Forty-Two: You were helping each other with more than just finding a cure

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Song- Long & Lost: Florence + The machine

"You were helping each other with more than just finding a cure."

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"Ominis, please wait," Anne's voice leaked with desperation as we left our orders unordered and the tea shop quicker than we had entered. The door to her home slammed behind her with its heaviness, an additional weight added with the denseness of the truth that was perhaps the very last thing I would've thought to happen.

My hands trailed across my face as my wand was soon discarded, the need to see no longer a want. This world was too cruel to want to see it, too evil to desire any of it.

The panic was pre-settled, poisoning the leaves that had began to sprout from Anne's vine of happiness in my heart. As I felt them begin to crisp with decay and dry with the air that Marvolo's message was trying to send, Anne's hands that found their way to my flushed cheeks to cup them tightly became numb with the heat of my agitation, but the coolness of her touch brought me back to a consciousness that forced me to feel how my breath hurt and caught on the sharp ridges of my ribcage.

"Ominis, listen to me!" Anne shook my jaw so that it aligned my responsive eyes with hers, even if I couldn't see them. Her thumbs stroked over the redness I could feel in my cheeks, seeming to calm the heave to my chest that I had thought to be untameable.

Our winter coats and scarves remained firmly tucked into our bodies still, as though they were a reminder of our pure intentions for something together that was now clouded by the never-ending flame that was my family.

"Are you absolutely sure that he's got her?" I could hear the fury behind Anne's attempt to remain calm for my sake, the version of her who was headstrong and rebellious finding a rage in the unjust. If Anne hadn't been struck with something so cruel, I was sure that none of this would've ever happened at all.

"Yes, I am sure." The clarity was terrifyingly truthful, and Anne couldn't find a fault in the assumption. It was rare that I became too panicked for sense, but when the sense still found me regardless of the destruction inside of my mind, it had to be true.

"Will you come back in one piece if you go to her?" Anne barely let the end of my statement finish, barely let the truth be heard before her need to always keep someone safe began to snap through to protect me.

I was grateful for Anne, grateful for the heart that watched out for me, for all of us. Without it, I feared we would one day meet an end that was similar to the one we were trying to protect her from.

"Yes, I will." It was perhaps an instinct, to pull her closer, maybe my heart desired to be beside hers just in case. But it was unexpected, a dishonesty of the love in our chests, to kiss her. Sebastian had always said that the things that were wrong felt the best, his mischief had always been a display of that which he believed in. But to kiss Anne was to comfort myself, and it became clear that she had a similar notion in her mind when she kissed me too.

And as Anne let me go, I felt no sense of clarity nor peace because this was just the start of being Ominis Gaunt.

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