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Her fingers are smooth and glossy, colored an unnatural white at the tips. You try to decipher the patterns she's tracing into the flesh of your back, but the gap between you and Carol is too large; you simply cannot figure them out. The only one you have been able to parse for certain: a wide smiling face inside a circle, drawn with a slow, intentional touch that made your skin ice over. She looks down at you with a similar smile---manufactured, stitched-on material sloppily-woven.
From what you know of her, she is good at stepping into a different body for the public. She wears a Carol Sturka shell and she wears it well, dressing herself up and spreading herself thin like mashed-up corn. How, you wonder, does this make her different from the---what did she call them---the Others?
But Carol is warm, and uninviting, and everyone you love is---
Everyone you love is---
You aren' t sure what to call it. You suppose none of the immune know what to call it. When you're with your aunt, she is just as comforting as she was before it all flooded down, even if her speech and her mannerisms aren't quite right now, even if she now rejects her traditional foods in favor of "the new brew". She prepares food for you --- she will prepare anything you ask her to prepare, she will give you anything you ask for ---- but she never eats anything herself.
Ah, saving it for you. We know these are your favorite foods, we would not want to take them away from you. Go on, eat up. We love you.
Carol sighs. Your arm rests across her rib cage, right snug underneath the curve of her breasts.
It is rather interesting, you think, that she chose you instead of Zosia. She seems both enamored with and enraged by them, the emotions spinning around in some sort of entwined eternal harmony. She seems hungry for something that is even more difficult to decipher than the pattern of her touch.
The sunlight flutters in from her window, silhouettes of flora forming against the wall. The world is so beautiful, every little budding flower and baby animal and freshly-harvested potato and human smile. They can't be as bad as Carol says if your aunt's smile didn't change, if the traces of her first personality still shine in like the light that envelops you now. She talks to you in wes and ours, but she can recall every memory the two of you share if she tries hard enough, and now the entire world can see the beauty of how much your family loves you. You have always believed that the simple act of that love can save the world from any potential downfall, and now these memories will be shared out and open, for everyone to witness the divine act of it.
"Kusimayu," Carol says, finally, her voice careful and strained. "Why did you---you know."
"Why did I decide to... be intimate with you?"
"Mm-hmm."
You sigh, burying yourself further into Carol---you should be distancing yourself, you should be learning how to fly and flying far away like the birds back home, you should be taking your legs and runningrunningrunning. Carol Sturka is a natural disaster. At your core, however, her connection refreshes you. She is a comforting connection.
Well.
She is a connection.
It feels so lonely now. It will all feel better when you join, but in the present moment, as the universe currently spins, it is splitting.
"I have missed..." you begin, but how can you possibly end that sentence; what is there to miss, if your family is still the same?
"I have needed... someone who can understand."
"You think I understand now? Interesting," she says, but she pauses, her teeth biting down right after the words spill out. "I mean... what do I understand?"
"What it is like," you whisper, "to be without. How hard it is."
"I changed your mind that f---"
"It is so difficult," you continue, "to be unjoined."
Carol shuts up. Instead, she says: "You still plan on letting them infect you with this thing?"
"I... I wish to have a greater purpose."
Another long period of silence. Her lips rest against your forehead---not a kiss, this time, just an act of desperate intimacy.
"I can be your greater purpose," Carol whispers. "I can help you find that. Please, let me help you."
You give a calm sigh. It is time to dream.
"Maybe," you reply to appease her, only to appease her.
