i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you. || magnus

[Ellyse]

your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine. i don't love you, but i always will.

  The silence that soon descends is suffocating, leaving too many words unspoken as the unforgiving sun begins to wane along the distant horizon. The pale light of dusk casts a shadow along the plain, painting their silhouettes in lilac and auburn, burning as brightly as the fierce fire that still flickers in the aftermath of her own bitter words. A gentle breeze carries through, caressing her skin and weaving its way through her delicate, finely preened feathers, but she cannot feel anything aside from the weight of her own words lingering between them. Her heart clenches inside of her chest as an immediate wave of remorse settles into the marrow of her bones. Her chest heaves still, her breaths shallow and many, the hot sting of tears still burning her eyes – though she tries desperately to swallow her own emotion down; a fruitless endeavor.

  His own words are blistering and scornful, and he is angry – he is furious. It is a dawning revelation that selfishly appeases her deepest, darkest insecurities. He is no longer reserved, or feigning indifference, which is what infuriates and wounds her most. His touch had been inundated with heat and hunger, only to be vacant and devoid of any semblance of emotion moments later, leaving her festering with yearning, loneliness and insecurity – a fate crueler than death. Her heart had always been fiercely guarded, intricately wrapped in barbed wire and iron, and yet little else could unravel her the way his apathy could.

  Each of his words are now laced with arsenic, unabashedly truthful and brutally honest – but it is not his words that stir the inevitable ache within her chest. The line of her jaw clenches, taut with tension as he averts his own gaze, attempting to piece himself together – wrought with anguish and frustration, and the pang of regret stirs yet again within the pit of her hollow belly.

  She had never thought of him as her own. She would be foolish to - he is but a broken, hollowed out shell of a former self, wounded by loss, ravaged by war – he had nothing left to give, he had told her so many times before – yet she knew otherwise. It is not a jealous heart that causes such discontent within her (if he should seek comfort with another, far be it for her to stop him), but a longing to see the fragmented pieces of his soul, to be let in beyond the brief, passion-laced moments of his fallen guard in the aftermath of copulation.

  ”It was never you,” she whispered softly, her voice unsteady as she closes her eyelids tightly, her heart weary but pounding still inside of her chest. ”it was me. You haven’t broken anything – I have.”

  The confession is heavy, yet she still feels like a caged bird, confined by her own insecurities and frustration. His agony becomes her own, bearing down on her heart with the weight of a thousand suns, and the dull ache in her chest reminds her that she alone is the cause. Gently, she reaches out, her whiskered lips brushing against the hardened, rigid line of his jaw, but she recoils moments after as if she’d been burned.

  ”I kept away because I cannot stand it any longer, Magnus – the uncertainty. My heart cannot take it. I am who I am; I am what I am – unashamedly. I have never presented myself to be anything but what I am, but you – you.” Laughter, dry and without humor, echoes in the thick, heavy air, as her weary gaze tiredly observes the way his golden skin fades into mottled blemishes. ”One moment, you allow me to see you – what lies within, your deepest secrets, and in the next moment – you are a complete stranger and I wonder if I know you at all.”

  ”It feels as if I am in love with a figment of my own imagination, Magnus,” she murmurs, her voice quivering still, a resolute sadness reaching the depths of her darkening gaze as her heart threatens to burst from her chest as her eyes well with tears yet again. ”I have never asked for anything more than you, as you are. To know all of you. If you cannot give that to me ..”

   Then there is nothing to be had at all.

Ellyse

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