Let's Play Pretend

Clarity

Outside, there was snow falling heavily in big, wide flakes. Everything seemed quiet and muffled and very, very cold.

Inside, Jenna sat with a big, untouched mug of (no longer very) hot chocolate. The whipped cream long since melted, making what had looked like a delightful treat seem slightly... off putting. Aiden had been talking for all that time, telling her things that seemed too fantastical to be true. When he had said he'd had something to confess, she had thought he might have eaten the last cookie or something. He hadn't. Her cookies were safe, for now.

No, he had lied. He had lied about a lot of things, it seems. But mostly he had just been keeping up the lies all of humanity had been told, or had been telling themselves. Well, if he now was to be believed. She thought there might be a hidden camera somewhere. That here might be a prank of some sort here... But from his shaking hands as he gesticulated wildly to underline the importance of some detail, she could tell that he was at the very least thinking he was giving her real information.

She needed time to process this, but he rattled off new facts at lightening speed. Eddie was a wizard? Or dealing with wizards? There were wizards? She had thousands of questions about this, but he assured her there was no time, that he had to tell her all he could. She could ask later, he promised.

He told her the reasons for his lies, and she thought she got it. She wasn't supposed to ever know anything about it at all. But it still hurt. She had told him so much, and he had told her things in return... But how many, if any, were real?

-I... I don't think I know you.

She blurted it out, and he paused. But only for a second, before he softly took the mug away and replaced it with his hands. And him holding her hands, that felt just as it had before. It made her feel just as safe and cared for. It was easy, when his fingers curled around hers, to think that nothing had really changed. She all but shut out the sound of his voice for a while, reveling in the touch of his hands and the way his fingers moved. He was stroking the back of her hands with his fingers, and somewhere in the distance she could hear him, making promises that she would have a lifetime to get to know who he was. That now there was no reason to hide anything.

He told her about his work, in some sort of agency that... Policed supernatural powers? Just this morning her greatest worry was that someone would steal her credit card info, and now she was supposed to deal with stuff like "people can enter your mind" and "Eddie probably did". The spider hadn't been a spider at all, and Eddie hadn't been Eddie at all, and... Was anything even slightly real?

-Cookies are real? Do you want one?

Aiden offered, as some sort of consolation that proved that... While she might not know him after all, he knew her. That he cared enough to notice how cookies made everything better, even though she tried to hide the way she sometimes ate her feelings. Her delicious chocolate chip feelings. And that he accepted it.

-Cookies. Yes, please. Cookies.

He tried to get up to go get her one, but her hands seemed reluctant to let his go. She wanted the cookies, but not at the price of this togetherness that would be broken as soon as he went to get them. His words were scary, but he was the comfort she sought. He was both the one to shake her world, and protect her from it right now and... It was... Okay. She could deal with things later.

-Or cuddles. We can replace cookies with cuddles.

He got down next to her, and held her in his arms. This was good. Why couldn't they just freeze time here, right now, before reality had to hit? He had said they would need to go. Soon. Any protest mentioning her job had only earned her a "are you fucking serious?" stare, clearly signaling that her job was of absolutely no importance compared to whatever was going on. Well, she did prefer staying alive to getting paid, if she absolutely had to choose.