She brought the emerald here, and shrugged off her equipment. She placed it against a wall, a wall which bore the mark of life, and just... stared.
Green.
Green as anything. Green as anything alive. Her own stone... her eyes shifted down to it, just waiting. Obstinately. In her paw. She had felt, as a kitten, that that stone was a point of tedium, an inescapable weakness of some kind. A necessary one. It had given her a magic she could not control and taken from her a power that she could have. There was the word: control. Now it defined her. Her mark of life. Chartreuse, beryl. She stared back at the emerald.
She always knew, or had felt somewhere within, that the fire in that cat would be the death of her. She just never thought she would see the day... not so vividly, not even by her own paw. Stiff and filled with something that burned just as hot without lingering to worsen the pain. And not even that, she had found after they had been to war, would have been just. Tahi's war...
Weren't you born here? She now realized, looking around slowly and uneasily, how this all felt familiar to that charred memory of the past. The first words you said to me— said ever, were... I didn't like them. Madhukar had started that fight and lost it. Wouldn't be the first time. You would've chased me to the end of a blizzard for a vengeance you had already tasted. And I would've run 'cause I knew you would always win. That was the truth of it. Madhukar's elected ignorance, turning away and neglecting her. And now they were here. Madhukar didn't feel like much of a winner.
Twisted, regardless of the name and the negative memories attached, had never been Madhukar's enemy. Just for a moment there, at the end of that blizzard in Ursa, when they were on the same team... Madhukar had almost been able to envision a world in which they could have been friends. Now she was alive, and "Twisted" was locked in that cosmos no one could reach, not even Tahi-shei and his obsession with death. Now she was just a rock.
A thought occurred, but Madhukar quickly dismissed it. All I ever make are chrysalises. All she had ever wanted was real life, but even that flitted out from her grasp. She kept running and climbing, fighting to keep her body awake and alive, still ticking and moving because she couldn't help it. That part of her had to live. But her mind was far gone, left in one of the chrysalises she had made and probably forgotten about. One that would never return. She had thought, the first time, that because of their stones they could all last forever. Everything would last forever one way or another. But some things... never even begun. So much wasted potential.
It felt like her eyes were about to turn green, waiting so long for something to happen. For the magic to flow. But she knew that nothing ever would. This was one of those things, confounded from the very beginning, right? Had to be. Or maybe that was Madhukar, searching for anyone to blame but herself.
"S- s-orry," she sputtered out, in her raspy, worn-out voice. Like the powder of a bomb that had failed to explode, something ready to detonate, ticking past its time. She would always keep ticking. These stones were a death sentence written into flesh and bone, or perhaps it was a contract worse than death. Immortality. An inescapable weakness. "I sh- I should... you deserve... s-some-thing," but I don't have the lungs. The guts, the throat, the jaw... what use was any of it anyway, to a rock? Or the words. Maybe a long time ago, when her best friend could have taught her, but not now.
—Suddenly, an understanding passed. She did have one thing. Some form of life to control. It occurred to her like an instinct, pulsating through her body like the magic of Polaris. She rose, grabbed the stone, and left that old tunnel behind, along with the costume she had once made to hide herself. Her fear. Twisted deserved to see it.
