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Everybody is born with a mark, a thin band of black, white, and every shade between encircling their wrist. It begins unbroken, but then, one day, in a single moment, it separates, and every minute, every hour, every day, the two sides inch apart, the empty space between becoming an inconceivable chasm of lost time.
For some, the increments are unnoticeable, marking the years rather than the days. For others, the band cannot stand to be whole and leaps apart in great bounds. But when the mark is gone, all are left alone, though their solitude is not equal.
Some watch the mark fade with the final dying breaths of the one they love, while others mourn for a lost chance, a miscalculation. But others celebrate, not for the loss of life, but that there is still one before them. They rejoice in the fact that the person they love most is still with them, even if fate did not deem them perfect.
Hecate’s band, a slim, onyx line slashed across the pale skin of her left wrist, was never whole, never wrapped around her wrist until its tail and head were one and the same. Perhaps for a moment when she emerged into the world, sticky and wailing, the band was unbroken, perfect in its simple, full beauty. But when she was settled upon her mother’s chest in a near silent contentment, her small fist beside her head, there was a gap.
It was small, unassuming, but it shouldn’t have been there, not yet. Hecate’s pale skin shone through the gap, a stark barrier between the two sides. As she grew and rolled from her back to her stomach, her stomach to her knees, her knees to her feet, the mark retreated into itself, ceding ground to Hecate’s unblemished skin.
By the time she was five, Hecate had learned to keep the bracelet her mother had gifted her years before firmly around her wrist. The silver band was just thicker than the one around her wrist and sat snugly over the mark, growing as she did.
Already she knew that when they thought she wasn’t watching, her mother and father traded harsh whispers, each sharp hiss accompanied by a darted look at their own wrists. She knew they fought, and that sometimes when they did, doors were slammed and words were shouted and glass was broken. She learned that when a quiet calm descended over the manor and all was still, that was the time to hide in her room, to ensconce herself in her own little world where there were no stern looks and no sharp reprimands to stop fiddling with the clasp of her bracelet.
Hecate was eight when her parents told her, their stoic faces lapsing into a poor facsimile of sympathy. By then, the band was a steady line stretching across the inside of her wrist, its inky color no longer bleeding onto the other side.
She tilted her head, rubbing a light finger over the dark line, bracelet discarded on the floor by her feet, and frowned. A crease appeared in her smooth brow and her dark hair fell in her face as she stared down at the unjust slash across her pale skin. Unable to tear her eyes away, she asked why, her lower lip trembling.
“But...why do we get this—this gift if it’s just going to be taken away?” She cried out, stubbornly refusing to allow unshed tears to fall. “Why's mine so fast?”
Her father grunted an unintelligible response, plunging his hands deep into the pockets of his robes and retreating back to his study. Her mother's face contorted into a snarl as she thrust the bracelet back at her daughter.
“It is not a gift,” she snapped, her uncharacteristic emotional outburst eliciting a flinch backward from Hecate. Exhaling sharply, her mother smoothed down her dress and composed herself, her voice dropping to a dangerous timbre. “It is nothing, a burden only if you allow it.”
“It’s not fair!” Hecate’s voice broke and she sniffed, wiping her nose with her sleeve.
Her mother curled her lip. “Pull yourself together, you’re a Hardbroom, and you will act as such.” Hecate straightened and swallowed, setting her jaw as she obeyed. “Better,” came the terse praise. “Life is not fair, Hecate, but a witch does not whine when things do not go her way, a witch makes them go her way. You would do well to remember that.”
Hecate shoved the bracelet back onto her wrist with trembling fingers, the clasp digging into her skin, and nodded jerkily. With a short nod in response, Hecate’s mother stalked away, leaving her daughter to angrily brush her tears away with a sleeve.
Glaring down at the bracelet protecting her wrist, Hecate resolved to never again remove her bracelet at night nor brush her fingers against the mark and wonder nor ask to see those of the servants. And like with most subjects, she excelled.
But one evening, as she shelved a few of the potions books she was studying, reaching high above her head to tuck it back onto its shelf, she faltered. Her solemn gaze was drawn to the bracelet wrapped around her wrist, denying fate its chance to flourish with its limited time.
