First Love, First War, First Step |√|

Love's Sting

Morning found me lying on the grass in front of Luke's tombstone. The grass had nearly grown as tall as those surrounding, and I was grateful for the privacy it provided me.

My face was pressed to the ground, and sometime in the night, I had curled around the place where Luke's body was.

"Ilania?" Meara said from behind me, and I looked up to find her standing behind me.

"You look awful," I whispered as she sat down next to me. "How did the meeting go with Matthew?"

She sighed and scrubbed her hands across her tear-reddened eyes. "It was awkward after you left. I think that he was uncomfortable having to talk to me right after I had seen you storm off, and I found it strange just to be talking to him."

"Love does strange things to you. You give everything to that person, you wonder how you can keep breathing when they're gone, and you start sleeping on their grave because that's where you feel close to them."

"I don't love Matthew," Meara protested. "I just met him, and he has to be ten years older than me."

I looked at Luke's tombstone out of the corner of my eye and shared a secret glance with him as if he was sitting right there. "He's only a year older, and I can tell when someone's infatuated with someone else. I was the same way with your brother."

"And look where you ended up," she said bitterly. "Sleeping on graves as if his body's next to yours, talking to him, and missing a part of yourself that you'll never get back."

I glanced down at my rumpled grass-stained clothes and self-consciously ran a hand through my hair. "I read a play by a man who lived long before the Infernos once. His name was Shakespeare, and it was called Romeo and Juliet.

"The title characters met at a party, fell in love, got married secretly, and committed suicide all within about three days. The person who wrote the foreword spoke on the fact that most people thought that Romeo and Juliet acted rashly and that there was always another way besides death."

"And I care why?" Meara asked. "They're just a couple of people who never really existed that made a series of dumb choices."

"Romeo was about seventeen or eighteen. Juliet was around thirteen. I can't help but think that if they had secretly gotten married after weeks of knowing each other, spent about a year together in which they had a baby, and then killed themselves because their parents found out, people might have felt a little more sympathetic."

I patted the ground gently. "The reader judges the two of them because they scoff at the idea that someone could fall in love in a split second. They love to hate them because perhaps they went through the same, except the other person never returned the sentiment, and they want the two lovers to move on with their lives rather than die.

"The reader also judges them on the fact that they were so young. Juliet was barely more than a child, just starting to discover what she was going to do with her life. However, her parents were willing to marry her off to a man way older than Romeo."

Meara frowned. "Why did they commit suicide if they were so in love with each other? You would have thought that they would have tried to resolve whatever problems they had some other way."

"Romeo had been banished, so in order for Juliet to join him, she took a potion that made her appear dead after sending a note to him. He never received it, and he heard that she had died from another source.

"Unwilling to think of life without the woman he had loved for three days, he bought poison, went to her family tomb, and killed himself next to her. Juliet woke up, found Romeo next to her dead, and chose to plunge his dagger into her heart."

With a sigh, I raked a hand across my forehead. "The first time I read the play, I thought that they were both extremely stupid for backing themselves into that corner. However, I understand now what was going on with the two of them.

"I fell in love with your brother at fourteen after only a few minutes. He was nineteen, passionate about what he loved, and I craved that kind of intensity. Maybe we had each other for three years, but there were moments when I was willing to die just so that I could be with him again."

"I still think they're stupid," Meara declared firmly, crossing her arms. "There's always another way besides killing yourself. You're still here after all."

"Love makes you irrational. It makes you feel things that you've never felt before, it makes you feel invincible, and it makes you realize that maybe that's what you've been missing all your life. It doesn't make sense, and despite the way that some people try to brush it away by calling it hormones, it is so much more than that.

"Love is always growing, always changing, and you have to be willing. When that love is torn from your arms, it makes you do crazy things. It makes you want to die, it makes you want to try to bring the dead back to life, it makes you want to stand up and confess everything you've never said."

I placed my hand gently on the tombstone. "Love makes you see that not everything is black and white. Maybe Romeo and Juliet would have garnered more sympathy if they had just confessed everything and took the consequences. Maybe they would have been seen as more heroic if they had done it to provide something that was lacking instead of out of what is perceived as teenage stupidity. Maybe if more readers remembered that their deaths brought peace to their warring families, the two would have been hailed as heroes."

Meara stared dully at the swaying grass, and carefully, I placed my other hand on her shoulder. "Don't be afraid, Meara. Love isn't always perfect, and the person you love may never return your feelings, but it will change you. Only you can decide how."

"Why did you let love happen? Why did you do it when you knew there could be pain involved?" She whispered even as a tear dangled on the lip of her eyelid before sliding down her cheek.

"Love is sacrifice. It's not about getting everything you want but being willing to give everything you have and knowing that the one you love will return it. It's about giving up your heart, your life, your very image of yourself in order to make it work," I said. "I loved Luke. If he had asked it of me, I would have died proudly alongside him, but he saw fit to allow me to live for longer. He sacrificed everything for me, and I'm determined to make sure that this tombstone, that death, isn't his legacy."

Another tear carved its way down her face. The silence stretched on for a long while before she buried her head in my shoulder and muttered, "Thank you."

I didn't know that I had just changed how the story was going to progress. I didn't know that I had altered the course.

I wondered what would have happened if my sour-faced mentor had lived, if I had never met Luther or Luke or Meara, if I had never gotten Meara involved in the Igniters.

Could I have fulfilled what I needed to do without events unfolding as they did? Would I have failed at the last moment and taken the meaning away from Luke's death?

I will never know. Meara will never know.

But we both will know what it's like to taste love's sting.