Chapter 80 #3
“You shouldn’t,” I sighed, and exhaustion crept into my voice, even though it couldn’t compete with all the feelings I harbored for this woman on my desk. For this ink soul who had somehow strayed into my life.
“He is the darkest darkness.”
She watched me as I cleaned her face, and it took every ounce of willpower not to kiss her until my apology reached her through deadly tenderness. An apology for something I hadn’t even done yet.
“And everything you’ve seen of him is merely the product of years of suppression.”
I didn’t want to know what that part of me was capable of, wanted to keep myself shut off from it.
Right now, I was in a state of control, where I had to make sure she could also gain the upper hand over Atrinus should he ever go too far.
“You need a safe word.”
She raised her eyebrows with a smirk.
“Just like Velina needs one?”
She was alluding to the fact that the only reason Atrinus had given Velina one was because he knew she would never use it, even if she needed to.
Velina didn’t want to be safe from him. She didn’t want consent.
My expression darkened.
“Quill. You know all the things he wants to do to her.”
All the things I want to do to you.
Not to mention all the things she hadn’t even read yet. Things only I knew.
Quill stared into my eyes, and for a moment I thought I saw something emotionally submissive flicker in hers before her gaze turned serious again.
“Maybe someday.”
A goddamn lie.
I didn’t like how much challenge there was in the way she held my gaze. That she was the living embodiment of Velina, about to reawaken the hungry ink shadow within me.
“You shouldn’t speak to a demon,” I warned her, and she closed her eyes, allowing me to gently rub her eyelids. “He might become hopeful. And a hopeful demon is an invincible demon.”
“Don’t you think you can learn to live with this darkness? Outside of your writing?”
I paused, feeling into the unease that overcame me.
She was digging too deep, would stumble upon something I had buried, whenever that had happened.
“This isn’t a flaw I can work on. Nothing I can compensate for.”
My thoughts drifted in a dark direction. The same direction that had driven me to the bridge back then.
“This darkness is different. It’s been haunting me for as long as I can remember, lurking in the depths of my mind.”
I couldn’t even grasp it clearly. How was I supposed to comprehend, process, and compensate for something I didn’t even know what it was or where its origin lay?
When I realized Quill was staring at me, my vision cleared, and my focus shifted on its own to the dark gray limbal ring surrounding her crystal-clear irises.
There was something in them. A thoughtful hesitation. As if she knew what I was talking about. As if she knew this feeling and could put it into words just as little.
And for a fraction of that moment, I felt as though all the darkness lurking in the hidden depths within me was more bearable. As if Blue were my candle in the darkness, ready to be swallowed by my shadows, only to wrap me in her warm glow.
“You’re afraid of it.” Quill’s voice turned into a whisper. “Of yourself.”
“No… No. I don’t have to be that darkness.” Shaking my head, I looked away, confused by myself. “That’s not me.” My vision blurred. “That’s something ugly I have to separate from myself. It drags everything into damnation. My inner peace, my family, eventually you…”
Quill’s tender hands landed on my cheeks, and she pulled me toward her.
I wanted to lie in her arms, wanted her to hold me until time reduced us to dust.
“Hey, Inkbird…”
My vision blurred completely. The tear simply escaped.
Long ago, I had locked that name away, along with all the poems I had written back then like a tormented poet. So how could it be that, every time she spoke that name, something inside me yearned for her so desperately?
“I promise you that your shadows will never drive me away.”
No. She couldn’t promise something like that. Neither of us was meant to make promises...
“And no matter how long it takes.”
More tears, yet the knot in my chest tightened ever more mercilessly.
“We’ll find a way through our darkness.”
Our darkness.
She bore the same shadows…
Enemy Of Truth
Jung Se Rin
A knock on the door made us both flinch.
“Davian, are you there?”
Tony pushed the door handle down.
Silence.
We both stared at each other, listening to the footsteps of my best friend, her brother, as they faded into the distance and eventually died away somewhere down the hallway.
But it wasn’t his footsteps we heard in the distance. It was reality, lurking out there, ready to catch up with both of us. It waited, treacherously, for a moment of our carelessness.
This – whatever it was we had – wasn’t meant for eternity. And it was my fear, reflected in her eyes, that told me we were both standing far too close to an abyss.
We would fall.
We would fall if I didn’t do what I was usually so good at.
You speak to my ink shadows,
running your fingers
through their sticky blackness.
As if you were savoring
having all the blood on your fingers.
The blood they shed.
Your blood.
– Leaking Batteries Diary