When Runi woke up, she was laying in an unfamiliar clearing.
The first thing she noticed was the smell of the flowers around her - they were sweet and calming. It almost reminded her of the candle she had lit in her apartment the other day, but the smell of the flowers couldn't quite be compared to anything else.
Something felt off, too, but all that Runi could focus on was the smell of the flowers. Maybe it was because her face was planted in them. That, in retrospect, made a lot of sense. But Runi found that she didn't really want to get up. She had been in the comfort of her apartment before. Her apartment didn't have a flower field. She was assuming she had been pulled into some random world again, but she didn't really want to think about it - the flowers, for now, were enough to satisfy her curiosity.
After another moment passed, Runi finally mustered the motivation to sit herself up. The rest of the woods were just as picturesque as the flowers she was in the middle of. Taking in a deep breath of refreshing fresh air, Runi hopped up to her feet. She couldn't be the only one here-
Her gaze fell on a woman laying in the flowers.
She could only see the woman's back, but something about the hair that cascaded down it - a light, light brown - in gentle waves was all too familiar. Something about the outfit was, too. The simple, white dress reminded her of a place she hadn't been in for what felt like an eternity, but Runi tried her best to push the thoughts away.
She wasn't looking at someone from Grimmore.
She couldn't be.
She approached the woman with the ease of someone who wasn't as nervous as Runi felt, hesitating when she crouched down beside her. Her back was looking very familiar right now, in a way that Runi didn't like in the slightest.
Runi carefully flipped her over.
Then she promptly stumbled back, tripping over her own two feet and crashing into the flowers behind her. Her eyes were wide and terrified as she stared at the woman who should have been dead. It was Nissam. Cornyx and her had killed Nissam. What was she doing here?
Then came the second wave of terror - could Nissam still control her? Was her death a permanent end to their connection, or was it just a temporary lull in the worst part of her life?
Tears sprung to her eyes. Runi was pale now, and trembling, too. She couldn't stand. She knew she needed to - knew she needed to get up and run away - but all she could think about was how much Nissam was going to punish her for what she had done.
Megara was startled awake. The first thing she noticed was the scent of flowers. Out of place and persistent in its wrongness around her, and then she opened her eyes. With the light of day blinding her from above, her eyelids fluttered, adjusting. When her eyes finally focused, and when the voice before her finally registered, she didn't believe her senses.
Her eyes widened. She wasn't sure if she was breathing and she hadn't the mind to check.
Rory? The question was a shout in her mind that died in her throat.
Rory was begging. Rory hadn't been begging when she died, but here she was, begging not to be hurt. By Megara.
She blinked and sat up. She resisted the urge to stand. Rory had always been taller, but she was on the ground now. Don't hurt me. There were tears pricking the backs of her eyes, she realized, guilty tears. Guilty. I'm guilty. That thought didn't help.
"I..." Her voice refused to cooperate with the flood of words in her mind. Like a dam breaking, they all wanted to pour out at once. Apology after useless apology, spattered with hopeless begging for forgiveness. None of it reached her lips.
Runi didn't notice that her voice sounded wrong. She didn't notice how Nissam faltered in a way that was unbefitting of the woman Nissam had been-was. She was too busy staring at someone who should have been dead, trying to figure out how she was going to survive something like this.
"Please," she repeated, voice cracking and desperate. She stared at Nissam's face for a moment, but quickly looked away. "I-I didn't mean to....I didn't know..."
I didn't mean to....I didn't know... Didn't mean to get involved. Didn't know Megara was a killer. Didn't mean to die. Didn't know Megara would kill her.
She got to her feet. The field. She could focus on that. Flowers, impossibly perfect in their beauty, stretched out to the edge of a forest that appeared somehow comfortable. Safe. This wasn't Megara's world.
She turned away from Rory. Rory's scared face. Rory's trembling body. She turned away as one of the tears escaped, and walked toward the forest, hardly noticing that she didn't have her cane, noticing even less that she didn't need it.
Even before she turned and walked away, Runi was on her feet again and rushing off into the woods. She didn't know where she was going. She didn't even try to think about it.
But then she found herself standing in front of a cabin.
