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..
    it’s just slipping away.
    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...
    less dying, more fear.
    less doubt, more Doubt.
    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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