Exit Signs I Missed (A Dark Artifices Fanfiction) ✔️

Kill You If We Kissed

Mark Blackthorn was in a very bad place.

He was confused as to why on earth Emma Carstairs would want him to lie to his brother, and the rest of his siblings about their relationship status. He was missing Kieran with a desperate, dangerous wanting, the sort that demanded everything from you and took even more - the kind, he was fairly certain, that the girl he was pretending to date felt for someone she wasn't saying.

However, at least Mark Blackthorn was definitely not in love with Emma Carstairs.

He was in love, impossibly in love, with Kieran, of the ever-changing hair, and wild eyes that matched his own in their divided brokenness, and his hands that could be gentle and strong. He had muddled, puzzling feelings for Cristina Mendoza Rosales, with her warm, steady eyes and hair like black silk, and soothing words. So he knew, then, that with all these entanglements, he absolutely harboured no romantic feelings for his brother's parabatai.

But he felt a sense of kinship, a sense of admiration and respect and protectiveness for this girl, who in his memory was a delicate blonde, now had grown into a strong, unyielding woman with all the power in the world over Julian's heart. They had the same longing, the same fighting, rebellious urge to break free of the chains of life and love and relationships, travel, wander and see all the brilliant places of the world, some untouched by human hands, others unseen by human eyes - that much, they had in common. Mark thought, sometimes, that had he not spent his years with the Hunt, or in Faerie, they might have ended up together in an alternate reality, where he had been there to watch Emma grow up and turn into someone desirable, someone any man would be lucky to love. Some other lifetime where he and Tiberius had had so much more time together, and he could be who his younger brother wanted him to be. Where he would not be surprised that Tavvy crawled into his lap, or that his siblings trusted him.

But deep down, he knew he didn't want that. He would never have loved Kieran, had he lived that life. Might never have lost him, but he never would have loved him.

So here he was, Mark Blackthorn, feigning love and hiding from his true love, and wondering how things had gotten this bad.

:::

That was the question of the day, it seemed.

How on earth Emma had gone from loving Julian to trying to pretend love for his brother -who, she mused, not only the mundane girls found attractive - she had no idea.

They were in the Institute's training room now, seeing whose aim was better with a crossbow, and Emma had to admit, Mark was a pretty good shot, even if he was only second to her.

"Not bad, Blackthorn. Not bad at all," Emma said to Mark with a smirk. "I mean, obviously I'm better, but still. Not bad."

"And as always, you are superior in everything but humility," Mark quipped.

After a while -a good thirty minutes, in which Emma insisted that she had hit the centre of the target, when she had really missed by two millimeters- they moved onto hand-to-hand combat, and then weapons training.

Cortana sung, and the familiar song, the song of the fight, the battle, the adrenaline rush that came with vengeance, and infected her with its coldness, the dance that she knew every step to, played out in her head. There was no room for Julian, for Mark, for being in love with her parabatai - there was only Cortana, and the blade against hers.

Mark was good, she would admit. Though faeries in the Hunt did not use swords normally, with training he had gradually gotten better; she had noticed, recently, that he was training just as much as her, and she was Emma, who trained like she breathed. She was fairly certain it wasn't entirely for the reason that he needed to get better at Shadowhunting. No, she was pretty sure he was using training the way she was now, to drive out thoughts by filling them with bruises, blot out heartbreak by breaking bones, shedding blood rather than tears.

"What are you... trying to forget?" She panted, metal clanging against metal as she parried, darting forward then back.

"What do you mean?" His eyes, both the blue-green and the gold, were unreadable; she sensed that they masked just as much pain as hers. "I don't have ... anything... to forget."

"Anything... but not anyone?" Emma retorted.

"I could... say the same for you," Mark said, feigning and then jabbing.

"I..." She paled. Emma remembered loving Julian, loving Julian so much it broke her open. And then she remembered trying to break him, because he loved her. The thoughts threw her off balance, and with Cortana gripped in her hand, she fell.

Mark landed on top of her, cold metal nearly piercing the skin of her throat. Nearly adding another scar to the thousands that decorated her skin like makeup, almost all of them connected to Julian somehow: Marks drawn by him, or wounds from their patrols together, or injuries from training with him. For a split second, she pressed her neck infinitesimally into the sword, to break the skin.

This scar was from Mark, now.

Mark, who would have to be her future, no matter how torturous it seemed.

Emma wriggled her way out expertly from under him, and pinned him to the training room floor; the golden blade of Cortana was flush against his jugular, catching the Los Angeles sunlight along with Mark's hair. A flicker of her old crush stirred, long dormant, and she breathed in. The breath hurt, like the very air knew what she would do and was burning, catching at her lungs.

She leaned down and kissed him.

The kiss was pleasant; like a day spent drinking in sunshine and laughing and talking and doing nothing in particular of importance. His hands tangled in her hair, pulling it free from the braid that she wore for training, smoothing down her back, and his lips were applying gentle pressure to hers. Nothing too insistent, as if he didn't really want her all that much, like they were killing time. With Mark, there was no trace of surprise; she was not uncertain of who he was when she touched the broadness of his shoulders, the chiseled expanse of his chest beneath his t-shirt, because she knew who he was: He was the faerie boy, Julian's older brother. His hair was cornsilk-soft, and for a moment she wondered if he had ever kissed a girl, or only boys. She didn't think he'd kissed Cristina, before she got back together with Diego, and he hadn't kissed anyone before he had been taken from the Institute. She wondered if it was any different, despite the anatomy, if mouths were all the same, kisses all the same.

Love all the same.