The essence of his blue eyes is always present. It is on his blood, on his dreams, on his prayers. It is on the slender fingers as he brandishes his sword, on the faded runes of his cheekbones, on the quiet flourishes that used to announce deaths and oaths. It will be forever scorched onto his mind, as if the turmoil buried beneath the waves of colour were an inevitable poetic reminder of other times.
Jem tries to avoid it.
It is… odd. He has always thought himself to have control over how much of the past he let on: Jem knows how to tame his memories, though the tick of the decades that have withered themselves away seem to have fumbled with his impression of himself. Now he can't help it any more.
Jem still longs for the sharp comments he used to throw away unexpectedly (which he always found strange: they were all so accustomed to the acerbic wit and reckless sarcasm of his parabatai, yet sometimes they were shocked with the audacity of the remarks he let out), and he longs for everything he represented. Bravery. Charm. Loyalty. Beauty. Instincts. He longs for the sound of pages turning and the flutter of his obscenely long eyelashes. He longs for everything William Herondale means. But whenever he thinks about his eyes -those deeply expressive eyes no one ever seemed to comprehend- Jem feels himself slowly crumbling down to pieces. The wounds reopen once again.
Evoking those eyes is evoking the tears that never left them.
Jem tries to avoid it.