Maybe if you imagined hard enough it would become physical. Maybe if you kept imagining the warmth of blood was his hand then it would be his blood at the very least. Your clarity would be your downfall this once. You'd always envied the crazy, the ones insane enough to just be away with the fairies.

There’s something I need to confess...

It was something haunting. Vincent was dead, long gone, and something that was the very root of his death was once a weed you had stumbled upon. You could've yanked it out, you could've— but it grew.

Is that not the very same as planting the seed?

He was secretly rehearsing his death every night.

You loved to play house, you loved to say when you were a child that you wanted to play house forever. Maybe life was house now. But Vincent wasn't subtle. Between nights together: sickly sweet hours of him giving you that puppyish look and beaming at you, you saw the way he'd trace the plane of his neck like an unbloomed flower. His fingers, ever so gentle with the touch, ran over the skin each time, like his skin were thinly veiled in gold foil he didn't wish to displace. He would feel his pulse, memorise the thrum of it as he watched over and over how one bullet there would be the eternal death.

And I knew, but pretended not to.

How would anyone confront that? In this world, it was like finding a christmas present someone worked so hard on buying. You couldn't tell them, that your curiosity would ruin it all and that it was worthless. You could never tell him. It'd ruin the tranquility of the days, and the need for eachother that was damn near dependant. Now you knew time was ticking, you certainly couldn't disrupt it.

Maybe I just wasn’t as desperate for him...

You weren't sure if you could love. You hadn't been. Some people were more pleasant than others. But Vincent adored you, if someone's face were to be out ad the definition of besotted, it'd be that stupid man. Hollowed out and left foolish by you; you should've told him to hack up his heart while he had the chance.

I know my love was different from yours,

Picture a colour blind person and a person with perfect vision next to eachother. The colour they point to is the very same objectively, and yet they see it different; experience it different. Could you tell the colour blind person they saw wrong, when it was perception that made it that way? Love was never blind, love was distorted.

—But it was love, too.

You really did love him, in the way you best could. It was dirty and didn't feel as pure as his was for you, but it was love. He was a white rose and you were a black rose. Maybe it was romantic that now he had died, his petals darkened.

Who could really blame me?!

You could still remember it. One of those many nights after realising Vincent was planning to die. It began as you staring at his back as he set in the middle of a library adjacent room. You could recognise that video he was watching with ease now, just the colours alone struck a chord in you like a stab of a needle. You remembered wanting to tell him to do anything but leave you alone here, to deprive the world of the sight of his white petals.

If you’d seen the look on his face too, you wouldn’t be able to judge me either.

And all those feelings tumble out. The moment he turns the video off, so he can believe that you didn't get to see, he catches eyes on him. Staring dumbly from the doorway. He was still hyperaware of the pulse in his neck, and how it sped up at the sight of you. He looks stunned, if not ready to dash for you. And he probably would, unless you beat him to it.