#songsen

And this conversation is too rich for the mediocrity of his surroundings. There's must still be something to be said about nights under the stars in a clearing in the woods, or perhaps a dock in the middle of the ocean, or floating in space, filled with the possibility of nothing and everything all at once. These words don't belong here. But Keefe does—not in a way to call him cheap or tacky, but in a bright, everything-everywhere-all-at-once kind of way. He's everything loud, everything bright, everything overwhelming.

"You need the reminder," Keefe says, resolute, as stuck in his self-righteousness as Tam's fork is to the syrupy table. "It's not over, Tam."

"Can't it be done? Can't it have died with her?" Tam feels the warm scent of unwashed bodies brush his skin. He wasn't made for this.

"You know that you did this to yourself."

And he hates Keefe for saying it. He hates him more than anyone, with an overwhelming catastrophic desperation that makes the entire world fade away, because it's always been that way with him. Keefe is simple and complicated in a terrifying, tell-me-who-i-am-and-i-won't-like-the-answer kind of way.

You know you did this to yourself.

Add that to his list of mistakes. Along with falling in love.

...

Tam might have physical echoes, but Keefe's are just as tangible.

The thing is, it's impossible to measure who has it worse (not that it stops him) when Tam's power is the thing attacking him night after night, while Keefe's mind is the only thing holding him hostage.

He's been there during attacks, of course. The times Tam loses himself in nightmares and his shadows come to life on the walls, shadowflux taking physical form to rake scratches into the mellow blue wallpaper Keefe handpicked for their bedroom, foggy condensation dripping from the ceiling onto the sunny yellow sheets of their bed. Their room is falling apart around them, and Keefe can't lie. He doesn't lie anymore.

It's his fault. Tam's.

His fault for choosing to learn shadowflux at all. Umber's journals taught him to weave shadow arrows and knives, rend apart concrete as if it's paper, bring objects crashing down when they're trying to sleep.

It's his fault. But he knows the way it burns. Lemon juice, saltwater, the sting of a frown and the twinge of hate. He knows burning like his own name.

So he knows regret. It calms him somewhat, to know that it was his own fault that he has these nightmares. At least he doesn't have to deal with blaming Tam.

Every day, he sees her: light auburn hair pulled into a bun tight enough to stretch the scars on her face that he'd given her. Right before he ended that light in her cold eyes, the ones that live on in his own face.

Gisela is trapped in his mirror. He has to live with the knowledge that every day, she might escape.

Every time he stares into it, meets his own eyes (her eyes) he feels her a little more. The burning of hate, of the fight with Dimitar and the salt of the ring in his wound. Sophie's desperate eyes, tear filled with prepared grief, because she knew then who he is now, and it destroyed both of them. And so he lost her.

Keefe plays that moment in his mind over and over, but he can’t come up with a version where she doesn’t learn who he is, what he is. He can’t come up with a version where she doesn’t leave him.

Sophie was right to mourn him then. Didn't that make it better when he died? When his mother killed him every way but physically?

...

Tam does not know who they want him to be.

It's a game of fear and choices, both of which he has learned from a schoolbook, studying the art of it.

This is fear: when your nightmares come to life, when your partner clutches at your arm because his mother formed from shadows made real, when the ghosts take physical form and you are powerless to stop them because you learned too well how to make them and not enough of how to send them away.

This is choice: to leave or to stay, to live or to die, how to run and how to love, how to unpack his clothes into drawers or how to make promises and keep them, how to leave one for another, to trust in his safety and let those he loves leave his sight to go with another.

And it's an art, along the lines of painting or singing or the poems he scribbles in his private journal. A love letter to terror, asking it to please stop calling because I'm happy now, I promise I'm happy, I don't need you anymore. All these lies.

He knows lying better than fear. Better than choices.

Tam knows lies, like the ones he tells himself. Like it was my fault (trying to convince himself) when it's not. It wasn't.

It was his fault. Keefe's.

Because he picked up Umber's journals for him, memorized every word to make the shadows leak into Keefe's head correctly, twisted his own insides around to keep him safe.

He would do it all again, of course. Every time, he's the one to lose himself in the glory of being a shield: Linh's protection, Sophie's rock, Keefe's last shred of common sense. It's him who makes the sacrifice, him who chooses to be exiled, to join the Neverseen, to give bits and pieces of himself away in a bargain that cancels out the danger instead of fixing it. He’s a bandaid on a gaping wound.

So perhaps this is fear: when you've given enough of yourself away to not recognize your shadowed eyes when you see them in the mirror.

Perhaps this is choice: whether to go on as half a person, or steal yourself back and take some of them with you.

...

"It drowns you sometimes, doesn't it?" Keefe watches Tam's legs swing back and forth on the countertop, and presses his hands against the cool marble. The chill is a tether and a knife cutting him free from his body. "The anger, I mean."

Tam considers this. Or, he puts on his Thinking Face, the one where his head tilts to the side and his eyes get all wide and his mouth comes open just a little bit, waiting for the spark to come through the space and light an idea in his head. It takes him a little while to form an answer, and when it does, it comes slow, tight with guilt. "Of course."

Keefe leans forward, places his hands on the counter on either side of Tam's legs and presses their lips together, quick, warm. "I'm sorry about that." He's not.

"You're not," Tam says.

He likes the anger, and Tam knows it. The day the two of them stop being angry about what happened to them is the day they turn into their parents and start being angry about what other people are doing and thinking and saying. It has to go somewhere. They have to go somewhere.

Keefe shrugs. He's less furious and more simmering these days. He paints it, his anger, the coolness of ice and piercing eyes. They stare at him always, worse at night, worse with Tam's shades bringing his mother back to life like she hasn't been dead for nearly three years. "You're not, either."

"No," Tam agrees, and this time it's him who moves forward to kiss him. His breath is warm against Keefe's cheeks, and he uses that warmth to center himself. Cold at his palms, heat on his lips.

See, he wishes he can tell his mother, I can still feel. Killing you didn't break me.

Tam did, though. Broke him apart and remolded him. For the better, maybe, or for the worse, probably. With a fire in the pit of his stomach like the throwing star he'd landed in hers. He hates him a little for that: for making him a new version of himself that he doesn't entirely like.

It's an attack, Tam's hands on his cheeks, caressing his cheekbone with his thumb, pulling him closer, threading through the tangles of his hair like he's not a boy made of lemon juice, of saltwater, of echoes. An attack because of how much it hurts, in his lungs and blood and bones, as Tam's palms warm his icy skin and Tam's lips part his own and Tam's eyelashes brush against his cheek with their closeness.

Keefe writes his own name in the fog in the mirror after he showers so he doesn't forget it.