“You’re in my bones and my blood and my heart,” he said. “I’d have to tear myself open to let you go.”

“Wet again,” Will said, glumly.

Not your parabatai any longer

Jem leaned closer against the chair, staring into the fire. “Better it were my hands,” he said.

Will shook his head. Exhaustion was muting the edges of everything in the room, blurring the flocked wallpaper into a single mass of dark color. “No. Not your hands. You need your hands for the violin. What do I need mine for?”

When you were an angel, what was your name?

laughing together at all the beautiful ruin around them. They were standing suspended in the sea: it couldn’t hurt them, destruction was their element. Clarissa was looking down as she laughed, trailing her moonlight hands in the water. When she lifted up her hands they were dark, dripping: he realized that the seas were all blood.

It was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him in the first place: realizing that this scarred, sarcastic boy was gentle with the things he loved.