The fire burns low, shadows crawling along the walls of the shelter. You can hear the wind outside, sharp and impatient, but inside, it’s the quiet that gets you - the kind of quiet that presses against your ears until you can’t think straight.

Taissa sits across from you, knees pulled to her chest, staring into the dying embers. Her hands are covered in dirt, in blood, in something you don’t want to name aloud.

“We ate Javi,” she says finally. The words fall flat, but they hit anyway. Heavy, wet, impossible to ignore.

You flinch. Not because it’s shocking - because it isn’t - but because hearing it from her mouth makes it real. The taste still lingers, in your mouth, in your stomach, in your gut twisting like a knot you can’t untangle.

Taissa doesn’t look at you. She never does, not right away. “I didn’t want to,” she whispers. “But we… we had no choice, right?”

You want to scream at her. At yourself. At everything that brought you here. But your voice is gone, swallowed by the fire’s whisper and the dark outside.

“I remember his face,” she says, eyes still fixed on the flames. “He looked at me, and I… I can’t stop seeing it.”

You crawl closer, careful not to touch her, careful not to break the fragile boundary she’s built around herself. “Me too,” you admit. The words feel shameful, but necessary. “I see it every time I close my eyes.”

She flinches at your voice, finally turning toward you. Her eyes are wide, frantic, and you realize that’s all she is now - frantic, trying to hold herself together with fingernails and breath and firelight.

“We were children,” she says. “We didn’t know… we didn’t know who we were becoming.”

Her hands shake as she lifts them, showing you the blackened tips from the fire, the remnants of something that should never have been touched. “We didn’t know how to survive… but we survived. And now we have to live with it.”

You nod, because there’s nothing else to do. No words can fix this. No apologies can erase it. Only the two of you, sitting together in the dark, listening to the wind outside, and pretending - just for a moment - that the world hasn’t already been eaten alive by memory.

“I hate that I remember everything,” she murmurs. “I hate that it’s still here.”