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"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame." — Song of Solomon 8:6
Lara has never needed sleep the way humans do. In the sea, rest came in long, half-conscious drifts; hours spent suspended in dark water with her eyes closed and her mind still moving, currents rocking her the way a cradle rocks something too small to know it's being cared for. She still doesn't fully understand why the surface world insists on treating unconsciousness as a daily requirement. An entire day can be ruined by too little of it, and Mari's whole body seems to run on the stuff like fuel.
Tonight, though, she understands what it’s like to not have it.
She's been lying on her futon for what her borrowed phone tells her is over an hour, staring at the same stain on the ceiling she's memorized the exact contours of by now; a shape that, depending on the angle of her eyes, looks like either a rabbit or a poorly drawn boat. Mari's breathing is slow and even from the bed above her, concealed behind the drapes, a rhythm Lara has come to recognize through routine and proximity, the one that means she's actually asleep and not just pretending to be so Lara will stop talking.
Lara isn't thinking about Luca, which is itself strange enough to keep her awake.
She's been thinking about him constantly for weeks; his hand when he holds a paintbrush, the sound of his voice when he explains a colour he's mixed, the steadiness of him that feels as if it should mean something, given how unmoored everything else about this new life has been. Leo's words from a while ago keep circling back to her, unhelpful and precise: If you don’t do anything, it’ll probably stay like this forever. And she’s fully aware that she needs to do something; she must. Himeka said so, too.
She tells herself it's nerves. New love is supposed to be nervous, isn't it? The prince, in her old life, made her nervous too, in the beginning; though thinking of that comparison now sends something cold and chilling running through her veins.
What she actually keeps thinking about (unhelpfully, insistently) is Mari.
It’s not anything specific. Not one moment she could point to and say there, that's the reason. Just an assortment of small things sitting oddly and heavily in her chest: the set of Mari's jaw when she's decided not to talk about something, the affection in her eyes when she talks about Grace, the sound of her laugh when something genuinely catches her off guard, and—
—and the way she'd only hummed her responses when Lara told her she was going to confess her feelings to Luca.
Lara doesn't know what to do with any of that. She's not supposed to be doing anything with that. She has a plan. She has a person. She has very little time left to figure either of those things out, and ruminating about her housemate’s terse non-reactions is not a productive use of what's left of it.
She sits up.
The room is dim and close and unhelpful for thinking in, Mari's breathing overhead somehow making it worse rather than better; a reminder of a person she's not supposed to be thinking about, sleeping inches away. Lara eases herself off the futon with more care than the situation probably requires, avoiding the floorboard Mari once pointed out always makes a sound, and slips through the sliding door, out into the hallway, then onto the balcony the way she's started doing more nights than not.
The chapel next door sits dark and quiet under the stars, its cross a thin pale line against the sky. Lara looks at it for a long moment, remembering the last time she stood in that garden—remembering the prayer she said, artless and plain; how Mari's face had looked in the moonlight afterward, and how it had bothered her for days without her understanding why.
She finds herself climbing over the balcony railing before she's fully decided to.
The window she and Mari used before gives easily under her hands, as though it remembers her, as though it's been left unlocked on purpose. She slips through into the velvet hush of the chapel, the light of the moon falling in the same shapes across the same worn floorboards, and for a moment she just stands there in the aisle, breathing it in, letting the quiet settle on her like a blanket.
She doesn't come here tonight to ask for anything. She's not sure, yet, what she came here to do at all.
The pews arranged in their same rows, dust motes drifting slow through the moonlight overhead, and up at the altar the small gold-finished cross seems to watch her. Lara drifts closer to it without deciding to, the way she's been doing most things tonight, and lets her fingers trail along the worn edge of a pew as she passes, the same groove hundreds of hands must have rested on before hers.
Her mind drifts to the prayer she said here weeks ago. Sleep for both of them. Nothing more complicated than that, or so she'd told herself at the time; though even then, some part of her had known the configuration of the thing she was actually asking for was bigger than sleep, bigger than she had words for. She'd asked God to let Mari rest. She hadn't asked why it mattered to her more than it should, why the thought of Mari carrying all that tiredness alone had felt like something lodged sideways in her own ribcage.
