Quitting magic is like quitting drugs.

Nearly impossible, almost like someone was suffocating you, wrapping their hands around your throat and digging their nails in as deeply as possible into your soft white flesh, feeling incomplete and empty without the addictive substance coursing in your veins, and the constant, ever-present threat of relapsing and falling back into it.

It's living without oxygen.

Standing it would have been horrifying – if not for Arthur.

Living without Arthur is nothing like without living without magic.

Magic is a deeply ingrained part of you, interwoven with your very being. You are its child, its keeper. Magic is everything to you. You are worthless without it, no purpose and no strength.

But Arthur is more.

Arthur is you, Arthur is every inch of you, every single piece, your heart and your soul and all that fell in between. Arthur is your whole world; magic is just what you used to keep your world in the balance, functioning and whole.

But you failed. Your magic failed to save him. All of you failed to save him. Magic was his downfall, and you are him, so now it's yours.

You're nothing without it because you're nothing without him.

So you quit.

You quit magic.

You never use it, not even for the simplest things. It's legal now, but you don't (won't, can't) use it again. Your magic was for him and him alone. It was always his, even though he never knew.

Always.

It's hard, giving it up. You expect it to get better, expect the sleepless nights and the itching feelings in your fingertips to vanish and melt away with time, but they never do. Magic is still a part of you and it will never die, not like he did.

You never use it, though. Never.

Only for Arthur. Only when he returned, when you could hold him again and never have to let him go. That was when you would let the magic flow back into you, let it light up your life once again.

All the magic did now was what it was meant to do in the first place.

Keep you alive.

You don't mean to use your magic in that way, but this is the one thing that is out of your control.

You never age. You never die.

Magic is what keeps you alive.

Arthur is what used to keep you alive.

Now, he's gone. So you needed something else, a force that tethered you to the world, to reality. Magic is what keeps you breathing.

You wish it was still Arthur.

So you go on, go on without Arthur and without magic, without the only two things that make you whole.

The magic runs deep.

Arthur runs deeper.

The two of them are holding you heart in their clenched fists, squeezing it too tightly and watching the blood drip drop down. You mean absolutely nothing without them, you are what you always feared you would become.

A vast expanse of emptiness.

No heart, no soul, no anything. You might as well die. But you can't, you never can. You will never die. Magic will never die.

But Arthur?

He died.

And that, really, was all that ever mattered. He was all that ever mattered.

He is the half to your whole.

But you're not even a half if he's not there.

He took your half with him. He took your love, your essence, your emotions, your magic.

Arthur is you.

You both died that day.

Your body may have been left behind, but the rest of you is with him.

It will always be with him.