The cabin was cute. If Runi wasn't biting back tears, she would have been grinning at the sight. It could have been creepy and haunted, but all that Runi saw was shelter from Nissam.
She knocked on the door.
"Hello?" she asked.
There was no answer.
Resting her hand on the door, she was surprised to find it unlocked. She quickly slipped inside and closed the door behind her.
Everything about it was romantic.
But Runi didn't even think about that. She was too busy scanning it for some place to hide, or for someone who could help her fend off Nissam. She couldn't do this alone. Cornyx had taught her that.
She ran into the bathroom.
Unsurprisingly, no one was in there. But as Runi walked by the mirror, she skid to a halt: an unfamiliar girl was staring back out at her from a red, tear-ridden face.
Runi raised a hand up.
The girl did the same, her hand lingering over freckles, brown eyes and a pair of glasses that Runi hadn't even realized she was wearing.
"You're me?" she whispered, now notably unfamiliar voice cracking a little. She ran her fingers through red hair that wasn't hers, marveling at how different she looked.
Megara walked directionlessly into the forest. Walked, not ran. She didn't run when she was emotional. She didn't run blindly. Yet another lesson beaten mercilessly into her head.
Her surroundings were idyllic, romantic, even. She could hear the sound of a stream somewhere beyond the brush, and light beamed down through the leaves above, making them glow with beautiful rays of soft, warm sunlight. The grass beath her was practically made for laying down in next to someone and staring up at the branches...
She stopped that line of thought.
Rory was here. Rory was dead, but she was here.
Was she like Jason? Resurrected from death by some hitherto unknown force?
That thought horrified her. Rory, back, alive, afraid. Rory. If Megara hadn't seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn't have thought of Rory as the kind to be afraid like that. She had always been resolute, trusting in herself and in Megara.
But that had gotten her killed. The gods only knew what she was like now.
Megara was broken by her thoughts by a cabin. She saw it out of the corner of her eye at first. She'd walked a rather bent and unsteady path through the woods and now she appeared to have some to its back door. There was a garden, and a path leading through it up to the door. Magara took note of the plants growing there. Flowers, vegetables, fruits, nothing poisonous. Then she was at the door.
This island was strange, idyllic in a way that could only be unnatural, and Megara was distraught. Thus was the logic that led to her opening the door and creeping quietly inside. If anyone did live here, she might as well not telegraph her arrival with unnecessary sound.
Then she took a quiet breath, pushing her glasses up as she rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. She had to be brave. Nissam couldn't hurt her if she didn't know it was her. She didn't look like herself right now. She just looked like...
She wasn't sure who, but it was someone who wasn't her.
She stepped outside of the bathroom.
And immediately froze.
All courage left her in a moment. Her knees went weak, and she stumbled into the doorway - leaning up against it with shaking, pale fingers.
She tried to say something, but all she got out was a strangled sob.
Megara froze. Stared. Of course, of course, she'd run into Rory here. Rory, crying. Alive and crying. The 'alive' part still hadn't processed.
"Rory?" she said. A doppelganger. Rory's double. This could be...it wasn't. Megara knew it wasn't. Rory had been born a twin, her double died when they were twelve. Drowned. This wasn't her. Besides, those glasses were very much Rory's. If anyone else wore something of such a high prescription they'd be nearly as blind as she was without them.
So distracted was Megara by this line of thought that she didn't realize that the voice from her mouth was not her own.
Runi managed a nod. If Nissam thought she was named Rory, she would go with it - it was the only way she could think of getting out of this alive.
But she didn't trust herself enough to speak; as it was, a tiny whimper escaped when she tried to open her mouth. She just kept clinging to the doorway, watching Nissam with a terrified alertness, and trying her very best not to keep crying and acting terrified.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and walked forward, meaning to step closer to Rory, though she didn't know what she'd say once she got there.
That was when she noticed. She walked without pain. This place had been so dreamlike, so unreal already that her mind had skipped over that detail. The cane that she so relied on was gone, and she didn't need it.
That revelation stopped her cold.
Was this a dream? No. She'd been transported to other realities enough times to know the difference. Then why had she been healed?
She looked down at...not her legs. She was many things, this wasn't one of them. Unless she'd somehow lost large chunks of her legs - doubtful, as she was pretty sure she wasn't dead - these weren't hers.
