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You do not move.
Your tears have taken motion upon themselves and seem in no need of your consent, slipping down your face in thin tracks while the hunger remains lit inside you, mean and wakeful, and the thought of opening the man before you still taps at your ribs.
A little while ago you had wanted him in pieces—had wanted your hands inside him, had wanted to learn what he looked like under the skin, had imagined splitting him like fruit gone soft in the middle, imagined your hands red to the wrists, imagined washing him down your throat in mouthfuls of red—
Then you blink.
There is a girl in the room.
The green of her dress finds you first, and something inside you goes small and quick at the sight of it, a frightened rabbit bolting for cover in your chest, in her forest of evergreen. She comes to you in pieces after that—her eyes first then her hands then the low shape of her voice, all those words you cannot understand falling over you in a hush that makes you think of water worrying stone smooth.
She reaches for you and you think she is as a river is and the thought startles on its way up.
You have forgotten before this moment whether rivers belonged among the things you liked or whether liking was even something you had ever done—and yet something in her coolness carries warmth under it, something in her nearness asks to be fallen into.
By the time her hand touches your face you are already leaning, drawn with the whole aching helplessness of a plant toward the sun, hungry for the heat of her palm, for the gentle drag of her thumb, for whatever in her feels like a place where a ruined thing might rest.
A sound claws its way out of you, small and torn and pitiful in its need, the mewling of a pathetic dying thing, and once it is out you cannot seem to gather it back in.
Twin Flame, you think.
The name takes hold with such immediate conviction that it does not feel chosen so much as remembered, as though it had been sitting somewhere deep and dark in you all this time waiting for the sight of her to call it up.
She feels like heat cupped in both hands against the oldest winter in you. Whatever has been drawn too taut beneath your ribs begins to loosen under the weight of her touch—
It is not a snap so much as giving way at the root, the holdfast of it softening in the dark until it tears free with that slow, private violence only buried things seem capable of. You feel it coil loose inside your chest, feel it whip outward. It catches on her. Wraps around her. A tangling made of bone-deep recognition.
A voice rises in you—high, girlish, trembling with delight, and it is not yours but it is not-not yours.
I know you!
The words bubble up somewhere deep inside you.
I dreamed of you!
The voice floods you as if it had been waiting in the dark all along.
Did you dream of me?
You stagger under the weight of it. The ache of centuries pulls taut into a single, blinding point—her hand against your skin. The small pressure of her thumb. The kindness in her face.
You are unraveling, you are coming apart—but you are also being stitched back together by something you cannot name.
She says more things. Soft syllables, curved at the edges, meaningless but kind. You do not understand. You do not care.
You care only for the warmth of her hands and the feeling of them on your skin.
Her hands slide down from your cheeks to the crook of your arm. Her thumb presses once against your sleeve and something inside you sighs with the exhausted certainty—
Yes, the voice keens. Yes, this is where I belong.
She says something again, the shape of it lifting at the end, and then there is the smallest tug.
You follow.
The corridor narrows around you as she leads you through it, and once your shoulder brushes the wall and the scrape of plaster sends a quick bright twitch through your whole frame, but her hand remains where it is and that is enough to get you through the moment.
None of this matters much beside the warmth at your arm.
When she brings you into the smaller room and gestures toward the couch, you lower yourself because she wishes it, because her wanting has somehow become easier to obey than your own confusion.
She kneels in front of you before the impulse can finish becoming itself, green skirts pooling around her knees.
Her fingers lace loosely through yours and the sound of her voice goes on falling over you in those same low patient currents until something starved and folded tight inside your chest begins, by miserable degrees, to uncurl toward her. She makes you want to wrap around her like a blossoming vine.
Everything about this girl makes your chest ache.
You are still crying. You cannot stop. Each tear falls hot, vanishing into the fabric clinging to your skin. She does not flinch from them.
For the first time in so long, you almost believe you are safe.
Sharp Teeth appears in the doorway.
He fills the doorway like a strike of lightning, words already spilling from his mouth in that careless, curling cadence. But the second his eyes catch on you, the second he sees your face, wet with tears and crumpled around the warmth in front of you—everything halts.
The edge drops out of him and his sharpness bleeds away.
He looks… startled.
Almost panicked.
And then he’s gone from the threshold.
One instant he is in the doorway and the next his hands are on you, tearing your fingers out of hers with enough force to light every bone in your wrists. Twin Flame goes down hard, skirts flaring around her like a split green sea, hands scrambling against the polished floor.
The sound that rips out of you in answer is high and raw and wholly animal.
You wrench against him at once—you twist, your body fighting the cage of his hands with the blind desperate purpose of a creature trying to get back to warmth before the cold can close over it again. You do not want freedom. You want her. You reach toward Twin Flame with both hands, trembling and clumsy with need, and the ache in your chest turns white-hot.
You think you will break apart if you do not feel her again.
She startles but she meets you halfway.
Her hands come up, her palms pressing against your palms, fingers curling over your shaking ones, and the warmth of her returns so quickly and so completely that your bones seem to melt with relief.
Sharp Teeth stares.
You feel his gaze flick—back and forth, from you to her, from her back to you. He sees your hands tangled together. He sees the tears on your face. He sees the human girl sprawled, skirts rippling around her like green water.
His gaze lands on Twin Flame—
And something in him changes.
He says something then, low and stunned and roughened by wonder, and though the words themselves remain barred against you, the shape of them does not. They move through him like revelation. Like injury. Like the discovery that the two have always been kin.
You wonder if he feels what you have.
Her hands are still in yours. She blinks at him, confused, her brow furrowing. She does not let go.
You lift your joined hands again with the whole shameless certainty of a starving thing and reach toward her face, and she lets you.
Sharp Teeth makes another strange broken sound behind you, half laugh and half choke and altogether unstable, but you do not waste yourself trying to understand him.
You understand only this: her hands are in yours again.
And you are not letting go.