Until We Meet Again | Enşah

Until We Meet Again

A/N: I apologize in advance for the pain I'm about to cause, but hey, multi-chapter story with happy ending coming soon 😼
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It's 3:26 am, and Ender Çelebi can't sleep. The curtains of her windows are drawn shut — she doesn't want to see the sky — and it's so dark in her bedroom, she thinks she might drown in it. The silence is horribly loud, crawling through her ears and squeezing past her skull, squirming until it adheres itself to her brain. It pours into her through tiny, unseen cracks in her body and fills up the empty craters that pepper her soul.

Ender wraps her blanket around herself and twists the top of it into her fist, gripping it tightly. She shifts in her bed — uncomfortable and so, so cold — staying still despite the tenacious ache in her sore muscles. Perhaps the chill will go away if she manages to preserve body heat, even though her insides are iced to her very core.

She's tired. Her eyelids gently close, but before she can get any rest they snap open again. The blackness that flickers behind her eyes is even worse than what's real; it's the perfect backdrop for scenes she never wants to see again. Perfect for twisting already terrible, terrible things into something even worse. It's better to be swallowed up by the void than have to relive that day. Pieces of her soul had withered and died, then. No one had noticed. No one had seen through her front of steel, but God, how much she wished she could have been shot, too.

There is a dull ache inside her, pulsing faintly in her chest. It swallows her whole, a pain everlasting, a constant reminder that keeps nagging at her, whispering that it was her fault. That she'd killed her. Not by pulling the trigger, no. Ender had killed Şahika long before that. Long before the court and long before Kaya.

She'd killed Şahika years ago, when they were still so very young and inexperienced, when Şahika had kissed her; told her that she loved her, and what had Ender done in return? She'd slapped her. She'd ran away, because in reality she'd been terrified of loving another woman. She'd left Şahika there, hurt, confused, heartbroken.

She'd never said a word about this to anyone — it was something she would take to her grave — but then years later, when she'd nearly forgotten about the woman with short hair and the bravery of a lion, Şahika had returned.

Ender twists and turns again, lying on her back this time, observing the dark ceiling above her. Thing is, she's not alive. Not truly, at least. She lives on hatred and despair, on incurable anguish that threatens to suffocate her more and more each day. It's not a life worth living. She can't keep pretending that everything is alright when she's losing the people she loves one by one. Her blood is being pumped by a heart that has no reason to keep beating at this point. A heart that's been through more than one can come up with even in the darkest tales; that's been broken, then painstakingly threaded back together, stitch by stitch, only to be shattered into tiny shreds again.

Would it have made things better, if you hadn't come to me?

Is it worth pretending that I'll wake up tomorrow, and you'll be there?

I never found the courage to tell you how much you meant to me.

...

I miss you.

You shouldn't have died.

I'm sorry I couldn't save you.

***

"I still can't believe it..." Ender whispers over her mug, hot steam going into her face.