you’d forgotten how to breathe underwater.

not in the literal sense. you weren’t the one bleeding into the tide. you weren’t the one slipping beneath the waves with a body too broken to stay afloat. but you were the one who felt the cold reach your bones before it ever touched your skin. you were the one who knew. the one who couldn’t sleep that night, who picked up the phone with trembling fingers and called chiyoh. her voice had been calm. unsurprised. she had always known, in her way, that the three of you were inevitable.

dragging them out had been harder than you imagined. will had gone limp halfway through, blood spilling from the gash in his side. hannibal had groaned, low and wet, a bullet wound in his gut that leaked through your fingers like wine. you’d screamed for help. chiyoh’s hands had joined yours in the dark. and somehow, somehow, they didn’t die.

sometimes you wished they had.

not because you didn’t love them. not because you didn’t ache for them in every unspoken moment. but because they had changed. because you had changed. because nothing about what came next felt real. because now they were here, alive, breathing beside you in a foreign villa with white walls and too many windows, and you had no idea who you were anymore.