(no subject)

[artemiodes]

[Dated to August 1st]

Only when she awakes does she remember.

Camilla had slept until nearly noon, caught for a little longer in the torpor of the content. She had fallen into a dream at some point in the morning's early hours, strange as it was comforting. Behind her eyes, a life she would not have recognized even the night before played out, one in which she had never been alone, in which every memory of her life had turned from I to we. She pictures herself hand-in-hand with a boy whose face is a twin to her own, or tented under blankets with their foreheads pressed together, or dashing about on a hundred adventures both fantastical and mundane.

When the sun streaming through her window finally does pull her into wakefulness, she enters the waking world with a smile on her lips that disappears a moment later as the seeming comfort of her thoughts turns to something darker.

Charles.

Her memories return to her so abruptly that she speaks the name into her silent room. Oh god, oh god, what have I done? She had forgotten him - her other half, her soul, her echo. Of course, word had gotten around over the last few weeks that people were mysteriously losing their memories, but she had never for a moment imagined that she had been so afflicted. Instead she had spent her month free, joyful, unburdened. She had been happy. The waves of loss and loneliness that had subsided over the year-or-more on the island come roaring back, mixed with unfamiliar emotions of guilt and failure.

All at once she desperately needs fresh air, and so Camilla stumbles out of the boarding house still in the soft t-shirt and cut-off sweatpants she had slept in. On the doorstep her legs give way and she falls to her knees. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she wants to say, and I miss you, and why aren't you here? But when she opens her mouth to speak the words, she only retches bile.

Comments

[plague_saint]

Kivrin hasn't exactly gone out of her way to look for the girl who shares her face--it still makes her nervous and unsettled in a way other things on the island don't. But when she sees her looking so upset, tearful and hunched over in front of the big house, it's just not in Kivrin to walk away.

"What's wrong?" she asks, coming closer, because are you all right? is a stupid question when someone's being ill and miserable.

[artemiodes]

When Camilla looks up to find Kivrin standing over her, she almost thinks that she will be sick again - but instead, she begins to laugh. It's a high-pitched, unsteady sound, brought on by irony in the face of too much emotion. Not so long ago she had stood over this girl, horrified that someone might share her face, and now it turns out that she had a twin beside her for her entire life.

"His eyes aren't like yours," she says finally, not bothering to explain the thought process that brought her to that statement.

[plague_saint]

No, but Camilla's are. "Whose eyes?" Kivrin asks, and there's a part of her that thinks she ought not even try to make sense of this situation.

[artemiodes]

"My brother's." She grins without joy or pleasure. "My twin. I guess he's your twin, too." This thought somehow unsettles Camilla, and her face twists as though in pain. Charles is hers, wherever he might be. She will not share him with anyone else.

[plague_saint]

"I didn't know you had a twin," Kivrin says, which is probably obvious; it's not as if she and Camilla had done a lot of sharing life stories while staring in panic-stricken awe at each other's face.