Strength

Participants:

sf_kara_icon.gif sf_yi-min2_icon.gif sf_yi-shan_icon.gif

Scene Title Strength
Synopsis Kara and Yi-Min's life together comes under attack.
Date March 15, 2021

Kara and Yi-Min's Apartment

Brooklyn


There's only one cure for stress, and that's time off from it. With that in mind, Kara's convinced Yi-Min away from the store for an afternoon. Even though they couldn't find coverage in their usual part-timer, Yi-Shan had offered to stop by and reopen after he finished errands of his own.

Which left them, relatively guilt-free, to enjoy an afternoon on their own, away from work, away from the world.

In the light streaming in from outside, the plants in the process of repotting in the small garden room look full of life— just as ready for spring as everyone else. Kara comes back from the kitchen with a bowl of fruit to be set between them. "We gotta find a better hobby," she confides as she comes to sit cross-legged on the ground again, dirt-smudged khakis no worse for wear than when they started this adventure.

"I don't know what I was thinking— Yeah, Min, let's shut down the flower shop and spend a relaxing afternoon doing…" She breaks off into a chuckle, popping a tiny slice of strawberry into her mouth. Her hands, at least, are clean. "Honestly, something pretty comparable." Chewing, her grin makes its way through despite that, nose scrunching.

"I love you. Thanks for entertaining me anyway." Kara leans forward to peck Yi-Min with a kiss before settling back into her cross-legged sit.

"Well, the difference is that one instance of this is work."

In the meantime, Yi-Min has been carefully pruning down the twisted, fleshy-looking roots of a daylily in preparation for its transference to the empty pot sitting beside her. It takes her several moments for her to look away from this work towards Kara and the fruit bowl, but she does so with a lingering smile.

"This is simply time spent with someone whom I love. The kind of time I love best, so do not be a silly melon. Give me a strawberry, would you?" Pop it between her waiting lips, she visibly means, seeing as how her hands are both gloved and caked in dirt.

"Shǎ guā," Kara teases in reply to being called a silly melon, her pronunciation— for once— perfect. Her eyes soften, her smile warmer than the sun coming through the glass as she holds up the bowl and passes half a strawberry to Yi-Min. She tsks afterward. "These are so small, I honestly should have picked something else instead… it's what I get for grabbing something that's out of season."

But, they taste sweet all the same, and that's the important measure.

She settles back into her sit, turning over a thought in her mind. Her eyes half-lid as she looks at the roots of the lily in Yi-Min's hand. "I've been thinking," Kara admits carefully. "About going back full-time somewhere. Anywhere they'll have me at this point; something not in security. Take the rest of my settlement and spend it on…"

On them is clear, but just how doesn't make itself apparent until she lifts her eyes back to Yi-Min. "Well, I was looking at how much it costs to have an event at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. O-or if not there, then the Library, or if not there then…" She lets out a self-conscious chuckle. "Then, maybe we just go to the courthouse— or we fly to Vegas and elope."

What she's getting after finally revealed, her smile fades, her confidence in the topic wavering. They've never been able to decide on these types of things. Something has always gotten in the way, between price, date, uncertainty regarding invitees, managing the shop… planning has just always fallen through. But now, that all feels inconsequential.

"I just… I love you, and I want to celebrate you," Kara defends her urgency. "Celebrate us in the way we deserve to be. With everything that's been going on, the last thing I want you thinking … is that I'm ever going anywhere. No matter what, no matter how weird or frightening, that I'm there for you. And that you deserve to be cherished." She pops another bite of fruit into her own mouth to try and break up the seriousness of the moment, though it's hardly casual now. "So we should just— do it."

As Kara talks, Yi-Min's pruning shears gradually move more and more slowly in her grip. At last, they cease in motion altogether after a final, lone snip— and then she sets them aside, out of her hands and out of her mind.

These are followed with categorical precision by the half-readied lily in her possession, then the very gardening gloves she is wearing. She doffs these the most slowly of all, slipping them off one by one, but she isn't even paying attention to the dirt that sloughs off them in small clods as she does.

Instead, all of Yi-Min's attention is focused on digesting the content of the words being spoken. A slow sparkle shows through in her eyes, subtle but every bit as warm as the emotion in Kara's expression: much of it appears a direct response to witnessing her partner's vacillating levels of confidence. She reaches a now-bare hand out for one of Kara's own.