Hecate glanced around her, worrying her lip, and crept to another shelf, her stockinged feet muffling her steps. There was no one else in the library that evening, but as she pulled a thick tome off the shelf, her heart thudded dully in her chest, and her breath caught in her throat.
Settling back into her previous seat, she curled her legs beneath her as she leaned over the book, her discarded shoes sitting in a neat line beneath the table. It took over a week before she began to understand what she was reading, another before she tried to apply it.
A week after that, when she was released from lessons for the day, she rushed to her room, unburying her notes from where they lay beneath her bed, her neat penmanship spanning much of the small journal she had conjured for herself. She flipped through the pages until she found the one she was looking for, tearing off her bracelet and settling atop her bed, bent over her journal in concentration.
With frequent glances back at her notes, Hecate made a series of dashes across her mark, the space in-between each a measurable unit. And every morning until the mark reached the first dash, Hecate awoke and noted her thorough observations in her journal, careful to hide the evidence from her mother.
By the next year, she had learned to account for the growth of her wrist, having needed to alter her calculations before creating her final formula. The year after that, she received her great-grandmother’s timepiece.
Her mother, still clad in her mourning black, summoned Hecate to her study and placed the timepiece over her daughter’s head, her thumb brushing over Hecate’s cheek for but a moment. Hecate stood with her back ramrod straight, her chin lifted. A look, almost akin to pride, flitted across her mother’s face, and something in Hecate’s chest twinged.
She accepted the treasured heirloom as if she did not watch the band around her wrist inch down every morning, as if she no longer needed to use her markings to know how much it shrank nor her notes to know how much time was left.
When Hecate entered Cackle’s Academy on her first day, already top of her class, a gold trim on her sash, the mark stretched just past half of what it had been when she first learned of its meaning. That was the day she met Pippa, Pippa whose bright, sparkling grin ignited a warm glow in her chest.
Pippa bounded into Potions that first day, her messy, golden hair held back by a pink ribbon, and plopped down beside Hecate, the gust of air she brought with her scattering Hecate’s carefully set up papers. Hecate scowled, trying to restore order to her papers, but when she looked up, the scowl faded.
“Well met,” Pippa greeted earnestly, pressing her palm to her forehead, her charcoal grey band displayed proudly for all to see, a mere fraction missing. Still out of breath, though she didn’t let it affect her ear-to-ear grin, she introduced herself, “I’m Pippa, Pippa Pentangle.”
Hecate nodded, reflexively pressing her palm to her own brow, returning the greeting flatly. But when Pippa’s smile slipped, a small furrow appearing in her brow, Hecate found her eyes widening, her own stilted introduction suddenly at her lips. “I—Hecate…Hardbroom.”
At her words, Pippa brightened, that wide grin returning to her lips as if it had never left. “Nice to meet you,” she chirped, pulling out her textbook and dropping it on the table with an unceremonious thud. “Want to be partners?”
With only a moment’s hesitation, Hecate nodded, her lips quirking up tentatively. She put her notes back in her bag and leaned over Pippa’s textbook, shoulder-to-shoulder with the blonde witch. And from that day forth, Hecate arrived to Potions with Pippa at her side, the other witch often bouncing on her heels as she recounted some great adventure as Hecate nodded and hummed in acknowledgement when appropriate. Potions may not have been Pippa’s strong suit, but Hecate was there every time Pippa tried adding pondweed instead of swampweed or stirred counterclockwise thrice and clockwise only twice when they were to be equal.
And as the years passed, something changed, though Hecate had no name for it. Suddenly, she found her gaze drifting to the wispy flyaways escaping Pippa’s customary pink ribbon or Pippa's scrunched up look of concentration, her nose wrinkling, when they brewed a particularly difficult potion. And if Hecate's hand slipped or she misread the instructions or even, gods forbid, their potion was barely passable, it was of no fault of her own, Hecate knew that much.
But as time lurched forward, Hecate’s mark shrank in great leaps and bounds, and Pippa’s crawled apart, the two sides hardly able to bear the separation.
