Seventeen years, ten months, two weeks, three days...
Each moment is agony.
Every second of every day, George Beaumont is reminded of his young wife's untimely death. With every glimpse of that painting up on that mantle, with every glimpse of his...
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Edited
Autumn of 1870
Anne's bones are prominent and jutting out of her back by the time Raymond reaches her. It has been nine days since the incident, and the only food that she has eaten are a few pieces of bread and some broth his Aunt Eleanor had gotten her to drink while she was asleep.
Raymond gingerly strokes her hair, letting the fine black silk of it fall onto her pillow. In the twenty minutes he has been there, she has not stirred once, and the rise and fall of her chest is troubled. It worries him to no end.
She is starving, that much is obvious, but nothing can be done about it. Even breathing is hard for her since the wounds around her neck have only just started to close. Eating, and even drinking would be painful. He manages to have her sip some water from a cloth, just enough so that she wouldn't thirst. She coughed, mumbling something about it hurting, before falling back into a feverish sleep.
He wants to hold her so badly, but he is afraid that he will harm her somehow. The fragile girl that lay almost unmoving on the bed is a far cry from the Anne that could throttle him in a second. For the first time in his life, he might actually lose her. The threat still hangs over him, and it makes him feel ill. No matter what happened, he cannot lose her. He would not be able to live with himself, and... perhaps he would not even be able to live at all.
He presses his lips to the inside of her wrist, which is covered in a thick bandage. Something happened to make her question herself again. She was always doing that, even if there was nothing left to be questioned. Raymond has known for years that it would be her undoing, but this? No. He never expected this.
Anne cries out his name. Her voice sounds like knives. The sound cuts into him.
Willing the thoughts away, he kneels beside her, looking to see if her eyes have opened. No. She is flushed, however. From the remnants of a fever that could have killed her mere nights ago. He runs his thumb ever so gently across her eyelashes, expression glum as he continues to think. He steers his thoughts away from things that would certainly haunt him, and he focuses on is was good. She is alive.
"I'm here now, kataigída. I'm here."
Kataigída. Storm. He ponders on it. A storm was something that is ruthless. He sees differences. Anne is kind, in her own way. He remembers how much she had cried for him when they were children, even if it was for the silliest things. She made him feel better when his bad lung troubled him, and she had always been there for him. A storm left ruin in its wake. She left places for things to grow and prosper. It is not destruction. She leaves life. Possibility.
They dreamed of those possibilities when they escaped to rooftops during summer parties. They were to be married. Five children, he had said. She laughed. They would travel the world together, fall in love with each other all over again every single day.
