#seastarved

It’s at night she sees them, on the whole. Glimpses of other worlds, other faces, a tired looking boy hunched over a book, a grey-faced woman with dark close-cropped hair. She watches them, watches them eat and talk and cry until they rub their hands over their damp faces and she finds herself copying the motion, kneeling before one of the warped planes of glass that line her gilded prison in some strange supplication to these people she cannot touch.

They never look back at her, though, not one, not even the angry man with the jaw like her own and fire in his eyes.

None of them do, except the man with the hook for a hand.

She sees him more than the others. He seems to skip between realms, first salt-soaked and angry on a furious sea, then cowed, bright eyed and desperate, on the edge of some lonely forested shore. She sees him drink, and swear, and fight, and it echoes through her, making her fists clench and her blood pound as though she were the one with rum in her throat and rage in her belly.

At first, she watches him because he’s interesting, more so than the others, his backgrounds as ever changing as his expressions.Later she watches him because he’s beautiful.

Then she watches him because he watches her back.

The very first time she almost misses it, her back to the ornate mirror at the end of her bed, until she hears the faintest tap tap tapping - some half imagined sound, she thinks, at first, the loneliness driving her mad - but when she turns she sees him, beautiful blue eyes blown wide, his jaw hanging open, his knuckles at the glass.

Tap tap tap.

What else can she do?

She throws a sheet over the mirror, and screams.

--

The next night she dares to peek, lifting just the corner of her sheet, just enough to see the pale yellow light of the dark haired woman’s home filtering into the room. She breathes a sigh of relief, reclaiming her bed coverings and returning them to the thin mattress before turning back to the mirror.

She hadn’t expected him to be there, he never had been before, but sure enough there he is, a sharp dark shadow pacing back and forth in front of the table, his hand in his hair, his mouth moving furiously as the sad woman and the man with the fiery eyes watch him warily, their hands entwined, their faces guarded.

At first she steps back, her heart thumping with alarm, but as he paces back and forth and back and forth she finds herself drawing closer. One step, then another, pulled forward as though by some invisible thread, her gaze fixed on the corner of his mouth, on the quick, flickering consonants of his tongue against his teeth. Without realising she finds her toes pressed against the mirror’s frame, her fingertips hovering over the cold glass.

Through the mist her breath leaves behind, she could swear she sees him say;

Emma.

--

She sees more after that, flashes of strangers; a woman with red hair and cold eyes, another whose lips seem permanently curled into a sneer, and once, just once, a man with sharp features and a smile that makes her shudder.

He's not a friend, she tells the boy with the book who stands at his shoulder. He's no one's friend.

But if the boy hears he shows no sign of it, and the man's smile only grows wider, wilder, less human until it's something almost reptilian, and she smothers him as best she can under her comforter.

He never comes back, thank god.

But the hooked man does.

He hovers in the background as all but the man with the snakebite smile come to stare and ponder and prod at the barrier between Emma and themselves. His brow is almost permanently furrowed now, and it upsets her, strangely. Her thumbs itch to smooth the lines away, her fingers tingle when he runs his hand through his hair.

She doesn't remember the last time she touched another person, but somehow she thinks she feels the heat of his skin against her palms. The weight of his breath on her skin.

Perhaps she's mad after all.

(Perhaps she ought to care.)

It's night again the next time she sees him alone. She's tucked up in bed, her chin resting on her knees as she watches the flickerflare of a candle against his profile.

His eyes are averted, downcast, his hand and hook resting on the bare wooden desk before him, and Emma’s heart aches unmercifully and inexplicably to see him so still, so seemingly bereft. That same strange pull sets her crawling over her bed, kneeling at the end and leaning forward until her hands are pressed against the glass. Nervously, she dares to pull one back, her fingernails cutting into her palm as she balls it into a fist, and, taking a deep breath:

Tap tap tap.

He looks up, and she wonders if this is how it feels to fall in love.

--

She can't hear him, not really, not even with her ear pressed against the glass and with his lips so very close, so he writes her notes in swirling script and swears to find her, help her, to bring her home.

This is my home, she tells him, mouth overforming every word as he follows the line of her lips. I don't remember another. Just here.

He shakes his head, tears another piece of parchment, swears another oath.

I love you, he writes. I will never give up.

Alright. Okay.

(She means I love you too, she thinks, but that really would be mad. Wouldn't it?)

--

He's bleeding. A thin red rivulet runs from his temple and into his beard, and his eyes are glazed, unfocused. She doesn't recognise the floor on which he lays, nor the man who holds a sword to his throat, but she knows the words he's muttering, can almost hear them, low and pleading in an accent nothing like her own.

Don't watch, love. Don't watch.

She screams, hammers fists against the mirror's surface until it warps and wobbles, a flash of blinding silver light, and then…

And then nothing. A black void where once he lay. A sword suddenly at her feet, solid and sharp but unsulllied by blood.

She takes hold of it, let's the weight settle into her arm and thinks maybe.

Maybe.

--

This time she searches for him, not daring to wait she trawls the corridors and rooms of her prison. She peers into every surface for a hint of something more than her own reflection, the sword solid still and real at her side.

Other figures come and go in flashes of red and green and startling white, but she doesn’t dwell on them. It's the black she's looking for, the sharp spots of blue, the steel that's starting to feel like home.

She finds him in the forest, caught between the dark gilt vines that wind around the mirror, still and steady and breathing as he waits for her. She can't help the smile that cracks across her face, muscles protesting at the unfamiliar motion as he steps closer, reaches out, his hook shimmering in that nowhere space between mirror and truth.

Take a leap of faith, love.