Stone Circle Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

How has all this happened? Yesterday was so simple. Today is unlivable.

Louis does not want this, in the same way she and Fig hadn’t. He wants to travel and explore and dream and enjoy fully the years and freedom given by youth, in good health and spirits and all the possibilities of the world at his pawtips. She’s a fool, but not so much to lock him into a fate he has not properly chosen for himself. Even when she imagines all the solace of his nearness, to have him close. For him to be her’s. To love him. He offers, she thinks, because a part of him believes he has to. But she does not want this for him.

She is cruel to make him believe any different, to hold him and steal his touch. Shameless. Selfish. Undeserving.

When their limbs untangle and she feels the cold where the press of his body was, her neck still dampened with his kiss, her vision softens with tears. His eyes dance between hope and confusion, all she feels too within her chest.

“Nothing can change how I care for you,” a breath, “But I want to do this- in a way that’s right for me. And I want to do it with him.”

There is a place where Louis stops and she begins. Where he cannot fit his life to her’s, and her’s to his. They’d parted that morning after the storm, and maybe that had changed the course of their lives. But Tauris didn’t think so.

Because it was always Fig. Even then.