She still doesn't have an answer for that. She's beginning to suspect she doesn't want one.
She doesn't know how to explain this growing, pulsing thing taking up space just below her heart. She'd spent her past life learning the shapes of human feeling from the outside (watching it, mimicking it, ultimately being devastated by it), but this particular knot refuses to resolve into anything she recognizes. It isn't fear, exactly, though fear is certainly a thread of it; the days are running out faster than she lets herself count, and every morning she wakes up still human is a mercy she hasn't earned and doesn't understand the terms of. It isn't love, exactly, either. At least he kind she was promised, and it’s not the kind the story is supposed to end with. Luca is good. Luca is kind. Luca looks at her like she's human, and asks nothing of her she isn't willing to give.
But every time she closes her eyes to picture her own happy ending, it’s not Luca’s face that she sees.
Lara doesn't sit. Something about sitting feels wrong tonight; too casual, too close to how she settled in beside Mari on one of these pews weeks ago and turned the whole thing into something almost light-hearted.
She continues to move up the aisle instead, past the pews, until she's standing right before the altar, and lowers herself down onto her knees against the cool wooden floor the way she's seen it done in the human dramas Yoshiya sometimes falls asleep to. She clasps her hands loosely, tips her head back to look up at the cross directly.
She doesn't know if this is the correct posture. She doesn't know if there is a correct posture at all, or if that was ever the point.
"I’ve come to you again," she says as quietly as she can, to the cross in the dark, to whoever or whatever might be inclined to lend her their ears at this ungodly hour. "It’s me, Lara. I don't know if you actually listened, the last time. I'm hoping you did."
Silence.
"I don't understand what's going on with me," she says, and her voice cracks slightly on the last word, more than she means it to. "I've done everything I was told to do. I found someone who's good to me. I've tried to get close to him, to cherish him…I’ve done all I can." She presses her clasped hands harder against her sternum, like she can force the confession further down where it can't keep surfacing. "So why does it feel like I'm lying every time I say his name and mean it?"
Her throat feels like it’s closing in on itself. Her eyes are starting to water.
“I don't have time for this,” she continues, barely herself. “I don't get forever. My days are numbered, and I'm spending it thinking about the wrong person, and I don't know how to stop, and I don't know if I even want to stop, and I don't—" Her voice catches, breaks apart mid-sentence. “I don't want to die without knowing what true love is.”
She closes her eyes, and the salty sting of her tears reach all the way to her retinas.
"Please…" she says, and it comes out smaller than everything before it, stripped down to something closer to a child's plea than a princess's prayer. "If you're listening. Just…tell me what I'm supposed to do. Tell me it's him….” She pauses to take a quivering breath. “Tell me it's supposed to be him, and I'll believe you. I'll- I’ll believe you over my own heart if you just tell me, clearly…I don't trust it anymore."
Nothing answers. Not with words, not with anything tangible Lara can hold onto. The chapel stays silent, the air and the darkness still, moonlight indifferent on the floor. The same cross above her keeping whatever counsel it keeps to itself.
Lara stays kneeling anyway, her hands staying on her chest, right where the ache has settled and refused to leave. She lets her forehead drop forward, breath shaking loose from her lungs in something that isn't quite a sob but isn't far from one, either.
She doesn't hear the window creak until it's already open.
"Lara?"
She turns at the sound of her name, and there (silhouetted in the open window, hair a mess from sleep, one leg still hooked over the sill) is Mari, staring at her.
"What in the world are you doin' here?"
Something rises up in Lara’s chest at the sight of Mari, quick and involuntary, familiar in a way that scares her more than anything the cross has failed to answer tonight; warm, pulsing, alive, wanting nothing more than to be looked at by exactly this person, in exactly this light. She pushes it down (she's gotten frighteningly good at doing that lately), and buries it somewhere beneath the dull pain already radiating through her ribs.
