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To love is to be changed.
Ada used to be afraid of that idea. She never considered herself to be someone who was built to be shaped and molded by something she could not control. But no one ever really does, she supposes. We just let it become a mere passing thought, this concept of being drowned beneath uncharted waters. A figment of an imagination we cannot seem to get away from.
It used to scare her, the thought of how easily it was for her to go against what she had forced herself to become the moment a shining boy with bright blue eyes stepped into her life. How quickly her legs could get knocked out from beneath her, pushing the air from her lungs with a force so commanding it did not wait to consume her entire being all at once. He was so different, so honest and willing. Not yet corrupted by the cruelty of the world.
That was what she had thought, at least. But as she later learned, though it did not change much about how she felt, he had already been through so much. Leon does not often speak about his childhood, but in those moments where he did let himself dwell, Ada learned that there was much reason behind why he chose to become the person that he did. His parents had lived a life much like that of her own parents— one of crime and spiritual disease. He did not want to turn out like them.
So instead of letting that unsteadiness turn him into something rotten, he chose to push back. He chose to help, rather than hurt. To be the good his parents never could have taught him to be, rather than become something violent and cold.
It is a stark contrast to the life Ada had chosen to lead following the events of her own childhood, but in all honesty, everything she did after a certain point was only an act of survival. The world was angry and unfair, and it did not give an inch even when everything took a turn for the worse, so Ada decided that even if that was the case, she would not let it break her. She would adapt to it. Mold with it. Chase after some sort of purpose in being able to survive the cold when everyone else couldn’t.
Until eventually, she discovered that not everything had to be this way.
There is a certain ease that comes with the ability to feel warmth. But it is not the kind of warmth which comes from the space among the stars that provides such inexplicable healing. It is that which comes out of the depths of the soul, ever-reaching for another until it finds what it is looking for and creates a home, nestled somewhere far beneath fractured bones and scarred tissue, never to leave. Never to hurt. To mend itself inside the cracks of what is broken and use its purpose for what is good, rather than for harm or chaotic insolence.
Ada found that warmth when she found him. She could never get away from it even if she tried, countless years of trying to run away from that which she desired most only ever ending in the same thing it had time and time again: violent emptiness carved beneath the shadows.
And now, as she lets her eyes drift over the beautiful fields of flowers in a place where nothing but that same warmth has made its permanent home, she thinks back to all of the times she tried to escape it and mourns for the time she had lost. Maybe if she had reached out, rather than cowering away, she would have healed faster. Maybe she wouldn’t have made the countless mistakes that she did after the fact, and would have been able to make the corrections necessary to fix what she had broken in her anger.
But the world had just been too cruel to her. She didn’t feel as though she deserved anything else. It was simply not worth it to be loved. To be cared for. To have hope in a place devoted to destruction. It would all be gone in the end, regardless. Disappearing the same way everything else had and taking whatever was left of her with it.
And that, she could not afford.
So for many years, she kept herself away. She never allowed herself to get close enough for the warmth she so desperately craved to carve its way into her being, for fear that it would be her ruin. Her fall. Her greatest undoing.
But Leon has never had it in him to give up for long. He never let her get too far. Because for every time that she let herself appear to him, he always reached out. Even if it hurt, and Ada knows that it did because Leon simply cared too much and too honestly to let go of things that he should, he did not waver in the knowledge that despite all of the wrong she had done, it did not make her unworthy of being saved. It did not change the fact that there was worth in her life, regardless of what she did or how much she had left.
It did not change a damn thing.
Had their roles been reversed, and it was Ada who found herself able to overcome the agony of life’s painful whims, she finds herself entirely believing that she would have done the same thing. Maybe in another world, that had been the case. She’s never really been one to believe much in fate, but if there is any explanation for the reasons behind why she feels the way that she does about him of all people, it would all have to lead back to that. Because there is no explanation she can come up with, whether good or bad or anything in between, that allows her mind to accept that any of what they shared made even the slightest bit of sense.
Maybe it wasn’t meant to. Maybe it was just another one of those things that did not need to be explained, buried beneath the piles of others which collected unprecedented amounts of dust in their waiting. Things she had forgotten and left behind. Things that would destroy her completely if she let them.
But that was just it. She could not put this away. She could not bury it like the rest, or forget about the way it made the sun seem brighter on even the darkest of days, or how she would suddenly and often find herself caring about the things she hadn’t before. Considering the weight of her choices. The consequence. The reasons behind it all.
She could not go back to the way things had been before, even if she desperately wanted to. So eventually, she stopped running altogether. She stopped hiding. She stepped out into the sunlight for the first time in however long she could care to remember and she let that warmth carry her home.
Right here, seated beneath the bright orange sky.
Loud, innocent laughter carrying through the wind.
