Branches

Something is missing. Something is wrong.

There is the obvious of course; the shift in the physical world that clashes with her perceptions every time she opens her eyes.

Like how this isn’t her body. It has too many extra things where it shouldn’t, and she can’t seem to walk or run without struggling for balance with every step, so far above the ground.

Or like how the space beneath the cloth-draped dining room table isn’t a cave anymore. She is too large for its secrets, for its mysteries. The one time she’d crawled past the tablecloth’s hanging edges to huddle underneath, she’d had to tuck her knees under her chin to keep her ankles from slipping out into the open. She couldn’t move. There was no room left for pillows or books or cushion barricades. It was just a table with a hollow space beneath.

Or like how Allen doesn’t laugh as much, and how all she has left of her mother is some letters carved into cold stone, capping the endpoints of her life with nothing in-between.

Or like the way that everyone looks at her: sidelong and wary, tightlipped with their eyes never quite meeting her own. She can feel people watching her when she isn’t looking. Whenever she turns to watch them back, their gazes slide away like water from oil.

She’s taken to playing hide-and-seek in the gardens to avoid those gazes; she does the hiding and waits for her brother to come and find her. He always does, and when he finds her he sighs like their mother used to before taking her hand to lead her back indoors.

Allen frets over her like she’s the child she used to be but isn’t anymore. He fusses with her choice of clothing, he never lets her wander too far on the premises, never lets her talk to strangers, never lets her get too close to the fireplace. She hears about the war through whispers around hallway corners at night, but no one ever talks to her about it, not even the people whose names she recognizes to be the heroes.

Allen tells her it’s because he doesn’t want her nightmares to get any worse.

Celena doesn’t believe that. Because something is missing. Something is wrong. It’s more than her body, more than her unrecognizable family, more than the looks and stares and the way the world feels brittle.

It’s more than her lost memories, even. Celena knows she’s not six anymore. She’s supposed to be fifteen, but she can’t remember anything about growing up. Her life is a series of flashcards, and the last half of the deck is missing. That’s where some of her nightmares come from, she thinks. Some of them are lost flashcards.

Some, but not all.

There’s a hole in her stomach.

Not physically, of course: it’s more of an absence, like lungs without any air inside them. When she breathes, she keeps expecting to feel something more than just air filling her.

And she’s so cold all the time. She’s so cold.

Celena stands out in the sun for as long as her brother will let her. She feels more complete, somehow, melting in the golden warmth. Her skin never darkens, and when she points this out to Allen, he looks at her—for just a moment—with the same tight-lipped, closed expression she’s so uncomfortably used to getting from everyone else. He thinks she doesn’t notice. She doesn’t tell him otherwise.

Celena knows that something is missing. But she also knows that something isn’t gone. She knows it the same way that she knows the instant the sun rises every morning. She feels a link, a thread, a pull towards some forgotten piece of her soul.

Celena will find it. She won’t stop until she’s whole again.