It's still there. But the foundations are cracking. The stones are shifting. Every session, every extraction, every forced march through my worst memories takes a piece of it away.
How much longer can I hold?
How much longer before the wall comes down and there's nothing left of me but fragments?
Keep it standing,Jace said.Whatever happens.
But what if I can't?
What if Webb breaks through and finds the thing I'm protecting and destroys it, and then there's nothing left worth saving?
What if Jace comes for me and finds only an empty shell, a body that breathes but doesn't live, a collection of trauma responses with nothing underneath?
Would that be worse than dying?
I think about the collar around my neck. The button Webb carries. High settings stop the heart, he said. Quick. Clean. Painless compared to everything else.
Would it be so bad?
To just... stop?
To let go of the wall and the memories and the desperate, exhausting hope that something good might still be possible?
My mother promised she'd be there. She wasn't.
Jace promised he'd come for me.What if he can't?
What if I'm just going to keep getting passed from monster to monster until there's nothing left of the person I used to be?
The questions circle in my head, vultures waiting for something to die.
I don't have answers.
I only have the wall, and the promise, and the fading memory of grey eyes that looked at me like I mattered.
Keep it standing.
I try to summon his face. Not the nightmare version, empty and mechanical. The real one. The one that watched me eat eggs. The one that pressed his forehead to mine and breathed the same air. The one that whisperedgood boyin the dark and made me feel like those words could be true.
The real Jace isn't empty. He's just... different. Wired wrong, maybe. Built to be a weapon and discovering, slowly, painfully, that he might be something else too.
Like me.
I was built to be property. Conditioned to serve, to obey, to disappear into whatever shape my owners needed me to be. But somewhere in the wreckage, something survived. Some fragment of the boy who ate pancakes with his mother on Sunday mornings, who believed in promises, who thought the world could be safe if you just found the right person to hold onto.
That fragment found Jace.
And Jace, broken as he is, hollow as he claims to be, found me.
Maybe that's not love. Maybe Webb is right, and it's just trauma and timing and two damaged people clinging to each other because the alternative is drowning alone.
But if it's not love, it's something close enough that I can't tell the difference.
Something worth protecting.
Something worth holding onto, even when everything else is being stripped away.
Keep the wall standing.
