How have I never written this before??? Tam and Linh's relationship has so much angst potential smh

TW: de/th, gr//f, sc/ssors (no cutting, no s/lf h/rm), tell me if I should add more!

Linh didn't cry, couldn't cry.

She saw it happen. She watched her friends react. Felt their arms encircle her, felt the scream ripping from her throat, heard the sobs and knew that her knees would sting from the impact as she collapsed onto the ground. Even though she didn't feel the pain.

As if her internal suffering had canceled out her physical reaction.

But her eyes stayed dry.

She rocked back and forth on her bed at night, whimpering against the nightmares. She blocked out the world with water in her ears. She sought comfort in her friends' arms, and found none.

She wasn't whole anymore, and everyone knew it.

Linh knew there were seven stages of grief, but she didn't see herself reaching acceptance anytime soon.

(they told her it would get better, but she was getting worse)

An imposter in her own body, the remaining shreds of her heart that had been torn into two, her silver-tipped hair an endless weight on her scalp. It reminded her of him.

Everything did.

She hadn't cried, and her eyes were as dry as a desert, as Exillium when Linh had learned how to feel cold all the time.

Maybe there was something wrong with her.

Maybe what her parents, what the Neverseen had done had finally broken her.

Or maybe she'd been broken all along.

...

Linh's hands shook as she laid them on the closet handles.

His closet.

His. His, not hers.

It was his, it should still be his, she had no right to look through his belongings like they were hers, to set her fingers all over his clothes-

A strangled whimper escaped Linh's throat, and she reminded herself to take deep breaths.

Deep, calming, shuddering gulps of air.

She swung open the doors, blinking in surprise as scraps of paper showered down over her. Once they settled, she glimpsed the inside of the small room, uncharacteristically messy.

(this wasn't right, couldn't be right, this wasn't him, she knew him and this wasn't him-)

Tam had always folded and hung up his clothes neatly, organized his notes, arranged his possessions with care.

But there were heaps of notes scattered over the floor, wrinkled clothes shoved on hangers or just crumpled on the ground, notebooks with torn pages and absent doodles and spilled ink and errant figurines scattered on the floor.

(this wasn't right, but the notes had Tam's handwriting and the clothes were his and maybe this was the real him, the one he locked away even from her)

Linh felt the impact, but she didn't register the pain in her knees as she collapsed on the floor.

Her mouth formed words, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to say.

What she could say.

Instead, she reached forward and took hold of one of the larger scraps of paper, covered in Tam's neat, almost perfect handwriting.

(no tears, still no tears)

She expected it to be school notes, or even letters from friends. But instead, she found Tam's own words scrawled over the paper, every spare bit of space taken up.

Poetry, scraps of song lyrics, all angry and sad and filled with emotion.

She took another paper. This one was covered in angry rants, the pen pressed almost through the paper with force.

Linh sifted through the papers, all of them poetry and songs and screams and rants and letters and journal entries.

He wrote about anger and frustration, about neglect and horrifying fear.

He wrote about the dangers of the darkness he was forced to live in, about the light he could never see.

(if there was a light at the end of a tunnel, would it welcome a shade? or would the light flee from the force of his anger, like everything (everyone) else seemed to?)

He wrote about her, too. Wrote about waves of water, the force smashing through all of his defenses. Wrote about drowning, about tsunamis and silver-tipped hair.

He never said her name, but she knew when he sang about feeling out of control, he was talking about her.

...

Linh hardly had anything, but she'd never possessed control.

Control of her life, of her powers, of her feelings, of her family and friends and everything she needed to stay safe.

Everything that had been taken from her.

Instead, she'd had desperate eyes staring after a future she could never have. She had fingers that grasped for the hope that always seemed out of reach, the hope that she waited for but never received.

She had wishes and dreams, but they never came true.

She had tears trickling down her cheeks and the overwhelming urge to drown the world and everyone on it, but she couldn't seem find the last remaining shreds of her heart.

...

She'd screamed and beat at the floor with her fists, but she hadn't cried.

Not yet.

Not ever.

She hadn't laughed, either. Not of joy, not of excitement, not of surprise or irony or any emotion at all.

She'd gone into shock that day, and Linh wasn't sure she'd ever come out of it.

Her life used to be full of laughter and pain and emotion, and she hadn't smiled or cried since it had ended. Since her life had ended, and a new one had never started. Ended, when Tam's lungs stopped breathing.

Her life had been finished with his, her heart ripped away the moment his own ceased to beat, and now she was a ghost. A wraith, passing through the motions and nodding at strangers in the street, accepting her friends' hugs and hiding her pain when she felt nothing at all.

A specter who felt nothing when people smiled. Not anger, not sadness, not joy.

Nothing at all.

Living without him wasn't living, because they were two halves of the same whole and she'd never been without him and now she was nothing, nothing at all. A ghost.

And then she was laughing on the floor of Tam's closet, surrounded by the snippets of his heart that she'd never known at all. Laughing, giggles pouring out of her throat.

Laughing, laughing, laughing.

Because Tam was gone and Linh couldn't feel anything at all.

(gonegonegonegoneforevergoneforever)

So she laughed, loud chuckles that tore at her throat and brought tears to her eyes, until she wasn't laughing anymore and tears spilled from her eyes as she rocked back and forth on the floor in Tam's closet that wasn't his.

And then she was gasping for air as she cried for the first time in months, tears soaking her clothes before she could scrub them from her cheeks. Her shoulders shook from the force of her sobs, her body shivering and shaking.

(gonegonegone-)

The silver ends of her hair drooped over her shoulders, and she cradled them in her palm, allowing them to slide through her fingers as she stood slowly, trying and failing to blink the tears from her eyes.

She reached Tam's desk.

She wasn't sure she was breathing. Did a ghost need to breathe?

Tam wasn't anymore.

(gone forever, he wasn't coming back)

She searched the drawers with shaking fingers, breathing deeply in an attempt to still them, to quell her raging feelings. She found what she was looking for and lifted the scissors in her shivery grip, carefully angling them away from herself.

She used her other hand to grab a fistful of her hair, the silver tips gleaming in the dim light of the lamps. She stared at it for a second.

(he wasn't coming back)

She cut, and the silver strands drifted away from her fingers. She grabbed another handful and cut again, and another piece of Linh's heart floated slowly to the ground.

Again and again and again, until all of Tam was gone from her hair and she could breathe again, tears still streaming down her cheeks.

She set the scissors down, ignoring the piles of silver hair lying at her feet. She knew her work was choppy, but she didn't care.

(gone gone gone and she was still here)

A weight was lifted from her head, from her heart with all the missing pieces, from the missing half of her life.

Not missing. Gone. Gone forever. Never coming back.

Slowly, her tears drifted from her face, forming a bubble in front of her eyes until her cheeks were dry.

The bubble of tears formed into half of a heart, and Linh stared at it, letting it trace her hand and arm as it drifted around her, exploring the uneven ends of her hair and cooling the back of her neck.

Then, it dissolved, trickling down and soaking into the carpet, and Linh was finally free.

So yeah, I totally killed off Tam and I feel no regrets

:D

God I love killing twins, especially only one of them. Priceless. Gorgeous. Wonderful.

Love it.