Chapter Text
Have you ever been stranded?
Lost. Alone where you shouldn’t be. Isolated in a place all too present to seem real, terrifying in it’s possibility, devastating in consequence.
It didn’t start out that way. It didn’t end that way either. Two souls, converged yet grown together. The same, yet separate. So intertwined as to only gain a Seam when outside forces made it so. Even then, they never left each other. They never could, not for themselves.
Lochne and Malingen could feel each other the way timefall denies the choice of life. Wholly. Ineffably. Distance was of no consequence. Memories made little impact, and neither did their differences. They flowed like water, one into the other, and they were better for it. Neither could live without the other. To do so would be to lose themselves.
And yet, they’d had to. Another soul, borne of their own making, and loved as equally by both. The only factor they hadn’t counted on- a bridge. The accident. The death of two, yet both remained, leaving the third to drown.
Lochne had never felt alone before that day. First her husband, then her other half, ripping her apart, leaving her bleeding from the inside out. Malingen, desperately clinging, tethered to another soul yet not to the one she was born with. The kind of love that feels like barbed wire, reminding her of exactly what she’d lost.
Stranded. One simple call away across a rift of their own design, the first difference they’d ever had that the other couldn’t understand.
Neither wanted to live. Not really. Not for themselves- not when their own souls felt like the aftermath of countless voidouts. But Lochne did, for her memories. Malingen, for their child, and for the future.
It’s not until the baby cries itself to darkness that Malingen begins to realize that she’s connected too- and that she’s her child’s personal Seam, preventing the same wholeness she yearns for with every fiber of her shattered being.
So she waits. Waits for Sam to come, and goes to him. She sets her baby free, and hopes she’ll make it back to Lochne before she follows.
She does, eventually. She follows. Digs her toes into the sand, and looks back. Reaches out to brush her sister’s tears away, seeing with the same eyes, speaking with the same lips. The last wisps of wholeness, years of blood and tears, of memories and dreams. The connection fades and Malingen goes with it with a soft smile and a promise.
I’ll see you on the Beach.
Lochne breaks. She shatters for the second time, but she’s not alone. Not anymore. Malingen’s sacrifice is worth living for and her death is a beacon, a home no one else could ever understand. She leaves Lochne behind with hope and family, yet still with rescue in the distance, and as the last of her sister dips below the water, Lochne finds herself accepting all of it with more of her heart than she’s ever had before.