Episode 38: An Ending (Meldrick)

The walk back to their room was long and silent.

Once safely behind closed doors, Aadya’s hand reached out for his arm.

He turned in response. Her blue eyes glowed like matching aquamarines. He looked just below them, at her lips that always turned a shade darker when she was upset.

“You’re my wife but you clearly don’t want to be,” he said as he pulled himself away from Aadya’s embrace.

The arm’s length between them felt as great as the desert’s wide expanse.

He could see the hurt in her eyes, the way her hands were held like opposite magnets in her refusal to knead them together, in her need to touch and exert her emotion in some way that made her feel less vulnerable.

“It’s complicated, Mel,” she stated.

“No, it’s not Aadya.”

She let two tears fall freely, in the abyss of space that he wanted so much to cross but couldn’t, for himself and his sanity. Finally, her hands found each other.

“You don’t understand,” she insisted.

He did, actually. He had just grown tired of sympathy.

“If the roles were reversed, would you be with just him or would you come sneaking off to me at night?” Mel asked.

She was silent. Her silence said more than any words could have.

“That’s what I thought.” he stated. It was bullshit coming back, marrying her. She didn’t want this. He felt like an idiot, but she was his only. He had never been with anyone else.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she begged.

“You’re going to lose at least one of us. You can’t have everything you want in life,” he argued, even though he wanted to give her everything. It was too much to put himself through this year after year. Pregnancy after pregnancy.

All the nights she tumbled in reeking of alcohol and gancanagh were weighing on him heavier with time. He knew it was like a drug. But it didn’t take away the sting of it.

“What about the kingdom?” she whimpered through tear-filled eyes.

The kingdom. That’s what she thought about, when it came to him.

“Fuck the kingdom,” he yelled as his hands ran down his face, smearing his vision. “I’m not walking out on the kingdom. But this has to stop.”

“I can’t.”

“I said this has to stop, not you. You don’t have to do anything. No action, Aadya, is more than enough.”

“No, I mean I don’t know how.”

She looked like she was about to collapse.

He didn’t know which was better, to make her stand on her own to push her to do something, and risk losing her, or to hold her and risk being sucked back into her indecision.

He wanted, so much, to give her everything.

“Do you want to?” He asked. He wished there was somewhere to sit or something to lean against. “What do you want?”

“You,” she said, her voice grasping for something – anything.

He let his shoulders drop and his body move closer. He enveloped her in his embrace and she let her body move with the waves of tears and emotion that escaped through the walls she had kept up.

His hand slid through her waves of hair and he pressed her closer to him, “It’s okay, Aadya. It’s okay.”

“Aadya?” he breathed into her hair.

“Hmm?” she hummed, the sweetest tones of her voice coming through.

“Have you considered…”

Vulnerable. He hated being vulnerable. This was an almost impossible bridge to gap with her. A question he hated asking.

“Perhaps, you could bond to me.”

In twenty years, she had never removed the talisman around her neck. It had been given to her after Drey’s death, so she wouldn’t have to bond unless she wanted to.

Her hand reached for it, and her eyes were pools of water, as she looked at him.

“If we can’t do this without it, I don’t think we should do it at all,” she replied.

He rested his forehead against hers, and promised that as much as he loved her he would move on for himself. And for her. So she could someday meet the someone that she could bond to.

He inhaled, and her scent filled him. He didn’t want this to end. He never wanted to stop smelling the sweet tones of flowers and earth mixing in with the fresh spring showers and smouldering lava fields that made her so unique and so deliriously desirable.

“Okay,” he responded, and he stepped back.

She reached out for him, “Mel.”

“Aadya,” he said. “I don’t want you to turn into my mother. I don’t want you to be with someone that isn’t everything. We’ve done a good with this kingdom. But you deserve to fall in love. To love..” he choked back tears. “To love someone completely.”

Aadya wiped her eyes, “You don’t have to go,” she begged.

Except he did, because if he didn’t go now five years would turn into ten. Ten years could turn into a decade, a century, a millennium… their entire lives could escape them waiting for another moment where everything was as clear as it was right now.

So for her, “I do.”

He moved back, toward the doorway, toward another future where maybe he could find someone who loved him without the shadow of his mother’s tyranny.

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