"I couldn’t sleep," Lara manages, which is true, if incomplete.
“You could’ve counted sheep or somethin’ instead of goin’ to church.” Mari climbs the rest of the way through the window, quick and efficient, suggesting that she hasn't fully clocked what she's walking into yet. But the moment she's close enough to see Lara's face properly, her expression falls.
"Hey." She crosses the last few steps quickly, dropping down in front of the altar without seeming to register that she's kneeling too, mirroring Lara without meaning to. "Were you cryin'?"
"No," Lara says, too fast, already lifting a hand to swipe hurriedly at her cheek, at the damp evidence she'd hoped the dark might hide. "I'm fine. I just—"
“Cut it out. You suck at lying.” The words carry no real heat; in its place is just unshakeable certainty, the kind that cuts through the disguise. Mari shifts closer, and before Lara can say or do anything, Mari’s thumb is there instead of Lara's own hand, brushing gently under one eye and then the other, wiping away what's left of the tears with a careful, deliberate touch that doesn't match the bluntness of her voice at all.
The feeling in Lara's chest surges back up immediately, worse than before; warmer and more insistent. She feels it in her throat, in the backs of her eyes, in the sudden, overwhelming urge to lean into the hand still resting near her cheek and never move again. She shoves it down harder this time, forces her spine straight, forces her breathing to even out, refuses to let it surface any further than it already has.
It doesn't fully leave. It just goes quiet, coiled and waiting. It's been doing that for weeks now.
Mari studies her a moment longer, something too difficult to make out working behind her eyes, and then pulls her hand back, seeming to decide the conversation isn't going to happen kneeling on an altar.
"C'mon," she says, already rising and offering a hand down to help Lara up. "Let's get you somewhere to sit."
Mari leads her to the back pew, and Lara sinks down beside her, still fighting to keep her breathing even, and all too aware of the warmth left behind on her cheek where Mari's thumb had been.
For a while, neither of them says anything. The quiet widens, filling the corners of the chapel, but it doesn't feel the same as it did an hour ago, when Lara was alone with it. It feels oppressive now.
"You gonna tell me what’s this all about?" Mari asks eventually, like she's testing the strength of ice before putting her full weight on it. “What made you cry?”
"It's nothing." Lara looks down at her hands on her lap. "How did you notice I was gone?”
“’Cause your futon’s next to me, so it’s kinda hard not to,” Mari says it matter-of-factly. “And you’re a lousy sneak. Left all the doors wide open.”
“I didn’t mean to wake you.”
"You didn't. I just noticed." Mari is sitting close enough that Lara can feel the warmth emanating from her skin. "You were prayin’ again? 'Cause last time didn't work so hot. Still took me forever to fall back asleep."
"Maybe I did it wrong."
"Maybe God's just slow."
Lara lets out a sound that’s almost a laugh, and it catches halfway up her throat. It should feel like relief; this small, easy exchange. Their eyes meet, and something deep within her registers that this is what she came here searching, in a way, this exact ordinary warmth, the distinct comfort of Mari's humour permeating the space that sat too heavy to bear. And it does help, some. That's the frightening part. Nothing about the ache she feels has actually lessened, and yet just having Mari beside her makes the whole night feel survivable in a way it hadn't a few moments ago, kneeling alone at the altar with no one to hear her fall apart.
She isn't supposed to find comfort this specific. She isn't supposed to need it to come from exactly this voice, exactly this proximity, exactly those pair of dark eyes. Comfort is supposed to be interchangeable; a kind word from anyone, a distraction from any source, that's how it's meant to work. It isn't supposed to matter this much whose hands wipe away the tears.
She pushes the thought down again, the same place she's been shoving everything else tonight, and tells herself, not for the first time, that it will stay buried.
“You’ve been weird lately,” Mari says, her gaze drifting somewhere past Lara’s shoulders. “Luca mentioned it too. When we were talkin' the other day.”
Lara goes very still. "You…talked to Luca about me?"
