In their world, everything was perfect. They had each other. But the slightest action can shatter a dream, can break a heart, and can kill happiness.

She was very young, he much older. That didn’t matter to them. Nothing mattered apart from their love.

She was young and hopeful, he older and jaded. But their dreams were united, however briefly.

She was easily scared, he calm and collected. He hoped that he would be able to help her with everything. She pushed him away.

She spent the next years alone, trying to deny her feelings. He spent the next years trying desperately to recreate what he had had, going from one relationship to another. But their lives would only be complete on the day that they met again. On the day that she let him back into her heart, on the day that they accepted their fate.

*~*~*

He was a successful surgeon, living alone since his divorce. She was eighteen, and in her last year of school. She was the dedicated daughter, loving her mother and father no matter what they did to her. And that was how they met. She accompanied her mother to the hospital one day. There were complications, and they ended up talking. And when her mother died, he was her shoulder to cry on.

When her exams were over, she chose a university close by, so that she could be near him. She was going to be a doctor. Just like he was.

And when she got in to the university, she moved in with him. By this time, they had been together for six months, and it did not seem too fast. She wanted to escape her father, who had become violent and vengeful since the death of her mother. And he wanted her to be around him all the time.

Over the next three years, they became closer and closer, each falling more in love with the other every day that passed. She met his children. He met her friends. He helped her with her studies. She helped him with his taste in music. They helped each other live.

He was her first love, that amazing person who comes into each life only once. The love that is always remembered and treasured, for long after the memories have faded. She was far from his first, but was also far from just being a notch on his bedpost. The love he felt for her was stronger, purer, than anything he had felt ever before.

*~*~*

But that gentle love was soured, when he begged for more than she would allow. He asked for her hand in marriage. She snatched back the hand that had always been so close to him; suddenly terrified of the man she had adored so dearly. Her experiences in the past had tainted her ideas of marriage, and she took back from him the gift she had given. He could only stand by and watch, as she robbed him of the only thing he had had lived for.

And she could do nothing but remove herself from his life. She believed that she was doing the right thing. She would have greatly loved to be able to stay, but she was helpless. Her mind controlled her heart, for the first time in her life. And she wished frantically that it were the other way around.

*~*~*

And the next time that Diane met Ric, she dared not mention the love she had taken from him all those years ago, the love she wished that she could give back. And he dared not mention that, on the day she gave it, he would take it in an instant.