When you've grown and learned of life you'll know what I meant that day. You'll have gone through a life that wasn't meant for you. You'll have trained far more than anyone your age; you'll become the warrior you are too good to be.
You will understand that everything happens for a reason and that one decision can mold a whole life. One decision can carve an adult out of a child. I cannot lament this decision since it's the best I am able to do for you child.
My farewells to you and this world for I am no longer allowed being in it. When you've grown and learned of life you'll know what I meant this day, when I tell you, life has not been amiable to either of us. And you will understand when the time is right why I have gone but for now you stay in the dark and live the way I've made you.
Your Mother Dearest.
"Mama?" Two pig tails bounce behind a small girl in a jumper, dragging with her the bear she had gotten when she was two. "Mama?" She only carried it inside her house. "Mama!"
Soon a body was being pulled out in a plastic bag by paramedic's as a child grew into an adult seeing her mother lifeless and defeated. Years could have passed and she wouldn't have noticed as she was taken into a car and then into an unknown house. As her life seemed to have ended with her mother's.
And that little girl was alone in a big, bad world full of cold calculating eyes. She could have stood there all her life and she wouldn't have cared clutching the note in her hand and tears threatening to spill across her face. Nothing could change as decisions were made and people were devastated.
The beds were cold and hard with age, along with all the children there. Caretaker's tried to make her get out of bed but she would not relent and years passed as she was moved from house to house. And she was a mindless tool until her fourteenth birthday, until she received a note that would change her life.
I'm coming for you, just hang on.
It didn't say from whom it was but it somehow gave her something to be for, to break routine and maybe even break a smile. She waited a year and no one came and all she saw was a cruel joke when on her fifteenth birthday came another.
I WILL come, don't fret.
And she ripped the note and stuffed it into the cake that she shared with twenty other kids, she turned to them with a look that couldn't be described as more than rage. She left and never went back; she was a lost soul between the masses.
And she slept around to get the money for her next meal and the next bus out of that town. She hopped around blindly surviving of what she could, for a year.
And on her sixteenth birthday, the note sender finally came. He sat down in front of her in that shady diner and ate silently while watching her intently and he finally spoke and she finally looked up. Tears filled her eyes as she looked at the man.
He smiled and she buried her face in her hands and let the tears fall. The man watched silently after that and picked her face from her hands and wiped the tears from her eyes. He smiled as he looked at the woman he lost centuries ago and watched the tragedy around her.
And she lived a life that hadn't been meant for her. The darkness in her heart made her strong and her decisions made a warrior from her. She looked at the man and saw what she was supposed to have lived. She saw her life wasted in unconscious searching for a man who had found her a long time ago.
She couldn't bring herself to apologize for being foolish.
He couldn't bring himself to apologize for waiting so long.
They looked at each other for what seemed hours and they could both be happy. They could ride into the metaphorical rainbow until the world crashed around them and burned them into ashes. She finally asked a name and she searched his face for any signs of a lie. He gave it easily and she gave her own.
She was broken and he had the instruments to fix her, she went to school. She made an everlasting friend and he worked for her and made her smile with his stories of long lost kingdoms.
"And when the princess ran down the stairs she slipped. The knight, her lover, could do nothing but watch her fall but when she stood he kept fighting, kept her alive as she grabbed the enemy's sword and fought alongside him…" Said he, hugging her while they shared a bed.
"What happened to them?" She asked in awe.
"He died."
"And what happened to her?" She seemed sad about that and he smiled looking at his princess.
"I don't know, tell me." She laughed, it was weird for her to laugh for anything when the last time she did was before her mother died.
She hummed closing her eyes and the picture came to her mind. "She grieved her lover… The princess ran two swords through the enemy and after burying her Knight she placed on his armor and rode his steed. Leaving behind her kingdom and becoming the bounty hunter he was."
"Oh really?" It was his turned to be surprised.
"Of course, He fixed her heart and she repaid him by finishing his legacy." She smiled closing her eyes. He hugged her tightly. "You should do this."
"Become a bounty hunter?" He teased kissing the top of her head.
"No. Make all these stories a book."
"But I only know half the stories." He said, he only knew half their lives, all these centuries they've spent together, looking for each other and only he remembered how it happened.
For her these were part of her imagination but they came up like memories as if she had lived this. Her nights were spent with tales and wondering what he would tell her next. He did the same when he told her about past lives, it's the first time she has told him anything of the sort. They were both just waiting to see what the other would say next.
He looked into her eyes and saw the pain of a thousand years accumulated and it hurt him to think that she's lived through so much and can't seem to acknowledge it. It hurt her to see this man and wonder when it was all going to come burning down around her, she waited for the inevitable moment where he would simply leave her to go place's unknown.
And their nights were spent together and their days were spent apart always yearning for each other's warmth to encircle them, their life became routine.
The moment she dreaded came upon her many moons later and yet not enough. He was shot down by common mugger's trying to rob their house clean and she pushed the one that killed him through the window and she called the police.
She stood there looking at her lover being pulled away in what she could have sworn was the same bag her mother had been in. And she cried and held her stomach because she was going to tell him that night, she would have told him of their unborn child but like always everything came crashing.
Like in the stories he told her she would continue if only because of him. The stories he told her would be written down eventually as stories she would give her child when it was older and able to understand.
And then it clicked in her very last breath, the stories had been her life and the stories he had not told her where the one's that she remembered most…
She walked down the street an empty soul between millions. Walked with a blinded path of nowhere to go until her name was called and she turned and she saw the man that the story book described, the one in the picture at the very end.
Her name was called again, the name of her great grandmother a woman who had lost everything when the man she loved was killed. She could not help but go and meet the man, a man to whom she felt attached
And he said with very little breath and shining eyes as tears came from her own, "I have found you again."