Salt :: [Nino + Vin]
Jan 16, 2015 17:12:09 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Jan 16, 2015 17:12:09 GMT -5
It's been a few days and he can finally admit it. He’s not a child anymore.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the smart-mouthed prankster has grown up — Ripred, no! He’s got a deviant reputation to uphold, after all, it’s just that these days he’s begun to realize that he’s living in no man’s land. The youngest of the Ripley brothers (an idea that sounds less sad than he remembers it feeling yesterday) is too old to be stolen away by the Reaping and so he doesn’t wake in the middle of the night with his fists flying anymore, muddled by nightmares that he’s followed in the footsteps of the more broken pieces of his heart. The dream scars of small teeth marks have faded from his skin; the only ocean waves he can hear are from a familiar shoreline.
These days smiles don’t have to be coaxed out of hiding, despite the infamous incident involving a particular Libertine girl breaking up with him. Nino Ripley has loved and lost… and lived. When he was seventeen, he didn’t think that was how things worked. A few days ago he came face-to-face with the eyes, the nose, the lips of a girl who tore him up in both the best and worst of ways and today life simply goes on like always.
He woke up and rode his bike to work, wiping the final remnants of last night’s vomit and glitter off the bar top as one of his coworkers claims the seat in front of him. She’s not the same kind of pretty as Ursula, but she’s definitely a girl and so he notices. This is the grin of someone who has looked into the faces of enough corpses to finally realize that he’s still alive, despite the way his heart has so often told him the opposite. Nino Ripley is not a sad little boy and he’s probably not quite a man yet either, but that doesn’t even matter.
“You look like you could use a drink,” he says as he sets a glass down, eying the girl before him — a note of amusement in his tone implying that he already knows she’s here for the usual.
What he’s lost doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to hang himself on the reasons his heart used to beat. If he can breathe without Fitz and Noah, then he won’t die without Ursula. Like this, he’s resilient in a way that’s more impressive than he might ever realize. There are so many things changing in his life right now for the better and if he could only admit that? Well, that will be the day Nino Ripley becomes a man.