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Anne Sallow wasn't going to die.  She might, however,  murder her brother.   She would have already, if not for the fact that he'd already done the same to their uncle, and after months of no-contact followed by an hour of screaming that made her voice hoarse, ending his idiot life would firmly put her in the realm of hypocrite.

To make matters worse, she'd barely squeaked her acceptance past the fact that her twin was a killer, only to become very abruptly aware of his other crime. That damned Relic and the exchange he'd tried to hide from her.  

She ground her teeth at the thought and jabbed her quill at the map they'd spent the last month poring over. 

The man beside her sniffed.  "Anne dear, there's going to be more holes than parchment if you continue like that."  

Astute, given he couldn't' t see. 

She shook her head. "We're running out of time."   

That, she could feel in a way that chilled her.  In a way that made her want to rip it out by the stem before it could grow roots.

Another sigh,  this one weary, practiced.  New twin, same story.   "Anne, you wanted him to accept there wasn't a cure, and he has.  Should we not respect his wishes?  He doesn't  want you to worry yourself over him."

"Well," Anne gritted, circling another point on the map with enough force to indent the parchment.  "Sebastian should have thought about that before he decided to disrespect my wishes and take my curse from me."  

Like it had been her favorite childhood stuffy he'd stolen and not a bit of insidious dark magic.

So, no, Anne wasn't going to die, and neither was her idiot brother.  

She wouldn't accept that. 

Maybe hypocrite was the correct word after all. 

Ominis made one of those knowing little ‘hmms’  and pushed himself away from the table.   It might have been too close to another sigh, token sound from the blonde, really.  And then the telltale sound of water and clinking.   

Tea. Routine. Steady.   

Ominis insisted on it, as though that one action itself held them all together.   Maybe it was just the act of creating some illusion of normal.  Deceiving their minds into believing,  if just for a moment, that not everything had become completely fucked.   That some things still endured. Would endure.  

The white porcelain tapped the table in front of her, cream, no sugar.   She didn't take it the way her brother did, with half the sugar bowl emptied into his cup.  

Anne tipped her head up to the man, sitting across from her again,  tea cup held in those pale, slender fingers.  Even the most mundane tasks looked elegant on him.  

"When is she getting here?"

She.

Her. 

Ancient Magic Wielder  Hero of Hogwarts Extraordinaire.

Eyeroll.

Anne might have learned the woman's name at one point.  M. C?  Em  Cee?  Emmy  Sea?   She was sure there was an ‘Em’ in there somewhere.  Sebastian had certainly told her, and it must have been in at least one of the dozen or so articles printed about her since Ranrock's defeat last year.   

All Anne saw was the way her brother had traipsed after the girl like some love-sick puppy, heart eyes big as a mooncalf's.   Or how she'd skipped along behind him,  caution to the wind as he'd delved further and further into the dark arts.  If logic had a limit, it was wherever the rest of the world ended, and the "them" of it all began.   Infatuated idiots circling each other down the drain. 

As if summoned,  the aforementioned Her barged through the door.   A whirl of mismatched scarves,  questionable eyewear, and loose parchments.   She never could simply walk into a room.   No, she blew through doorways.  Doorways,  lives, dreams, everything as far as Anne could tell.  A disastrously dressed tornado with a power that could level a village. 

Em heaved her perpetually over-stuffed bag onto the scrubbed wooden table, only narrowly missing Omnis's tea cup and succeeding in dislodging several precariously placed parchments from her person.   “I’ve found more!”

“Of Isadora’s Journals?”  Ominis queried.   

He’d not moved an inch in the wake of The Tornado’s destruction, just sat there sipping his tea like the woman had simply announced the morning news and not at all that she’d hauled in through the door, declaring she’d just come upon the one possible lead they might have.   

Supremely unflappable. 

