aestheticals | ( blackboard ) the end and the beginning

She already knew it would happen long before she heard his name called out or before he’d risen to collect his diploma. It had been a swelling sensation in her chest, forcing itself into her throat and forming a lump, and her eyes had already started stinging, and before she- before she knew it- that’s it. She’s crying, fat, indelicate tears rolling down her cheeks and she is so fucking thankful that damn make-up is waterproof, but she’s still crying, and it’s like a broken tap has been turned on. He turns to find her in the crowd, to find her where she sat, near to the front, amongst the other teachers, and for a moment his face falls, and she hears his voice speak to her - only her - from a distance.

Cat?

She doesn’t know if she has ever heard him sound so lost before, in just the one word..

Calm down, you idiot. I’m over the fucking moon.

There’s a pause, so brief that she almost wonders if it even happens, before he suddenly laughs, grinning like a maniac, and she finds herself laughing too, suddenly, if not a little hysterically, and that’s when her colleagues glance at her and realise she’s been sitting there sobbing her eyes out for the past two minutes. She sits through the rest of the ceremony mostly calm, smiling mildly to herself and deflecting her colleague’s vaguely concerned questions as to whether or not she was all right, and when it closes, everyone rising to attend the reception in the somewhat sorry looking marquees out in the sodden grounds, she finds herself inclined to start crying all over again, though she just about holds it back.

Not for very long, mind.

It takes a few minutes of milling about and everyone spreading out around the tables for them to find each other, with him muttering little mental messages to her the entire time while she requests that he shut up and find her faster. When they finally catch sight of each other across the marquee, she realises a little belatedly that the tears have started once again, and she dips her head, embarrassed and annoyed, because she’s crying over a young man that she’s desperately loved for two out of three years, she’s crying because she was the very one that forced them apart in the first place, that the day has finally come where she isn’t limited to a secret, shameful kiss on his birthday, until she feels his hands on her shoulders.

(He’s really quite terribly handsome, she has come to realise, especially now. Soon he’ll be twenty two years old, but he already looks like a man, with his hair slicked back neatly and his face bright with a grin and- when did he get so tall? Was he always so broad and so adult? He isn’t the teenager caught between boy and man anymore, and frankly, it makes her heart beat that little bit faster.)

“I have a diploma,” he says, barely even trying to keep the maddening elation from his voice. “I’m officially a graduate.” His hands are so warm on her bare skin. “You look beautiful, by the way. Absolutely beautiful.”

“You’re not half bad yourself,” she intones, a little hoarsely, snorting mildly as she tries to wipe away some of her tears. A lot of eyes have turned to watch them, and the hum of conversation in the marquee has dwindled. “Least you’ve not got some bloody Niagara Falls situation happening on your face.” As he reaches up to brush his thumbs across her damp cheeks, helping her to dry her face, more eyes fall upon them, more conversations suddenly fade to end. “You’ve graduated,” she murmurs, sounding oddly breathless.

Joshua King laughs, loudly, and releases her shoulders only for a moment, and then it happens, he gathers Catherine Morrison into his arms and he kisses her - hard - on the lips in the middle of a marquee full of colleagues, peers, students, parents, everyone. She kisses him back, she flings her arms around his neck and a throwaway thought escapes her, that she never wants to let him go again (Fine by me, he adds, muttering a vague protest against her lips as she pinches his shoulder for his troubles).

Silence has fallen all around them, but they couldn’t care less, and they still don’t care when the buzz of response suddenly kicks up, started by a high pitched “oh my god!” rising from one of the students, and everyone’s staring and talking about it, but they just don’t care. Empires could rise and world powers could fall right now, and still they’d be in their own world, together, and suddenly complete.