It had started out like any other practice session. Ross had palmed the usual suspects - torches, pins. Anything he could set on fire for his act as the resident fire breather. He’d had a wild hair to try to add in blades. It seemed sensible, right,? Adding another aspect of danger. But he wasn’t good with the sharp objects like some and before too long the grass under his feet was dripping with blood.
He made a hasty beeline for the medical tent. Something was buzzing inside of him the way it almost did when the circus moved. This time, though, he didn’t have the nausea that came with it.
Gently, he pushed one of the flaps aside. Those perched in the couple of seats with minor injuries just looked at him.
A shirt had been wrapped around the limb with the laceration. Sweat dotted his brow. “‘Allo?” Okay. He wasn’t going to die but it still hurt and the blood wasn’t a good look. Thank goodness Friedrich wasn’t here.
Last night, Cerise put pen to paper and signature to contract. Today, she found herself unceremoniously thrust into work, albeit during what seemed to be the quiet hours compared to what she’d witnessed the evening before. No music distracted, no voices shouted, no crowds milled about. The grounds were mostly quiet, and the few people she’d seen filter into the medical station were mostly overheated rather than injured. She made a mental note to make some sort of reminder about good practices in hot weather and retrieved another ice pack from a well-stocked box. “A moment,” she called, the same accent curling her words.
Something gave her pause, an uncomfortable lurch in her chest. Cerise absently pressed the palm of her hand against the place her heart beat, metronome steady, and regrouped. It was nerves. It was the familiar cadence, and nothing more.
Stepping out, she pressed the cold compress gently to the back of Aine’s neck and passed off a bottle of water with her other hand. “Drink, mm? Finish at least half before you go.”
Dizzy spells over breakfast preparation were worrisome but manageable. The copper-bright scent of blood on the air was of greater concern, and she turned to the latest arrival with an expectant look that quickly melted into shock. Her lips parted, a perfect if soundless gasp, and inside her skull, nothing but static whispered.
A moment. Ross scoffed and his expression tightened, painted with irritation. A moment would likely mean bleeding to death (he was exaggerating but in pain) and with a huff he continued to press his poor shirt upon the gushing laceration in hopes to stave off the essence being wasted. Thank the stars there weren’t any vampires afoot.
That same pause came upon him - his heart fluttered, increased in pace, a swath of nerves - and then it abated.
Ross pivoted at the waist to look somewhere else when the woman manning the tent slid out from beyond to study the opened maw of the actual medical tent.
And then those earth browns found the medical person again…Ross was staring. His mouth felt dry and all of the sudden he forgot that he was bleeding because what he was seeing was much worse. A ghost. It couldn’t be…while his twin had aged fifteen years, he still recognized her immediately and understood the buzzing he’d been feeling.
“Cerise…?”
The staticky buzz in her ears resolved, the world around her wobbling back into motion as Cerise blinked owlishly at her brother. “Oh,” she hiccuped, eyes suddenly damp, “You are here. I knew… or, I’d hoped…” The sound she made was neither laugh nor sob, but somehow both at once, mixed with the fringes of happy disbelief. He’d grown so much, and yet he was unmistakably the same.
But also he was bleeding, and the way he stood suggested he might bolt away at any moment, so she reached out, tentative, fingers beckoning. “Step back this way with me? Please, Ross.”
Cerise wanted to grab hold, to touch, to confirm the reality of what she was seeing with her hands in case it proved to be some strange hallucination that might evaporate at any moment. It was all she could do to contain the urge, strain visible in the way her shoulders tightened and her lips trembled. She’d always been prone to tears when overwhelmed. It was an absolutely terrible habit, and wildly unprofessional besides. In this moment, Cerise wasn’t sure she cared.
It took him an extra second to register her request coupled with the beckoning of her slender fingers. Cerise. His twin. She was here…she was alive after all of this time. His mind rolled through varying hypotheticals - what if their parents, their siblings had also…. - and then he made himself stop. False hope was worse than a string of lies and he wouldn’t let himself get inflated like that. He couldn’t take the disappointment. Fifteen years of fear and guilt already twisted into a knot in his chest and he’d carried it with him in its cage since that day. And now…
The glistening in her eyes made his decision for them both. Fuck everyone in the waiting room. He stepped in and curled his arm around her, the one not wrapped up in a cloth, and pulled her in for a squeeze.
Her hair smelled the same. She felt different, grown, but like herself when she pressed in against him. They’d been close as children, as twins tend to be, and he felt something click itself back into place.