The Tornado nodded, breathless,  “In a tomb near Mauranweem.”

~~~

Anne rubbed at her eyes until colors burst behind her eyelids. “I still don’t understand why we can’t use Ancient Magic.  Here–” Anne jabbed her finger at the journal.  “--Isadora talks about healing–”

Em’s mouth flattened, and air pushed through her nose with enough force Anne could hear it from across the room.  Exasperated, probably, but Anne really couldn’t be bothered with it. 

“I’ve told you.”  The woman gritted.   “Isadora removed pain.   The symptom, not the source. The most I could do is make him comfortable, and the potions already do that.  And that's if I could even do it without destroying everything that makes him, Him.  Even if I could somehow remove the curse itself and not the emotions tied to it, you’ve seen Seb’s scans; it’s integrated into his cells.  If we tried to excise it, we’d kill him.”

The evening devolved after that.  Too much blustering Tornado for Anne’s tastes, and she resigned herself to the back garden where the mid-November air nipped at her nose and cheeks.

“Have you gone to see him yet?”

Anne didn’t look up.  “You know I haven’t.” Not since she’d learned what he’d done.

Beside her, Em chewed the inside of her cheek, massaged the words, churning them over and over.  Anne could almost feel the thoughts bursting to make themselves known.  She stood.  “Merlin, spit it  out, would you?”

The woman’s lips flattened, grimacing in the moonlight, cut diagonal across her face. "Seb would never tell you because he doesn’t want you agonizing over him, but he’s not doing well.”  She let out a soft, bitter laugh.  “He should be in St. Mungo’s, but he refuses.”  That made sense, Anne thought; they’d failed her.  “I think the Relic, whatever he did, the curse is progressing faster, and I don’t know how much longer—”

“Stop.”  Anne snapped the word up before Em could make it real.”

“He’s been asking for you.” 

“No.” Anne shook her head.  At the implication in the statement or the woman next to her, she wasn’t sure. “No,  I won’t.   If the curse is moving fast, I’ll just have to move faster.”

The Tornado pressed a breath through her teeth. “You two are so alike,  you know that.”

“Shouldn’t you be leaving.”

Em shot her a look then, like a storm broken stone, wind made ice,  frivolity snapped. “For fucks sake,  he’s given up everything for you! And you won’t even—”

“I never asked him to!” Anne bit.  A hiss and a shout.

“You didn’t have to.”  And the witch vanished with a pop and a rush of wind.

“Well, that sounded pleasant.  Shall I make arrangements for a luncheon?” Ominis, eyebrows raised, poised as always in the doorway.  Exactly how long he’d been there, she couldn’t say.  Long enough, it seemed.

“You agree with her,” Anne muttered to the sky.   Not a question, even if part of her hoped for his denial.

She didn’t hear him move before his arms slid around her from behind, and his lips hummed into the top of her head.  He’d always been soft with her. “Not everything.  I imagine it’s more himself than you he’s done it for.”

“He never even asked me if he could.” No, the idiot had just gone and stolen what was rightfully hers. “He just–”

Ominis chuckled behind her.  Something low and soft against her hair.  “And if he had, would you ever have let him?”

~~~

In her dream, her seven-year-old self tugs a reluctant Sebastian down a sunny cobbled street.  Independence is not to be wasted, and they’ve just been granted a handful of coins and an hour to spend in the village on their own.  Zonko’s brilliant orange sign just around the corner, a flashing symbol of her destination as her brother tries to steer them round the other direction to Honeydukes.   

Sweets.  

Who needs sweets when they’re just feet from the best joke shop in the Highlands?

“Sebbie, come on.” She tugs at his arm.  “We’re going to Zonko’s.

He snaps his arm from her. “Don’t call me that!”

“Why not?  Mummy does.”

“Yeah,” He scuffs his shoe at the dirt.  “Well, that's Mum.  Doesn’t mean you get to.”

“Sebbie.” It’s really too easy to poke at.

“Anne, don't!”

She giggles and dances away up the street toward Zonko’s. “Sebbie, Sebbie, Sebbie.”

 He pouts and follows as he always does.

~~~

The next time The Tornado blew into Anne’s kitchen was both unannounced and just as unwelcome as it had been every other time. 

At least Tea was finished, and Anne was spared the necessity of trying to maneuver dishes out of the way while chaos bloomed over the table.   An assortment of scattered quills, scrolls, handfuls of toffees, and chocolate frogs--for her brother's damned sweet tooth, probably.   Before she pulled the small blue notebook from the depths of her bag.  One of Isadora's Journals.

“I think I’ve found something.”

~~~

“Once more, if you will.”   Ominis paced a well-practiced line across the sitting room.   “I  was under the impression  Ancient Magic was out of the question.”

The Tornado made an impatient sort of noise, for once, not flung in Anne’s direction.

“We can’t use Ancient magic to remove the curse.  It doesn't work like that.  But here--” The woman jabbed her finger at the page-- “Isadora mentions a man.  This other Ancient Magic wielder, Sanyu Mbabaki. She must have come across him on her travels.   Anyway,  she talks about how he would use the magic, not to  remove something per se,  but to encourage the body’s ability to heal itself.”

