her body to think a kind-hearted caress was about as sharp as a pocket knife. With Nicolas now, that wasn’t the case. Each word that spilled from his mouth, she wanted to lean into, believe for the better, but not every hesitation inside her chest could be drawn out by his comfort.
As he looked to her hands, she looked at his. It was easier, true, but something in the newborn demanded she look back up, right into the eyes of a hope she had refused to hold onto every time it landed on her lap. Regardless of whether he was right, or she was wrong, or whether or not Lexi Brampton could in fact make it out of Arcadia with hands that knew more than how to bruise, he believed in her. And that alone was enough to quiet her cautious heartbeat, long enough for her to gather the courage to reach out. Gentle, Lexi’s hand grazed his cheek, cradling his jaw with care, and a surprisingly steady hand. The brunette closed what little distance was left between them with a sentimental kiss, careful and warm, and telling of something words couldn’t seem to do justice.
Her nerves came rushing back as she pulled away, no sooner had Lexi met his gaze that a small smile escaped her. Lexi pressed her lips together and searched for the right thing to say. “Thank you.”
marina v., the breakup poem #1. (via findingwordsforthoughts)
