When Seeing Them Again Isn’t Soft

Reunions are often written as gentle things.

A moment of recognition across a room. The gradual realisation. Relief washing in slowly, softening everything. Two people finding their way back to each other in a scene that gives the reader time to breathe, time to feel it, time to settle into what’s happening alongside the characters.

There’s a reason that version exists. It’s earned. It’s earned when the story has built toward it carefully, when the distance has been long enough that arriving somewhere is its own kind of peace.

But not all reunions feel like that.

Some feel like impact.

Like everything you’ve been holding carefully in place — the distance you’ve maintained, the equilibrium you’ve constructed, the version of yourself that has learned to function without this person in it — shifts all at once. Without warning. Without the courtesy of a gradual approach. Like your body reacts before your mind has had any chance to catch up, before the part of you that makes considered decisions has even registered what’s happening.

Like there is no distance at all between what you feel and the moment itself.

That’s what this reunion is.

It’s not calm. It’s not measured. There’s no slow unfolding, no careful navigation of what this means or how to handle it. It’s immediate in the way that some things are just immediate — not because Marc and Finn are people who lose control easily, because they’re not, but because some things bypass the systems you’ve built to manage them.

Because when someone has that kind of history with you, seeing them again doesn’t come with a buffer. There’s no gradual adjustment period, no gentle recalibration. The body remembers what the mind has spent years trying to organise into something manageable.

It just hits.

And then you’re standing there, in the middle of whatever ordinary moment this interrupted, with all of it suddenly present and immediate and completely uninterested in your carefully maintained equilibrium.

And then you have to decide what to do with that.

That moment — the one right after impact, when the dust is still moving and nothing has been said yet and everything is possible and terrible simultaneously — is one of my favourite things to write. Not the reunion itself. What comes immediately after it. The split second where a character has to choose, consciously or not, who they’re going to be in response to something they weren’t prepared for.

Marc makes a choice in that moment.

Whether it’s the right one is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Almost Yours Again