“That doesn’t explain why Isadora resorted to siphoning pain as she did,”  Ominis retorted, still wearing a path into the carpet.

“ Mbabaki’s method was slow, and, as far as I can tell, he only practiced on physical ailments.”  Em shook her head slowly.  “Isadora had waited years, by then, and she was working with grief, not physical injury or illness.   She didn’t want to gamble with a slow process  she couldn’t guarantee the end result of.” 

“Then slow wouldn’t work for us either," Anne snipped from her spot on the sofa.  “ Not if the curse is moving as quickly as we think.”

Em turned toward her. “We don’t need it to be perfect!  It just needs to be enough to get his body to distinguish itself from the curse and start fighting it.”

“And you think you can do it?”

“Not on my own, no.” Em sighed.  "The curse is too far progressed. Even with Ancient Magic, Sebastian doesn't have the strength to fight it. We need something to give us an edge, to assist the healing process enough the Ancient Magic can take over and eventually push the rest of it out.

“Phoenix Tears,” Ominis said, simply.

Em spun, a tornado in all her macrame glory. “Exactly!”

“You do realize we’ve a better chance of breaking into Gringotts than getting ahold of a vial, do you not?" The blond sniffed. "Even my family's connections, were I to use them, would be of little effect.

“Ah!  But that’s where you're wrong.”  The Tornado’s grin didn’t dissipate. “I have a plan.”

~~~

A phoenix

The Tornado had a phoenix.

Ancient Magic Wielder, Hero of Hogwarts Extraordinaire herself. 

By this point, the sheer ludicrousy of it all shouldn't have surprised Anne. Of course, the woman would just happen to own one of the rarest birds in existence.  She had, after all,  apparently jumped headfirst out of a rainbow to quell a Goblin uprising. 

Anne muttered as much, shoulders bent against the driving snow; shoes soaked and frozen despite the many warming charms over her clothing.   Late November in the high mountains was not on Anne’s list of desirable destinations.

They--Anne and The Tornado-- had apparated as close as the anti-apparition boundaries around the region would allow and had since, spent the last hour trudging through the snow and biting wind.  Or rather, Anne trudged, Em, on the other hand, pranced ahead of her; over-stuffed bag slung over her back, and an amalgamation of multi colored scarves flapping along behind her like a horde of color-clashing flags.   She'd even added an extra hat and a pair of fuzzy pink earmuffs over her usual wool hat.

"I don't own Bartholomew."  Em laughed, voice carried back to Anne, " I saved him from poachers once, and now he'll....well, he'll usually come if I call him from this spot."

"Bartholomew?"  Anne asked,  cresting the ridge behind the other woman."

"That's what I call him!"

“So she's friends with a phoenix,”  Anne muttered, "Next you're going to tell me you're friends with a dragon."

"Well, not friends....exactly--"

Anne snapped her gaze up to the woman.   Pink-cheeked and smirking below her hats.   

Surely not.

"--But Poppy and I did rescue a Hebridean Black and return her egg to her in 7th year.   She even let us pat her nose after that.   So I suppose...."

Anne snorted.   Of course, the Tornado had gone and gotten chummy with a dragon. Really, it was no wonder, with the woman dangling shiny magic and dragon-sized carrots ahead of him, that Sebastian tottered after her like a damned fool. 

They reached the peak in silence.   One that lasted too long at their approach.  The kind that had hung in the presence of undisturbed stillness. Or perhaps something disturbed that no longer was.   An empty sort of thing.

Em sliced the silence with a whistle, and they waited until the stillness became suffocating. 

And again and again until Anne cut a look across to the other woman, " I don't understand.   I thought you said the phoenix would come to you?"

"I said usually. And he does come normally.”  The woman paced, hands over her ridiculous double hats.  " I mean, I've only called him a couple of times,  but it was only a few months ago and--"

"Do Phoenixes migrate?"  Anne cut through The Tornado’s bluster. 

Em spun. "What?"

"He’s a bird." Anne hissed, "Do they migrate south in the winter?"

The Tornado stopped moving,  halted completely, colorful scarves drooping like sad little flags.  "  I.....fuck.

It really did nothing to temper Anne's fury.   "And you didn't think of that?"

Em’s hands jerked up, expression twisted to a storm. "What exactly is your problem with me?  Hmm?” 

So here it was.  

"My problem?"   Anne was just getting started.  “My problem is that you are the reason  Sebastian is even in this mess in the first place!”

“Oh, that’s rich, coming from a sister who can’t be bothered to even speak to him.”  The sarcasm bit colder than the icy wind.  “I’m the one who’s been there,  the one who cares, who loves him.”

Love? The insult of the word twisted inside Anne.  Pathetic.  Was that really how the woman tried to justify it to herself?

"Is it truly that upsetting  that I care for your brother!?"

"No." Anne laughed, bitter and cold.  "You don’t get to say that.  If you cared about my brother, you wouldn't have encouraged him into the Dark Arts just to learn a few more tricks.  If you'd actually cared, you'd have told him no.   That's what you do when you care!   You look out for people even when they can't look out for themselves.”  She was screaming now, composure flung haphazard to the wind.  “If you loved him,  you would never have let him feel like he needed to get himself killed to save me."

"I didn't know what he was planning with the Relic."

Em’s voice was so thin, so hollow, it halted  Anne’s tirade in its tracks.  "What?"

"I didn't know what he was planning,"  she said,  blinking up at the snowfall. "One moment, he was begging me to talk to the Keepers, and the next thing I knew, I was getting letters from Ominis telling me Seb had gone to the Catacomb with the Relic. I don't know why he changed it.... we never discussed it. By the time I got there, it was too late.”  The woman’s gaze met Anne’s, then, kaleidoscope storms to furious browns.   “Do you honestly think I'd have let him go through with that  if I'd known?"

