A/N: I am on a roll! Here's some more angsty blackstairs/Jemma/juliemma/emmules/emmian for you!
thank you so much to Miss Katris, Shauna Kullden, and Krystyna (Guest) for reviewing!
to Krystyna: It is so flattering to be compared to Cassie! Yes, I have some trouble with tenses, as I switch around a lot. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so it was kind of messy. No excuse, I know. :) I don't know how good my Emma/Mark will be- I've never written it before. This will be endgame Julian/Emma, though.
Emma ran from the training room, hands on her knees, and gasped for air. She bent over, staying in the position for a time. Only when she saw water droplets appear on her jeans did she realize she was crying.
The moment she saw her tears fall, she crumpled to the floor.
"Jules," she sobbed, and she was weeping, then, for all the things she had lost. A thousand broken possibilities of the life she might have had with Julian, one where they were never parabatai and had been boyfriend and girlfriend instead and had grown up and gotten married and had children. Or maybe even one where Mark had been here, the future she had thought of once, briefly, and she had fallen in love with him and been parabatai with Julian. Just anything but this awful mess where she was in love, so crazily, deeply, madly in love with Julian Blackthorn, and he was her parabatai, and now everything from now on could only be a pale semblance of happiness.
:::
Julian didn't know when his relationship with his parabatai had gone so wrong. It was impossible to talk to Emma nowadays, to look at her, even and not think about kissing her, touching her, telling her he loved her. It was more difficult than slaying a thousand demons blindfolded to see her without being able to press his lips against hers, run his fingers through her hair, feel her body against his, warm and strong and Emma. He felt the absence of her like a knife wound; being without her was like phantom limb pain.
As as the paintbrush slashed across the canvas, He wondered why he kept painting Emma. It hurt, every time, to look at the image of her, because he couldn't stop hearing her say, You and I don't make sense. Mark and I would make sense. Or, I care about you. I even love you. But it's not enough.
To further his pain, he remembered what Mark Had said. So you bring him to Emma, for the wishes of our hearts are like knives against us. It felt like that now, thoughts of her stabbing him over and over and over again. But still, he kept painting her.
Julian picked up the gold, then set it down. He would paint her as he never had before: in shadow. Her hair was a rich copper, gleaming with the faint undertone of bronze and amber. Her face was half shaded, only one brown eye showing, the other a subtle glint in the darkness. She was dancing with someone, who was entirely hidden in the shadows. Her hair was bright, but second only to her ivory dress, which clung to her curves.
He put the brush down. He needed to stop torturing himself.
:::
Emma wondered what Julian's private studio looked like now. Would she walk in and see a thousand copies of her face, or would it be too unbearable for him to look at her, be reminded of her, as it stung her to look at him and see the distance between them, the distance that she had put there? She couldn't bear - though she knew it was for the best - to think of him not loving her anymore. That not only eros was gone from their relationship, but also philia and agape.
Had she destroyed all the facets of their relationship?
She shook her head. She couldn't think like this. It was for the best. It was better for Julian to hate her and be alive than for him to love her and go insane. The thud of her feet against the sand, her footsteps weightless as she ran, lulled her into peace.
The sand stretched out for miles ahead of her, interrupted here and there by clusters of rocks, driftwood and sea glass and shells scattered along the beach. By in the Angel, why had she chosen to run on the beach today when, since her encounter with Julian, he was all she could think about? Memory slammed into her like a wave, but the sensation was at once far more painful and far more pleasurable than drowning.
:::
Julian, lying on top of her, his arms braced the sand on either side of her, his mouth on her neck.
His hands in her hair, fingering the silvery-gold strands like it was something precious, his blue-green eyes glowing in the moonlight.
The cold of his wet shirt against her skin before he tore it off, revealing a lightly muscled chest that bore faded Marks and fresh ones, runes that she had put there, runes that had not acted as ordinary runes should have.
Julian's hands beneath her saltwater-soaked jeans, yanking them off along with her underwear, his hands searing her cold skin, tracing patterns on the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, moving higher and higher before he thrust into her with a groan.
Him murmuring her name against her throat, Emma, Emma, as he shuddered against her, his face pressing into the hollow beneath her jaw, teeth scraping her skin as he came.
:::
She kept running, kept moving forward, and tried her hardest not to look back.
:::
Julian slammed his fist into the easel, splintering the wood. The sound of it breaking was satisfying, and he shoved it into the wall, where it shattered and collapsed in pieces to the floor. A pain registered in his hand, dimly. He was bleeding, multiple slivers of wood sticking out of his palm and fingers. The pain drove out the voices in his head, the ones telling him that he had had it all and lost it all, and had no idea why.
"Emma," he murmured, his tone nearly begging. "Emma, please..."
He wished he could have heard her say that she loved him, the last time they kissed in his studio. He wished they had never become parabatai, that he had never been selfish enough to want her tied to him, to this place, to this life. He wished he could stop himself from painting her, loving her, wanting her, any more than he could stop his heart from beating.
:::
"Julian!" Emma called, clutching her hand to her chest: she knew it wasn't injured, but it felt like it was all the same. She knocked sharply on Julian's door with the pain-free hand. "Jules, open up!"
After a second, he opened the door. "What, Emma, what?" He sounded as if he had been falling off a cliff, about to catch himself, and now she had pushed him back off the edge. He was grasping his right hand in his left, she noticed, the one with the Voyance rune on it.
"You're hurt" was all she could think of to say now that he was looking at her, blue-green eyes luminous in the darkness of the doorway, his hair adorably dishevelled. He was so beautiful it hurt to look at him. "What happened?"
"You left me - you don't love me, and it is killing me to know that, Emma, that's what happened!" Julian was shaking now, with rage and barely restrained tears.
She had once thought that a crack in Julian would be a crack in the world to the younger Blackthorns; now she thought that a crack in him would be like a fissure in her, too. She reached out to touch him, not caring that it would murder her precarious self-control, not caring about anything except the fact that Julian was hurt. The worst thing someone could do to their parabatai. Her arms went around him, face against his chest, ear against his heartbeat, the only steady thing she'd known since her parents had died. Julian wrapped his arms around her, gingerly at first, then tightly, pressing her flush to his body.
"Let's get those splinters out of your hand," she told him. "And I'll give you an iratze."
The fight had left him. He murmured, "Okay," and let her.
:::
Julian's hand was bandaged now, a pile of bloody wood chips and tweezers next to them on the table. She had picked up her stele, and was carefully applying a healing tune to his forearm, and she thought back, now, to the one that had started it all, after the arrow poisoning. The blood on his chest, a never-ending spill, a terrifying sight that reminded her of the fact that Jules could die.
"What happened to you, Jules?" She was careful to call him that, careful not to give either of them a flashback to what they had so fleetingly been and could never be again.
"Broke an easel." He looked sheepish, brows knit together. There was sadness in his verdigris eyes.
Emma put down the stele, watching the rune spark and fade, a stark reminder that their love was still there, the wrong kind. It's only been a few days, she told herself. Give it time.
"Why?" Julian loved his art supplies. They were everything to him. And besides, Tavvy played in the studio all the time, and he would never do anything to hurt his youngest brother, his baby.
"Just lost it, I guess." The sheepish note was back in his voice, faint embarrassment colouring his neck with a lovely flush.
"I don't know why we trust you in the kitchen," she joked, trying to settle back into their comfortable, pre-sex-on-the-beach routine.
"Because the rest of you are far from domestic," he shot back with a grin, the one reserved just for her.
"Very true," Emma said. "You're right sometimes, Jules."
She's just right this time.