CH261 Thera’s Perspective

Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Why did I do that? Thera kept asking herself as she ran away, feeling all but horrified that she’d almost kissed Ben, only going to his cheek at the last minute, while being completely wrong about her reason for doing it.

It also wasn’t as if she didn’t know why she’d done it. Not really. As much as she wanted to deny the fact, she’d moved because whether she liked it or not, she wanted to kiss him, and it was growing harder and harder to tell herself she didn’t. As much as she hated it, it was growing all the harder to say she just wanted him as a friend.

Eventually, when she couldn’t run any longer she stopped, taking a seat on the steps of a church that had closed up for the day and placing her head in her arms as she caught her breath. She didn’t know what to do so she’d simply tried to escape from her problem, not wanting to face it, but she wasn’t given the peace as Steph came up beside her.

“Sorry, me and Amy didn’t think about how that might have sounded, we should have told you more,” She said as she took a seat beside her, waiting for a response that didn’t come.

“Um, do you want to talk at all? She asked, trying again and getting the same result before giving in to the question she really wanted to know. “You love Ben, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to love Ben!” Thera almost shouted, all of it coming out as if a dam had burst. “He makes me happy, and he’s kind, and he tries so hard for me Steph, but he’s going to die centuries before me! I don’t know how my dad or my aunt make it work, but I can’t. I can’t imagine watching someone I love slowly age and decay as I stay the same.”

No matter what her parents said, no matter what her aunt Lux said, it always came back to this, and she still didn’t know how she was supposed to handle the thought. Even after Ben had awakened his skill, the difference would be a blip in her lifespan, made all the worse if she awakened any of her own. While he got a few extra decades out of this, she was certain to get centuries, maybe millennia. Even if she stopped training her magic now, Ben could never come up to her level even if he managed to awaken a dozen skills because of the diminishing returns that would come with each one.

Steph just sat beside her calmly, listening to the outburst in silence as she took it all in, trying to listen and support the best she could until Thera fell silent again.

“I know that’s your big concern, but Thera, like it or not Ben isn’t going to age and die anyway. The only thing you can change is what you do while he’s around.”

“…I know that.”

It wasn’t a shocking revelation or anything. She didn’t want her lifespan to keep her from enjoying things like friendships, even if they were all destined to be comparatively brief, but bringing romance into the mix made it feel different. If she could just put her feelings to the side, she thought she’d be able to spend whatever years she had with him happily enough, able to see him off with a smile in the end, along with whatever family he’d made for himself in that time, but she hated that thought too. She didn’t want him growing old, and she definitely didn’t want him starting a family with someone else, but that just made her feel worse. She didn’t want to date him so she wouldn’t be hurt in the end, but she didn’t want him dating someone else because she couldn’t imagine herself being okay with that either.

I really am terrible. I just need him to find someone and deal with it without being weird. It will be fine eventually.

Even as she thought that though, she couldn’t keep one last thought from slipping out.

“Besides, It’s not like it’s guaranteed he’s interested.”

“No, he definitely is.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do because he told Will the other day.”

“…Should you have told me that?”

“I don’t know,” Steph shrugged. “But it seems like it would be better to have it out there for you to think about than not knowing for sure, no matter how obvious it might be.”

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Just how happy hearing that made her made knowing what to do all the harder, but she knew she couldn’t just do nothing. It would be shocking if Ben didn’t want to know what was happening, but before anything else she wanted to clear her head.

“Alright, well I don’t think I’m going to be able to get out of this so I’ll talk to him in a bit, I just need to relax first. Want to take a walk with me?”

Steph happily agreed, and the two of them wandered down the darkened streets of the city, all the while both of them quietly wondered just how things would work out.