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

She doesn’t notice the change in him at her warning, doesn’t see the shadows appearing like bruises in the bottoms of those dark, gold eyes. But it’s better this way, hiding such ruinous secrets, filling the hollow spaces between truths with false smiles and too much silence. Perhaps the truth would destroy her, and perhaps it wouldn’t, but it was not a truth to be discovered now, not a secret to be pried from his heart and unwrapped like a bandage on a wound that would never heal. It would find her on its own eventually, secrets always did - nothing seemed to stay buried for too long, not even the dead as they rose like wilted flowers from graves long-lost, long forgotten. There was no hurry.

‘I will do my best,’ he says, he promises, and she smiles a little when she touches his shoulder with the soft of her whiskered mouth. “That’s all any of us can do, Magnus.”

‘It feels like I have been asleep for a very long time.’ He says again and she can feel her mouth tighten with a frown that seemed to surface from the depths of her ragged heart. It was something she understood, though much less literally than he meant it (and how could she know that), but the times without Makai, the days turned weeks turned months when he had fled and left only heartache and loneliness echoing in his wake, those hollow in-between times, that, felt like sleeping. Days that meant nothing, only empty, only gray, only waiting for those hours when they found each other again and the world would set itself on fire and burn with them until the sleep came again, until he left because he always did.

She knew what it meant to be asleep for a very long time, waiting for the days that mattered in an endless, immortal life to find her.

She wondered if he knew it as well as he thought he did.

Those bright green eyes settle back into the gold of his face, into an anguish he could only just barely hold together, an anguish she knew so intimately. “Do you make a habit out of luring strays home, Magnus?” She asks lightly, and for a moment that frown dissolves as the corners of her mouth quirk subtly upwards. “I have daughters there,” she says instead, ignoring his invitation, “Pyxis and Ilka.” She pauses for a moment and those green eyes darken a shade beneath the furrow of her brow. She often wondered if they had left to hide from her, from the misery she wore like a second skin each time Makai left. “I try to give them their space.” Because I’m a terrible mother, she doesn’t say.

But when her gaze falls into his just a little further, she can feel the glaciers melting in her chest. “But forever is a long time, it seems very likely that I’ll see Heaven at least once in my life. When I do I’ll be sure to see it through your eyes.” A quiet sigh tightens and rattles in her chest as she turns her delicate face from him for a moment. “I’d return the favor and invite you to my home, but I’m afraid this is it.” Her eyes trail across the meadow and then back to his face even as that small smile darkens on her lips. “The Chamber just never stuck.”

oksana