"What can I say to all of this, Kara? Really. Only a thousand times 'yes,' that is what. With everything that has been happening, I have… been learning that all we have for certain are the things that we ourselves make. Stop it with the 'me' business; there is only 'us'— otherwise, you have never been more correct. Let’s just do it."

Kara's heart still won't stop pounding. She swears it even skips a beat. She lets out an incredulous, grateful breath of laughter, her flickered smile returning in intensity. "God, this feels like proposing all over again," she admits at her own expense, unable to take her eyes or her smile off of Yi-Min. "I can't believe— okay. Yes. Yes. We're really doing this."

After sitting there for a moment near-dumbly, she sets aside the bowl of fruit to reach for her fiancée, embracing her with all the earnestness she wears on her face. Her head rests against Yi-Min's in this moment that feels like it could last forever.

But it doesn't.

Kara is the first to let go when her phone sounds in her pocket. She means to just silence it, but after seeing who it is, she swipes accept on the call after all. "Hey," she greets a little breathlessly. "What's—?"

The light in her eyes shifts, happiness giving way to something else. "Y-yeah, hold on," she tells the person on the other end. She lowers the phone from her ear, and when the screen winks back on, she taps the speakerphone option.

"Ah…" The speaker cuts off with a cough.

"Ah-Min?"

It's Yi-Shan. He sounds… unwell. With nearly the same strain to him as when he showed up on their doorstep a year ago, injured owing to the secret truth behind his employment with the Linderman Group.

If not exactly the same kind of thin voice.

On hearing the identity and quality of the voice in question, all the accumulated warmth drains out of Yi-Min's demeanor. Every last bit of it, and all at once.

Yi-Min practically snatches the phone out of Kara's grasp, only to stare down at the object cradled between both of her own hands as though it had suddenly transformed into something completely alien.

"Ah-Shan? What is it? What's wrong?"

"I need you," he states unequivocally. "Don't go to the shop. There… «There was a bad handoff. Transfer to a Linderman mule… he was followed. Confusion. Who opened fire first, I don't know.»"

He says he doesn't, but something in his voice says he has his suspicions. Kara follows little of it save for the word Linderman given so much of this is outside the lexicon she normally uses.

"I'm halfway to you, but I…" Yi-Shan sighs for a moment in frustration. "I'm in a lot off Sackett and Court."

"Stay there," Kara says firmly. She looks to Yi-Min for only a moment before beginning to push herself to her feet, chores, delicacies, and pleasant things all equally pushed aside in favor of reacting. "We're leaving now." Coming to her feet, she reaches down to help her partner up, her grip strong and sure. "Come on."

Yi-Min doesn't need any more urging than what she had just heard. The same chill has now driven the feeling from her limbs, but still she places her hands into Kara's, using them to draw herself up with a sort of numb forcefulness.

In the brightness of the sunlit day, a pall of darkness seems to hover around her slim shoulders. Only her dark eyes blaze all the more intently— a lone, hooded focal point of piercing adrenaline.

"Hold on," she finishes for Kara, pushing the phone back into her partner's hand in nearly the same movement.

"We are coming for you."


The spring warmth in the air would be pleasant if not for the chill in Yi-Min's heart as she and Kara both sprint down the sidewalk in light jackets. Time was of the essence, so the few blocks they need to cross, they do so on foot. Occasionally, Kara looks to her partner.

She'd kept a scrutinous eye on her while they gathered themselves into shoes and coats. Nothing shook out of place, no need arose to take her by her shoulders to tell her to breathe. The only knife flying through the air, so to speak, was Yi-Min herself.

The pedestrian-only zones they cross over help them find their way without many impediments. The lot Yi-Shan mentioned, though, is harder to find when they come upon the intersection. It takes heading slightly down the sidewalk past it to see a parking lot open up for an apartment building under extensive construction. The gate at the mouth of the drive of it is open, and Kara heads for it without any doubt in her mind.

They're rewarded for their decisiveness. Around the corner of the building on the right of the driveway entrance to this parking lot enclosed off by the surrounding buildings in the apartment complex, someone sits slumped with his back against the bars of a ground-floor balcony.

Yi-Shan, eyes closed, a bloodstained hand pressed to his chest.

In his other hand, a gun.