One day in Year Three, Pippa attempted to lure Hecate out of her room to investigate the whispered rumors surrounding Hollow Wood, and though she had every reason to refuse, Hecate found herself standing from her desk and being dragged to the door. When they reached the very edge of the woods, Pippa darted in, spinning as she called for her best friend. And as Hecate stood there, her toes just within the forest's dark shade, she thought about refusing. She really did try, but then Pippa grinned, twirling where she stood, and Hecate’s feet lurched into movement of their own volition, propelling her to Pippa as something in her chest fluttered.
Given the nature of their expedition, she marked it down as nerves, but then it happened again and again and again. It was months before she knew what it was, months before she, her chest aching and eyes stinging, learned to suppress it. She couldn’t allow it to take root, to dig its claws into her heart and scrape out a space for Pippa there. For if she did, she knew that the space, that Pippa sized hole would never leave. She knew that, and for years it was only that steadily shrinking band around her wrist keeping her heart in check.
It was another year before that beating organ buried deep within her chest broke free from its rigid confines.
The great escape happened one frigid day in the middle of their fourth year. Hecate sat at her desk, wrapped in thick layers, a scarf around her neck to protect her from her drafty, attic bedroom. When she paused in her work to blow on her frozen fingers, Pippa burst in, the door swinging erratically in her wake, and collapsed onto Hecate’s bed.
“Are you…alright, Pipsqueak?” Hecate asked, twisting to look at Pippa.
Pippa blew out a breath, her chest still rising and falling quickly from her sprint up to Hecate’s bedroom. “It’s so unfair!” She blurted out after a moment, turning her head to stare at Hecate, the corners of her lips pulled into a scowl and her brow furrowed.
Hecate raised an eyebrow. “What is?”
“The mark!” Pippa exclaimed and threw her hand up, Hecate’s gaze flicking up the band around Pippa’s wrist, the dark grey still broken by only the smallest of gaps. “It’s just so—I,” she huffed, “what’s the point?! You get someone, but you never know until they’re…gone! How are you ever supposed to find them—that one perfect person?”
“But…you’ve known this, Pippa.” Hecate frowned, regarding Pippa with narrowed eyes. “Why are you…”
“One of the other girls said something,” Pippa replied despondently, turning to stare up at the peeling, plaster ceiling again.
“Who?” Hecate demanded, faintly aware of the scraping of wood against wood as her chair forced itself away from the desk.
“Doesn’t matter,” Pippa dismissed her with a wave, her voice thick with false cheer and the corners of her lips straining to pull themselves back into their usual, bright configuration.
“You…you don’t have to be someone’s one, true match to…love them,” Hecate said, faltering only slightly in her attempt to bring that genuine glow back to Pippa’s smile.
“I know,” Pippa replied with a heavy sigh. “But that doesn’t make it any less unfair.”
When she fell silent a moment later, Hecate returned her attention to her work, well accustomed to quiet afternoons with Pippa. It was a short while before Pippa spoke again, a proud declaration ringing emptily in the quiet room.
“I hope you’re the one for me, Hiccup.”
Hecate froze, her hand jerking to a stop, leaving a trail of ink across her meticulous work. Her eyes fluttered shut for a moment, and she almost turned. But as she felt her grip loosen around her pen and her neck begin to twist, her gaze dropped to her wrist, and she couldn’t look away. Because beneath the silver bracelet lay that cruel stroke of black that had laid waste to any childish, idealistic hopes she might have once held of having someone who was made for her, made to love her, and she for them.
Nails digging into the edge of her desk, leaving brutal half-moons in the soft wood, Hecate forced herself to stay facing the wall, her gaze boring into the slender fissures between each stone. Her ears rang with the reminders of why love was quite possibly the most destructive force to ever be inflicted upon witchkind, and Hecate barely caught Pippa’s next words.
“Don’t you?” Pippa asked, rolling onto her side so her hopeful gaze burned into Hecate’s neck.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Hecate shook her head jerkily. “No…I don’t,” she choked out.
Pippa fell silent again, and had Hecate found the strength to face her, she would have seen the unmistakable hurt on Pippa’s face, the tense, confused set of her searching eyes. But as it was, Hecate saw nothing, her eyes still tightly sealed against the world as if she could ever hope to wake from this nightmarish reality.