Home, Ada has decided, is not near as frightening as she once believed it to be. Of course, she had never had one to begin with, the concept as unreal and as nonexistent as her own name, but she had often led herself to believe that a home was something she could never have. She did not want to be bound forever, not because she felt that she was free, but because she knew that no sooner than she would let herself achieve it, it would be gone in the next breath. Turned to dust and ash as quickly as it had been built.
That idea of home, however, had been an incredibly fragile thing. This one was different. It was real. It was brought up out of ashes and shattered cement, rather than reduced by it. Built with love and tears and strong, calloused hands that desired nothing more than to belong. To hold. To protect. To mend and heal in a way that did not hurt, despite all of the blood they had spilled out of violent necessity.
The irony of Leon, Ada has found, is not in his will to push forward. Sure, how does a living man hope to make a great change saving lives, when the reality that befalls him suggests that he secretly wants nothing more than to die in the process? But it isn’t that which causes such bemusement within her when she looks at him. The real irony is in the way he chooses to make that change. For someone so kind, so easily maneuvered by the emotions lingering in equally battered souls, there remains a cruel shred of sharpened steel somewhere hidden beneath his skin, only brought out by the evils of others.
It bears its fangs often, leaving him desolate in the end. Tearing him apart and opening him up until his heart is on the floor and nothing is left but the darkness of the room and the warm light which pierces through the cracks in the ceiling above his uncertainty. This, Ada knows, is only an aftereffect of loss. A replacement for that which may have once existed in its place, but was yanked out and replaced by something completely opposite.
But even though life has taught a kind man much cruelty, it has not stolen away the rest.
Those same hands, which are often used for chaos and war, are not incapable of doing something less so. They can still find a way to create good, whether inside of the world or above it or beneath it, reaching for the things which they feel matters above all else until they find them and latch on. And they do not let go.
They certainly never let go of her, and for that she is grateful.
Because without them, she never would have ended up here.
Leon finds her eyes from his place at the bottom of the hill, crouching before a patch of bright red tulips swaying in the wind. He laughs when he is tackled by the bubbly young girl playing alongside him, two bodies tumbling onto the grass until she is laughing along with him, incredible joy evident in her features. Entirely trusting that this is somewhere she can remain safe and loved, without having to fear what might come after it is all said and done.
Ada always knew that despite what he might think of himself, Leon would be a perfect fit for a father. Despite all of the brokenness and fear he so often felt and withheld, there was a certain comfort in knowing that he would never allow his children to experience that kind of pain. Especially when they didn’t have to. Especially when they had a choice.
Especially when he had spent his entire life fighting for a world where they did not have to be shattered into pieces just to find meaning inside themselves.
Not like he had. Or like Ada had.
She had always known that she could never have children of her own, the circumstances of her life leaving her battered and infertile— a byproduct of whatever punishment the world had chosen to bestow on her as payment for her misuse. But in the hope for something different, she and Leon tried anyway.
Once everything was all said and done, and he had left his job with the hope that she would leave hers, finding great comfort in the fact that she did, they settled down in a place they could call home and tried to build something untouched by the world’s unkindness. They tried to create life, despite having spent so long destroying it. But Ada knew it would be for naught, having well come to terms with the fact that she just wasn’t meant to have this. To have anything else to give in the aftermath of it all.
She spent countless nights lying awake with him, trying to openly dream of a place where she could become something more than she was. But Leon wasn’t trying to get her to become anything more. She was enough, just as she was, whether fertile or infertile, broken or whole. It simply did not matter. Not when all he really wanted was her.
And even if they could only dream of something such as this, he was entirely content with just letting it be. They would find another way. They always had, time and time again even when the odds were entirely stacked against them, pressing down and down into the steadiness of their bodies until it eventually gave way. Until eventually, it realized that it could never destroy them completely, because they would survive regardless.
After some time, it was no longer an act of trying which brought them together this way. Ada needed Leon like she needed air to breathe and if there was one thing she had learned during the countless, sleepless nights they shared together, it was that there was nothing that could change the fact that he was the only thing that mattered. The only thing that could heal her the way she had spent entirely too long running from. The only real warmth she had ever truly known.
So when that period of dreaming ended and slowly morphed into something more grounded, just as her idea of home had all that time ago, she stopped letting the weight of the uncontrollable drown her beneath the darkness, and started letting it mold her instead. Allowing it, along with the heat of the body which so often found itself wrapped entirely around her, to shape her into something steady. Something whole. Something she had never once dreamed she could be.
And when all was said and done, life was brought up out of the ashes. It entered in the form of a timid young child in desperate need of a home, who had been battered and bruised by the same cruelty which plagued Ada her entire life, but who would not have to know that cruelty any longer. Not as long as she was around. Not as long as he was, either.
And especially not when she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is where she was always meant to be.
Entirely loved, and changed for the better because of it.