Yi-Shan slowly opens his eyes at the sound of movement, shakily raising his handgun up at Kara and Yi-Min until his bleary eyes focus on them and he slowly lowers it. “You made it,” he gasps, resting his gun in his lap. Yi-Min can hear the wheezing, wet quality of his breathing from here.

“Always the—punctual one, Ah-Min,” Yi-Shan rasps.

One of the blurry shapes enlarges rapidly in Yi-Shan's vision, filling one side of it as Yi-Min arrives on the spot and crouches down before her fallen twin.

"What happened, Ah-Shan?" she practically demands of him, her voice shaking with the stress of a hundred emotions at once. From just above him, she reaches to cup at his cheek with the long, trembling fingertips of one hand, her dark eyes scanning him over from bottom to top in a frantic assessment of his state.

"Kara, call for help."

This is bad. Kara knows that the moment she sees him. She hesitates, lips parting to protest for a moment— the last time Yi-Shan had shown up injured, it had been to their home, away from the eyes of others. Whatever had happened here, she suspects it's the result of something similarly illicit.

But as bad as before was, this is worse. She looks to Yi-Min and keeps her distance for now, pulling her phone from her pocket to place the call. Her fingers fumble clumsily over the screen. There's hardly any signal. She looks up at the empty apartment buildings surrounding them, to the small crane parked hidden in the corner from street-view.

She waits while the phone dials. It rings, and rings.

"Come on," Kara whispers to the phone.

“Feds,” Yi-Shan gasps, looking into his sister’s eyes. “They tailed our Linderman contact,” he says with a bit of breathlessness. In the same moment he moves his hand away from the gunshot wound to his chest, his hand is slick with blood, clothes soaked dark through. “Someone—fired a shot, everyone started shooting.”

Yi-Shan’s grip on the handgun in his lap tightens. This close up Yi-Min can see he is trembling. Dark eyes fix on her, and Yi-Shan says to her, “No monsters.” She knows what he means. Not those kinds of monsters.

Yi-Min listens desperately, soaking in the few words of explanation her brother is capable of offering, but at the same time she finds herself barely listening. Even as he moves his hand in pain, she is frantically casting about for a way to prevent his physical condition from deteriorating further as they wait for help.

"Is anyone still after you?" she follows up raggedly, seeing no recourse but to rip a long stretch of cloth off from the bottom of her blouse. This she does as she re-hones in on Yi-Shan's face for but a few seconds more, intent on keeping pressure on the terrible wound in his chest.

That much, at least, she knows to do. But she is no doctor.

And, Kara… "Kara?" Yi-Min’s voice lilts upwards, beseeching. Why is there no phone conversation to be heard?

It takes on average 25 seconds for a 911 call to be answered. On days with high call volume, it could be longer.

But the busy tone that emits from Kara's phone as she pulls it away from her ear is entirely unexpected, shock blinking her eyes open as she looks down at the unbelievable sight on the screen. She finally shakes her head and redials when Yi-Min says her name with that tone of panic. It begins ringing all over again.

"It's okay," she says soothingly, looking down as Yi-Min tries to dress her brother's wounds. "It's okay, Min."

The sound of shouting from the street they entered from indicates it might not be, though. Kara's head turns at the shout in Taiwanese, he went this way!

But something still feels wrong to her. She shoves the phone dialing 911 in her pocket and begins to crouch, an arm working around Yi-Shan's back to begin to hoist him. "Come on," Kara urges, more terse than afraid. Her grip becomes more insistent. "We shouldn't stay here. We've got to go."

Yi-Shan groans in pain when he’s lifted. Kara feels the warmth of blood on her forearm and hand from his back. The rounds went straight through him. Blood has turned Yi-Shan’s teeth pink and he looks with bleary eyes at his sister, then toward the sound of shouting.

Go,” Yi-Shan says, fruitlessly trying to push himself away from Kara and failing for all her strength. “Just—leave me. I’m just—I’ll slow you down. Please. Just go.” Yi-Shan looks up at Yi-Min, wordlessly begging with weary eyes.

Don’t make me watch you die.

"You're a damn fool if you think I'm leaving you behind!" The outburst, born from pure desperation, flies from Yi-Min like a dart of venom. What is more, Kara's attempts to soothe her only succeed to incite her further.

There is nothing in the world that could force her away from the side of her xiao di, her baby brother. Her twin. Half her heart and soul.

