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CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
(you made your bed)
NOW LIE IN IT
✧
THE SATURDAY WAS GLOOMY, SKY NOT BRIGHT AS IF PROCLAIMING THE OMEN TO THE WORLD. A warning of worst days to come, that it had to get darker before brighter, looming for everyone to know the day Morgan Lee sealed her fate. She could feel the nerves building up in her chest, squeezing Remus' hand and finding as much comfort as she could in it, though the feeling fled from her as soon as she found it.
The feeling on her shoulder wasn't Alistair's bruising grip but Greer's dismissive pat. It was sad, but cold, and unattached. She spoke grand words of not wanting anyone to die, but still was so callous and away from care, patting her gently and telling her calmly to get her affairs into order. The words didn't join together in her mind, how someone could speak kind words but do nothing to stop what they know is going to happen.
Greer did not object to Morgan's defiance in the same way she did not fight to stop someone's death. She accepted both and drew into herself and away from others, but Morgan tried to shrug off the phantom touch. If Greer wouldn't stand up against her father, Morgan would. She was afraid, so pathetically afraid of what came next, but the end would be worth it. It had to be worth it.
"I'll be right with you," Remus leaned in, muttering the words more into her hair above her ear. It did not escape her notice that he was too tall to properly whisper into her ear.
She swallowed that thought away and focused on his words. "I know," she forced a smile, squeezing his hand as if to comfort him and not herself, "Thank you."
"Always," he vowed, in the sort of way that felt young and pathetically shallow with no sense of understanding the word. She wanted to scoff at him, to shrug it off, because how foolish could he be to consider forever? That wasn't an option for her, and even if it was, forever was never a guarantee with anything.
She had seen too many failed marriages of Helen to believe in that promise from a partner. While Remus was nice and sweet, kind beyond belief in ways that she hadn't experienced from most of her classmates, they were still young and naïve to the world. Merlin knows what a naïve little girl she had been, still was in ways.
She thought she could play Prince Charming for her aunt; save her from a marriage with a horrible man without consequences, and now she was about to lie in her bed.
But forever did sound nice. Always sounded like a dream, and she hoped that one day he did find an always and forever; something permanent and everlasting, something she could never be for him.