~~~

The wrongness of it all smacked Anne in the face the moment the rush of side-along apparition settled her vision enough to note the unfamiliar figure beside Ominis at Sebastian’s door. Unfamiliar and yet familiar in all the wrong ways.   Pale green robes,  crossed wand and bone, and that detached solemn expression they'd all carried. 

Distant voices to sharp focus as she and Em approached the childhood home her brother now took up residence in, and the same she’d barred herself from with his presence.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Gaunt.   Truly.  I wish I had better news."  

The woman turned at their approach.   Em didn't pause at the door.  She must have seen something, but Anne couldn't focus on beyond the sudden rushing in her ears. The Healer's face was wavering in front of her,  words, and words and words, Anne couldn’t distinguish. Concern, like pity crushed in the wrinkles.  

And then something taller, solid. Mint and lemon, and juniper.  Ominis.

Wind screeched bitter cold through the valley.  Slender fingers tipped her head back,  warm thumbs sliding at her wind-bitten cheeks.  "Breathe, Anne.  He's alive.  He's resting inside.  Just breathe." 

Alive? She knew that much, she'd have felt it if.... but that still left questions knocking at the door.   Giving her grim looks she'd grown to know better than the words that tried to mask them.

The squeeze of apparition pressed around her until she found herself back in their own flat. 

"What's going on, Ominis?"  Slipped back,  arms secured like walls around herself. 

"Tea, first." Small comforts,  steadied in routine while they all went up in flames. 

"I don't want tea," she snapped.  " I want to know why that healer was at Sebastian’s house."    

But he'd already walked to the kitchenette, hands moving to start the water boiling.   Practiced motions.  He would insist on the calm to keep himself from cracking; meanwhile, Anne paced with all the patience of a dragon.

"Sebastian had another flare, while you were gone."   Anne halted mid-step. Ominis was not looking toward her,  focused on adding the tea bags and then water to the cups.  At least he'd not made her wait until it was finished. "One of the worst so far."

"But the potions--"

"They are no longer working to combat the effects."  Ominis sighed.  "Anne, the healers don't know how much longer  he-”

"Stop!" Her head snapped up, eyes locked to the ceiling where she could carve her denial in the crown molding. "Just stop."   The joy of murdering her idiot brother belonged to her and her alone, not some curse he'd stolen from her. "I don't care what they're saying, I'll find something."

The sounds of Tea halted,  replaced with something that tried to be a laugh and failed miserably.  "You two are so alike." 

Anne huffed. Merlin, how many times was she going to hear that this week?   

"Sebastian needs you, Anne."

She spun on her heel to retort that what Sebastian needed was a cure, and for the second time in hours, halted in her tracks. Ominis's head was bent,  hands braced against the counter. Her calm and steady was breaking. 

