near or far

Enzo

Enzo's laugh is a boisterous thing, smoky like something you'd hear in the back of a bar that you can't access because of a velvet rope. "You're going to traumatize the poor thing when they find out it's a one-night stand by virtue of mortality!" Not that he'd be around to feel guilty about it, so that isn't a no. "People don't often get to check things off their bucket list after the bucket is kicked, so why not use the dad-benefits?" His vampiric grin makes it clear Remi's discomfort would only be a bonus in this situation.

As she flops forward he rubs her back with his free hand as if it will help the words flow, tracing the curve of her scapula and cresting over the edge of her dress where it hides the small bumps of her vertebra from his palm. Or simply because he wants to touch her as much as he can before he goes.

"I mean, tough love moment? Yeah, duh." His hand sweeps her hair out of the way of her nape to gently massage behind her ears. "If he isn't treating you right, then you have to swallow down those feelings because people fuck up the most in the beginning." Before years of closeness, loyalty, facing hard times side-by-side. The early days are where it's make or break. "There's starting off on the wrong foot, and there's starting off on a broken foot sister mine." Leaning closer, he thunks his forehead onto her bare shoulder. "And if you're going to settle down like an old maid, then you deserve the world Flora. Grand gestures, rocks at your window and all." And if he has to swallow his bitterness that he can't be here to help her vet these assholes, well, she can't see it. The world should have been theirs, and now he has to hear secondhand stories of some half-rate giving her crumbs instead.

I'll tell a guy I like him but only if I'm drunk
I might take shots real fast, but I take love real slow

i could be the reason you can't sleep at night

"Traumatized?" Clucking under her tongue, the Doubletake offers her twin a smile that's as wry as it is shiny with mischief. "You were a prize when you were alive, and now that you're dead? You're like some weird sex dream come true." Was it weird to talk about her twin in such a way? Possibly, but the relationship between twins was a closeness not readily understood by the outside world.

Closing her eyes, the pain that accompanies the tears feels exhausting. It's too-warm and weighty such that there's little else Flora can do but give in to her twin's massaging fingers with a weary sigh. She'd born the sadness of losing her twin for so long that to allow anything else to try and match that sort of pain just makes her want to squirm and run. "I always hated when you were right." The queen murmurs into the hollow darkness that resist between their bodies. Wanting to perhaps disappear into it—or to eliminate it altogether—Flora tries to ball herself up all the more against Enzo's chest.

"I wish I could just have you, instead." She whispers, unfairly. "There has to be a way." And in just 4 more levels and a thousand more threads, maybe there would be.

Enzo

Enzo gags dramatically, nose wrinkling and smearing the freckles on his face like a painting left out in the rain. “Eugh! Okay firm rule, nobody with corpse kinks. Someone can want me for only my body but not - like - only my body.” This is supposed to be about striking an item off his bucket list, not some creepy stranger’s.

Yet his dreams - cut short or otherwise - mean nothing when held against her active hurt. It’s easy to drop and forget, expression smoothing and focus pointing back to true north.

They have an entire beach to themselves and yet they huddle together like blind pups, breathing each other’s air. “Hey, no past tense,” he whispers, and in the dark of their tangled forms it’s okay for Enzo to sound fragile too. Just for a moment - just until she needs him to be a rock again, and he brings her to his chest to stare unseeing past her head. “Think any of the gods are old enough to accept human sacrifices to balance the scales?” It’s a morbid joke at best, but Enzo’s arms tighten just enough to betray him. He wouldn’t ask that of his twin, never. But he would also sacrifice any number of unknown souls to be back by her side. “We have this for now. It’s better.” It is. It has to be.

I'll tell a guy I like him but only if I'm drunk
I might take shots real fast, but I take love real slow

i could be the reason you can't sleep at night

"Fine fiiiiiiiine." Flora huffs before teasingly muttering something about beggars and choosers under her breath before brushing her nose lovingly against Enzo's.

