When Loving You Had No Consequences

I

He toyed with a lock of my hair. "I'll come back for you, I promise."

We had run away to the abandoned barn on the hill. He was leaving in an hour.

My hand reached up to catch his and when our skin touched, a new wave of misery overtook me. We sat there, gazing into each others' eyes with a mixture of despair, hatred and deep affection so complicated that it hurt.

"Don't go." I whispered, tears threatening to fall. The past few days had been filled with so much crying, you would think I'd have no tears left. But I did. I always did.

"Once I'm done, I swear, I'll be back," He offered gently. "But I need to do this. For my family. For me. For you. For us. It'll help us."

How will this help us? I wanted to scream. How is you leaving me helping me? "There's always working at your pa's mine. You don't need to go to college." My voice caught at the end and my jaw wavered.

"Sol..." He murmured, hearing my sorrow. The pity in his tone made me want to hit him. Hit him and kick him and call him nasty names. Hit him for leaving me for an old brick building that would do nothing for him. Who was he kidding? With his ties to the town, -his sick father and his family's business- he would grow old and die here, not go on to be some world-renowned scientist like he hoped of being.

"I need to establish my career," he continued. "and I can't do that in Garnet's Peak. It won't be long, we've talked about this. Just two years there and I'll be home again. You'll never even know I was gone."

It wasn't about that.

It wasn't about the length of his departure. It was what I felt when I looked into his ivy green eyes, sparks of amber around his pupils dancing in the candle light. Well, not what I felt. What I saw.

It was never an emotion, no, it was a split-second vision that washed over me. Some made me shiver, others I had to stop myself from congratulating the people.

The people. By now, I knew everyone in the villages' futures.

Yes, I said futures. Not deaths. Most of the time I saw their demise, but once in a blue moon I'd see an important moment, one that usually didn't involve anyone dying. These moments were upcoming memories that would stay with their owner forever. I called them moment futures instead of the others; the deadly futures.

In little Sue, the baker's daughter, I saw orange. I saw people standing around in a circle. There was a large fire. It was complicated. It was a early future. It was an deadly one. I much preferred moment futures.

Some futures would happen soon, and others late. The sooner ones I called "early" and the later, I called "old". In early futures there was a bright blurriness wrapped around the scene. In older ones there was a darkness, like the fate would be sealed off until a later time.

When I first realized I was seeing the future, I was very much horrified. I'd looked into my mother's eyes once and seen her fate: mines, dark red gems, hacking at rocks. I'd seen the tremble, the terror, the crumble of the tunnels as she tried to escape. I yelped and immediately told her. What I didn't know was that the second I'd told her, my mother's fate would dissolve, twisting and bending into a new disastrous future. I know now that if you tell someone their fate, you're messing, tempering, with reality. And every time you do, that person gets a new, more grim death. And so I've learned never to tell anyone what would happen to them, no matter how bad. Because there was always worse.

I stopped telling my mother what was going to happen to her once I'd seen the daylight. I had seen the morning light streaming through the shutters. I had seen her in bed. And I saw her eyes never opening again. It wasn't a Sleeping Beauty kind of thing. No true love's kiss would wake her. Mother would die in her sleep and she would never wake up. And what scared me the most was that I couldn't remember whether this was an early or old fate. So each night Mother went to bed could be her last.