always and forever is forever young
your shadow on the pavement, the dark side of the sun
So are you.

Mallos couldn’t claim that he’d never heard a declaration of love before. He’d had relationships which spanned months, years, decades; he’d even been married before, more than once. Usually, though, whenever he heard anything which amounted to a commitment beyond superficial passion, that was his cue to take his leave. Those few occasions of matrimony had taught him the hard lesson that it was better to back out at that point than to plough on with tepid feelings. It was rare to accept such depth of feeling with a flutter of warmth, the butterflies in his stomach expressing their delight while his brain was still catching up.

She laced her fingers through his, holding them there. Mallos resisted the urge to pick her up again and refuse to put her down.

Croe broke the moment with her guarded expression and comment about hygiene. He quirked an eyebrow at her.

“There’s a very clean bath through that very clean door there,” he humoured her, gesturing to their left. “And that one,” he gestured to the right, “leads to the very clean bedroom.”

There was a fourth door (excluding the one which led to the rest of the castle): where the desk sat in front of the window, a (clean) whitewashed wooden door had been squeezed next to the latter feature. The door made no sense, since the window pointed to the outdoor world, and they were several stories up. Mallos didn’t mention it. Croe left to clean up, abandoning him to his thoughts.

Now that he was alone again, it was difficult to keep the panic from rising like a lump in his throat. He paced up and down a few times, turned the cushions round on the sofa, picked up the entire stack of paperwork off the desk and tipped them out of the window. What was he supposed to do now? Every time he even thought about trying to think about it, his heart raced, his skin tingled and his legs felt weak. He collapsed into the chair behind his desk, pressed his elbows to the wooden surface and his head into his hands. Breathe. Stop thinking. He slouched back into the chair, his hands dancing across the desk of their own accord and locating the screwdriver he’d dropped earlier.

By the time the tinkling sound of the shower stopped, Mallos had fully dismantled the lighter, his clock, and his mobile phone. The three of them lay in a mess of cogs, plastic and screws, impossible to differentiate. He left the pieces, entered the bedroom and pulled open the doors to his wardrobe, scrutinising the contents. There was little there, owing to his ability to shift and morph the clothes on his body whenever he wanted. He pulled out a particularly large grey shirt and held it in his hands for a moment, his throat constricting. Sperantia must have bought it for him, since it was the only conceivable reason why he would own anything which was the wrong size. He slammed the wardrobe door shut with a little more force than was necessary and returned to the living room, which Croe was just re-entering from the other side. Wordlessly, he held out the shirt for her.

i can feel you in the silence saying, “let forever be,
love, and only love, will set you free.”