#headgleeksana did not beta read this one for me so don’t expect complete and utter brilliance…

[mappingthesky]

angst prompt idea: they get into a fight and nymphia says ‘just leave me alone’ in the height of emotions but doesn’t really mean it, and jane would actually leave thinking that’s what she wanted, making nymph cry even harder

basically miscommunication at its finest

i said leave (but all i really want is you)

It’s been building in the way that all breakdowns do.

Everything accumulates. The things that are all manageable in the moment - the insecurities, inconveniences, odd interactions and instances of discomfort - start to stack up, sticking to each other like snow, feather-light flakes amassing into unmovable drifts, and suddenly they’re an avalanche crashing down upon her. All at once it becomes unbearable - the weight of the world which Nymphia has fought so hard to remain soft in spite of.

It’s not the first time that Nymphia has hit a rough patch, but it’s the first time Jane is here to see it, and for some reason it’s making Nymphia spiral out, like swerving to avoid the ice and driving them right off the fucking road.

It could be because she’s used to dealing with this alone. That she’s used to everyone assuming she’s alright, used to disappearing until she can find it in herself to be sunny and bright once more. It could be that she’s scared to let Jane see her like this, scared that every day she remains sullen is doing irreversible damage to Jane’s vision of her, whatever it is, and replacing it with this - the slow blinking, soft-spoken, unsure, shell of a girl that Nymphia is lost somewhere inside of. It could be that Jane is being so sweet about it, that every one of her tireless attempts to lift Nymphia’s spirits so clearly comes from her heart, that she’s so obviously willing to do whatever it takes. It could be that, because with every one of Jane’s displays of affection meant to make her feel just a little bit better, Nymphia feels guiltier. More frustrated with herself and her inability to pull herself out of the hole she’s in. More afraid that it’s their grave. More afraid that she’s dug it herself.

Maybe that’s what’s scaring her into silence now, as Jane tries to will her to open. She’s been rattling off things they could do for a few minutes now, trying to coax Nymphia out of the apartment with the promise of a walk around the park, or a trip to the thrift store, or slurpees at 7-11. It’s been days of this, and Nymphia wants it to happen just as badly as Jane does - for something to light her up, to pull her from the place on the couch she’s content to spend the rest of her life wallowing in, for some miraculous gleam to pierce through the low-hanging fog that’s clouding her vision. Jane sighs, and Nymphia feels too heavy to hold.

It’s not Jane’s fault. She’s unfamiliar with the freezing over of Nymphia’s feelings, unprepared for her aloofness after the bright, sparkling fizz of the first few months. She’s doing the best she can with absolutely nothing to go off of. Jane asks for the second time if it’s anything she’s done, and Nymphia feels worse than she did the first. “It’s not you,” Nymphia says, and can’t quite admit the other half of it out of some newfound fear. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I feel this way. I don’t know how to stop it.

“You would tell me if it was me, right?” Jane asks and it’s like a knife, her voice a thin blade of worry. It cuts right through Nymphia - that Jane thinks she could be to blame, when Nymphia has created this hurt all on her own. The truth is that there’s nothing Jane could do that would hurt her quite like this, in the specific way that Nymphia hurts herself. She doesn’t know how to confess something like that, isn’t sure she would want to even if she did. All she can do is nod, and the hot tears spill over as the thoughts completely overwhelm her.

Jane’s oh, Nymphia is crushed with concern, and she moves to comfort her so instinctively that it makes Nymphia’s heart break all over again, because it’s Jane we’re talking about -Jane, the girl who was too shy to make the first move or say the first I love you or shed the first tear is now breaking through her own emotional barriers to comfort her, coming to Nymphia’s aid like it’s as natural as breathing, and Nymphia is the one that’s too emotionally tapped to know how to respond to that. She feels Jane wrapping around her even though she’s unsure, can feel her wondering how to go about putting her back together, and all Nymphia can manage in the face of Jane’s bravery is to cry into her hands.

“Baby,” Jane says, and Nymphia can hear it in her voice - the mounting desperation, the options she’s running out of. “What can I do?”

Nymphia doesn’t know why it happens - why she goes cold when she so desperately wants to be warm. Why she becomes so irritable, why she leans so hard into her roughness when she knows what she really is - patient, kind, loving. The truth is, she’s exhausted. It’s hard work to be so soft-hearted. Sometimes it’s too much to ask.

So all she does is shrug, mumbles that there’s nothing Jane can do. She hears the words come out of her mouth in slow motion, and doesn’t know why she can’t stop them, why she can’t seem to say this is enough. Just hold me until I stop feeling like this. Just see it through with me.

“Hey. Talk to me, Nymph,” Jane says, soft and urging, like she can sense the words Nymphia can’t seem to bring to the surface. It’s more of a plea than a command, but all Nymphia can hear is the frustration buried at the back of it - the part of Jane that surely must be exhausted from her unrewarded efforts, exhausted by Nymphia’s inability to keep it together.

