Love Me, Harm Me

I have (too) many regrets

"I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call."
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

.☀.🌑.☀.🌑.

He'd been avoiding her. Ever since she'd posted those keys through the mail slot, gone in the middle of the night, Meliodas had been avoiding Elizabeth - everything to do with her.

Over the past few weeks, he had been doing everything within his power to keep himself stable. First it was the pictures, neatly taken down, boxed and put away, deep down in the storage cupboard. Next was that scrappy puppy she'd found - which had been dumped at Ban's a week later. He couldn't bear looking at it, couldn't bear thinking of her. So Meliodas simply got rid of it.

Everything. Every little thing was gone. Reminders hurt the most. More than the pain of knowing, the burden of existing, the reminders stung most.

Burying himself in his work used to be something Meliodas could do easily. Slipping into autopilot, limbs wired to the automatic instructions of his brain, had always been something he could rely on. Throughout his entire life cruising by on autopilot had been living. Watching the world change, everything flicker and whither and die, before him had always been the norm.

What had changed now? Why now did he struggle to shut off the other side, full of sunshine, full of light, full of laughter, that she'd brought?

Now Elizabeth was gone, key posted through the slot and all her stuff gone, what was there to stop him? Darkness had always taken root within Meliodas. Darkness would always exist within him. Usually, that darkness would spread without a problem. But now? God it was like talking to a damned brick wall.

Some days he wished he had never let her walk out. Some days he wished he'd never met her. Some days... he just wanted her to come back.

Part of Meliodas thought about it - seeing her again. Eyes closed, drifting away in the muddled bliss of whatever he'd done to get her out of his mind, he'd just lay there. Head filled with clouds, senses dulled with artificial joy. Sometimes he'd still see her, the ghost of a beautiful woman, smiling at him with a radiant beam that rivaled the shine of angels' halos. Other times she was gone, slipping into the distance as a hazy shadow.

But sometimes, sometimes, he did think about actually seeing her. Washed up on the shore, covered in sticky sea salt, clothes clinging to her pale skin. Those brilliant blue eyes of hers would sparkle like lost jewels - pretty sapphires - as she laughed, flipping her soaked silver hair over her shoulder. There she was, with all the wreckage, happy and smiling and waiting. In the wreckage. His wreckage.

No wonder why she was never coming back.

"You look like shit," Zeldris. True to his word he had come down to London, reluctantly.

Being a mess was always the best thing Meliodas was good at. In the past he had always been all over the place. Hopping on the trains, always going from north to south and east to west, he had never known stability. Stability was robbed from him as soon as his mother had died. But now the difference was that all the turbulence in his life was beginning to show. Fine cracks, spreading like fractures in a windshield, he was breaking down. This time he couldn't hide it.

"Well, I feel like shit," Meliodas grunted out in response, pulling open the fridge. Nothing was really there because he hadn't bothered to restock. Settled in that decision, he took out a carrot and bit off a solid chunk with a satisfying crunch. "And I quite like being a piece of shit."