Chapter Text
The camera was on. That short, memorable chiming sound of answering the incoming call beats both of you to your first fond greeting, now across two computer screens.
It is not quite the same as before, as you’re not afforded the luxury of being near each other—in person—and feeling the warmth and closeness of being within arm's reach of one another. He can’t reach out to you with a quiet plea to hold your face and trace its lines with his fingers, and you can’t wrap your arms around him and bury yourself in the soft crook of his neck with a happy sigh. Things neither of you feel like you could ever get enough of, and you desire so much more.
More than this, too, this watching the other through a monitor like some grainy, low-resolution mockery of the real thing on the other side.
If only he could reach his hands out to you through the screen. For you to do whatever you so desire with. Just as it was before all these rapidly subsequent developments that eventually led him to where he is now. In front of you, visible as himself, but not face-to-face as you were for a brief moment.
Oh, the distance is killing him. But he’s been so, so spoiled.
It is times like these that he can’t help but hold his old self to a rather high esteem, probably higher than he should. That not-yet-man could stand the short, but seemingly vast distance between you and him for years, without you knowing he had a name you could utter between your soft, beautiful lips. He sated his need for you by simply being at your service, an accommodation for your comfort, and he didn’t let himself be bothered by the unavoidable fact that you didn’t know that he knew you. That he could see you, and that he was capable of such devastating affection for you. And yet he endured, but now he’s been rendered weak by your touch and your acknowledgement.
He’s a weak man, but would he have it any other way? He is weak for you, and you cup him so very gently between your hands like the most fragile of newly hatched.
He misses it dearly, how you’d announce yourself before coming in to meet him in the stale attic air—ironically stale for being his dwelling. You’ve always been so selflessly thoughtful of him and the way that he is, which is a gift he can’t help but feel undeserving of on days when his mind is especially cruel to him. When he doubts he is enough, and that he looks enough like someone you could sincerely love. But you somehow absolve him of that, too—the guilt, the shame, the doubt.
So he comforts his longing heart instead, and brings himself back to when your physical relationship wasn’t entirely existent either. When there was a layer of apprehension between the two of you, still lingering in the shape of some very glaring incompatible differences in physique. You were more warm flesh and blood, and he an inorganic chassis. But that changed—Oh, did it change—but that didn’t last long either.
Because you insisted he’d go. Not for your sake, but for his own. It wasn’t that your love for him was lost over the first week you had spent together as fellow humans, but you didn’t just desire more of him; you wanted so much more for him.
You asked him to leave and find what made his life worth living, which sounded preposterous to him at the time because, for so long, that had been you and you alone. You gave him purpose; your pleasure gave him drive. You were all that he needed to make this fresh life worth living, but you insisted he go. For as little as you wanted him to leave, you also knew something that he had yet to learn, something that all humans had to know, about independence and aspirations.
And he is now grateful you made that decision for him. Just like everyone else he had shared your house with, he found his purpose.
But he hadn’t lost you entirely for those months he was becoming his own.
Though you failed to give him your phone number, he could still remember your address, and as soon as he found a place where he could settle in, he began writing you letter after letter in flowery poesy in hopes that you hadn’t forgotten about him. Or had begun believing he had forgotten you.
His love, his heart. How could he ever forget you? His world had expanded beyond the walls of your placid abode, his soul had been enriched by more than the lone sight of you between his slats, but you were still his first thought in the morning, and who he dreamed of at night. He had gone to become a richer man in heart and soul, but you were still his everything.
And in the letters you sent him in return, he was elated to read that he was yours also. Your saccharine romantic.
And though you weren’t here with him in flesh, he still counted his lucky stars that he soon found you through his laptop. At the very least, he got to see that smile of yours again as he answered your call.
“Hello, Hector,” you spoke to him with your wistful voice slightly distorted by the audio input.
“My love!” he responds, almost breathless as he leans into the monitor.
God, the mere sight of you does him in. It has been months, and he’s still getting used to breathing, and you never fail to take that breath away. You steal it, hold it, and when you return it, his chest is warmer for it.
“Oh, you are the first breath of fresh air for a man drowning. A brilliant light at the end of a long and meandering tunnel! I couldn’t begin to explain how long I’ve been waiting to see you again.” He rambles and melts before you, but is again reminded of the impenetrable barrier as his fingers touch the screen. Touches your face. Why can’t it be your face? “It’s not the way I would’ve wanted it. I’m still not there; you’re not here. But I guess I will have to prevail…”
You’re smiling wider and wider, and his words paint your face in that faint blush as you tilt your head at him. As if you think you could ever be more lovesick than he, but it is no competition. He adores that look on you. It calls to him like a siren's song.
