To the Light { a joel miller fanfiction }

Chapter Nine - Edge

"I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul."
― Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

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Joel tried to ignore it. That was the only thing he could do that didn't involve brutally ripping open his chest and allowing her to take a peek inside. It was a truly impossible feat, though, ignoring something as detrimental and expansive as his love for her. He knew it had always been there, a seed planted somewhere deep in his core, holding the potential to grow and flourish into something immense, something tremendous, something that would supersede his physical form, palpable and evident as the features on his face. He did not possess the strength to suppress it, it was like the knowledge that it existed gave it power, caused it to cultivate and expand.

He tried to bury himself in a façade, a cold and distant cloak he could don so that she would not see what it was he was actually trying to hide, so that he could keep her just a little bit longer. He was truly powerless when it came to staying away from her, though, and somehow trying to slip into some frigid, aloof guise just made him more desperate to be near her all the time.

He was terrified, truly and utterly petrified of his feelings for her, the moral discrepancies that arose because of who he was and what he'd done, the possibility of losing her now that he knew that he couldn't. It was all too much, and his first and most natural instinct was to run, or push her away, or show her what a cruel and nefarious thing he truly was so that she would leave.

He knew that he could never entirely disregard her, not anymore, perhaps not ever, but there was no scenario in which any of this made sense. He'd gone too far, tried to dip his toe in, and instead, gone ahead and dived in head first. The light that shone off of her was too bright, too inviting, tugged at his chest in such a brutal fashion that he knew, when he was forced to sever the rope, he was going to cut off pieces of himself in the process. He would never be the same, but it was only fair. He couldn't keep lying to her, evading the truth by hiding the most expansive parts of him, that rotten and violent nucleus that made up the core of who he was.

Days went by, and he rattled off excuses in his head, trying to justify his continued existence at her side in any way that he could. He knew he was running out of time, and that knowledge birthed a large and clawing entity in his core, its presence frequently causing him to slip into some panicked, dissociative state that had him palming at his chest, hunched over, his breathing all erratic, short and fast so that it never felt like he was getting quite enough oxygen into his lungs.

Adeline had watched it happen, only once, while they were walking back from the schoolhouse last week. Some vision of his past that had carved itself into his brain, a flashback that had morphed and altered into something even more grotesque and blasphemous. The people he'd killed back then had taken on the faces of her and her sister, staring up at him, terrified and bloodied, and it caused him to keel forward, almost falling onto the ground, face down in the snow. He caught himself with his hands on his knees, his eyes shut tight as he tried to get his breathing back to something normal, tried to cast away the images that made him feel like he might just die right there, suffer cardiac arrest or a stroke or something that would stop that fucking aching in his chest and send him down to his damnation once and for all.

Adeline had panicked, grasping at his arms, and rubbing his back and calling out his name as she tried to get him to look at her. Joel, Joel, look at me, hey, look at me, are you okay? What's wrong? Tell me what's going on. A little angel calling out for him, singing his name, letting it ring out through the fiery pit he was condemned to.