Sounds subside into a low, dull roar in her ears even as outwardly, she appears to come to an unmovable decision. Without movement elsewhere in her limbs, her small fists ball at her sides, and she lifts a calmly embittered gaze up to her fiancée. The other half. "Kara, take Yi-Shan. Get him out of here somehow; I do not care how. I will catch up, and I will hear no argument. Go."

Kara needs no encouragement to continue to hoist Yi-Shan to his feet almost against his will. She finds some small relief in the fact the bullet went all the way through — if they can stop the bleeding, they don't have to worry about fishing the bullet out of him before it festers in his skin. She struggles for a moment to pull him to his feet, and once meeting success, turns to Yi-Min.

Only to be told to go.

The light leaves her eyes, fear taking hold. "N-n—" She feels as though her strength might give out at the thought of Yi-Min facing whoever it is coming this way. "Min, please," Kara begs. Even knowing her partner has a weapon in the form of her body and mind, she can't accept this act of selflessness.

Or so she thinks, anyway. She looks off where they came with a flicker of anguish on her face, mental math being calculated. "I expect to see you right behind us," she does, in fact, argue. "Don't make me come back for you." And then she turns, Yi-Shan supported with her, and heads for a walkway between two of the apartment buildings. It's gated with a locked door— but only for those trying to enter.

The process of that escape is slow.

A rattle of chainlink gating from the entrance Yi-Min and Kara had come from reveal three men with guns. They're not strangers— they're people in Yi-Min's employ, who work both sides of her flower business. They look furious. One of them is bleeding from the arm, in far better shape than Yi-Shan is overall.

"«You bitch,»" one of the men yells at Yi-Min, gesturing violently with his gun. His finger remains over the trigger, pointed her direction. "«You set us up! You and your Linderman dog brother!»" It's then he looks over her shoulder, sees Kara and Yi-Shan shuffling away. "«Hey, hey— he's here after all!»" The call to the two with him sees one of them begin walking forward, ready to walk around Yi-Min to line up a shot on the other two.

"«I did no such thing,»" Yi-Min snaps flatly in response, bewilderment and anger rife in her voice. As she straightens to face the trio of assailants closing in, she has to restrain herself from looking back to Kara and Yi-Shan, as the last thing she wishes is to draw more attention to them.

No, she simply has to trust that Kara has their retreat in hand. "«Chun-Han, please. Some mistake has been made. Please stop this at once—»" Her endeavor to verbally beseech the man who had addressed her is genuine, but it also ends the split second she sees his focus shift off of her.

Oh no.

There is little time for her to think, even with a vague form of intent already ingrained in her mind, and so she merely acts. With an outcry, Yi-Min sweeps her palms upwards as though in a grandiose invocation of some unseen god, intent on causing the guns of all three men to go soaring well above their heads.

"I said stop!"

And up the guns go, levitating in the air over the men's heads with all the delicate harmlessness of a mobile above a child's crib. At once, all three men enter various states of confusion, the one having broken off from the other two stopping short with his eyes widening. Notes of bewilderment leave them in staggers, Chun-Han ultimately being the one that turns and attributes the fantastic act to Yi-Min.

Horror enters his eyes— but then they harden. He reaches behind him, pulling a long knife out of hiding. The man directly beside him bends over long enough to pull one out of the inside of his boot.

"«I always knew…»" Chun-Han snarls. "«there was something wrong with you.»"

He's never, not once, given any indication to that in the past, and yet he sounds so cold and certain now. The blade of his knife catches the light as he dares a step forward, edge of it pointed out in a way that advertises his intent to do harm if his expression didn't somehow already give that away.

A short distance away, Yi-Shan digs his heels in. He feels Kara’s momentum pull at him, then slack as he turns to look back in the direction of Yi-Min, at the shouting, at what he can see beyond her. Guns, floating free in the air. Just like the orchid.

Yi-Shan’s lips part, a breathless whisper, something said to himself and the wind alone. He feels Kara’s hand around his arm, her urgency, her struggle—same as his. He remembers the orchid: beautiful, delicate, and then crushed.

Ah-Min,” he whispers again. Louder this time.

Alas, Yi-Min does not hear her brother, being too caught up in the battle that she herself had instigated. Despair flares in her heart from hearing Chun-Han's words, a far more effective weapon against her psyche than the knives could ever be.