“I can’t read your mind, baby,” Jane reaches out to brush Nymphia’s hair from her face like it’ll reveal something, like she’ll find some semblance of an answer there. “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me,” Jane says as gently as possible, but it still sounds like a cue, like she’s begging for something to go off of.

“Okay,” Nymphia says, because she doesn’t have anything at all. “So go.”

She can feel it - the moment of impact. The moment Jane pauses, still mid-reach, still tucking Nymphia’s hair tenderly behind her ear. The moment lightning strikes, the moment the air goes electric.

Jane’s eyes go wide. She looks startled, dumbfounded, afraid to move. Her lips ghost open, breath visibly hitching in her throat. “What?”

”Go home,” Nymphia hears herself say, her voice a scrape against her own soul, a contradiction to everything she cares about. She sees Jane wince, watches as the reality sets in, and the right words feel farther away than ever.

“Nymphia,” Jane shakes her head, scrambling to find her footing amidst the shaking of the ground they’ve been standing on. “I don’t think I-“

”Just go, Jane,” Nymphia forces the words through her teeth and can’t seem to figure out why she sounds so angry.

She watches the pain rippling out across Jane’s face, the searing flare of her eyes. The way Jane watches and waits for Nymphia to change her mind, the way she looks like she’s going to reach out again but doesn’t, the way she awkwardly rises from the couch and looks around the room like she should have more to take with her. Like it’s wrong to leave without Nymphia beside her. The way she so obviously doesn’t know what to do with herself - whether to fight or to flee. The way she’s never sounded quite so meek as when she says goodbye and tells Nymphia to call her if she needs anything. The way she shuts the door so gently, like she’s trying to be silent, like she’s scared to upset Nymphia with something so insignificant as the click of the door even as she’s being shoved away. The way she pauses on the other side like she’s waiting for Nymphia to change her mind. The way that, when Nymphia doesn't move, her steps sound different as she walks the length of the hall - heavier, somehow. And then Nymphia knows why she’d sounded so angry - because she’s doing this to Jane. Because she’s doing this to herself.

There’s a few moments where she can bear the quiet, and then it all comes crashing down, because Nymphia is utterly, completely alone. Because she didn’t have to be.

-

Nymphia misses Jane from the moment she lets her slip away.

She spends most of the night sulking in it, recounting everything that led up to the moment when it all went wrong while the sun sets on her and what feels like everything else. She stays there until the room has gone dark, illuminated only by the far off glow of the hallway light, the blinking power button on the television, the electric green of the clock on the stove.

The night passes, and the sun rises whether she wants it to or not. She knows how this goes. She’s weathered this sort of storm before, knows that there’s nothing to do except feel her way through it. She’s done it before, but it’s not until she wakes that realizes she can’t do it again. Not in the same way she’s done it before. The ache is bigger now that she’s let someone in and shooed them away, and Nymphia desperately wants Jane to hold her hand through it, wants to go back in time and undo the thing that she thinks could do her in for the rest of forever.

She does it more times than she cares to admit - types out a long text message to Jane, deletes it, types a shorter one, deletes that too. The various iterations of the apology doesn’t matter. They all boil down to the same thing. i love you, i’m sorry, do you still love me?

They don’t matter, period, because Nymphia never sends them. She’s scared to see the damage she’s done, to inevitably take inventory of what survived her most recent storm. She hopes beyond belief that Jane will be the first to reach out, that she’ll magically know just what Nymphia needs in the way that all star-crossed lovers supposedly do, and is reminded fifteen times that afternoon that there is no such thing - that star crossed lovers are doomed from the start, that’s what makes them so. And just when Nymphia starts to think that Jane must truly hate her, that she must have already moved on and left Nymphia in the dust to chase after happier, more stable girls, she remembers that she’s the one who sent her away.

-

It’s on the third evening without Jane that Nymphia is forced to reemerge. She’s sat in the dark for longer than she cares to admit, has doom scrolled far past the point of finding anything interesting, and has effectively run out of anything remotely appetizing in the pantry. And so she rises, drags herself into the shower and lets the hot water remind her that there’s something inside her that can still be warmed. She pulls on something she can disappear inside of, sweeps her still-drying hair into a ponytail and slips on her headphones. When she emerges from her apartment building and onto the city streets, she’s reminded that there’s still a world out there - a world that will carry on with or without her, a world in which anything can happen. It doesn’t matter that she’s doing it on her own terms, replacing the noxious whirr of the world with her own personal soundscape - as she walks the seven minutes to the supermarket, she’s meeting that world halfway. It’s a win in itself.

She’s only feeling so brave on this particular trip, so she sweeps through the aisles quickly, eager to get home and label today a success, if only for her brief stint in human interaction. She plucks a few things off the shelves, whatever sounds remotely appetizing, and finds herself thinking of Jane; her insistence on satisfying Nymphia’s sweet tooth, on coming home with brown paper bags of flaky pastries or chocolate-covered confections or sweet, doughy balls of mochi. Missing Jane and all of the sweetness that comes with her, Nymphia rounds the corner, and nearly runs right into her.

