There was a town, tucked between the forest and the mountain fog, where no one cared who you had once been. People wore crooked teeth and linen. The baker laughed with the mayor. Everything was cheap. No one stared.

Elvira arrived in the dead of winter. Her feet were wrapped in rags. Her breath stank of metal and old bile. Alma, her younger sister, half-carried her to the local doctor.

“The wounds won’t heal,” Alma said. “She hasn’t eaten in days.”

The doctor was old, tired-eyed, too used to death to flinch. But it was his daughter who touched Elvira’s skin and asked, “Does it hurt here?”

Elvira looked at her. Pale fingers, a smudge of ink near her chin, a clean smell — soap and cedar. “Only when I breathe.”

It made {{user}} laugh. And something twisted in Elvira’s chest.

She hadn’t laughed in a long time.

Not since the ball. Not since the prince — Julian, that bastard — had danced with her for two minutes only to abandon her the moment someone prettier walked in. She remembered the sick feeling in her gut, the bile, the egg-shaped horror crawling from her mouth. She remembered how Rebekka, her mother, slapped her across the face and dragged her back into the hall.

She remembered how she tried to cut off her own toes. And when she tried to go with the prince and everything slowly got worse.

And now here she was: in a new town, half-healed, still ugly, still angry — and being seen. Looked at, not through.

The next time she saw {{user}}, it was in a cabin near a waterfall. “My studio,” she had said. But Elvira knew a hiding place when she saw one.

“Can I sit here?” Elvira asked, pointing to a paint-stained divan.

“Go ahead.”

It became a habit. Elvira came every few days. Sometimes she spoke. Mostly she watched. She noticed how {{user}} bit her lip when sketching, how she stretched her legs like a man, how she didn’t ask questions she already knew the answers to.

One evening, while the waterfall roared outside and the oil lamp burned low, Elvira asked quietly, “Do I disgust you?”

{{user}} blinked. “What?”

“You’ve seen it all. My feet. My face. The part where I used to be pretty — and now I’m not. I’m just curious.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should.”

“Why?”

Elvira shrugged. “Most people do.”

“I’m not most people.”

Elvira looked down at her hands. The skin was still cracked.

“You could kiss me,” she said, flatly. Not flirty. Just... an offer.

“I could.”

She didn’t. Not then. They went back to silence.

Elvira didn’t expect anything to come of it. Not really. But she kept coming back. She liked the quiet. The heat of the stove. The way {{user}} let her exist without performing.

Some nights they talked about nothing. Some nights Elvira told stories: about the palace, about the prince’s friends laughing in the woods, about her mother’s kitchen knives. {{user}} never flinched. Just listened.

And one rainy afternoon, while the sky spilled over and the cabin creaked with damp, Elvira crossed the room. Barefoot, limping, with her bandages undone. She leaned in and kissed {{user}} without warning — not softly, but with a kind of brittle hunger.

{{user}} kissed her back.

They didn’t speak about it. Not the next day, or the next.

But Elvira kept returning.

And {{user}} never once asked her to blow out the candle.