Emi doubled over and howled as her head exploded in white hot pain. Something hot dripped from her nose, and she saw fresh blood adding onto the older bloodstains on her clothes.

“And she’s refusing to remember. Of course she would,” Azriel was on a roll, fingers tapping at her temples in jerky, random intervals. “Anyone would want to forget their death. Especially if it was traumatic. At 15. But then why is her body older…?”

She was suffocating. There was no air, it was too quiet, there was glue in her eyes. She was multitudes. They were all in the dirt, waiting for their bodies to leak away into mush in their coffins.

He freed them. He named them. She is Emiko. His wife put them all back together.

“…unless it’s not her body. No, 23 can’t be right, there’s only one soul in there. I think.”

They are one. They haven’t been they in a while, simply ‘I’. All of them folding into the smallest of them, the youngest.

He didn’t want Emiko to remember. But she did, and then—

Great, hiccupping sobs interrupted Azriel’s tirade. Seth and Azriel both glanced at each other, then Emi, alarmed.

“I—I remembered.” She sobbed. “He put me back together and I broke him.” She glanced up at the two others. “And I’m going to break you, too.”

“…Do you remember how you died?” Azriel asked

“I wanted to fly.” She whispered. “I could fly.”

“You’re shitting me.” Seth sighed.

“What?” Asked Azriel.

“The parkouring. She fell.”

“I don’t want to be back in the ground.” She stared at both of them with pleading eyes. “Don’t put me in the ground again.”

“Aaaand that’s why she’s always on random people’s roofs. They probably buried her wrong.”

Azriel winced. “We’re missing pieces, though. How could she remember being buried if--”

“Azriel?” Emi asked softly.

“Hm?”

“I’m tired.”

And she promptly fell off the bed, and without her hands to react, she face-planted.

Fly Part 2

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