Chapter Text
He remembers hearing somewhere that all the cells in the body are destroyed and replaced every seven years.
The fact makes him snort derisively. Some would call him cocky for believing that the cosmos would bother to trifle with his life out of the expanse that is the universe, but this; this was a big, honking cosmic joke if he had ever heard one. The moon, the stars, the planets, the black holes he had once learned about—during his brief years enrolled in school, sitting in plastic chairs whilst surrounded by all-too-cheery bulletin boards—were all laughing heartily at his expense. Of that, he was convinced.
He does the math quickly in his head. Twenty-seven, verging on twenty-eight, science dictates that he has been through four different versions of his body. His cells have created and destroyed themselves almost four times over, mapping out their deaths and rebirths amidst the strengthening of his jaw line, the broadening of his shoulders, and in the maturity that seemed to settle in over his face somewhere between having Russian expletives yelled at him over the ice and belting out ‘O Canada’ as the weight of the world fell off of his shoulders and became the weight of the Olympic medal hanging from his neck.
Out of the three—nearing four—times that his body has experienced cellular rebirth, only one body has truly belonged to him, and him only.
Holding onto the hand of a girl with barely any words but with the world in her eyes, he was oblivious to everything but the foreign feeling of how her small, mitten-clad hand felt in his, and how conversation uncharacteristically stuck at the base of his throat instead of streaming past his lips in an endless, exuberant commentary. Watching their feet move in slow, awkward unison and peering at her out of the corner of his eye, he had not known that the next eighteen years would bring his body to shape around the delicate curve of her waist and meld against the soft rise of her hip, the spaces between his fingers transforming into valleys that only the base of her fingers could fulfill. He had not known that her palm pressed against his would become as natural to him as the steady thud of his heartbeat; he had not known of how he would ingrain her carefully into his heart, nor of the slow-burning emptiness that always filled the spaces that her prolonged absences left behind.
For someone who has never been married, he’s never felt so divorced in his life.