continued form x @adeadlyspy
"ONCE," Carmen echoed, the word rolling over her tongue as if testing its weight, a buried TRUTH. A wry smile tugged at the corner of her lips, the ghost of something softer before she set it aside like an old photograph—one too - w o r n - at the edges to keep revisiting. "Feels like a lifetime ago," she mused, voice slipping into something almost wistful. "Like a dream I only half-remember, like a story someone else lived and whispered to me in the dark." Her fingers toyed absently with the hem of her glove before she folded her arms, as if she could hold the past at bay. " At one point, it was everything. And then, like all things too bright, too consuming—it was nothing." She exhaled, tilting her head, the brim of her hat casting a shadow over her eyes. A shield. A habit. Carmen had long since learned to be unreadable, a closed book bound in scarlet leather and silk. But tonight, under the weight of Sam’s gaze, under the curiosity that crackled between them, she let herself offer a flicker of honesty. Afterall, Sam had been one of the few who had earned it.
"Chase," she said, his name an invocation, A RELIC buried deep. "Back at the academy. Before the world decided who we were supposed to be. Before the lines were drawn, before I knew better." Her fingers drifted absentmindedly to her clavicle, to the scar that memory had CARVED into her. A lesson written in flesh. A DEBT paid in trust. "I loved cared for him." The words came quiet, measured. "Or maybe I loved the idea of him. If fate had been kinder, softer, less cruelly poetic."