Starrk wakes up.
They know what rebirth feels like — know how the reformation of limbs and regrown skeleton and restructured muscles all pulse with tempered energy.
They have distant memories of evolution, that pride and satisfaction of flexing strength, even as obscured by the aftermath of despair and loneliness as it all became.
They still remember that elation: addictive, all-consuming — a harmony that closes down the holes of their heart by another beat, shared in a bridge between one and another
They know what it feels like to wake up after death, both alone and together.
He wakes up, and wishes he hadn’t.
It's a funny thing to explain, a difficult thing to connect the correct words with the correct ideas when you only have dreams and swooping feelings in your chest to guide you.
He tells anyone who would listen that he misses his twin. Everyone tells him he does not have a twin.
He tells everyone that he has a twin. Anyone who had stopped to listen would be quietly told that he made up a twin.
He does not have a twin — but it is the closest thing a human child with a human child’s mind could compare that soul-bond, that soul split, that soul separation and soul creation to.
Death, he relearns, is a tragic thing. And no one would realise how absently he wanders through life until much too late.
Witchcraft and Wizardry — Starrk remembers magic, even if in a different form.
The way air alone could sustain the smallest of creatures, the way that same air could keep afloat the giantest of beings; he remembers weaponry, dangerous and lethal, beams of energy he could expel from his fingertips with the faintest of thought and a twitch of his fingers.
There were a lot of people — creatures, beings — who could shoot energy from their palms, but his was far more powerful, explosive, cutting; that controlled, chaotic destruction to his controlled, chaotic being.
This magic is dangerous, but it's also much more beautiful. It is much more versatile, from the most benign and mundane spell, to the forbidden techniques that can go as far as completely warp the existence of others.
It is beautiful, he observes. All of it.
And it is also what he needs.
Starrk no longer has a literal gaping hole in — and around, and at — his heart.
He is no longer an expert swordsman, or gunslinger, or marksman, or strategist — he is no longer a lot of things, but those things are not what he misses the most.
All beings can reach a point of desperation, a willingness to sacrifice anything for just the one thing; the achievement of a goal, the peaking of power, a culmination in dedicated years of effort.
He is no different — not in this life, not in any life; he never has been. (They never have been.) Loneliness is the aspect of death they're well acquainted with — it is their bane, their end.
And death, he finds, is not something you’re easily shed of.
He tried — and failed.
It wasn't like the shrugging off of a second coat, not a coaxing of energy to split a lock of ember into its own raging flame.
His soul rips in half with a painful agony. He has torn away at his soul before, torn it apart to mould as he had seen fit — but this was different.
It is still him — It is still him, that half of his soul now bound to that still-blank, homunculus body.
It is still him. It is still him. It is still him.
It is only him.
(Despair tears a new hole through his chest.)
The thing is, Starrk never minded to trade his life to have Lilynette back by his side.
He would have gladly, peacefully, embraced the arms of finality countless times over, if only she were with him.
That Captain kills him in war, with Lilynette’s spot empty in his soul, and he dies in his human life, uncleansed and unable to get her back because she cannot make up a part of the amalgamation that would have been their human self; because they are the same soul, same person, fundamentally the same in existence — but they are also just different aspects of the amalgamation of a Hollow’s construction, brought to their own life.
And that is the crux of it: their type of Hollow are made by the merging of several countless souls, so who’s to say they weren’t, at some point, their own person — simply tied together so intrinsically by fate? (And also thusly, promptly, without warning, separated after several lifetimes spent by each other’s side.)
If he waited a bit longer — if he had waited — maybe then he'd have encountered a bright-eyed little girl; a little girl with that same despair in her chest and same empty spot in her soul — that little girl born ten years too late.