”Comme tu m’as manqué,” he murmured, squeezing her again. There was a hesitation to let her go as if she would vanish into thin air. Could a dream feel this real?
Relief almost took Cerise’s knees out from under her, but then Ross was there, solid and sturdy, and it didn’t matter that he was taller or broader than he’d been the last time she’d seen him. He was still Ross, and the peculiar unease she’d been ignoring all morning vanished as neatly as fog under bright sunlight. “Je t'ai cherché,” she hiccuped, both arms linked behind his back and squeezing firmly. She’d looked, and she’d finally found.
Or rather, he’d found her. But that was just details, anyway, and they didn’t matter.
Leaning back, but not yet prepared to release him from her embrace, she peered intently into eyes the same color as her own. There was so much to say, so much she wanted to know and to explain in turn. No matter how many times she’d pictured this exact thing happening, Cerise couldn’t remember a single thing she’d planned.
She’d never pictured injury in the mix, though, and it was the lingering scent of blood that finally prompted her to step back, even if one hand remained wrapped delicately around her twin’s wrist. “Come, come. Let me fix that.” Cerise tugged, color high on her cheeks as it occurred to her that the few others nearby were watching, intrigued by the unexpected show. She was not ashamed of the display, but perhaps it was not the right way to begin a new job.
Likewise, everything that he’d ever thought to say in this moment vanished. There had been many nights he’d lain awake considering what he would do if something like this ever came to fruition. Silly, he knew. Or, at least so he’d thought until now. He looked into his sister’s eyes and everything around them stilled. Nothing mattered to him outside of that moment. He knew she would likely have questions - many of which he wasn’t sure yet that he had the nerve to answer - but they would get there.
As she beckoned, Ross struggled with letting her go but followed all the same. She could’ve been leading him to his demise and he would’ve continued on regardless. “Ah, oui. I was trying to do something more with my act.” A flush of sheepishness painted itself across his nose and cheeks.
Into the back of the tent he went. The sting of the wound brought him back into an immediate sense of reality and as he sat down where she told him, he had to fight off the urge to just hang on. He moved the soiled shirt from the wound to expose the ugly wound across a forearm.
“Your act,” Cerise repeated, tone caught somewhere between amusement and disapproval. “And what is your act, mm?” She couldn’t begin to guess, not even when the angry slice in his skin was revealed, betraying that apparently he’d been playing with something bladed. It was too clean a cut for anything else. What sort of performance involved blades, though, she had no idea. It was only her first day here, after all. She’d yet to explore.
Habit snapped on a pair of gloves, bright blue nitrile and powdered just enough to make her want to sneeze. “This will feel… ah… it will be strange, but please remain still.” It was not the most reassuring of things to say, but Cerise was still working on what passed for bedside manner, and any eloquence she might have otherwise possessed had gone straight out the window the moment she’d seen Ross. Hopefully she could be forgiven.
Fingers found his wrist again, gripping tightly, and she drew a steadying breath in through her nose before holding it deep in her chest. The wound in his arm began closing, skin knitted back together from one side of the gash to the other, leaving behind only the smears of blood to betray that it had been there at all. Simultaneously, her forearm opened up in a perfect mirror to his injury, and then just as quickly healed. It hardly had the time to bleed at all, and her nose wrinkled as she released him and shook out her arm. A disinfecting wipe made its appearance, offered with an encouraging smile. “There, now. Good as new.”
The same could not be said for his shirt, but it might yet be saved with a quick wash and a good stain remover.
“Oui. I am the fire breather.” Maybe it sounded silly when uttered aloud but his chest swelled up with a measure of pride. He liked performing. Wowing an audience with his gift made him feel more human and less like a dangerous freak show. Less like the monster he knew himself to be. And, he didn’t feel like tucking tail when he was on the stage. That cowardice vanished the moment he laced up his fire designed Dr. Martin’s. “It is not a terrible gig.” Dangerous, sure, but he hadn’t yet lost control of his ability.
Even after all of these years apart he did as she requested. It was easy to fall into line when Cerise asked, and his arm held where she could get to it while his frame stilled. “You will not be hurt?” The idea that she had powers too was something which had come immediately to mind - but was that possible? So many questions bubbled up behind his lips but dutifully he sat like a statue.
As she worked, his eyes widened. Brows nearly hit his hairline. She did have abilities! He watched in fascination and horror as the scene unfolded - the way his skin and muscle, tissue knitted itself back together and her own tearing apart for those precious seconds. His stomach lurched a bit at the feeling of the repair but once it was completed he was grateful.