"He came to talk to me. Wasn't like a whole conversation about you." Mari's jaw does the stubborn thing it does when she's deciding how much to say. "He's worried. Thinks you might be pullin' away from him or somethin'. I told him I didn't think that was it, but." A shrug, deliberately casual, betrayed by how carefully she's not looking at Lara while she says it. "I dunno. I told him you two are pretty good together. You tell me."
Instead of answering right away, Lara is back staring at the altar.
"You told him that…" she repeats, quiet. "…that we're good together."
"'Cause you are. Aren't you?" Mari says it as a question but delivers it like a statement she's daring Lara to contradict, arms crossing loose over her knees. "He treats you right. He ain’t a dry-texter. Listens when you talk and takes you out on dates." A beat, and when she speaks again, something in her voice goes flat, as if she's reciting a list she's made herself memorize. "Sounds like exactly what you'd want. What you deserve, even."
"I don't know what I want anymore."
It comes out before Lara can stop it, rawer than she means to let show.
Mari finally looks at her then, Lara can see her in her periphery. “You said you were gonna tell him how you feel.”
"I know, I—" Lara stops, starts again, tries to find some version of the truth small enough to hand over. “I want to tell him. I know that I have to- I have to do something about us or we’ll stay the same forever. But now that I’m close to it, I can’t- I don’t- I don’t know if I can even do that, I—" Her breath catches. "I just…I don’t know anymore.”
"Well…you don't gotta have it all figured out right now." Mari's voice softens. It almost catches Lara off guard. "The whole confession thing. People take their time with stuff like that. It's allowed."
"I don't have time to take, Mari." It comes out sharper than she intends, edged with something akin to panic, the reality of her own countdown surfacing before she can stop it. "Every day I don't choose is a day closer to not getting to choose at all."
Mari goes quiet at that, and Lara can feel her watching, feel the particular weight of her attention when she's trying to find the right thing to say and failing to locate it fast enough.
"Yeah," Mari says finally, low. "I know."
Lara looks over at her. Really looks, the way she's been trying not to all night. She watches as something complicated moves behind Mari’s eyes; concern, maybe, or guilt. A kind of frustration that comes from caring about someone whose problem doesn't have a fist-shaped solution.
"Can I tell you something that isn't about Luca?"
"...Sure."
"I feel like I’m a scarecrow," Lara says slowly, working the thought loose as she goes, the way she always does when she's translating something felt into something spoken. "I don’t really know what I am. I’m just acting like I do. I know that I should accept my fate, tell myself that I will do what I have to do, and not look closer than that." She shakes her head. "But I…I don’t think I'll ever be that way. I don't want to be that way. I don’t care where I go after I die. I just want to see heaven while I'm alive."
Lara waits for Mari to say something, anything, but she doesn’t. She's looking at Lara now with an expression Lara can’t place at all because she’s never seen it on Mari’s face before. It’s raw and open, like a fresh wound, something that seems to cost her to hold still under. As honest and blunt as Mari is, Lara feels that there are still parts of her hidden under this tall shadow of a fortress Lara simply can’t scale. But now, that fortress is gone, leaving in its wake a stark, bleeding vulnerability that makes Lara want to look away, as if she’s intruding on something deeply private. Mari's lips part slightly, looking like it’s attempting to form a word, but the effort collapses before making a sound. In that heavy, breathless silence—
—something in Lara simply stops asking for permission.
She doesn't decide to lean in. There's no clear boundary between the thought and the motion, no space where she could have stopped herself if she'd wanted to. One second she's looking at Mari's face, and the next her hand has found the side of Mari's jaw, and the distance between them has closed into nothing at all.
Mari doesn't pull away.
But Lara does.
She jolts back so fast she nearly topples off the pew, hand flying up to cover her own mouth like she can physically shove the moment back inside herself, undo it, unmake it. Horror floods in cold and instant on the heels of whatever had just possessed her; she can feel her pulse hammering somewhere up in her ears, can feel the shape of what she's just done settling over her like something with teeth.