“Why?” Pippa breathed out, the barest tremor in her voice. Hecate didn’t answer, exhaling sharply as her eyes opened and fixated on the cool, grey stones in front of her, following the endless grooves, each with neither a beginning nor an end. “I-I know you’re private, Hiccup, but is there something…wrong…with your mark?” Pippa asked hesitantly.
“Pippa…” Hecate began but found she could not continue.
She heard a scoff behind her, heard Pippa roll back onto her back. “I don’t understand why you won’t just talk to me!” Pippa exclaimed in frustration. “You’re my best friend, Hecate, why don’t you trust me?”
“I—” Hecate balled her hand into a fist, her palm stinging when her nails began to dig in, leaving those same crescent-shaped indentations behind when she finally forced her hand apart again. “Pip—please just…drop it,” Hecate pleaded quietly, her shoulders hunching as her chin dropped to rest against her chest.
Behind her, Pippa nodded silently, her gaze fixed on the ceiling to hide the tears gleaming at the corners of her eyes. She angrily swiped them away with a quiet sniff but made no move to leave the room. At her desk, Hecate briskly flicked her own, obstinate tears away and got back to work, the neat print beneath her gaze blurring and swimming together in an unintelligible sea of ink.
As the days passed and the months dragged on, Hecate watched Pippa’s mark inch apart as she tried to force fears of her own from her mind. By the time summer arrived at the end of their fourth year, Hecate’s mark was a mere dash against her pale skin.
That summer as she lay in bed, her knees curled up to her chest, the smooth silk cool against her bare skin, she brushed light fingertips over the mark, tears escaping down her cheeks and splashing against her wrist. With each drop, the line was warped until fate was denied and she was given more time.
And every night of that lonely summer, she stared up at the ceiling and hoped that it wasn’t Pippa. It couldn’t be Pippa.
So she prayed to the fates, to gods she had never accepted, to the monsters lurking in the shadows, those ancient and terrible beings who could not have possibly had more darkness, more evil in them than what had determined her future. She prayed and pleaded that she would mourn for no one, that whomever she lost would be nothing. And when she could believe no more, when she knew they would never listen to such pathetic pleas, she changed the words.
She asked for them to take her first, to come for her in the night and steal her away without a trace. She begged for them to pull her kicking and screaming into the darkness, into that eternal night even Pippa would be lost in. She knew it didn’t have to be up to them; she could be the one to find that darkness, to prove that Pippa wouldn’t be gone too soon. But she found she didn't have the strength to leave Pippa like that, to leave her alone with no goodbye. Her pleas were selfish, she knew that, but she couldn’t bring herself to care, not if it meant she wouldn’t have to fear for Pippa’s future.
When morning came her first night back home, Hecate rose abruptly and sat at her desk, pulling out her worn, leather-bound journal from where it still lay hidden. A faint smile ghosted across her lips as she gazed at her childish print, her thumb brushing against the faded ink. And though she didn’t need her notes, hadn’t for years, Hecate followed the innocent words of her younger self, marking a series of lines across the shrinking length of the mark. When she received her answer, how much time was left, she closed her eyes, blocking out it out. Shaking herself, she did it again and again and again. But the problem was not with the arithmetic.
When she returned to school, she took the journal with her, stowing it in her bag, where it stayed long after it would never be needed again.
Hecate often spent the evenings in Pippa’s room as the two worked, sometimes together and sometimes separately, content to simply bask in the other’s company. And if Pippa noticed Hecate watching her every move, her friend's dark eyes unreadable as she scrutinized her, she didn’t say a word.
There was never a moment when Hecate was able to forget her inescapable fate, but there were days when she came close. Those were the days when Pippa’s dazzling smile, the one that never did fail to set the butterflies trapped in Hecate’s chest into flight, pulled Hecate in, luring her into orbit around Pippa. But as the year wound down, so did the mark on Hecate’s wrist, and those days became fewer and further between. Pippa’s smile still glittered even in darkness, but Hecate found herself torn between letting the light drown out the darkness on her wrist and fighting it, refusing the promise of the shrinking mark.