Offering her twin a crumpled but adoring smile, Flora tries to let all the emotions that had risen in the back of her throat like tepid seawater, drain away. He was dead, yes, but he was still here. Who else had the chance to chat shit with their dead twin? Who else could just bring them down for advice basically whenever they wanted? "I think Dygra seems into that. She's the new...er, old? god of the ancients." Flora murmurs before giving her head a little shake. One way or another she'd get Enzo back, even if she had to force her way into Mort's halls to do it. No doubt their dad could pry the door open and Hotaru could provide the distraction needed for Flora to stealth in and snatch his soul away.

Glancing over her shoulder, she could see both parents waving at them, their bodies silhouetted against Torchline's vast skyline. "I wonder what happens if you just...don't go back." The Doubletake wonders, but even as the words leave her lips she's already shifting slightly in order to make it easier for them both to inevitably stand.

Enzo

His teeth imprison a deadly plea from reaching her ears, a dark desire that Mort's perfect halls should have made him forget how to want. Maybe it's being here that makes it come back like a full-color picture intruding into his monochrome, timeless existence. The humanity of this plane, the humanity of her, is a poison he only remembers being addicted to when he's in her arms.

Enzo will go back, and forget, and be mindlessly happy in his promised eternity of bliss - because dead things cannot dream. Dead things cannot hope. So here and now, while his body is corporeal and his mind is flawed, he weeps for wanting.

"I don't want to," he admits like a frantic secret, and his arms like chains drag his sister back down to the sand like a demon clawing an angel from its golden perch. It's a confession that will hang around her neck like a noose, but he is too selfish to spare her the pain. "I don't want to go back. I want to be here, with you, alive." The green of his eyes is unnatural in the vivid light of the sun, wet and starving as they search for hers. "He'll make me go back even if we wait him out. He'll be smiling and understanding and sad, and I'll go with him because we all know I have to." All of them human and hardwired to never anger Mort, to quail at the very notion of it. Something so terribly unnatural it can't even be envisioned.

Enzo's hands come to cradle Flora's face in his palms; perfect and unscarred, the way they'd been on the day he'd died. "Death is like a dream, and there's nothing I could want for. Nothing but you, and I can't reach you." The perfect happiness Mort promises breaks its own logic when the only happiness he's ever had is her, so the desire itself has to be cut out of him to grant him any kind of serenity. "If you ever find a way -" fuck, but what a curse he puts on her, and his love feels monstrous as he kneels in front of her half-risen form, "- I don't want you to hesitate a second taking me from there." To hell with anyone who might tell her he's at peace when he'd trade it all in a heartbeat to have one more try by her side.

Pressing his forehead to hers, Enzo's hands sink into her golden hair like it's a lifeline that will slow the racing of his heart or quell the bile of regret in his throat. He doesn't dare close his eyes. If he memorizes the array of freckles on her collarbone, maybe he'll take enough of her with him this time that he won't feel confused by the hollow feeling in his chest as he wanders sunlit Greatwood roads. "Leave them. Stay with me. I want every second we have left to be for us." Mort, their parents, it doesn't matter. Last time had been for goodbyes, but this time he has more than a fleeting moment and he intends to seize every second. No more tears. No more people. Just Flora and Enzo, as it always should have been.

Standing, Enzo grabs his sister's hands and walks backward toward the ocean with a grin so bright it overshadows the edges of the tearstains on his cheeks. "So let's go swimming, dress and all." She won't tell him no. He knows she won't. He wants to throw her into seafoam and hear the pitch of her shrieking laugh, wants to feel the burn of muscles that have mortal limitations again, wants to memorize these new shapes and angles she's formed in the years that passed in what was a blink to him. 

And when the final grain of sand trickles over in the hourglass, as the doorway opens and his name is called, Enzo presses a kiss to Flora's cheek and says, I love you, forever and always, but it really sounds like until next time.

He leaves his hope behind with her.

- Fin

I'll tell a guy I like him but only if I'm drunk
I might take shots real fast, but I take love real slow