It's anguish that only adds fuel to an already-roaring pyre. All three of the limply-orbiting guns fluidly pivot in midair as one, coming to point straight downwards at Chun-Han, the foremost in the squad of knife-wielders.

"«That may be so,»" the florist acknowledges in an irate, ragged murmur that manages to carry across the lot. "«But not as much as will be wrong with you in a minute.>"

That observation over, Yi-Min dips suddenly down into the deepness of her own mind for all of the understanding she had impetuously accrued regarding her ability over the past short weeks, finally sending the twin spectral hands of her telekinesis winging forth from out of her tiny form once more—

—to pull each and every one of the airborne triggers on Chun-Han at once. She does not stop after one round, either, but stands there miming the action of rapidfire pulling triggers with her actual empty hands like a person that had gone completely mad. All the while, the angled thunder of the bulletstorm continues from above as Yi-Min's mouth opens in a high, bloodcurdling yell that is utterly lost under the pandemonium.

The thin, precise tendrils of her focus are thin— and precise. Steady, right where they need to be. Her anger pours itself into her actions, and Chun-Han's body jolts in response to the report of the guns firing at once. The jerk of the weapons as they snap back from having been fired after the first training of them sends that careful aim off on the second fire.

Her yell fills the space between reports of the guns. She snakes her grip better around them again for the third time, shooting Chun-Han as well as the man standing next to him. She tightens her control on the guns and fires again.

When Yi-Min exerts that careful dexterity and strength both in her ability, it brings a shift in her nearby loved ones. Kara's eyes widen in the beginnings of horror. Yi-Shan…

Yi-Shan suddenly finds he's able to stand upright without issue. The emotion in his expression slips away. He ceases to fight Kara's attempts to drag him— somewhat. No longer is he pulled by the gravity of what Yi-Min does toward his sister.

Instead, he finds himself turning back to Kara, his eyes the color of molten gold.

Instead, Yi-Shan’s hand finds its way around Kara’s throat.

The adjustment is sudden and violent. Yi-Shan’s right hand lashes out like a striking viper, clamping down on the front of Kara’s throat with a fingertip pinch. Her response is a hoarse gasp through a clenched windpipe. Yi-Shan lifts her up off of the ground with one arm. The pain is agonizing, tears well up in her eyes and her legs kick wildly in the air, her hands wind around Yi-Shan’s wrist.

It is not the gasp or the hoarse cry for help that Yi-Min hears, but rather the muffled, meaty snap that draws her attention to her brother and her lover. She is able to see, just in time, Kara’s limbs go limp at once as her head lolls to the side like the blossom of an orchid with a broken stem. Yi-Shan blinks his attention from Kara’s lifeless body to Yi-Min, gold eyes burning bright behind loose tresses of dark hair.

He drops Kara to the ground, and she is so much dead weight.

Breathing wildly from the exertion of what she had just accomplished, Yi-Min turns her concentration to the other side of the makeshift arena with a jolt.

All three guns drop from the air haphazardly, clattering and skidding across the ground like so many discarded children's toys. Yi-Min is paying them no more heed whatsoever, her mouth gone agape as she tries vainly to process what it is she is seeing.

The longer she looks, the less it is that she comprehends.

"…Wh-what?" is about all Yi-Min verbally manages, the blood draining out of her visage. Once her gaze finds the pallor of her dead lover’s face and fixates on it, she finds it impossible to tear it away, even behind the alien sight of whatever is possessing her brother. "Namo Guan Yin, no…. Kara???"

Kara doesn't move. Kara doesn't answer.

In contrast the men Yi-Min had opened fire upon have taken flight, dragging the surely mortally-wounded Chun-Han with them. Their fear of Yi-Min's capability is such that they won't leave him to whatever cruel fate she may intend for him. The nature of her distraction almost doesn't register to them— the only thing mattering just that she's no longer firing.

They scurry away.

Kara's crumpled, unseeing form lays perfectly still, the only blood on her murderer's hands his own.

Yi-Shan does not look away from his sister. But it is not her brother looking back at her. It is just a pair of violently glowing gold eyes set in her brother’s sockets. All the mirth is gone from his lips, all the love is gone in his eyes. They would remind the glassy eyes of a corpse were it not for the fact that he pivots and starts to advance on Yi-Min.

Yi-Shan’s steps are slow and purposeful, heavy as if though he were saddled under a great burden. He moves with simple, mechanical fluidity. No emotion, no heat, no life; Robotic precision.

