Exit Signs I Missed (A Dark Artifices Fanfiction) ✔️

So Simple But We Can't Stay

This chapter is dedicated to @AdelinaGray Thank you for all your support and comments and votes! Check out their account, everyone reading, because there are some great fan fictions as well as original stories.

Emma ran from the 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 that 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 only 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 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 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 make sense. Or, I care about you, I even love you. But I don't love you enough.

And to add to 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 again. But still, he kept painting her.

Julian picked up the gold, then put it down. He would paint her as he never had before: in shadow.

Her hair was dark, under the shade, gleaming with a faint undertone of bronze, and amber and copper. 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 hidden entirely in the shadows. Her hair was bright, but only second to her ivory dress, which clung to her curves...

He put the brush down. He needed to stop torturing himself like this.

:::

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 was eros 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 for 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.