In that moment something changes. There is a flicker of her features, like the shadow of a flame dancing over her mouth and brow. The real telltale sign that the blow found purchase, however, is the way those cold amber eyes suddenly burst into flame.

     Everything began to unravel the night he turned up on her windowsill, perching like he always did, like a Murkrow, like a bad omen. Oh, except it really had been him at first: his eyes, so soft, his words, apologetic, his name for her on his lips with that little stutter few people ever heard.

          C-cat, please…

     After so many weeks of silence, hearing him utter it had come with the relief of cold water on a fresh burn.

     Of course she hadn’t allowed it to stop there. He came to her to denounce the man he had once been — and though she told him ( and herself ) otherwise, she gave him only accusation in return.

     “ You ain’t been actin’ like my boy, so I’m gonna tell you this like I’d tell anybody else. You hurt my kin again, and I will come for you. No matter who you are. ”

     In truth, she was terrified. People who hurt the people they’re supposed to love never really change.

   Do they?

     Plumeria will never forget the moment his sky-blue eyes turned to ice. The sudden curl of his lip, the stiffening of his posture. It was as though something broke between them in that moment … or broke in him, perhaps. No … in her, too.

     Miss Akana, he’d called her. It was as bad as, it was worse than the first time he called her Melia, sneering and spitting her name at her like acid — so much worse, now, for all the times she’d heard him say it with tenderness.

     Now she stands before the man who lived in her lover’s body. It was all she could do not to think too much of a Parasect, a shambling corpse with a foreign organism in control of its nerves and impulses. Setting her jaw, she meets his eye and wills her features not to soften. The sky was that colour the first day they went flying, the day he began to teach her to fly.

   “ Don’t you speak me like you ain’t here. ” The warning rattle of a scorpion.

     He smirks back at her. She loves that smirk. It broadens, taking on a cruel cant that never touches warm azure eyes gone cold as ice. Instead of heeding her warning, he draws nearer still. Of course he does.

     “ I can smell the lyin’ on you, ” she spits, her expression and posture both iron-wrought. “ You tryna scare me ‘cause you the one who’s afraid. ” Suddenly her throat is closing up and she swallows, fighting the wave of dizziness that comes on.

     “ You don’t gotta be afraid, Hyde. ”

     Finally, laughter. He’s not afraid. He’s never been less afraid, because now he sees her for everything she really is. Liar. Traitor.

     Then the words come. They come like rope slipped around her throat and wrists and abdomen, between her lips, between her legs, and they bind her in the same way. They come with such gravity that for the very first time, hope falters. They come in response to her final assertion ( she sounds so sure for someone who is pleading ):

   “ You wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t afraid. ”