The Final Lesson (Julian)

[Lyra Newbury]

She took a deep breath as he pulled her close to him, to prepare for the real point of the evening. The reason she had asked him over under the guise of a cooking lesson. She had to tell him now, she couldn't let him make the evening better by telling her all over again that he loved her. Her heart wouldn't be able to take it. 

She placed her hand on his chest over his heart and looked into his eyes as she spoke. “I know. But if you and I are ever going to make this thing between us real then I think the best thing we can do for each other is to at least try to mend some of the things that have made us so broken. Both of us.”

“I love you, Julian. And I’m not going anywhere. I don’t want to hide from each other like we did before. That didn’t do us any good, it only made things worse and I want this to be about us getting better. Healing.”

“But I don’t think we can date right now. Not like date date. I need to focus on fixing whatever’s wrong with me, and I know that’s what you want for me. But you need to heal, too. You were right, we’re not ready for this.” Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

[Julian Faust]

Julian's brow furrowed in confusion as Lyra essentially pumped the breaks on their relationship. It was odd hearing her say what he had wanted and still feel the sting of rejection. It was irrational, but then so were his feelings in the first place. He understood what she wanted, it was what he wanted, or at least it would have been what he wanted if he thought that they actually stood a chance of getting better. And when Lyra said it, it was almost as though Julian could have hope too.

Her words, delivered vulnerably and with love, somehow made her even more attractive in his eyes. She was being strong, not just for herself, but for him, for them. He loved her even more.

But he didn't know what to say. Instead he brought his hands to her pixie face and kissed her forehead.

[Lyra Newbury]

She put her hands over his and held them there for a moment before bringing them down between them. She held him tight as she looked at him. 

“I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard. I'm sorry. I was being insolent but I do love you, Julian. And I plan to be with you if you’ll still have me when the time comes. Just not like this. Not when I have to wear these stupid earrings to keep from falling apart.” She pulled the silver hoops from her ears with one hand while she held Julian’s hand with her other. She dropped the earrings onto a nearby table and when they no longer touched her skin they reverted back to the large, dangling rubies that had first caught her eye.

“We both deserve to feel at peace.” She took a step back from him and held up her hand. She was holding Julian’s enchanted ring. “I need to know how you really feel, Julian. Not a show, not the fairytale prince you think I deserve. If you do love me you’ll talk to me as the real Julian. I want the messy and the difficult and everything you’ve been trying to keep from me. Everything I’ve been avoiding myself.”

[Julian Faust]

He'd been all kinds of undressed with Lyra in the past, but when she took her earrings off and stole his ring, it was the first time he truly felt naked with her. He gave a mild protest as she took it and his visage shifted to that of the man she had seen before, less perfect, more on the edge, tired, worn, but still ridiculously gorgeous.

"It's not you Lyra. It's not that I don't want to share that side of myself with you, it's that I don't want to share it with anybody."

[Lyra Newbury]

Her heart was instantly racing, as if all of the emotion she would have been feeling without her jewelry had suddenly rushed in on her. She took another step back from him and held his ring tighter, not trusting that he wouldn't try to get it back from her before she heard what she needed to hear.

"Julian, there's nothing in your past that could ever make me love you any less!" There were things she had done, things only Nicolas knew about, that might make him love her less. She knew enough to not tell him, but if her heart kept pounding so furiously he might find out another way. Lyra tried to focus on her breathing. She needed to ask him one question, but it stuck in her throat, too terrified to hear the answer without any charms to soften the blow.

[Julian Faust]

"I know that." he said with a pained expression. He took a deep breath, he still wasn't ready to talk to her or anyone. A part of him simply wanted to handle the problems he had on his own, another part of him just couldn't put his feelings into words.

[Lyra Newbury]

The tears that had threatened to fall while she wore her enchanted jewelry now fell from her eyes as she looked at the pained face of the broken man that she loved. "Just- just tell me one thing, Julian. Please don't lie to make me feel better. You owe me the truth."

She wiped the tears from her cheeks as she forced herself to ask him the question. She was terrified of the answer, but there was a small glimmer of hope now. He had said he loved her. His ring wouldn't fabricate those feelings. Maybe his answer to her question wouldn't kill her.

