White Roses, Black Doves

A hunger through time-21

The house began to settle into their lives like a parasite, taking more than it gave. Doors that Percy carefully latched in the evening would be standing wide open by morning, and the scent of dying roses—musk and copper—lingered in the hallways, no matter how many windows they threw open.

Percy grew gaunt, his waking hours spent in a fugue of listless agitation. His dreams were the only reality that mattered; vivid, terrifying tapestries of a life that felt more like a skin he had once worn than a fantasy.

One night, the dream was particularly cruel. He was in a library, the smell of cedar and old paper suffocatingly sweet. Alice

was there, her hands pressing against her stomach, a radiant, tearful smile blooming on her face as she told him she was with child. The joy in his heart was so absolute it threatened to burst his chest.

He woke abruptly, gasping for air, the phantom sensation of her warmth still clinging to him. He was back in the cold, modern bedroom, the weight of his reality pressing down on him—the heavy, suffocating presence of Lucy sleeping beside him. Her breathing was rhythmic, predatory.

He slid out of bed, his shirt damp with cold sweat, and stumbled toward the kitchen. The moonlight turned the floorboards into pale, skeletal fingers. He reached for the glass on the counter, his hands shaking, when a movement in the dark window reflection caught his eye.

She was standing behind him in the glass. Alice, that was the name in the back of the picture he shoved into his wallet.

"Percy," she breathed. The name felt wrong, an ill-fitting garment. She didn't say it like a lover; she said it like a stranger trying to pronounce a foreign tongue.

She drifted closer, the air around her humming with the static of a dying star. Her hand, cold as midwinter, grazed the nape of his neck. The sensation was a jolt of lightning that bypassed his brain and struck directly at his soul.

"Cornelius," she whispered, and the name hung in the air like a prayer.

Everything that had been wrong—the boredom, the hollow engagement to Lucy, the fragmented memories—suddenly slotted into place. His blood burned, turning from ice to molten lead. His mind raced with the echoes of a hundred lifetimes, and his heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

He spun around, desperate to reach for her, to hold onto the only anchor he had ever known, but the kitchen was empty. The reflection was gone. The only thing left was the sound of his own ragged breathing and the distant, rhythmic ticking of a clock that wasn't there.

He returned to the bedroom, but sleep had become a battlefield. He tossed and turned, the sheets tangling around his legs like shroud-cloth. Lucy stirred, her eyes snapping open in the dark, watching him with a cold, analytical intensity that he was too far gone to notice.

He squeezed his eyes shut, his hands fisting into the pillows. He didn't want the waking world. He didn't want the modern house, the bills, or the woman beside him. He wanted only to fall back into the dark, back to the library, back to the scent of roses and the feeling of her hand on his neck. He needed to find her. He would endure the hell of the waking world, if only he could find his way back to her in the shadows.