#i'll tag valtor's parents when i come up with a surname for them

[darkpoisonouslove]

The Road of Words

Summary: Griffin is visiting Valtor at the hospital after he got injured pulling a stunt to impress her. He has to wake up to see the results of his efforts and Griffin swears to put in an effort of her own to reach back to him.

CW: mentions of coma, head injury, blood, self-harm (very minor but it counts), self-deprecation

@trashcankitty12​ requested the following prompt - You’re in a coma and I confess all my feelings only for you to wake up - and I did my best to deliver. Not a scenario I usually dig but I tried to give it a spark of originality.

Songs I listened to while writing this and I feel like really fit the tone of the fic are Promise by Fytch and Tether Me By Galleaux. Give them a listen if you feel like it!

Griffin's fingers clutched the smooth pot desperately. It was heavy and slipping in her sweaty palm. There was no heat left in her body for the cold clay to absorb. The dread had numbed her to anything but the occupied hospital bed she was looking for.

She'd gotten directions at the reception after giving her name. She had to be on some kind of list with allowed visitors when she had no business being there. Just like Valtor.

She swallowed around the lump in her throat only the frozen blue of his eyes could wash away as she reached for the handle on a pristine door. Behind it was Valtor, lying motionless like she'd never been prepared to see him. For all of her resistance to his flirting, she'd always figured the first time she caught a glimpse of him in a bed would be with herself underneath him and pinned to the mattress by his rippling muscles and disarming smile.

A notification from Instagram had found her in the middle of the night curled up with a novel. Valtor had tagged her in a photo of a rare flower he'd taken hours earlier at sunset. The captured moment had found her despite the tricky signal on his mountain climbing hike and she'd drifted off to sleep with a smile still on her face and a warmth in her heart.

Her tea had been steaming in her half-empty mug the next morning when the twins had called her with the headline that Valtor had been found with a head trauma and taken to the hospital.

Coma.

She'd thrown every window of her apartment open but all the chilly morning air had done had been to shake her to her core. Her lungs had heaved with dry sobs as she'd looked down from the 40th floor, hands clutching at the windowsill. He would've climbed up the side of the building if she'd asked it of him. All she had done had been letting them both down time and time again.

Griffin pushed the door open slowly. Her heart pounded in her ears to compensate for the stillness on the other side of the door and and her finger trembled over the cactus in the pot. Prickling it would spill red to drown out the unblemished peacefulness of the hospital room in case it was too unbearable.

Valtor's parents were sitting on a couch opposite from the door amidst too much chaos in place of the rigidness she'd expected. Elinor's long black hair spilled over Ailan's suit jacket and his shoulder where she'd rested her head as if it were too heavy. Her usual stoicism had melted off of her lean form. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she'd missed to wipe away a smudge of her mascara. Ailan's hand was gentle on the crown of her head but his knuckles had turned white gripping at his own knee. His leg twitched in failed restraint to keep it from bouncing and his lips moved senselessly in his wife's hair. He was pulled taut like a bandage stretched to tearing over a wound that was too big. Nothing in their stance spoke of both their remarkable height or the power their name carried.

"Griffin," Elinor rose up from her husband's chest. He offered her his handkerchief at the sound of her nasal voice.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude," Griffin was stuck to the floor, her legs made of lead. It would be like stepping on their graves to go any closer to them. Her hard-to-get routine had left their son limp in that bed.

"It's okay, dear," Ailan rubbed Elinor's back while she was blowing her nose quietly. "I'm sure he'd want you here. Maybe he'll feel your presence. He's always been attuned to it."

Griffin swallowed. Valtor had put his whole heart into getting to know her. He'd found a way into hers through the suffocation she'd subjected it to to avoid a crack in her walls. And now the only sound coming from him was that of his shallow breaths.

"We'll be outside on a short walk." Ailan helped Elinor up and they leaned on each other. Their steps were slow but steady as they passed by her and Elinor squeezed her shoulder instead of holding on to her husband.

Griffin had to push her finger on the cactus in her hands for the pain to ground her. The moment the door closed behind Valtor's parents, her knees gave out and she slumped in the chair at the side of the bed. Their company had been a punishment but one well deserved.

The quiet hit her harder now that she had proof she was the cause of it. She'd always been but Valtor had been filling it–and her lungs–with his sweet talk. She'd come to talk but her throat was parched like she'd choked on the sun.

All the ashes of the moments she'd let burn out were flickering over her skin to brand it with echoes of the words she'd never said. Her breath had stopped the first time she'd laid eyes on Valtor's shapely physique and his confident stance, on his strong jaw and striking eyes as he'd introduced himself as a benefactor to the school where she'd grown up and was working. She'd smiled to herself watching him do an art course for her students through a window after she'd refused to be the head of the project and his supervisor. She'd discussed books with him till the middle of the night and had never said a word about his pick-up lines. She'd accepted his invitations to a matinee raising awareness about endangered species in the local botanical gardens and a charity fundraiser for victims of abuse but had never replied to his date suggestions. So many things he'd said to her and she'd kept her silence, and her distance.

Her grip tightened on the pot with the cactus. She'd smeared her blood on the side like some sort of magical ritual to bind her life force to that of the cactus, and of Valtor. She'd picked a succulent that survived with the same tenacity he'd shown and bloomed in the color of her hair. She hadn't managed to kill that one even when she'd stopped tending to her plants for months on end alongside abandoning Faragonda and Valtor appreciated her and her efforts. He had to wake up and give the cactus the same devotion he'd put in the photograph that had won her over.

"In the eye of the sun," the caption had read under the glowing halo of light the sunset had become around the flower's crown of purple-bluish petals.

