There wasn't a shred of natural light left, as far as Logan could tell. His candle was moments away from burning out, and he whimpered as a drop of hot wax slid onto his fingers while he tried to shine the light over his work. In hasty, messy black ink, the words: Forever and Always shone in the faint light. Freshly applied to the paper. Illuminated, only in the most crude of designs, with gilded flowers and blue gems and white lillies. All things which Logan had done. He stared at it, both proud and dissatisfied; proud, because he had completed what he set out to do. Dissatisfied because it was still not what he needed it to be.

Logan, with a frustrated sigh, slipped the paper into a plastic insert, and slipped that plastic insert under the bed. With hundreds of other plastic inserts, many of them all bearing the same words. Forever and Always. Those words, when Logan's father had said them to him, struck some kind of chord deep within the little boy. What was a forever? Was it as long as it sounded, or could they be different lengths? If he was, for example, to want to be near Jace forever, would that be long enough?

Though Logan obviously could not and would not wonder these things aloud, he could not help but consider it. The way Briar, his dad, had talked about the terms made it sound like they were unbreakable... but the tone he used made it sound like he didn't really believe it. In a place like Wonderland, where no one could die, they should always be together, forever, shouldn't they? And yet Briar had explained to Logan that his husband had left one night, and Briar had never seen him again. He had up and disappeared. What Logan could not grasp was the sheer weight of his father's pain: Since there was no death in their world, Briar's husband had simply chosen to leave. He had not wanted to be with him any more, so he had left. That was what it seemed like to him, at least.

And Logan could, thankfully, not yet grasp that. In the ideal world, he would never know what it felt like to lose the one you loved most. As an infant, he could barely even comprehend the notion of love. The closest he felt was for his friends. Every night, Logan drew those words in ink, trying to capture what they meant to him. He had studied many a flower, many a bird, so many sigils and symbols that he could not even count. All locked away in his young mind.

Although he could not know this yet, that tattoo would one day be his most prized: Forever and Always, accompanied by two flowers. The flowers would represent something to the boy, one day. Given enough time. Or maybe it was barbed wire that would mark its importance. In Logan's life, something as gentle or sweet as a flower was quite the rare sight.