One morning, she wakes up and finds she can't really remember his face anymore. There are the eyes, of course, those clear blue eyes. And his dark hair, casually swept aside from his face as he bends over his book or drives a knife point-home into the target. But other things, like the curve of his nose, the line of his jaw. How he laughed when she said something clever. The softness of his gaze when he watched James play... Those are fading into the empty bed next to her.

She flies to her feet and scrabbles at the trunk at the foot of her bed. Items get strewn carelessly about as she digs through it, looking for it, that one thing they both shared, they both loved equally- there! Her hands closed around a worn copy of The Tale of Two Cities. His epigraph is faded, but her fingers trace over it reverently. How many times had their hands brushed over this book? He said it was hers, but he loved it tooo, loved to read it to their children as they got older, loved to read it to her when she was so swollen and pregnant that she could barely move. She smiles almost involuntarily at the thought, just before the loneliness claws it's way back out of her chest.

She pushes it down and rises to her feet, the book in her hands. It is as much a part of him as it is of her, and it is the only thing of his she has left. Everything else was too painful. She grasps the cloth that covers the mirror in her room and gives it a tug. It slides off with a whisper of sound. She hasn't seen herself since she chopped off her hair in a fit of grief. It hangs around her chin in jagged strips. She makes a mental note to ask Magnus about fixing it.

Before she can lose her nerve, she reaches down into the book, past all the years that have cracked the binding and torn the pages, past the tear stains she left when she tried to read it after he died. Past all the love that welled up between these pages, inkblood against stark white, down, down to the boy that wrote the epigraph. That bright, shining boy that now faded in her memory. She grasps him and pulls him out, over herself like a too-small coat. It burns. She forgot how much it burns, how the realigning of joints make sickening cracks as they move. She almost passes out from the pain. She hasn't changed in years.

She opens her eyes, and Will is in front of her. Laughing, reckless Will. for a single, breathless moment, he has returned. "Why are you in a dress?" she's about to ask, reaching out a hand. It is only when the reflection reaches one out as well that she remembers that he is gone and she lost forgot what he looked like. She is able to look at her reflection for a moment longer to burn the sight into her mind, and then she crumples.

He is gone.

He is gone.

He is gone.