"I—" Her voice comes apart before she can finish the word. "I'm so sorry. I don't- I don't know why I did that, I wasn't thinking, I shouldn't have- Mari, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"
She's still talking, tripping over apology after apology, shame carving a hot, burning channel along her spine up to the top of her head, when underneath all of it, unbearably, the thing beneath her heart surges instead of retreating. Bigger than before, insistent as a spring tide, pressing up against her ribs like it's trying to break free of the small, confined space she's kept it folded into for weeks. It doesn't feel like guilt, the furthest from it, no matter what Lara’s brain thinks is true; it feels like relief, obscene and unwelcome, like an animal starved that's finally caught the scent of food.
“—I shouldn't have come here at all, I should just go, I'll figure this out on my own, I'm so sorry, I—"
Mari's hand closes around her wrist.
Lara stops talking.
"Lara." Mari's voice is rough at the edges, certain and a little unsteady all at once. She doesn't let go of Lara's wrist. If anything, her grip tightens, gentle but immovable, an anchor thrown to something already sinking. "Shut up for a second."
And then she pulls Lara back in.
This kiss isn't like the first. There's no hesitation left in it on either side, no space for apology to squeeze back through; it's immediate, and hungry, and far less careful than Lara thinks she’d be comfortable with. Mari's free hand comes up to cradle the side of her face, beckoning Lara to her.
Lara simply gives up trying to push down anything at all.
The thing beneath her heart doesn't just surge now. It roars.
It's nothing like she imagined a first kiss would feel; not the soft, careful thing from the human dramas she’s watched, not the gentle unfolding the prince once tried to press onto her under a different moon, in a different life. This feels like drowning in reverse, like being pulled up out of water she didn't know she'd been sinking in for months. Mari's mouth is warm and assuring against hers, tasting of nothing in particular and everything at once, and Lara's hands find their way to the front of Mari's shirt without her permission, fingers curling into fabric like she needs something solid to keep from being swept entirely off the pew.
Every place they're touching feels lit from within; Mari’s fingers on her face, the press of her knee against Lara's own, the small, involuntary sound Mari makes low in her throat that Lara feels more than hears. It's too much and not nearly enough at the same time, awakening some old, deep craving in the pit of her stomach that has nothing to do with the version of love she was promised, the version with a prince and a happily-ever-after and rules she was supposed to follow in order.
Mari shifts back against the pew, and before Lara can fully process the movement, hands settle at her waist and pull; firm and sure, unmistakable in intent. Lara goes with it without resistance, knees bracketing Mari's hips as she settles into her lap, and for one dizzying second all she can do is look down at Mari, moonlight catching the side of her face, her dark eyes barely visible but steady.
"Is this…this okay?" Mari asks, breathless.
"Yes," Lara says, and it comes out more definite than anything she's said all night. It terrifies her, even as she means it completely.
Mari's hands stay at her waist, tentative, as if she's giving Lara every chance to change her mind, to pull back, to remember herself. Lara doesn't take it. She leans down instead, closing the last of the distance, and this time when their mouths meet there's one degree of urgency less, both of them slowing down as they learn the shape of this new thing they've stumbled into.
Lara's fingers find their way into Mari's hair, and Mari's grip on her waist tightens in response, drawing her closer. The chapel around them falls away (the altar, the cross, the whole weight of everything Lara came here to ask for) narrowing down to nothing but the warmth of Mari beneath her, the soft, unsteady sound of her breathing, the impossible, overwhelming fact of being wanted back.
It should feel like answer enough. For one long, suspended moment, it does.
They break apart only to meet again, over and over, a rhythm that reminds Lara of nothing so much as breaching for air; the buried instinct of coming up before diving back under, except here the diving back under is the point, is the whole of what she wants, not a necessity to be endured before returning to the depths. She used to breach like this for real, once, lifetimes ago, chasing lights through the top of the water only to arc back down into the dark because the dark was where she belonged. This feels like that. Come up, catch her breath, go back under. Come up. Go back under. She could do this forever and it would never once feel like losing her lungs to the tides.
It doesn't feel anything like Luca.