Then he was pulling his sister back in for another hug. Ross ignored the immediate onset of moisture prickling in his eyes and focused on her. “Merci, Cerise.” He mumbled into her shoulder and just held on.
It was a question she chose to ignore as relatively unimportant. Did she hurt? Did it matter? She could heal, and without the ability to heal others as she could so effortlessly repair her own body, it seemed to be a fair trade to Cerise. A little momentary discomfort, the fleeting sensation of being cut without a blade present, was something she’d mostly taught herself to breathe through without reaction.
Now, had he turned up with a broken bone, she might have needed to sit down. Burns? Burns took mastering the instinctive urge to hide, and she was grateful to have his arm to focus on when he mentioned being a fire breather. Of course he was. She’d always known the fire had to have been Ross, and yet… confronting the reality of what that meant was something else.
“De rien, Ross,” she murmured, folding around him, hands soft on the sharp angles of his shoulders and briefly squeezing at his nape. It was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended; their hair was the same shade of copper, their skin the same shade of pale. Cerise would go so far as to say their hearts beat in the same rhythm, but she’d never been brave enough to be so poetic out loud for fear of sounding silly.
Pressing a kiss against his temple, she lingered. It was like being whole again, and easy to get lost in the feeling. “I hear about this place, and I know. I should be here… and here you are, and I am so glad.”
Agony. The last fifteen years had been pure agony. A personal hell. Ross would’ve given anything to take back what happened and yet here was the reward of his patience. Her mouth on his temple, her touch more soothing than any salve or aloe. He didn’t bother to hide the trickles of moisture sliding down his cheeks. “I am glad that you are here.” Over the moon. Now they both were complete, instead of lingering on as two lost halves.
He could hate himself more later and dive back into the dark pool that was his anger and depression when she wasn’t there to stop him. It was likely that she could feel some of it, too. Their bond ran deep.
But she had work to do and as selfish as he wanted to be, he knew there were others perched in plastic chairs needing her kind and patient touch.
“But I should not keep you.” A sniffle and he made himself look up at her. “There are others who need you more.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to scoff, to point out that no one could possibly be more important than him, and to hell with the rest of the world. Cerise very much wanted to say exactly that and more, to shrug away the responsibilities she’d only just assumed, because the selfish need to glue herself to her twin’s side and never budge again almost swallowed her whole.
But.
She forced a nod, centering herself on another deep breath and exhaling out close enough to ruffle his sweat-damp hair before she straightened. “We will talk later, d’accord? You and I, and none of these interruptions.” Though her voice was perfectly level, dark eyes glistened with renewed tears. It hurt to let go again so soon after finding Ross, even if she knew (she hoped, fervently and with every fiber of her being) that she would not be parted for more than hours this time. If he ran again, she would simply have to renew her chase. It would always be that simple because Cerise was nothing if not stubborn.
Turning, she snapped off her gloves and whisked refuse into a nearby bin taped up in biohazard red, then presented a little jar of sweets with the ghost of an impish smile. “For your bravery, mm?”
“Oui. Just us.” Ross very much wanted the same thing she did - to shoo away the patrons of the tent and spend the next few hours dominating the precious seconds of Cerise’ time until dawn. But he couldn’t do that. He had to surrender her back to her role because she had agreed to it. But he would make sure to come and find her when she was ready and they’d catch up.
A hand swept across her face first to brush away the tears, and then he tended to his own. In front of anyone else he would’ve felt a measure of shame in such vulnerability but she understood on levels that no one else ever could.
There wouldn’t be running this time. If he hid, she would break down his door. If he left the grounds it was likely that she would be there beside him. And his mind couldn’t serve up any alternatives.
Chuckling as he wiped away a last few tendrils of moisture, Ross accepted a small red circle of confection on a white stick. The wrapper crinkled. He popped the candy into his mouth and savored the flavor of cherry dancing across his tongue.
“Let me know when your shift is at its end. I will come here and we can walk together.”
Pleased, Cerise beamed. She was no less tear-blotched than she had been a moment ago, but Ross was smiling at her and agreeing to return later, and that was more than enough to help her face the rest of her day. “Oui,” she confirmed, before pointing a finger at her brother, lower lip set into the first hints of a warning pout. “No more practicing your act today, eh? You go sit. And stay hydrated.”
She would be incredibly cross to see him again for professional reasons. There were enough people turning up flushed and overheated. Those things, Cerise could do nothing except the basics to help manage, and she was not looking forward to giving the same lecture about drinking water all day long.
Perhaps she would make a sign. Something with glitter.