I counted my blessings, now I'll count this curse; oksana

[Oksana]

you taught me the courage of the stars before you left

how light carries on endlessly, even after death

He sinks into his thoughts, falls away into his memories, and for a moment she is left alone. It is a short moment, maybe little more than one single beat of their hearts, but it is long enough. She can feel her own mind drifting dangerously as she considers this poisonous love that burns like acid in her veins and eats holes in her heart.

It had felt like an easy love at first, like there was nothing to question, all instinct and impulse and meant to be’s. He gave her the strength to take the Falls, and the support to keep her wild, reckless heart tethered there for as long as was possible. And when he became sick and the smell of death followed him like a devoted pet, she had lent him her strength and her soul, everything she had was his to take. But after that, things had changed, an impossible shift in a perfectly flawed world. She had become a mother, and he a father, and now looking back she cannot help but wonder if she was the first one to press a knife to the seam of their relationship. If the things she had wanted, a family, a child, were not the same things he had wanted. She wonders, with a lump of guilt and sorrow lodged in her throat, if she had asked him to be someone he wasn’t.

Her chest heaves with the silent whimper of concealed sorrow and she turns her face from him for a moment. She does not know why she does, why she cares if he sees something crawling through the shadows in her eyes like a wounded animal. Maybe it’s reflexive, or maybe she’s just tired of falling apart in front of everyone. But she doesn’t look back to his face until she is certain he will only find a softness there, a lie, and a stormy quiet in the bright emerald of her guarded eyes.

“It won’t kill me.” She tells him when she is certain her voice won’t crack and betray her. It was already killing her. But there was so much to live for, so much to hold on to. She had a family in her children, a beautiful family, and an even stranger one with Dempsey. But it gave her purpose, even when she could feel the missing part of her soul like a ragged hole in her chest. It wasn’t perfect, sometimes it was barely enough, but it was good, and it was so much more than she deserved.

Despite herself, she reaches out to press her nose to the curve of his gold cheek with the ghost of a smile pulling at her whiskered mouth. “Just don’t hurt anyone I love.” She says pulling away, and the smile widens and deepens into a warm laugh that just barely touches the corners of her quiet eyes. He doesn’t strike her as someone who would.

Her ears flick at his next words and her face softens in understanding for him. “Coming home is never what we think it will be. Everything changes- if not home, then we do. It’s hard to find the way back in, but it isn’t impossible.” She pauses thinking of the Chamber, of a place she wanted to be home, a place that seemed as though it would never be home. Even though she drifted back, every time she drifted back, there was nothing strong enough to tether her there. Nothing strong enough to tether her anywhere, not since Makai, though Dempsey and the twins came so painfully close. “Where have you been?” She asks looking back at him, her eyes soft beneath a furrowed red brow. “Where will you go?”

oksana