They didn’t have forever, Hecate knew that. Even without any marks, they could never have forever. But knowing that didn’t stop Hecate’s heart from freezing mid-beat when Pippa told her about her upcoming trip to the Pentangle estate in France.
“W-When?” Hecate dared ask. They sat side by side on the short grass under the great elm tree just outside the school walls.
“Oh, a few weekends from now…after exams,” Pippa answered, plucking idly at the grass, shredding a few blades between her fingers. “It'll be nice to have a bit of a break.”
Hecate barely managed to nod, a weak smile at her lips as her hands blindly grasped at the timepiece around her neck. The warm spring day grew hazy as she reeled, images rising unbidden to the forefront of her mind: Pippa lost at sea, her broken, mangled body pummeled by the choppy waves; Pippa sinking below the turbulent waters, falling into a place not even magic could bring her back from.
And when the day came for Pippa to make her trip, Hecate, plagued by weeks of those incessant images, sat at her desk at Cackle’s, blunt nails tapping an irregular beat against the old wood. Her fingers twitched, but she clenched her hand into a fist, containing the magic sparking at her fingertips. When she could do so no longer, her hand freed itself and her broom came flying.
She soared high above the trees, a light rain soaking through her uniform, the wind whipping at her cheeks as she leaned low over her broom, urging it to go faster, faster. When she arrived at the Pentangle manor, she was almost too late. Pippa stood with her parents just outside the entrance, her back to Hecate as she fixed her bags firmly to her broomstick.
“Pippa!” Hecate stumbled off her broom, leaving it to clatter emptily against the paved stone.
Pippa turned, a confused smile on her lips. “Hiccup? What are you doing here?” She asked as Hecate strode toward her, her friend's legs moving as quickly as they could without breaking into a run. “You’re soaked! Why didn’t you use a spell?
“Don’t go,” Hecate pleaded, grabbing Pippa’s arms, her dark eyes frantic. She knew she looked a mess, her cheeks red and the wind having torn her hair from its tight bun, but it didn't matter, not when she was this close. "You can't."
“But…we’ve been planning this for—”
“Please,” Hecate begged, the word a strangled squeak as a desperate tear slipped from behind her lids.
Pippa’s gaze darted to Hecate’s wrist, her arms still trapped in Hecate’s viselike grip, and bit her lip, glancing back at her parents. “Just, er…gi—give me a moment.”
She darted back to her parents, and Hecate watched them exchange quiet words, the indistinct murmurs barely reaching her ears. Tearing her gaze away from them, Hecate stared down at the ground, her hands wrapping around her treasured timepiece, thumbs rubbing against the familiar grooves and etchings in the metal. With her gaze averted, Hecate jumped when two warm, dry hands came to rest upon her own, gently tugging them away from her pocket watch.
She followed those hands back to their owner, meeting Pippa’s solemn gaze. “Are you…?”
Pippa nodded, the corners of her lips quirking up. “Would you like to stay the night, Hiccup?” She asked lightly, that small smile not quite reaching her eyes.
“I—” Hecate thought to refuse, but at the tired, pleading look in Pippa’s eye, found herself nodding. “I’d…love to, Pipsqueak.”
Pippa’s hand still clasped around her own, their fingers tangling together, they waved Pippa’s parents off and made the trek up to Pippa’s room. The walls, once warm and welcoming, felt suffocating, closing in on them until they were pressed together, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder.
When they reached Pippa’s room, Pippa handed Hecate fresh clothes, turning around without a word. Even after she turned back around, unable to suppress a smile at seeing Hecate in her pink pajamas, they didn’t speak. A dull gloom hung over their heads, a thick silence that choked the words from their throats before they could even become that. And in the silence, as they lay side by side on Pippa’s bed, their fingers still intertwined, unable to part for even a moment, Hecate could hardly keep her eyes off of Pippa.
She stared at Pippa, a gentle smile rising unbidden to her lips, following the smooth planes of Pippa’s face, the graceful, arching brows. In the few moments she was able to tear her gaze away, it shifted to rest upon the mark on her wrist, still protected by that silver bracelet she would wear long after it was rendered unnecessary.
She needed it to stop, to slow in its languid deterioration, anything to prove she had done the right thing. But it didn’t, she knew that, knew it without having to watch that inky darkness slip from her skin as if it had never been there to begin with.
