It is almost worth it, to see her eyes again. Almost worth waking with your mouth choked with formaldehyde, your limbs stiff and cold and foreign. Almost worth his hands on this body you stole.
Something in his eyes moves. A vein of rust among the green.
If you could, you’d say her name the way you howled his as you died. A curse, for him, and a battle cry to her.
He bends her face to yours and you feel his breath dew your borrowed skin with condensation. Your lips hang slightly open, slack, Cytherea’s teeth loose in your blackening gums, and he presses his mouth against them, and it is her mouth, and the lids of your eyes slide shut, though you cannot tell if it’s borrowed motion or ecstasy.
“Wake.”
It is her voice, after all these years, that breaks you. Your eyes open- they are not the eyes of a cavalier, long devoured by a wizard in a quest for power and death. They are the eyes that saw her looking out from his face, and though they are nestled in a reliquary of dead flesh they are your own.
It is not lust, when she says your name. It is a question, and your eyes are your answer.
Pyrrha draws back and touches her fingers, gentle as a kiss, to Cytherea’s lips. It burns like electricity in the tomb of her corpse.
You have always just been ghosts in borrowed bodies. It is not so terribly unusual, this meeting, for you. It is simply long-delayed.
You exhale, a death rattle, and your hand trails jerkily across the spare planes of hips left naked above soft sleeping pants. The rage that animates you bunches unwilling fingers into fists.
You hear the bones pop.
Pyrrha rests your head, so gently, against her shoulder, clears a space upon the bier, and lies down.