[open] find what you love and let it kill you; gates, any

[Longear]

She sinks into him. The hollows and bulges are like her father’s (and like Trystane’s – they are nearly triplicates, though each a different shade of melancholy), and she knows them like lines of longitude across familiar shores, because many of them are her own. Years ago, she wore their yellow and black, too. Then, very suddenly, it had begun to peel away – around her eyes (so that she looked like she was wearing bright spectacles – they made her mother smile), from the velvet of her nose, the guard hairs of her jolly little scut and the whorl on her forehead (where mother liked to plant most of her kisses – where she plans to nestle into her own daughters, once they are here). 

She had been her father’s girl, then, tail to toe.

And then, she was most like mother. And grandmother (she took her mother’s word on that, drinking in the earthy stories of the old jungle woman, who had withstood tide and exodus; who had been left a lady in the wake of a great and beautiful tragedy… It is funny, how very small the world is, indeed). Not as rosy-tinged as they, but pale and bright-eyed; round and sturdy; wild-haired and flower-scented.

—mother and father had found each other in the Gates, where first they made Trys out of fleshy, intimate coition (not like mother).

—then she had been laboured for, hard and strange, on the jungle floor.

(—and many, many years ago, her maternal grandmother had loved a man who called that Heaven home, the same firmament where her paternal grandparents had loved and ruled in;

— and, because a spark survived a flood, a magician could make sisterhood and bromeliads into something tiny and awakening…)

Gone.

For now, he is all she has (that and the soft rabbit’s tail that remains, in place of long, coarse hair like theirs, as a reminder always of what she must find). “Longear,” she mutters eventually when she finds composure. “You have not seen my father? My brothers?” Has he ever even met her brothers? “H-He’d have Fang. They’d be together, I mean… or… I hope. I thought you might be him, but then I saw,” that he was alone, she knew it could not be.

And by now, her mother might as well be a lifetime away… impossible enough to find her before the shake-up.

When others join, she lets him lean off her, because she can tell they come to him in searching, like a beacon lit high on a hill that she surely must share. She watches each face (their worry, their longing for comfort that brings them to a huddle of warm breath), recognizing none of them until the last to come. (She had called herself Camelia, Longear remembers well enough.) “Hello,” she says, and it is distant and general – to all of them, trying to anchor herself there, because otherwise she feels a tug to set loose like a dandelion seed and bump and wander until she finds.