“Can I see it?” The silence shattered with Pippa’s whispered plea as she turned on her side to face Hecate.
Hecate stared up at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling with each unsteady breath, and didn’t answer. She didn’t know if she could.
“Hiccup?”
Hecate sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. When she finally spoke, she heard her voice as if it were at a great distance, hoarse and as jagged as the splintering fragments of her heart. “It isn’t…you.”
“No…no, of course not,” Pippa replied with false cheer. Hecate didn’t need to look to know how Pippa’s lips trembled with the strength it took to remain upturned. “You know, I-I might go for a walk, stretch my legs a bit before bed.”
She sat up and swung her legs off the side of the bed, her back to Hecate. “I could…go with you,” Hecate offered hesitantly, sitting up as well, her eyes tracking Pippa’s every movement.
Pippa shook her head, her shoulders hunching, but she didn’t stand, not yet. “Hecate, do you—” she hesitated. Taking in a shallow breath, she tried again. “Do you love me?” Her voice cracked, so quiet it was a mere whistle in the wind, but Hecate heard. She always did.
Swallowing harshly, a stubborn, immovable mass trapped in her throat, Hecate opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She choked, expelling the air forcefully from her lungs though she had no hope of dislodging that mass. With a quiet sigh, Pippa stood and shuffled to the door, her feet dragging with each step and her shoulders still hunched. Hecate watched her go without a sound, but when Pippa's hand landed upon the doorknob, pushing it down heavily, her body surged into motion. She leapt up, stumbling off the bed, a desperate cry at her lips.
“Wait!” Her hand rose, stretching, reaching toward Pippa. Her fingers ached to interlock Pippa’s own, to tangle together so completely neither would know where they ended and the other began.
Pippa turned, her hand falling limply from the door. Her eyes glittered with hope or perhaps tears, Hecate couldn't tell what as she dropped her gaze to the floor.
When she finally looked back up, meeting Pippa’s gaze with a rueful smile, her hand falling uselessly back to her side, she said, over the racing of her heart and the thrumming pulse in her wrist, “I do…love you, Pippa. I...always have.”
Pippa bit her lip and ducked her head, a light flush darkening her cheeks. She took a few steps forward and looped her arms around Hecate’s neck, standing on her tiptoes so she stood eye to eye with her best friend, Hecate’s arms moving to wrap securely around her waist. With another quiet sigh, the cool air whispering against Hecate’s cheeks, Pippa pressed her forehead against Hecate’s own and closed her eyes.
“I love you too, Hiccup,” she murmured, her quiet words trapped, swirling in the shrinking space between them.
“Don’t go,” Hecate breathed out, keeping her eyes open. She didn’t dare blink, memorizing each line and curve, each tiny, almost invisible freckle that made Pippa’s face so…Pippa.
Pippa let out a dry, hollow huff of laughter and sighed again, her shoulders rising and falling with the heavy sound. “I have to.”
Her smile disappeared, and she leaned in closer, their noses brushing, before opening her eyes and pulling away, her eyes darkening. Hecate grabbed her hand as Pippa moved away, not holding her back, simply grasping for that gentle touch. Their fingers trailed apart.
“Goodbye, Pippa.”
Pippa clicked her tongue, a measure of forced levity returning to her voice. “You make it sound so final. It’s not goodbye, it’s…just a walk.”
“Just a walk,” Hecate echoed faintly with a nod, unable to force a smile to her face as Pippa left, closing the door with a quiet click behind her.
From the window, Hecate watched Pippa walk away through the rain, a silent timer beginning in her mind the moment Pippa disappeared from view. For hours she waited, her bracelet discarded on the bed and her gaze flicking back and forth between the window and her bare wrist.
At first she paced, striding a steady six beats back and forth and back and forth, but when her legs grew heavy and her toes dragged behind her with each step, she collapsed onto the bed, curling around Pippa’s pillow as she listened to the heavy pitter-patter of rain against the roof. Thick storm clouds rolled in, obscuring the moon’s pale shine and shaking the manor with the force of its rumbling groans and shrieks, bolts of lightning striking slashes of light through the room, each exposing how her mark slipped away into the night.
