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

[magnus]

Everything she did, each motion, each turn of her golden head, undid him. All of the anger and frustration that had been building up within him, uncoiled, lay spent. To see her so openly hurt, so vulnerable, was more than he could bear, and when her words came wave upon wave of hurt that he had caused, he could only make a strangled sound in his throat. Why did he insist on ruining things so cleanly? He had known the damage wrought by his own hands and yet he had held her anyway. He had known that his heart had long become a calcified, ugly thing and yet he still turned to her, still wanted her desperately.

He was such a selfish, selfish man.

Her lips found his jaw and he moaned for a second, turning his head into her, but she was long gone, her touch ghosting over him and leaving him aching. Her gold-flecked eyes opened and found hers, stripped bare with emotion, his face open and vulnerable to her. “I…” he started and then stopped, mouth closing as the words fled him, the emotions impossible to put into words, dangerous and twisted as they were.

How could he possibly explain to her the lives he had led? The way he had loved before, given himself so completely to others? The way their bodies now lie as sun-bleached skeletons, or sunk to the pits of the ocean, or somewhere he could not ever visit? How could he ever try and explain that his love was but a wretched thing—poisoned and fatal? That she, so full of life, deserved so much more than him?

It didn’t matter because the words died on his tongue and he reached for her, gently this time—tentative. He breached the distance between them, but the motion was a question instead of a demand. He did not seek to devour her with heat, but to comfort her with warmth, trying to soothe the wounds on her chest, dry the tears from her cheek. His voice was low when it finally came, still raw with emotion, but low—the  softness of a river after the surging tsunami it had been. “What do you want to know, Ellyse?”

It was all there, hers for the taking.

out of the blue out into the loneliest place that you'll ever know
I carried the world just as far as I could but the damage had taken its toll