Griffin left the cactus on the nightstand before she'd broken the pot. She dropped off her purse next to it and wiped her palms in her charcoal skirt mindful of the blood oozing from the pinprick on her finger. She didn't take Valtor's hand into hers. She'd left her fingerprints on him.

"I came here for myself as much as I did it for you. Because it turns out you've become a part of my life no matter how much I was trying to avoid just that." She'd grasped it in the artfulness of the photograph – he was the sun and she was the flower as much as the opposite was true as well. Her eyes were the golden ones but his gaze was the only thing that would brighten her day. If he'd give it to her. If she hadn't made it to the end of the universe where sunlight didn't reach.

"I was scared to know where the road stopped for us. I didn't want to face an inevitability. But I figured I'm more afraid of not knowing just how far we can go." The sun would rise one day on a dead flower but if Griffin let herself, she could have with Valtor what his parents did. She could have a lifetime full of love – in the eye of the sun instead of the storm. "I was scared of being just a speck of ink on your life but I will be. I will be anything you want me to be."

Her finger wasn't bleeding anymore but her heart hadn't stopped. It was pumping blood in her veins frantically to keep her moving and breathing long enough to be anything to him. Being just a short footnote to his life explaining his condition would be enough for her as long as he survived it.

"What do I have to do to show you how much you mean to me if you're still not convinced?" The silence shattered from the power of Valtor's voice and air cut into her lungs.

Tears spilled from her eyes like liquid sunlight. "Valtor."

()()()()

Her heart was hammering under her palm like it was trying to knock her down where she was leaning on the wall next to Valtor's door. It'd been a long while since she'd ran out to get the doctor and then Valtor's parents. They were inside now along with her purse and her tears had dried on her cheeks but her heart wouldn't settle. It wanted to shoot out of her chest and land only in Valtor's hands after she'd dashed out the door without another word. She hadn't had any this time. Otherwise, they would've spilled out along with her tears.

The door opened and Elinor stepped outside. Her blue eyes had lit up with the light of a whole sky full of stars and the corners of her mouth couldn't contain her smile. She was steady on her heels in her own right again. Her husband was a reflection of her lightness once again rather than a crutch to support her weight.

"Thank you, Griffin," Elinor drew her into a hug that turned her stomach. "You were there five minutes and he woke up."

Griffin's hands weighed like anvils on Elinor's back and would break her spine with the words pushing on Griffin's tongue. "No, it's all my fault he ended up here in the first place," she could hear herself speaking from afar through the confusion dizzying her mind that would have sent her tumbling down if not for Elinor's embrace. If she'd been more honest with Valtor–and with herself–she never would've pushed them down that road. She'd made him feel like he needed to prove something just because she was woven from distrust in the dark. "I'm sorry."

Elinor pulled back, eyes locked with Griffin and hands on her shoulders. "You don't have to apologize to me. Valtor makes his own decisions and I wouldn't stop him. You've been unfair to yourself in your refusal to believe he was seeing your worth."

Griffin grabbed on to Elinor's arms as the world spun around her on its head. Valtor had gone to such lengths for her, to show her her own worth, not to prove his feelings. He'd risked his life for a single photograph when she hadn't believed his words. And she'd received the message – loud and clear.

"Thank you," Griffin squeezed Elinor's hands whose touch was gentle despite the strength in her arms – just like Griffin's own mother's had been. She was lucky to have found someone with the same striking wisdom to advise her in the wake of her parents' deaths.

"Go to him," Elinor brushed a strand of purple hair from where it'd stuck to the salty tracks on Griffin's cheek. "He's been asking for you." With a nod of encouragement Elinor released her.

Griffin pushed the door open to draw the attention of both men inside. Ailan nodded at her and patted Valtor on the shoulder before making his way out quickly and closing the door.

Griffin and Valtor stared at each other wordlessly. She took in the way every inch of him moved with vitality. His lungs drew in full breaths and her smile got a wide grin in return. How had she ever doubted the shine in his eyes? He was glowing like the sight of her infused him with pure light.

"Thanks for the cactus," Valtor reached over to pull it to the edge of the nightstand, fingers brushing the leather of her purse still lying abandoned there. "Now I'll have company in my prickliness."

Griffin chuckled despite herself and shook her head. "That's not why I brought it. I was hoping it would lend you some of its resilience." The confession came out whole instead of shredded in pieces like she'd feared. "It has survived through many years with me."

"There was no way I wouldn't pull through with you here but why did you come? Was it just fear that drove you here, saying the things of my dreams?"

Her heart jumped in her throat and she had to swallow it to speak, not to keep him from seeing it. She sat down in the chair by the bedside again. It was quickly becoming a monument of their relationship's development.

"I don't know how much you heard of what I said before but I was scared. I was scared I would never get to tell you the photo got through to me because I'd been so scared to act, to feel. I hardly made it through the loss of my parents," Griffin choked back the memories spilling into her eyes. "It was so hard for me to believe in my own future when I'd been pulled from my roots. I've been living on willpower and instinct but I'm ready to feel again, to love again. With you."

Valtor offered her a hand and she took it. He brought it to his mouth for a kiss, the breath from his lips scorching her nerves with the pleasant shiver it sent over her skin. They'd held hands as they'd danced but they'd never made it closer to each other than an inch apart.

"I heard you say you'd be anything I want." Valtor's sly smile had her resisting the urge to roll her eyes. He had something positively scandalous on his mind. "I want you to be my wife."

"Valtor!" Heat rose inside her – overwhelmingly invigorating in the subtlety of the romantic history between them. "Ask me on a date first." She'd say yes this time. She'd say yes any time.

"Take your time. I'll ask you on a thousand dates. We have a whole future in front of us," Valtor laced their fingers together.