When they came with the news an eternity later, Hecate already knew.
She sat crumpled on Pippa’s bed, the clean, white sheets crushed under her clenched fists. Her shoulders hunched, shaking with quiet sobs as her fingers rubbed her wrist, a tender, red streak where the mark had once lain. Rocking back onto her heels, Hecate pressed her fingers to her cheeks, her lips, trying desperately to feel that final touch between them, anything but that aching emptiness at her fingertips. She closed her eyes, but even that was not enough to feel Pippa’s fingers against her own again.
Her tears fell in a never-ending torrent down her cheeks, every breath as if she were underwater, drowning, gasping for air. A hoarse, choked scream forced its way from her throat, clawing and prying her jaw open to be free, and she hurled her bracelet at the wall. It left a mark on the wall, a blemish in the pristine coat of paint. But she didn’t see it, her eyes fixed on where her own should be. A sob echoed in the empty room as she dug her nails into her wrist in one last attempt to drag the mark back to the surface of her skin, back from wherever it had sunk away. As if it still lurked just beneath the surface.
Hecate didn’t sleep that night, only succumbing to sleep's alluring pull when the first rays of light began to creep through the window.
She lay atop Pippa’s rumpled covers, her face pressed against Pippa's pillow as tears dripped down her cheeks until her eyes ached and begged for relief. With each shuddering breath, she drew in the too faint, comforting smell that had faded alongside its source. She closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her. Its shaky oblivion refused to swallow her into a disjointed world of flashes and fragments, a world in which she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. It would be better that way.
So she lay there, curled in a tight ball, her eyes closed and breath coming out in quiet gasps, each sending a puff of air against her pale wrist, unmarked by all but the crescent moons of her own nails. Slowly, her breath steadied and her eyes opened, forced to confront the harsh reality written across her wrist.
Once, many years ago, she hadn’t believed that fate was cruel enough to give her someone to love only to sweep them away the next moment, leaving her with nothing but the crumbling ashes of memory. She had been foolish then, the innocence of youth blinding her from the truth.
Fate did not care who won and who lost, it did not choose for one person to suffer more than another. It did not delight in the power it held over its puppets for it was nothing.
Her mother had been right all those years ago. The mark, and the future it tied to her, was a burden only if Hecate allowed it. But she had; she had welcomed it with open arms and allowed fate to take control, to puppet her limbs, her heart, her mind until she had no choice but to love Pippa. And how could she not?
How could she not love that vibrant, pink-stained whirl of life that had forced its way into her own? How could she not fall for that easy smile, that mischievous glint in those warm eyes?
And when her gaze alighted upon the bare patch of skin on her wrist, she couldn’t deny that fate was not nothing. She couldn’t deny that she, its willing victim, had been given what she had been promised, and it had been taken away before she could even blink.
She knew that love could sprout, could flourish without the mark. She knew that fate should be nothing, not a barrier between a person and their happiness, not some binding declaration of love. But as she lay there, she wondered how she could ever love again, how anyone would ever measure up to the love she could never forget.
Hecate's eyes closed again, and for a moment she could almost pretend that Pippa was still there, lying beside her. She could still smell her sweet, clean scent lacing the sheets and the clothes Hecate wore. Her hands trembling, she could trace the creases and folds in the sheets, proof that Pippa had sat there mere hours before. She could, with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands pressed over her ears, pretend that she wasn’t entirely alone in the world. But then she opened her eyes, and the illusion shattered, the fractured shards reflecting her own tearstained face back at her.
When she finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, passing out with her face still tucked into Pippa’s pillow, the pink fabric damp beneath her cheek, she didn’t find the peace she hoped for in her dreams. The dark, murky images flashing beneath her lids did not hold ignorant solace she had hoped for. No, instead everywhere she turned, she was met with flashes of pink and snatches of golden hair at her peripherals, Pippa.
But when Hecate awoke mere hours later, there was no sign of Pippa, not a single rustle nor giggle no doubt at Hecate's drowsy expense from the other side of the bed. And as her eyes opened to stare blankly at the ceiling, prickling as the sun shone through the flimsy curtains, she knew there never would be again.