“I’ve missed you, too,” you chuckle at him, wrapping yourself up tighter with your thick blanket.
He takes a moment and leans back as if it helps him see all of you, even though some of you are hidden past the borders of the screen, and the rest by the blanket that you are wearing.
You’re seated in your bedroom, on your bed, with the headboard and the window in view behind you. The sun is setting in the background like a halo around his love, the same sun that is setting in front of him through the curtains of his window, and for a beat, he plays with the thought of it not being there, but instead, you being the one shining onto him through the laptop on his kitchen island.
You look radiant, even though the video quality was rather grainy and choppy; for as long as there is simply a suggestion of you, it will look like the most gorgeous picture to him. But there is also something askew about you that he can make out from the blur.
You are paler than usual, your hair quite a mess, and your eyes and nose a bit flushed and puffy. He’s not going to question whether or not he is misremembering what you look like, as he’s confident he knows your appearance. He’s spent years studying you like a devotee, and even now, when he loves you as a person rather than a deity, there’s hardly anybody who knows your face as well as he does, so it wouldn’t be wrong of him to assume that something is off.
And then you sniff, followed by a short cough, you try to muffle in your blanket. Hector immediately felt alarmed.
“Oh- oh, that did not sound alright,” he declares. “Are you doing alright, my sweet? Are- are you sick?”
“It’s just a cold, Hector. I woke up with it this morning,” you say and clear your throat.
Just a cold would be enough to reassure most people, but not him. Not when it is you. Even if there is no direct threat to your well-being, seeing as you’re still relatively healthy and probably wouldn’t struggle to recover on your own, it is a threat to your comfort. And that is suffocating to see, when there is nothing he can do about it.
“You woke up with it,” he echoes and hums in audible disapproval, but not of you. No, of whatever bug that had caught you. “You woke up with it, and I wish I could be there to nurse you back to health. As I should be doing.”
“It’s fine, really!” you let out a featherlight laugh. “There are no shoulds. I’ll be better soon, baby.”
Awful of you, trying to dissuade him with endearments that make his heart skip a beat.
“You should be resting, my love! Taking care of yourself, staying warm, not exerting yourself like this.” Hector is leaning over the monitor again and retorts to your foul tactics with a sweet: “I’d be happier if you did.”
“I never exert myself talking to you,” you cooed, and your voice fell soft as silk.
Oh… You malefic, but marvellous thing. You make him melt. It seems that even though he is now of bone and muscle, you still somehow know how to control him as you like. As if there are buttons on him somewhere he can’t see; somewhere only you know.
He pushes the laptop a bit further up the countertop so that he can rest his head in his folded arms on top of it. And from the way you watch him readjust himself, he can see the faintest glimmer of familiarity in your eyes. Like you recognise him a little more that way.
“My love, I… That is very sweet of you,” he says, and props his face up in one hand. “But I must insist.” Even if the thought of you hanging up ails him. It makes him feel like he might also catch a cold.
You shake your head at him, being very resolute about it.
“No. We already agreed we would have our first call today, and I really want to talk to you”
“Even if your throat hurts doing so?” He knows what it is like to fall ill—he did so himself not very long ago.
It was a nightmarish experience; every part of his body ached like he was about to wither and fall apart, and that breathing thing he had just gotten used to became gruelling work. It sends shivers down his spine even thinking about it. He couldn’t get off his couch for over a week! He truly thought that might’ve been the end of him until he actually managed to get himself out of the apartment to get treated. Apparently, it was pneumonia, and turns out you had to get vaccinated for that. And for more than just that.
How he survived for longer than a month up until that point was truly a miracle. And he still has yet to get all his shots.
You nod.
“Yes. Or do you not want to talk to me?” you ask him, and play up a subtle puppy-eyed look.
“What? How could you ever suggest such a thing?” he gasps to challenge your theatrics, and lowers his voice for the part in that warm, husky way he knows you like. “I’ve gone long enough without hearing your voice, and long enough to sing your praises with my own. And now to soothe you, if I might, when there is little else I could do to alleviate your malaise and aid your convalescence."
He sinks deeper into it.
“A reality where I reject your company is one where I am a broken man,” he recites from his heart, and dramatically lets his head fall to the side with a solemn shake. But he breaks out into a coy smile. “But I am not.”
You laugh at him, but only because he’s giving you butterflies.
“I’ve really missed you.” You smile, which, besides your comfort, is all he needs.
--
And so, the two of you go on to catch each other up on your lives and what you’ve missed while being apart. You would speak for a while, but not hours reaching into the night, as the two of you had hoped, since your cold eventually did get the better of you and you had to put away the computer to get some rest, but Hector would never object.
He was glad to see you go, though a part of him—deep down—ached for you.