She’s never kissed him before, but there were small, chaste things; moments when their skin came into contact unexpectedly that he always seemed startled and grateful for. Warm in the mild, sunlit way a held hand is warm, or a kind word, or the comfort of being chosen by someone gentle. She'd told herself that warmth was enough. That it was, perhaps, all warmth was supposed to feel like, and that anything asking for more than that was simply her own greed, her own inability to be satisfied with a good and simple thing.
This is something with a current underneath it, something that pulls instead of settles, that doesn't ask to be enough. Lara has spent hundreds of years and one entire resurrection trying to comprehend the shape of human love into something she could wrap her fingers around, and she is starting, now (dimly), to understand that she's been holding the wrong dictionary the whole time. Whatever her heart has actually been reaching for, repeatedly, in every version of herself she's ever lived, has always looked like this. Felt like this. Tasted like salt and conviction and the algedonic ache of finally, finally surfacing somewhere she was always meant to breathe.
There's a thought that surfaces somewhere in the middle of it, entirely unhelpful given everything else crowding her tonight: I want to do this until we both give out. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not stolen in careful moments before her time runs out. She means it the way humans mean forever, the foolish, reckless way. Kissing Mari in kitchens and doorways and the backs of cars, kissing her when they're both grey and slow and have long since stopped counting the years. Kissing her like there will always be another day left to do it in.
It's a wish formed utterly wrong for what she is. She knows that even as she thinks it. She doesn't get the privilege to get old. She barely gets later. But the thought dwells on her anyway, undeterred by the small print of her own existence, and she lets herself want it exactly that much, if only for one reckless second; a whole human lifetime of this, as selfish and impossible as it is.
She wants more than she has any right to want.
More.
More.
More.
More of Mari's mouth, more of her hands, more of the warmth radiating off her skin, wants it so completely and so impatiently that it frightens her, wants to crawl entirely inside the sensation and never resurface—
Wants.
Wants.
Wants—
And that's when she sees it.
Not with her eyes. It rises from somewhere far beneath conscious thought: the fish-shaped monolith that hangs suspended over Lake Biwa, ancient and enormous, its massive stone jaw beginning, slowly, to unhinge. Wider. And wider still. A mouth built to consume something whole, ravenous with nothing gentle left inside it at all.
Lara wrenches back a second time, gasping, hand flying to her own chest like she can physically hold whatever's inside her from clawing its way out. The image is still there behind her eyes even now, vivid and monstrous; the impossible size of that jaw, the black nothing behind it.
"Lara?" Mari's voice cuts through the ringing in her ears, sharp with alarm now instead of desire. Her hands come up, hovering, unsure whether touching her again will help or make it worse. "Hey- hey, what's wrong, what happened?"
"I—" Lara can't finish it. Her whole body is trembling, the aftershock of the vision tangled up inextricably with the aftershock of the kiss, indistinguishable from each other, making her insides tinge green. She scrambles back off Mari's lap, putting distance between them that her body clearly doesn't want but her mind is screaming for, until she's pressed against the opposite arm of the pew, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around herself like she's trying to hold her own parts together by force.
Mari doesn't reach for her again, though everything about her posture says she wants to. Hands hovering, then dropping to her own knees instead, giving Lara the space she's clearly asking for even though it visibly costs her. "Talk to me. Please. Did I do somethin'? Did I—"
"No." The word comes out too fast, too fierce, and Lara has to close her eyes against the sudden, crushing guilt of watching Mari's face warp into something like hurt at the force of her own denial. "No, it wasn't you. It's me. It's—" She presses her hand hard against her sternum once more, right over the place where the thing still sits, quieter now, but not gone, never fully gone. "I saw something."
"Saw somethin'? Like, a person? Did somebody—"
"Not a person.” Lara tries to find the words she needs. "I don't…I don’t know how to explain it. There's- there’s something. Over the lake. It's been there for a while, ever since I got here. It's part of my true nature. Part of what's inside me." She swallows hard. "When I feel something too strongly…when it gets too close to the surface, I see it open its mouth. It wants to eat."
