Work Text:
It was Effy's twenty-eighth birthday. She could have been out with friends, but instead she found herself wandering the streets of Copenhagen alone, retracing the steps she and William had taken all those years ago. She sighed loudly standing in front of the brick building that once housed Culture Box.
It had been fourteen years since her chance encounter with William. Fourteen years... The time had flown by and she was now the same age he was when they had met. It didn't feel that long ago. She shook her head trying to wrap her mind around it. It all felt so strange.
She just couldn't seem to forget him. He hadn't been a very nice person. In fact, he had been quite an asshole. An American with a chip on his shoulder, so angry at everything and everyone. The truth was, back then she had been just as angry. She had felt a closeness to him. They both had lost a father and that had left them feeling alone and bitter. He had changed the course of her life. No one had ever stood up for her the way William had that night, punching Henrik, her mother's boyfriend at the time, in the face for being inappropriate with her. She had been dealing with it all alone for so long when William had showed up and without a thought instinctively protected her. He not only protected her from Henrik, but also from himself, as much as he had wanted her, and finally from herself, trying to keep her innocense in tact.
She had truly loved him back then. She knew she wouldn't have regretted giving herself to him, but a lot of her desire to sleep with him had been her trying to take a measure of control back in a life that, at the time, had felt totally out of her control. Everything had changed for her after that. She had the courage to tell her mother about Henrik being inappropriate with her and her mother broke up with him. Their relationship grew close as a result.
Effy sat down on a bench and reached into her handbag. She pulled out an envelope with her photographs of William inside. She had had some pretty good relationships since then. She was actually in one currently. Mikkel loved her and treated her wonderfully. So why was she alone on her birthday remembering William?
She took the photographs out of the envelope. Their edges were worn and their corners folded over. She couldn't help but smile as she thumbed through them. He would be fourty-two now... What kind of man had he become, she wondered.
No one seemed to be able to measure up to those fourty-eight hours with William. The way he had made her feel, it had been him and her against the world. Somehow he had understood her in a way no one ever had before or since.
She had often thought of looking him up online, trying to find him, but she knew their time had passed. If she had been older back then maybe their story would have ended differently. But, maybe not. Everything would have been different and she wouldn't change what they had shared for anything. They had had something most people would die for, and though it slipped away too soon, too fast, they had both grown. There was a peace and a calmness that had been lacking before and a warm place of knowing they were no longer alone. That no matter what, there was someone who had truly understood and cared.