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amything THIS IS FOR YOU.A Series of Anti-Climaxes, Part 4 (final)
A Series of Anti-Climaxes is a collection of one shots exploring possible starts for pairings that do not exist, at least outright, in canon, without playing them out to any large degree despite the set up -- anti-climatic.
Part 1 - Moritz/Melchior | Part 2 - Anna/Wendla | Part 3 - Melchior/Ilse
Title: Love Is the Answer to a Question that I Have Forgotten (But I Know I've Been Asked)
Fandom: Spring Awakening (General)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Ilse/Moritz
Summary: Ilse never really thought much of the children back in town. Still children, when she had fallen into so much more.
Notes: A Christmas gift for
amything, who has wanted some Moritz/Ilse for forever and who I said I'd write some for in, like, summer of 2007. Title from Reading Time With Pickle by Regina Spektor. Thanks to prosopopeya and msmoocow for betaing. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.” -- Charles Dickens
She was handed a bottle of beer. She didn't drink at first. No. Just let it sit there for a while, resting on her thigh as she held it in her hands, running her thumbs down it, sliding down the glass, not cold but just cool, approaching luke warm, but the cold and the cool and the warm all blended together, blurred by the constant caress of her slender fingers. She stared at the fireplace, cackling at her, and she was alone in the room for the moment but she still pretended that it was simply involuntary, unconscious, how the tips of her fingers slid over the curve of the bottle, considering what was coming, not scared or excited or wanting to or not wanting to but just considering.
Holding the bottle gently, delicately, but not so gently as to let it slip from her fingers, to look like she didn't want it, she lifted the bottle to her lips and the beer tasted awful warm but that was all the better. It felt like it should be bitter. It wasn't the first sip of beer she'd had but regardless she couldn't imagine or recall any other taste as she swallowed and it lingered just a little. The important things rarely came easy. So independence had to taste bitter, she had to choke it down, because she couldn't see how it was her freedom if she didn't have to take it kicking and screaming.
She didn't know why she cried a little, in his arms, after her lover had fallen asleep. She had no reason to cry anymore – that night she had lifted the bottle to her own lips and called the bed hers when she laid down with him and if she didn't want to, she could have not, but she wanted to. Ilse wanted to sip her beer, lay in her bed and have sex with her man. She knew his name, even when she moved on to the next one, the next bed, the next bottle of beer, but in her head she never said it. Didn't need to. She didn't name the beer or the bed either, so she didn't see why it mattered.
The funny thing was, it only lasted so long before she started coming back to town. More or less. She'd stand at the edge of the river she'd crossed to get away from that life and she'd watch that place from afar. Sometimes kids would come down to the water on the other side – kids. Who used to be her good friends, when she was a child also. She'd see Wendla Bergman a lot, alone, and sometimes the girl wouldn't even spot Ilse across the river as she stared out at nothing but sometimes she did, and sometimes she smiled, though it was a sad sort of smile, and Ilse wondered if that sadness was for her. She didn't know what would make Wendla think that Ilse was in need of that kind of smile and not Wendla herself.
Ilse even saw the boys sometimes, on the other side of the river. She hadn't been gone so long from that town but it had been so long since she'd really known them, been able to run through the mud with them and be children, real children, that it felt like a very long time. Of course, it was clear, they weren't the children she had befriended years ago. They were older now, looking more like men than boys. But at the same time, they didn't carry themselves as if they knew it yet, and when they stared at her across the water, they weren't the stares of men. Almost. Not yet.
So she had no reason to be scared or excited or otherwise bothered when one of these boys crossed that bridge one day. No reason. So she rested her fingers on her chest and could not understand why her heart was racing. Maybe it was because Moritz didn't just stare at her from afar like he did when he was always cowering beside Melchior, but because he was alone, and he kept on walking, hesitantly, across the bridge in her direction.
Just across the bridge, several feet away, he stopped. “Hello... Ilse,” he said, as though he didn't really remember how to speak without thinking carefully about how the syllables came together.
“Moritz,” she said, smiling, and her heart fluttered a little and she was sure it was because it had been so long since they'd spoken. So long she couldn't even remember.
He looked like he wanted to say something but no words came. He swallowed uncomfortably and she felt his eyes flicker down her body and then into the distance, and though it was such a familiar look it seemed to catch her off-balance.
When she thought of Moritz, her thoughts always wandered back to when they were kids. They were a troublesome bunch – her, Moritz, Melchior, and Wendla. Melchior always had the elaborate games with great backstory and complicated rules that they'd forget or change twice over by the time the evening was over, and Wendla would always cheat and Moritz would always follow the rules diligently as though he absorbed everything Melchior said sponge-like and Ilse would always stick with Wendla because Melchior always let her get away with anything.
She wondered if she had perhaps been mistaken. That maybe she hadn't seen what she thought she saw in his eyes. That maybe the change had happened in herself. That maybe she really hadn't separated her life now with her life back across the bridge. That maybe if she crossed that bridge things wouldn't be the same as when she had crossed to get to this side.
Or maybe it wasn't just her. Maybe she was right about him also.
“I better go,” he said apologetically, and his words were so sweet, and so was his shy smile and it occurred to her that she could know. That if he really was more than the boy she had once known, she knew how to get into men's heads. Right? Moritz hadn't moved, and she saw him swallow uncomfortably again and she realized she was staring into his eyes and she could feel her hands shaking and she thought, distantly, that this was strange... confusing. She'd kissed a lot of people in her young life and she had never shaken before.
“I've missed seeing you.” She didn't really think about the words and they meant nothing to her. Ilse felt like she had to remind herself how to walk, left, right, left, right, as she came closer to his body frozen there, his breath quick, and she found that she couldn't do it. Somehow, she couldn't do it. She looked into his eyes and she couldn't just walk up and kiss him on the mouth like she would anyone else. Awkwardly -- god, how long had it been since she felt awkward? -- she leaned forward and kissed him, gently, on the cheek.
He jerked away, his eyes wide, and he blurted out, “I better go,” as if the only words he could pull out at a moment's notice were ones he had already thought of, and she turned away and didn't watch his quick footsteps back over the bridge.
She told herself, when she calmed down later, what a bad idea that had been, that the boys in town were not like the spontaneous artists she knew, and how when it came down to it she didn't want back into that world across the bridge, and she certainly didn't want Moritz Stiefel, a boy who couldn't be kissed on the cheek without having a nervous breakdown.
But that night, in the arms of a man who would be happy to give her so much more than her mind could imagine Moritz Stiefel ever giving, she could only press her lips to his and imagine what Moritz would do if she kissed him like that, and she could imagine the shaking in her own hands and his gasping breaths and the whole thing so awkward and fumbling and she had to admit that it was sort of charming.
Charming, she thought, as she lay in bed staring up at the stars that were the same ones they had played games under as children, to be with someone who would think that her lips were something worth getting upset about.
Next time she saw him, she told herself, rolling away from the window and pulling the sheet up to her chin, next time... maybe, she'd find out if she was right.