Jane’s at the end of the aisle and reaching for a bag of those dark chocolates that she’s gotten Nymphia into, because of course she is. Her blonde hair is in a top knot and she’s dressed for comfort much like Nymphia is - leggings, a t-shirt, a cardigan slipping down her shoulder. She gasps ever so slightly, tugs the airpod from her left ear and looks back at Nymphia, a little awed and a little afraid. She looks so soft, so warm, so much like home that Nymphia just wants to curl into her, to give in to her completely.

“Hi,” Nymphia says and her voice wavers, because it’s the first word she’s spoken in two days, the first thing she’s said since she sent Jane away.

If the last Nymphia saw of her was Jane’s complete and total collapse, this is exactly the opposite. Jane’s eyes flash, her chest fills, and Nymphia wants to pour into her again and again. “Hi,” she says, and it’s almost a whisper, almost a smile on her lips.

Nymphia looks at Jane and doesn’t know where to start. There’s a breathlessness between them, a brink that they stand on together. Somewhere between uncertainty and sureness. Nymphia looks at Jane and knows where she wants to end.

Her eyes fall to the bouquet of sunflowers that peek out of Jane’s basket, pretty and plastic-wrapped. Nymphia has a horrible, gut-wrenching thought. Jane interrupts it.

”I, um,” Jane stammers, looking down and shaking her head at herself, mouth closing momentarily, a little ashamed of herself but admitting everything anyways. It’s a little sad, somehow still endearing. “I was gonna drop them off for you,” she shuffles her feet, avoiding eye contact. “And some other stuff,” she says, and Nymphia notices the things at the bottom of the basket. All of Nymphia’s favorites: the instant noodles, the hot chips, the loose leaf teas that Nymphia can never justify splurging on, and the strawberry bubblegum, and the dark chocolates with chili that Jane had been reaching for (because of course she did).

“Sorry. If that’s weird,” Jane sputters in the way Nymphia knows she does when she’s nervous. “I was going to call you. Or text. Um. But I didn’t-I didn’t know if you wanted to talk.”

“It’s not weird,” Nymphia blurts out, and Jane’s head snaps up. “It’s nice,” Nymphia hears herself say, but it’s so much more than that. “I wanted to text you.”

Jane blinks through the disbelief, and Nymphia wonders for the hundredth time what the last forty-eight hours have been like for Jane. Whether she spent them hoping beyond hope in the same way that Nymphia had. She thinks maybe she did, because:

“You did?”

It’s the shyest Nymphia has seen Jane since the very start, when both of them were so unsure and so obviously smitten in the way that women who fall for each other so often are: both so in love and so unwilling to believe that it could be possible.

”Yeah.” Nymphia suddenly feels like she could cry, and is suddenly aware that she’s feeling again. All at once she’s swept up in the exhilarating thrill of risking it all, of surrendering so completely to someone else. “I wanted to text as soon as you left.”

Jane’s breath sort of hitches and the look in her eye is so many things at once -hope, fear, relief, worry. They open their mouths at the same time, both start with, “I didn’t-”, both sort of gasp and start to laugh at each other, and it’s the best sound in the world, because Nymphia didn’t know if she could ever laugh again, if she’d ever hear that sound she loves so much - Jane laughing just for her.

“You go first,” Jane nods, and she could be giving Nymphia a second chance, except she doesn’t quite have to. Nymphia could never fail her, would never need a second chance. Jane would never write her off in the first place, would keep choosing her time and time again.

“I didn’t want you to go,” Nymphia says, because she wants to be honest with Jane; she feels that she owes her that much. So she speaks softly, slowly, making sure that every word is as close to what she means as possible. “I don’t know why I told you to leave. I was scared, I guess. I’m sorry.”

Jane shakes her head, “I didn’t want to go, Nymphia, I swear. I only did because I thought that’s what you wanted.”

”I know. I thought that’s what I wanted too.” Nymphia’s bottom lip is curling out and her eyes are starting to mist and she’s in the middle of a fucking supermarket. “But it’s not.”

Jane swallows. “No?”

“No,” Nymphia shakes her head, can barely get the words out without choking up, but she’s determined. She wants to. She doesn’t care who knows, just as long as Jane does. “I want you there with me.”

Through the first of the tears that are welling up in her eyes, Nymphia can see Jane resisting the impulse to reach for her, just barely holding herself back long enough to ask. “Can I-”

Nymphia sputters, half-laughing. “Please.”

This is the part that makes all the work of letting Jane in worth it - the part where Nymphia is completely enveloped by her, slotting so perfectly into place against her, because she isn’t meant to be alone. She’s meant to be with her. They aren’t star-crossed lovers destined for some ultimate doom, and they aren’t the stars of some great tragedy. They’re something so much simpler. Something so much better. They’re just each other’s people.

“Are you okay?” Jane says against her hair, not daring to let go, not even wanting to, because this is all she’s wanted from the start - to know what to do.

”I will be,” Nymphia squeezes tighter, eyes shut, savoring her return to safety. “Are you okay?”

”Yeah,” Jane says, and Nymphia can hear her smiling. “I think I will be too.”