Conviction fades from Yi-Min's eyes as befuddled horror takes up residence in its place, and she stumbles back one step— desperately seeking out any trace of her brother in those merciless gold eyes and finding none.

Something is screaming up and down at her that everything about this situation is impossibly wrong, but despite the shock of tension raising every hair on her neck, she can't bring herself to do anything other than stand there rooted to the spot.

"Yi-Shan, what the fuck did you do??" Yi-Min demands of him— no, demands of the air at large, all her confusion pouring into her shaking voice.

Yi-Shan’s answer comes in the form of a blow to the side of Yi-Min’s head. Her vision blots for a moment from the force of the blow and it sends her staggering and then tumbling down onto her knees. By the time she’s thought to look up at her brother, Yi-Shan has wound up his right leg and kicks her so hard in the abdomen that it knocks her across the parking lot.

Yi-Min bounces like a stone thrown across the surface of the pond, landing some fifteen feet from Yi-Shan. He follows her moment with unblinking gold eyes and resumes his relentless approach. He does not answer her, does not even so much as blink. It’s like he’s become nothing more than a machine.

"Ah— Shan—," Yi-Min tries to scream, but it comes out only as a tortured croak after she untwists her limbs enough to force herself up into an almost-kneel. The second impact makes her vision swim for longer than the first: when she'd landed, she'd struck the back of her skull at an angle on the parking lot floor, and she feels the wetness of blood pooling in her hair.

When she dizzily lifts her chin back up, reevaluating the status of the scene before her, she finds herself doing so through a haze of dazzling stars. Through it, she can barely make out the jerkily-blurring advance of her beloved brother.

Not her brother.

“Please…” Yi-Min whispers, into the void.

Yi-Shan does not relent.

He is on Yi-Min faster than she expects, dropping to a knee beside her with both hands quickly finding their way around her neck. This close she can make out the features of his face, his dark hair hanging in front of burning gold eyes. She feels her wind-pipe restrict, feels his thumbs pressing against her trachea.

He says nothing. There is nothing in his eyes.

She remembers him as a child, round-cheeked and stubborn. Selfish. Bratty.

Scared of thunder.

He would hold Yi-Min until the storms passed.

Now—

Now…

Wheezing, unable to form words from the hands around her throat, Yi-Min kicks and claws to no avail. Yi-Shan had always been larger and stronger than she— when they would play-fight as children, he always had to take care not to accidentally hurt her.

Summoning the last of her strength, Yi-Min weakly flips a wrist out from under her as though reaching for something invisible. Reacting to her panic, the nearest of the dropped guns sails into her hand in a graceless arc from across the parking lot: a dark hound, answering the call of its master. She instantly feels the weight of it, in her hand and in her heart, in lieu of being able to see it. She feels the cold barrel press up into Yi-Shan's ribs, and then

her eyes dimming with darkness and tears

she fires.

A jolt of a moment later, the grip around her throat eases. With the clearing of her sight, she can better see how the golden overriding of her brother's everything is fading from his eyes quickly. It drains away as fast as his life does. She thinks— maybe— she might see a flicker of final attentiveness to his gaze before he slips away from her again, this time for good.

He slumps over across her abdomen, landing with a dull thud while blood weeps from his chest onto her.

The air is oddly silent now that the last of the gunshots have gone off. No sirens rouse themselves in the distance to come for this scene. The city is so distant and far a thing from this walled-off lot that Yi-Min might as well be in another world, one she shares with too many still bodies.

One belonging to the man who'd called her a freak.

One that belonged to her fiancée, her heart.

And now, one that belonged to…

Yi-Min continues holding Yi-Shan to herself long after he is gone, cradling his head in her blood-soaked arms— as if she might continue to defer the call of reality forever if only she does not let him go. It's an untold length of time before she destroys the deathlike silence herself, the last of any false comforts remaining to her, to let out a wail of pure, keening anguish.

There is no telling how much time in total Yi-Min loses this way: her slim frame wracked by convulsive sorrow, wishing only that the emptiness of the encroaching dark might come to swallow her up, too.

And all the while, like a temporary sentinel even beyond the bounds of death, the glassy stare of Kara's corpse continues to keep its own kind of frozen, hollow vigil over them both.

After all, with all said and done… what was any of this but time spent with someone whom she loved?


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