She steadied her breathing. Rory didn't recognize her, then, right?
She blinked, looked Rory over again. What if... She dismissed the thought, not because it was unlikely, but because she couldn't risk being wrong. As far as she was concerned, the girl before her was Rory until proven otherwise.
Runi was still crying and terrified, but she knew that something was off about Nissam. They had known each other for years. Runi had been able to read her expressions and moods as well as she could read her own. It had helped her survive, later on, but it had started from the two of them spending so many hours pouring over long lost artifacts together.
That wasn't Nissam's angry face. That was her confused face. That was the face that she had made when she was almost able to understand the meaning behind an artifact, but couldn't figure out the last piece of the puzzle. And her legs - Nissam never looked down like that. Not now.
She wasn't angry.
She wasn't upset.
This was just how Nissam would have looked before everything that had happened - like she was looking at the Nissam from the past, and not the woman who she had killed with her current best friend's help.
She pushed up the bottom of her glasses again, rubbing away her tears with the palms of her hands like she had tried to do back in the bathroom. Runi wasn't really sure how you were supposed to cry when wearing glasses, but she felt like she was doing something right.
"Nissam?" she croaked out, voice hoarse from crying. "Is...Is everything..."
She faltered.
Was she supposed to tell Nissam who she was? Should she tell Nissam who she was? She still didn't know why she was suddenly someone named Rory-
Wait.
She knew everyone that Nissam knew, and Nissam never knew anyone named Rory. There wasn't time for her to make secret friends and acquaintances. Her mind started to run. She took a hesitant, but more courageous, step out from the bathroom, bridging the little distance that remained between her and Nissam.
She looked like whoever Rory was. So maybe - just maybe - this wasn't Nissam. Maybe she was just someone who looked like Nissam, and Runi had been too busy panicking to analyze. She tilted her head to the side and pursed her lips in a very Runi-esque way, suddenly not that worried about Nissam recognizing her. Because if she was right, Nissam wouldn't be able to.
Because Nissam wouldn't be Nissam.
"You're supposed to be dead," she said. He wasn't there with her, but she imagined Cornyx next to her as she spoke - Cornyx, who wouldn't have hesitated to hurt Nissam if it turned out Runi was all wrong about this. It gave her a boost of confidence she really needed. "Cornyx and I killed you. And I was scared when I saw you, but I'm not really now, because people don't come back from the dead. Not like this. So you're-you're either another person who's pretending to be Nissam, or you're just a figment of my imagination. And if you're a figment of my imagination, I'm not scared of you anymore. I killed you. I'll do it as many times as I have to if it makes you go away for good."
A jolt of panic sized Megara by the throat and squeezed with every passing word. This wasn't Rory. Relief, then panic again as she realized what was being said, and who...no, not her. It couldn't be her.
By all logic, it was improbable, by Megara's own rules, it was impossible. She wasn't allowed that kind of hope. She wasn't allowed. She was too fragile to let the shards of dashed hope hit her. She'd be torn apart.
But even as she thought that, her mouth betrayed her.
Not-Nissam knew who she was without ever saying her name, even though she wasn't supposed to know that if she wasn't really Nissam. Only Nissam would have been able to read her like that. And maybe Cornyx, but he would have said Miss Runi instead of just Runi, so that ruled him out. She started shaking again, and stumbled right back into the bathroom door's frame.
"You're-You're-" She couldn't get the words out. She wanted to, but she couldn't. She tried to imagine Cornyx next to her again, but all she could see was the air beside her. "No. No, no, no. I'm supposed to be safe now. We-We...We killed you. You have to be a figment of my-my imagination, because you're supposed to be dead!
Megara's eyes went wide and she shook her head, "No, Runi, I'm not...whoever this is," she gestured to herself, her words a little frantic. This was Runi, for sure. They were both in the bodies of the dead. Gods, that was morbid, even for her. "I'm..." she struggled to say her name. It felt like she was in disguise, and she was never, never supposed to refer to herself by her real name while in disguise.
She shook her head, trying to clear the instinct away. Old rules. Old rules didn't work here, wherever 'here' was.
"I'm-I'm Megara," she said, pleading with her eyes for Runi to believe her.
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