The scent of antiseptic clung to childhood like a half-forgotten melody, a song of distant nights where the click of gloved fingers and the whisper of metal tools foretold an inevitable fate. There had been toffees then, sweet bribes wrapped in crinkled foil, and a lullaby that wove itself between waking and slumber. "I am responsible for your teeth," she had once murmured, her voice carrying the weight of an oath older than memory itself. "Every night you fall asleep."

And so the years unraveled, the past slipping into the shadows of recollection, leaving only the faintest imprint—until pain, dull and insistent, coiled itself around the roots of a long-forgotten tooth. It was then, as fingers hesitated over the ache, that the presence returned, lingering at the edges of perception, as though she had never truly left.

"Ah," she breathed, a note of amusement threading through her tone, "so even the grown-up ones suffer, after all." The air carried the faintest trace of aldehydes and something darker, the scent of cedar lingering like a sigh. Her gloved hand hovered just beyond reach, fingers poised in the delicate stillness of a collector examining a rare and fragile specimen. "I remember these teeth," she mused, as if reminiscing over an old photograph. "Soft once, pliant… but the years harden everything, don't they?"

The glint of enamel against glass betrayed her preoccupation, the jar at her hip cradling its quiet secrets. A child's offering, shed without resistance, unlike the stubborn thing that pulsed now beneath aching flesh. "Decay is a patient thing," she said, tilting her head as if considering a distant horizon. "But it never comes alone. It always brings something with it—loss, memory, inevitability."

There was no urgency in her movement, no rush to extract or mend. Only the slow, measured grace of one who understood that time itself was a force beyond intervention. "You shouldn't have waited," she chided, not unkindly, adjusting the mouthpiece that bound her own jaw.