Mari stares at her, clearly struggling to parse whether this is metaphor or literal fact, whether she's supposed to be comforting a broken heart or something stranger and older than that. "Eat…what?"
Lara doesn't answer right away. She looks down at her own hands instead, still faintly trembling, and thinks of Lisa's warnings, half-formed and incomplete, about what true love actually costs a creature like her.
"I don't know," she lies, because the truth (you, it wants to eat you, all of you, everything you are, until there's nothing left) is not a thing she has the courage to say out loud, not here, not now, not to the person it's actually about.
Mari watches her for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that looks dangerously close to understanding more than Lara's given her credit for. But she doesn't push. She just shifts a careful few inches closer instead, slow and non-threatening, until their knees are almost touching again.
"Okay," Mari says finally, gentle in a way Lara doesn't feel like she deserves right now. "You don't gotta explain it all tonight. But Lara—" She hesitates. "Whatever that was. Whatever just happened between us…I ain't sorry it did."
Lara turns to her, aching with nothing that has to do with monsters, and tears her gaze away from Mari almost right after, gluing it to the floor instead. Silence stretches out long and unresolved between them, fragile and tense; something neither of them seems to know how to touch without breaking further.
Lara doesn't know what to say, so she doesn't try to say anything. She just sits there, arms still wrapped around her own knees, staring at the floorboards instead of Mari's face.
"I have to go back to him," Lara says finally, so quietly it barely disturbs the air.
Mari blinks at her. "...What?"
"Luca. I have to—" Her voice wavers, and she hates herself a little for how much it costs her to keep saying his name like it still means what it used to. "I need to tell him how I feel. Leo said I should. Himeka said that, too. Everyone's been so patient with me, and I keep—" She presses her palms against her eyes like she can push the last hour back into the place it came from. "This can't have happened. I can't let it have happened."
"Lara. You can't just pretend it didn't."
"I have to." It comes out harsher and more desperate than she means. "I don't have time for anything else. I don't get to just- explore this, or take it slow, or see where it goes. I have days. Maybe weeks, if I'm careful. And if I choose wrong—" She stops herself before the rest of it spills out, before she says the word die out loud in this sacred, holy place and makes it more real than it already is.
Mari doesn't say anything for a long moment. When she finally does, her voice is threaded through with something that sounds almost like grief already arriving early. "So that's it, then? We're just gonna sit here and act like this never happened?"
"I don't know what else to do." Lara looks at her, and immediately regrets it. Mari's face in the moonlight undoes something in Lara all over again. "I'm scared. Not of dying. I've made peace with that, mostly. I'm scared that the thing I want most isn't the thing that's supposed to save me. And I don't know what happens to me if I choose it anyway."
"Maybe it still would," Mari says. "Save you, I mean."
"I can't take that risk." The words taste like ash coming out. "Not with something that shows me monsters."
Mari flinches at that, small but visible, and Lara immediately wishes she could take it back, wishes there were a version of tonight where she got to keep both truths (the fear and the wanting) without one having to devour the other.
Neither of them moves toward the window for a long time. When they finally do, it's without another word, climbing out into the cool pre-dawn air single file, the chapel falling dark and silent, indifferent to whatever it just witnessed.
They don't speak on the walk back. They don't speak walking up the stairs, or crossing the room, or settling back into their separate places; Mari in her bed, Lara on her futon below, the drapes drawn shut between them like something has been sealed. Lara lies awake long after Mari's breathing evens out into sleep, staring up at the same water-stained ceiling, the same rabbit-or-boat shape she's memorized by now, and presses her hand flat against her sternum where the thing beneath her heart has finally gone quiet.
It doesn't feel like victory, going silent like that. It feels like something merely biding its time.
Lara closes her eyes.
She wakes to an empty room.
The realization arrives slowly; a soft unspooling, blinking against thin morning light filtering through the curtains. The bed beside hers is empty, blanket folded back neatly.
“She was out running,” comes a voice from the direction of the tank, dry and entirely too pleased with itself. “Two hours ago. You sleep like the dead, you know that?”
