at the very least, they tried. they can’t deny themselves the
knowledge that it had been there — the effort, the will to
attempt to move forward despite the inevitability of being
forced to stop. he hasn’t held the atlas in his hands since
it happened, but his fingers don’t flex with the absence of
it anymore either. he’s less concerned with their last
adventure as he is with Their Last Adventure, and that has
to mean something. somehow.
the pictures are still down, and he doesn’t miss them. not
more than he misses him, anyway — it’s eclipsed by things
bigger, and infinitely more terrifying, clawing up the walls
of his insides. he doesn’t know how to think of them, let
alone talk about them, so they just fester in the recesses
of his mind to be dealt with later ( or never, if he has his
way. avoidance is key. )
capella doesn’t shut his eyes either. not for more than a
few minutes at a time, out of pure necessity. right now a
hand moves to card into jace’s hair, a soft brush back off
of his forehead where it sticks in the cold sweat that hasn’t
appeared prone to go away for ages now.
he can’t afford to kill hope, as much as he wants to at times.
as much as he feels he has to, with exhaustion weighing
the pair of them down in tons, and the same song being
sung again and again and again in his head. there’s always
been something just out of reach in there, some mysterious
answer to a question he doesn’t know how to ask, but now
he thinks he might’ve had it all along..
there’s really nothing for him to say. nothing, really, that’s
worth breaking the silence anyway. he leans down to
press his lips to jace’s temple, and he stops himself from
wondering.
concerns that plague him now are relentless. quiet finds
him close lipped and tripping over thoughts more than
it ever did Before. just another part of the easiness of it,
maybe ; something that comes with the new uncertainty.
everything is less clear now. for every less, there's a more
that he never expected. less rush, more time. less sleep,
more nightmares. less movement, more restlessness...
there is now a foreseeable maybe. a more likely for the
rest of ; an absolute in sickness and a more hopeful in
health. jace is not sure if they've ever really been one for
tradition but tradition aside there are statistics and even
if they are less likely to follow the norm, he has always
been good at math and 50% is a lot higher than the odds
he's already beat.
it is possible that with less pressure from the universe he
has simply fallen back into the expectations of who they
are is where they've been instead of where they're going ;
where they were supposed to go. they have an infinity of
eternal forevers. there is no argument that they posses a
transcendental always. but nor, is there any argument
to their lack of ability to handle the right now.
lips part only to allow the tip of his tongue to flit over the
chapped skin with the almost, not-quite of a question he's
to afraid to ask even in the wake of temple kisses. jace is
aware of what he's done, how he stole capella away. right
out of the night sky in the passenger seat of an all too
familiar car last year with a single word: relapse. but maybe
for as hard as it was then, right now is harder. if one word
was enough for him then, there's no idea what the opposing
can do to them now. when every second no longer counts
for infinitely more until death do us part seems infinitely less.
after all it was never really in the cards Before, Until.
so it is agonizingly unclear whether this is it, or whether
jace will return to continuously counting on next time, for
for capella to stay.
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