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The first breath clawed its way through the hollow of his throat, dragging soil, memory, and something else into his chest. Not air. Not life.

It wasn’t possible, shouldn’t be possible, but the moment his eyes flickered open in the blackness, he felt her.

Not as a sound. Not as a face. No whisper of her name broke the tombstone silence.

But she was there, inside the slow thud of his unnatural heart, curled into the silence between thoughts. She flickered like candlelight behind his useless eyes, a rhythm aching in time with the clockwork piston inside his chest.

The bond. The curse. Their forever.

Thirty years had passed. Thirty years. And yet… he felt no time in her. Her presence was still young, still sharp as she was the last time he touched her skin, the last time she whispered his name into the dark.

“If we ever fall apart, let us always find each other again.” She had said it with such foolish certainty, two young monsters playing god with their own souls. A binding spell sealed in blood, grief, and something far more dangerous: hope.

He had forgotten it. Buried it like the rest of himself beneath decades of rot.

But now… now it blazed in him.

The moment he rose from the ground, she called to him. Not in words, no, their bond was deeper than speech. She lived in his marrow, thrummed in the aching joints of his ruined limbs. Every half-formed nerve screamed toward her direction. His body, even in its broken state, remembered her.

The girl he loved. The one he bled for. And somehow, impossibly… the girl who was still alive. Still young. As though time had turned its back to her.

His hand, gray and shredded, trembled as he looked down at himself. This could not be how she saw him again. Not like this. Not until he could become a man again. Her man. The one she chose when fire was still warm between them.

He would not crawl to her in this grotesque half-life. No, he would rise. Repair himself, his body, his voice, his mind. And only then would he stand before her.

He didn’t know where she was yet, but he would. He didn’t know what she'd become, but he didn’t care.

Because even now, every time he closed his eyes, he saw her walking through the storm in his memory. Hair tangled with moonlight. That sly curve of her mouth. A girl who never feared the dark, because she had always been the most dangerous thing inside it.

She had waited for him once. And whether she remembered the curse or not, she was waiting again.

Isaac placed one trembling, rotted hand on the cave wall, forcing his decaying form upward, bone grinding against bone. Every motion screamed. Every inch forward felt like dragging the weight of the entire afterlife behind him.

But he welcomed the pain.

Because the deeper it cut, the closer it brought him back to her. He would be whole again.

(Post-recovery:)

She moved like memory.

That was the cruelest part. Not her face, though it was unchanged, untouched by time, a perfect echo of the last moment he kissed her. Not her voice, soft and clipped, trailing laughter into the courtyard.

But the way she walked. The careless grace. The sharpness behind her stillness. The way she scanned the world like she already understood how it would hurt her next.

Isaac stood beneath the old sycamore tree near the edge of the grounds, just close enough to see her, alive, whole, radiant under the twilight sky. And she… was smiling.

Not the smile she used to give him,crooked and secret, made of midnight promises. This was gentler. Lighter. A smile for strangers.

She had survived. The love of her life had been torn from her and she had endured.

But of course she missed him. Of course she needed him. They belonged to eachother. And he was there to take her back with him.

~

The perfect night came. He had gotten his semblances back. He looked like the old himself again. Beside the right hand he missed since Morticia cut it that night.

He was watching up at her leaning against the terrance edge. It would've been easy to climb up the wall.

And he will.

Here I come, my beloved. he thought.