when they touched ./ beatrice hartmyre

Ever since I was a child, I was bound.

When I flowed from my mother's womb, a young man followed me. Our fingers, they touched ever so delicately in the silence of a night filled with screams. The garbed doctors marked us as twins; they marked us as equals on a path that led only to a land of destruction. Still, I was so much more smaller than my brother, Theodore, and my fragility rang true as I always had to have one more drop of milk upon my tongue than he. Our fingers, however, never stopped touching. Fingertip upon fingertip; soul an eon away from soul.

As we aged, armed with buckling knees and spreading grins, I found myself becoming more of an equal to my dear Teddy; I found our fingertips spreading apart, tissue of skin by tissue of skin. I was born of fire and scorched ground. I rampaged day and night, though my soul was already burnt to a crisp. I knew all the answers, all the directions, in this foolish game we played. Though, truly, I knew nothing. Some had said that Ripred would bless a chosen one with infinite knowledge every thousand years. I, however, was not chosen for such a thing.

Chosen for infinite pain, however, I was.

As Teddy and I's fingers grew farther and farther apart, so did my sanity. I started to fear the unknown, succumbing to my innocence in the only way possible. The darkness, it petrified me. The night my mother died, the night my family broke, I swear that I only wished for warmth. Swear, I do, that I only longed for his fingertips.

I called for Teddy, but answer he did not. I found a match, and in a moment of blistered dreams and screaming fate, I struck it. My fingertip was singed in the process, causing me to drop the match on the dry, splintery wood below my feet. The house, it burned; Teddy, he saved me. He dashed through the flames and rescued me as my father saved all the others. All the others, that is, except for my darling mother.

I had felt nothing but fire in my soul after that night when I ripped apart the fabrication of my family; I had never stopped fearing the unknown that plagued the corners of my fragile mind. Teddy and I, our fingertips would no longer touch. My hands, they never would let Teddy go, however. When he would leave, I'd scream. When the dark caressed my cheek and Teddy did not hold my hand, I'd cry.

When I found him dead, so pale and cold, I burned. I kicked and screamed and attacked the walls, screeching curses at the boy in the coffin with an empty bottle of pills in his hand. They told me he breathed. I had taken his hands, our fingertips grazing each other as skin touched skin.

He did live, I knew. But how does one live when stuck in a land of the unknown?

Ripred knows that I wish I knew the answer to that question.