Lara turns her head toward Grace, who’s regarding her with the flat, unimpressed stare only a fish possessing the soul of a powerful sea witch could manage. “Good morning to you too, Lady Witch.”
“Mm. Interesting night, was it?” Grace’s fins flick lazily. “You both came in reeking of guilt in the middle of the night and didn't say a word to me. I'm hurt, honestly. After everything.”
"It's complicated."
"Everything with you is complicated, dear. It's practically your whole personality now." A pause, considering. "She might be under the bridge. If you're wondering."
Lara lies on her futon for another few minutes, running last night back through her mind in pieces she isn't ready to look at directly: the altar, the prayer, the kiss, the second kiss, the thing beneath her heart roaring louder than it ever has, the jaw unhinging wide enough to swallow both of them whole. She thinks about Luca, the promise she made to herself, the fact that she is (by any reasonable accounting) completely out of time to make the same mistake twice.
She goes anyway.
The morning is already warm, the kind of summer heat that hasn't yet built to its full weight but promises to by noon, cicadas starting up somewhere in the trees along the riverbank as Lara makes her way down toward the bridge. She hears Mari before she sees her; there’s the sharp, rhythmic sound of breath and movement, familiar by now, the distinct cadence of her shadowboxing drills. When Lara rounds the last bend, there she is: T-shirt clinging slightly with sweat, feet planted in the dry grass, throwing combinations at an opponent that exists only in her own head.
Lara stops a few feet away and watches, and it's supposed to be nothing; she's seen Mari train before, knows what her jabs look like, the snap of her hips on a cross, has cheered for exactly this motion from a very different vantage point weeks ago in an arena full of noise. But all she can think, watching those same hands cut clean and precise through the morning air, is how gentle they'd been the night before.
The way they'd wiped tears off her cheeks. How they’d closed around her wrist like an anchor instead of a warning. Settling at her waist and pulled her closer instead of pushing her away.
She tries to shove the image down. It doesn't go without putting up a fight. Nothing has, lately.
"Mari."
Mari startles, missing her rhythm entirely, stumbling half a step before she catches herself. "What the hell. You ruined my flow."
"I'm sorry."
A sigh, and some of the sharpness bleeds out of Mari's shoulders. "It's fine." She swipes an arm across her forehead, not quite looking at Lara directly, suddenly very focused on adjusting her wraps instead.
Lara hesitates, feet rooted to the damp grass. "...Did you sleep well?"
"Slept normal." Mari's voice gives nothing away.
"Ah." Lara nods, though there's nothing to nod at. "I see."
Quiet settles over the riverbank, broken only by the distant sound of water moving under the bridge. Mari goes back to fussing with her wraps, and Lara stands there with her hands clasped in front of her, feeling the solidity of everything she isn't saying pressing up hard against her teeth.
"I'm going to do it today," she says finally.
Mari's hands go still on the wrap.
"Luca," Lara clarifies, unnecessarily, since there was never any real question of who she meant. "I'm going to tell him how I feel. Today."
Mari doesn't look up right away. When she does, Lara sees the wall again.
"Yeah," Mari says. "Figured you would. You keep tellin’ me about it."
She goes back to her wraps. Lara stays a moment longer, watching her hands, and then turns and walks back the way she came.
She only makes it three steps before she stops and looks back over her shoulder.
She half-hopes that Mari would tell her “no”, “don’t”. Grab her wrist the way she had in the chapel and pull her back one more time, would say something reckless and true that would give Lara permission to be reckless, too. Mari doesn't. She doesn't. Of course she doesn't. Mari has never once, in all the weeks Lara's known her, made a single thing about herself when someone else needed her not to. She just keeps winding the wrap around her knuckles, business as usual, like Lara's already gone.
So Lara makes herself walk. One foot after the other, up the riverbank path, until the sound of Mari's fists finding air again fades behind her and there's nothing left to listen to but her own heartbeat, loud and uneven.
Entirely too human for something that isn't supposed to survive much longer as one.