“I died and then I woke up in a temporal anomaly, everywhere and nowhere at once, stretched between timelines. Our ship was dying. I was dying. But only dying. Death can’t inhabit this environment, for this reason.” She cups his cheek in a small hand, thumb drawing circles across the three-day stubble.

He exhales into her palm, presses a kiss against the cool, callused skin. “No.”

“It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

“No.” He says, heart roaring in his ears.

“Why, Allen? I remember everything. You could have—”

“I couldn’t.” The syllables fall in shivering clumps. Allen aches to hold her, to press lips to forehead, mouth to clavicle, to breathe in the scent of her hair, the warmth of her skin. But he does not.

“—had a proper life without me, outside of me.”

“No. No, I couldn’t.”

“So, you’d rather have this? You’d rather be a ghost story?”

A filament of silence arches between them, glittering with a thousand things unsaid. Allen is riveted with the luminosity of her eyes, the nebula of emotions that spin in orbit around the axis of her pupils. He does not remember her ever being more beautiful.

“Yes.”

She breaths in. Her eyes are bright and sad. “No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“What I mean is—” Fatimah slides long fingers over his own, pulls his hand down and flips his palm upright. Into the lines, she places a chaste kiss. “—you need to stop.”

“I don’t—”

“You can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. They can’t stay here.”

Allen hears them again, a susurrus of voices, more distinct than they’ve been in a thousand years. But he ignores them, the way they’d ignore him, when he begged at their door, pleading for a love already gone cold. It was always him and Fatimah. It would always be him and her.

“But—”

Now, Fatimah is eighteen, still thin as a wire, her cheekbones razor-straight, her hair a snarl of taut curls. She cups her hands over the back of Allen’s head, eyes bruised, pulls him close. “You have to let me go.”

“I told you,” he says again, this time with more vehemence, less force. “I can’t.”

But she does not listen. She never does, Allen thinks, furious, before her lips find his and there is suddenly nothing else but the memories clotting in his throat like tears. “Once upon a time, there was a boy.”

Her voice is clear and silver and sweet as despair, and it is all he can do to not weep.

“And he loved a girl very much. But the girl died. He would not have it, though, and so, he chased her into the dark. Unfortunately, he forgot something important. He forgot to leave himself a trail. In his haste to find her, he became trapped.”

Allen dampens his mouth. “Maybe, it was intentional.”