"Will you ever be with me? Not out of some ridiculous sense of guilt or fear, but actually be with me because you love me? Is there any possible way that can happen, Julian?"

[Julian Faust]

He hated her pain, and yet pain was what he always seemed to cause her these days.

"I want to make you happy Lyra. I've wanted that ever since I met you. But there are some things I just don't know if I'm capable of." he told her honestly.

"I don't want you to wait for me. I want you to go and live your life. I want you to be happy without me. I can't tell you what the future holds."

[Lyra Newbury]

"You're not even going to try!" she sobbed, backing away further. "You claim you love me, Julian, and you won't even try to fix yourself so we can together! Do you have any idea how hard it's been for me to admit that there's something wrong with me? I've dealt with this depression quietly by myself for my entire life and when I realized it was affecting you I knew I loved you enough to try to make it better."

Since starting her sessions with Dr Nadeer, Lyra had discovered that she'd held on to a lot of things silently throughout the years. Some things like her depression, bouts of melancholy she used to refer to it as in her head, had gotten worse as her life fell apart. Other things, her panic attacks and cutting, had been more recent and were initially triggered by the traumatic events that she had refused to deal with properly. Lyra had a whole host of things going against her but she held on to that one ray of sunshine she could see. Julian.

"You won't even try for me." She threw his ring at him as she yelled, "that's not love! Love is putting someone else's needs above your own. You don't have to predict the bloody future to know whether or not you're going to try to fix your stupid bloody heart!"

[Julian Faust]

She had taken his ring, and there was no keeping him calm anymore.

"Says the girl who wanted honesty! I am bloody trying!" he yelled in return. There was only so much Julian could take as well and he had reached the peak. He had been stepping delicately around the issue for her sake and it was killing him.

"I told you how I felt! I told you that I was trying, but just because I try to sort through it doesn't mean I will! I've been trying since the first night we slept together. I thought if I could figure my sh*t out then maybe I wouldn't destroy you if we got together, but I didn't get better did I?" he snarled at her.

"Things didn't get better! Do you know how hard it's been for me to deny you?! You're everything I could want, and when I see a happy future it's by your side, but because I love you, because I hate hurting you I've pushed you away trying to deal with years of grief and pain that I can't even understand. I've put you first this entire bloody time!"

He was angry at her baseless accusations against him, he had locked himself away and poured himself into his art trying to work through Belle's death and his own anxiety drowning in alcohol and physical fitness as punishment. She called it abandonment, but she didn't know the kind of pain it caused him to not be selfish about what he wanted and drag her into this vicious cycle of doubt.

[Lyra Newbury]

"You're so bloody brilliant, it's amazing how stupid you are! It's not working, Julian! Figure it out already. Everyone else already sees it. You paint and you're better when you're painting but what happens when you stop? Nothing's changed because you lock yourself away from the people that care about you! Your 'therapy' is only making it worse for everyone around you and you're not even getting better!"

"I've tried so many different things to get better. If one didn't work I tried something else. I tried moving on, dating someone else, that obviously didn't work. I've locked myself away and drank myself into a stupor, I've cut myself, those things didn't work either. I'm trying with a psychologist now. I don't know if it's going to work, but at least I'm not giving up! At least I haven't resigned myself and my loved ones to a miserable existence because I'm too stupid to try another way!"

[Julian Faust]

"And being around everybody else makes it worse for me!" he roared, "Being with you makes it worse!"

As if realizing what he said he turned away from her, he hadn't meant to say it like that, but it was true.

"You have all these expectations of what we can be. It isn't that I haven't tried other things Lyra, I have." he turned back toward her and rolled his sleeve up, "Aparacium." he said tapping his wand against his wrist revealing a series of jagged scars followed by more precise ones, and one very thick obvious one.

"And you terrify me because you're just like me."

[Lyra Newbury]

Lyra stared in horror as Julian presented his scars to her. Her hand covered her mouth as she gasped at the wounds that covered the length of his forearm. Her hand shook as she reached out and trailed her fingers along the raised scars. "Julian," she whispered as her voice quavered.

She was angry and hurt and several other things as she fought with this man but the emotion that won over all the rest in that moment was remorse. "I'm sorry!" she wailed as she wrapped herself around him. "I didn't know. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Julian."

