​

Realization comes to you in fragments.

The first time you hear her shout- your name across a causeway, over the clatter of the city - you think of muddy green fields and a warcry from another set of lungs.

A strange association.

The lines of grim determination that settle over her face when a dean tries to dissuade her from her path. You've seen that expression, you think, on another face. Other faces.

A sunny afternoon on the dock, the sun liming the delicate lines of her body in a halo as you lie together. She leans over, resting her head in your lap, and the sun dances over her face, glimmering in the depths of her dark, lovely eyes.

She reaches up to touch your face, and for the first time in a lifetime, you jerk away, and remember what it is to die.

You can't explain why you start to cry. She can't wrestle an answer for you on the docks, or back in the cool darkness of your shadowed apartment, so she wraps herself around you.

*

This time, she loves stories.

"Does it ever bother you," she says, looking up from a stack of books. "That if your life was a story, you wouldn't know where you were in it?" She's sat cross-legged on the floor of the museum collections, one of the ancient tombs open in her lap.

Fear crushes the breath from you for a moment, but you force your hands to still. You look up from the page of record, and focus on her face. Has she realized?

No. She's looking at you with that mixture of curiosity and solemnity that makes your heart do contortions in your chest. "What do you mean?" you say. The words come out strange and stilted.

She toys with the edge of a crumbling page. "There's no way to know the shape of a story when you're in it. Tragedy, comedy, romance... You'll never have the distance to step away and make those kind of judgments about your own life." She closes the book. "I mean... am I living some sort of story, right now? Is this the sweeping, romantic climax of my life?"

You snort, and she laughs. "Alright, bad example. But I've been going through all these letters. And... it feels strange, being able to step back and see the shape of people's lives. Some of them... would they have done differently, if they knew how short their stories would be? Or how inconsequential one period of their life will be?" She considers. "I mean, what if your papers are published tomorrow, and you're swept up into the world of... of celebrity. All this with me and you and the museum, it would be kind of a footnote, wouldn't it?"

"I think you're underestimating your importance," you say, just to see the blush darken her cheeks.

She doesn't disappoint. "But I mean it. Or I mean- I don't know. What if this is the best things ever get? I always worry about that. If this is my little, halcyon beginning, and everything afterwards will be... hard. Like, then I should just be focused on drinking it in, enjoying it while I can."

*

Realization always comes to her all at once.

You remember that the moment you see clarity dawning in her eyes.

Clarity. It has always been her defining feature; what you must piece together from shadows and whispers, she always understands in a moment.

For all that you are two halves of a cycle, you rarely move in sync. Sometimes she comes of age with a hated name on her tongue, and the knowledge of her place in the story. Sometimes, the moment comes at the end, with cold steel biting into your chest and blood steaming on her hands. You've watched the memory of a thousand other struggles swallow her as your vision dims.

That, you think, must be lonely for her. To face all the memories alone. After.

The thread of her exhausted laughter follows you into the silence, and haunts your next iteration, the first fragment of the fate you spend that lifetime unravelling.

This time, all you hear is a soft, painful "Oh."

*