Oneshot Collection

echoes, salt, lemon juice (a lesson in pressing bitterness into wounds): Kam

"It burns you sometimes, doesn't it?" Keefe twists his paper napkin so tightly it rips, shreds of the stained white scattering over his black pants. "The memory, I mean."

He doesn't have to ask what he means. "Like lemon juice. Like saltwater."

Keefe's fingers trace the grainy wood of the restaurant table with difficulty, the surface probably still sticky from the syrup-soaked pancakes he'd finished less than five minutes previously. "Like echoes?"

Tam stays silent. His hands are at his sides: he's never liked the cheap fast food places, preferring the clean-cut elegance of his own kitchen over screaming children and food he can't trust. More than that, it's the effect of it all: the bright lights in his eyes, the under-flavored over-sugared food, the lack of privacy, the smack of chewing gum coupled with the constant thrumming of the kitchen fridge, the tacky orange booth seats that stick to his skin.

And this conversation is too rich for the mediocrity of his surroundings. There's must still be something to be said about nights under the stars in a clearing in the woods, or perhaps a dock in the middle of the ocean, or floating in space, filled with the possibility of nothing and everything all at once. These words don't belong here. But Keefe does—not in a way to call him cheap or tacky, but in a bright, everything-everywhere-all-at-once kind of way. He's everything loud, everything bright, everything overwhelming.

"You need the reminder," Keefe says, resolute, as stuck in his self-righteousness as Tam's fork is to the syrupy table. "It's not over, Tam."

"Can't it be done? Can't it have died with her?" Tam feels the warm scent of unwashed bodies brush his skin. He wasn't made for this.

"You know that you did this to yourself."

And he hates Keefe for saying it. He hates him more than anyone, with an overwhelming catastrophic desperation that makes the entire world fade away, because it's always been that way with him. Keefe is simple and complicated in a terrifying, tell-me-who-i-am-and-i-won't-like-the-answer kind of way.

You know you did this to yourself.

Add that to his list of mistakes. Along with falling in love.

...

Tam might have physical echoes, but Keefe's are just as tangible.

The thing is, it's impossible to measure who has it worse (not that it stops him) when Tam's power is the thing attacking him night after night, while Keefe's mind is the only thing holding him hostage.

He's been there during attacks, of course. The times Tam loses himself in nightmares and his shadows come to life on the walls, shadowflux taking physical form to rake scratches into the mellow blue wallpaper Keefe handpicked for their bedroom, foggy condensation dripping from the ceiling onto the sunny yellow sheets of their bed. Their room is falling apart around them, and Keefe doesn't lie. He doesn't lie anymore.

It's his fault. Tam's.

His fault for choosing to learn shadowflux at all. Umber's journals taught him to weave shadow arrows and knives, rend apart concrete as if it's paper, bring objects crashing down when they're trying to sleep.

It's his fault. But he knows the way it burns. Lemon juice, saltwater, the sting of a frown and the twinge of hate. He knows burning like his own name.

So he knows regret. It calms him somewhat, to know that it was his own fault that he has these nightmares. At least he doesn't have to deal with blaming Tam.

Every day, he sees her: light auburn hair pulled into a bun tight enough to stretch the scars on her face that he'd given her. Right before he ended that light in her cold eyes, the ones that live on in his own face.