She couldn't hold him tight enough, she clawed at him as she cried and apologized repeatedly. She felt absolutely wretched for ever thinking he hadn't done everything he could think of, for making him feel guilty over her pathetic problems.

[Julian Faust]

He held her in return, still angry, still hurt, but accepting the comfort she brought him in that moment.

He didn't want to talk anymore, he felt raw and vulnerable. It wasn't that he worried Lyra wouldn't accept him for his past, or his scars, he knew she would. But he worried she would love him and go with him to the darkest place inside of himself and that he wouldn't be strong enough to pull them out. He had tried everything to battle the darkness he had, and nothing had worked. So he wore a mask and fooled the world. But Lyra was the first person to make him want to try again.

[Lyra Newbury]

She ached all over and as she held him she realized how foolish it had been to take away their safety nets. His ring was lying somewhere on the floor behind him and her earrings were on the table just out of reach. She couldn't get them and hold Julian tight at the same time and as she had done several times over she chose Julian over her own wellfare.

She cried and apologized as her breathing became more strained and when her throat finally tightened enough to cut her words off half way out of her mouth she simply stopped talking. Her body shook with the fierce tears that had now silenced her and the pain had started in her chest and was creeping to every corner of her body. But still she held him.

[Julian Faust]

He brought them to the couch and switched their positions so he was holding her, cradled rather, as he wrapped his arms around her and pressed his forehead against hers.

"There's so much to tell Lyra,it's dark and ugly, and I try not to let it be a part of me anymore. I worry that it could consume us both. I found art, and that helped for a while, but not enough. I had made my peace with this earth, and I thought I was done with it. When Nik found me, and beat it into my head that Belle wouldn't have wanted me to live that way, or die that way, I turned things around. But really I continued on as penance for taking the coward's way out. So I played the white knight and in a way it was my way of preventing others from slipping into darkness too."

He paused to look in her eyes, "But then I found you. You were the first thing I dared to let myself want since she died."

[Lyra Newbury]

She moved with him but she was not as pliable in his arms as she normally would have been. But as she continued to shake with silent tears she let him hold her and press their bodies together in a demonstration of comfort.  The pain continued to course through her and she curled herself smaller in his arms in attempt to somehow stop it from spreading. It was a searing pain.

She could hardly hear his words over her internal suffering but she heard enough and when he paused she looked up at him and found he was looking down at her. His words were so beautiful and so honest, everything she had demanded from him and they felt like a knife in her heart. Lyra twisted the blade herself.

How could she have forced him to this point? How could she be so ignorant to think that he hadn't gone through his own journey, one that she hadn't earned the right to know about. She hadn't earned that right now either, she'd simply beaten it out of him. Her head fell against his chest as she felt the darkness loom nearer.

[Julian Faust]

"Don't cry love." he said holding her tighter then brushing the tears from her cheeks, he kissed the path the tears made on her cheeks before pressing his lips against hers briefly.

"I'm a mess, I know I am. But I want this." he took her hand, "I want this with you. I know I said it's worse when you're with me, but that's not entirely true. There are moments with you that make me realize why I'm still alive, why I'm happy I'm alive. The idea that we could have that, it makes me want to try."

[Lyra Newbury]

Her fingers were locked onto the back of Julian's shirt, it would have taken a crow bar to pry her off of him at that moment. Lyra needed the pressure of Julian's arms around her to help her breathing steady. Almost as if he knew what to do, he held her tighter and kissed her. He read her so well, even as he fell apart he instinctively knew what to give her. She could feel the darkness and pain start to slowly recede.

Just as it had been with Nicolas, the relief didn't seem to compare to the comfort ripping her flesh open would have provided. It was a dull release of the pain that had made its unwelcomed way into her body, but it was a release nonetheless. And unlike with Nicolas, she had Julian's love to ease the emptiness she felt.

Her crying lessened but she couldn't stop it completely. Not yet. She was, however, able to speak again. She looked up at him with tears still falling down her face. "Even if it's messy?" she choked out.

[Julian Faust]

"I'm beginning to think that messy with you could be perfect." he answered. His anger was receding as he accustomed himself to the feel of her in his arms.

"I'm a terribly flawed man Lyra, are you sure you want me?"