Chapter Text
Mama's right — Momo doesn't know a lot of things.
She'd tasted just a nip of despair and everything collapsed around her like a house of cards. Maybe if Momo'd been less ignorant, steeped and drowned in reality, she'd be curled against Milena in a dark, quiet corner right now. Chasing chaste kisses to the sweet melody of a viper's call and not relishing the throb of a worn out throat, breath spent and the air filled with the lingering echo of a grieving song.
Maybe. Just maybe, but. Maybe not. Momo feels like she'd have ended up here regardless, nails broken and bleeding, crusted with cold dirt and impossible yellow pollen, everything just one big aching sore. Here, alone because the world is cruel like that. Here, where the curling breeze is a cruel scream in her ears, the tip-tap of the piano keys she will never learn, and maybe… maybe it's fine that she's here anyway.
Here, at the end of what can only be the beginning, and Momo doesn't want to be anywhere else, if this is how this short, significant part of her life is supposed to end.
Momo isn't quite sure when she became numb to the chill, and the night drawing to a close all around her in steel blue and pale, creeping gold.
"I love you," she tells the air once last time as sunlight starts to feather a stinging hand across her cheek. "I might hate you just a little too, leaving me like this, giving me this, this hope, and —"
Breaking your promise—
Momo knows a lot more things now, but it's not enough. She spits a smooth hiss, the light just the underside of searing and too bright. It hurts, all of a sudden, a boiling and steaming brand. She wishes she knew more, wishes she had someone to ask — someone like Fine, someone who gave away the answers in life away so easily —
"Ugh," Momo groans, and drags herself up from the dirt, staggers into the shade of the tree and away from the gleaming sun.
Tears well along the edges of her eyes, and she pulls Fine's cloak up and over her head, fisting her hands into the dark, torn fabric.
Save her.
Save her.
Save her.
Momo failed, in the most important way, but in the smallest and unfair way she might have actually… succeeded.
Do you understand just how long it took for Fine to heal after being hurled into despair?
Fine never got over that, and Momo wonders how that other vampire never seemed to notice, how he could love her so much and not realize it. Momo's stupid, but even she knew something was wrong. Vampires don't just refuse blood, let alone do what Fine did for Momo, a pitiful little human who knew nothing of the world saved by what she'd heard hissed Capture the queen!
Queen Fine. Pathetic, naive Momo. She stifles a giggle at the thought, and swallows it back with a bottled up scream when her ribs protest, tender and raw where Fine's teeth sank in just deep enough that Momo can feel the new fangs shredding her bottom lip.
It's fine. Fine isn't, can't, won't be here, and while Momo knows so little, she thinks she knows someone who might know more, because.
Because if she's going to find Paradise, she's going to have to build it up with her own two hands and not on the broken backs of the innocent.
The singer was a Warm, y'know.
Vampires are a plague that appeared one dark day, and humans fell to their blood lust, fell to their melodies and sinful rhythms… but if singing and music and anything just so beautiful and fun are their culture, how did a Warm sing that song? If humans can sing, why isn't it a human thing to do so? Why is it so terrible?
And, if vampires are satied just with blood, not eating, not killing humans, why can't they just do what they were doing along the canal or on the island? Why can't they just get along?
Why is Mama the way she is? Why did no one ever tell her that there was an end to the never-ending snow?
Momo trembles, and then sucks in a sticky gasp that descends into a sob.
There's so much more she needs to know.