I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Fear can do such strange and twisted things to your heart.
It can rend and manipulate, taking a potter’s hand to the clay and molding it into something new. This morning she had been but the broken glass girl. She had been Adaline. In love with a brother that she could, should, never have. A girl who had stoked the wolf’s rage and watched it burn her life now.
But now?
Oh, now.
Now, she feels memories beginning to form in the back of her mind. Memories that are not her own. Memories that are only ghosts of the truth. They are but shadows of the truth. She doesn’t know the fullness of her sister’s heart. She doesn’t even know that she has a sister, let alone that she wears her face. She doesn’t know how gentle her sister had been—how soft and kind and deeply in love.
But she slips into Charity’s life so easily and it fits so well.
As if she had been made for it.
As if, as if.
He says her name is Charity and she has spent so long dreading this day that she doesn’t even try to fight it—doesn’t deny it. She isn’t Adaline. She is Charity. She is Charity and he is Jarris and there is something that means something between them. Oh, oh—how long as she wanted someone to look at her with the quiet look he gives her now? How long has she wanted to feel this swelling in her breast?
How could she possibly fight it?
“Dusk,” she whispers, the name filling her mouth with sawdust because the words he says next send her reeling. “Daughter?” she repeats and she blinks away the tears that touch the corners of her eyes. She feels something like a scream that tears open her throat but she makes no noise; she just drowns in the ache, she just drowns in the sorrow that suddenly floods through her—the fear, the loss, the guilt.
“I have,” she shakes her head, “we have a daughter?”
Her slender, fragile chest heaves as she struggles to take a breath.
“H-how,” her breath catches, “how could I forget?”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