"I can't go to him, Omi." It sounded too frail for how tightly it gripped her.  " I can't... I just can't".

But he'd already grabbed her again, wrapped her into him,  soft as always before she ever knew she needed it.  

"Why?" His breath tipped against her ear.  She'd not even begun to shake her head when he continued. "I've let you keep that,"  Just as soft.  "Given you time, because you asked, but I don't know that we have--"

"Because I don't know how to forgive him." Confession bit against his shoulder, wrapped in enough denial to keep her from tasting the salt. " He's dying for me, and I can't stop being furious with him."

"For Solomon?"

"For taking the curse.”

~~~

They didn't go to the cottage where her brother now slept. 

And that night,  as so many others, Anne curled herself into the blond,  let him trace lines on her skin.  Sweet kisses down her throat while the rest of the world faded away. 

He was always the most patient of them.  Most of all with her.  

"I'm furious with him too, you know,"   Ominis whispered,  when neither of them had slept, and the sky paled in the east.  

~~~

Later, Anne would tell herself she'd needed access to her parents' Library and whatever research they had tucked away on those shelves.  Not that any part of her wanted to see the idiot half of her soul.   That the war waged to keep her away was slowly losing steam beneath the repeated pressures.  

Admitting that felt like giving up.  Accepting some inevitable future.  

They were fools if they all thought she’d let him get away with it. 

Anne was determined not to look into her twin's bedroom when she passed.   Head down, straight to the stairs, up to the second floor. She should have known better. 

“Annie?”  

His voice was wrong through the partially opened door.   Thin, hoarse, as though breathing had become a laborious task. 

Slowly,  she pushed her way into the room. 

Sebastian was half-sitting in the bed.  His head and shoulders propped up on a precarious pile of pillows.  The last time she’d seen her twin, he’d been vibrant, whole.   His cheeks full, flushed, and tan, still clinging to those last stubborn remnants of childhood. Now, his skin sank into the hollows, thin jaundiced paper, stretched over his skull below the dull mess of chestnut curls. He smiled when he saw her,  lips split, cracked, and chapped. 

Anne swallowed. “You look awful.”  

Yes, that seemed the sisterly way to greet him.

“Really?" Sebastian snorted weakly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“Look at you.”  Anne was beside him, straightening the bedclothes before she could think better of it.  Remind herself she was still furious with him. 

“Annie.” 

She ignored his protest, conjuring a glass of water and pressing it to his lips.  “You need more fluids,  and just look at your hair.”  She added, trying to smooth the unruly mop of curls, “ It’s a mess.  What have you been doing with it?”  It refused to settle no matter how many times she ran her hand over it.   

“Annie, leave it alone. It’s not going to lie flat.”  Sebastian swatted feebly at her hands.  “Merlin, you’re as bad as Mum was.” 

“And what do you think she would say about this?” 

Her brother’s face scrunched. “About my hair?   Probably that it’s like hers. “

“No, not that.”  Anne waved his answer away. “ And budge over, would you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re my little brother, and I said so.”   

Sebastian glowered at the term.  Throwback to their first year at Hogwarts when she’d gained inches on him and refused to refer to him as anything else.  “We’re twins, and I’m a head taller than you.”

“I’m still older.”

"That doesn't count." But he slid toward the wall, and Anne lay down on top of the blankets next to him.  

Merlin, how long had it been since she'd climbed into bed with him?   Not since the weeks after their parents died and she'd pretended to be scared and insisted on sleeping with him because she knew he had nightmares.  They didn't fit nearly as well now, even with the weight he'd lost. 

“I meant.”  Anne started again, gaze glued to the few Quidditch posters left on his ceiling.  “What do you think Mummy would say about this?”  

This, because naming it would make abstraction into a reality, and she was already toeing the line. 

“I dunno, Anne,” he muttered.  “It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to her,  you know that.” 

“She would say you never should have done it!” Anne bit. 

“A lot of things never should have happened,  but they did." Sebastian sighed beside her. "On the bright side, though, this really secures my win for best twin.”

Trust her idiot brother to make this into a joke.

“When I die, you won't beat that, ever.  I want  the victory on my grave.”   Anne turned to see him, smirking, arm outstretched, emblazing imaginary words ahead of them.   “Sebastian, best twin ever— You can give a speech,  tell everyone all my best qualities, how good looking I was, and–”  

And that was really more than she could take. 

“Stop! Sebbie, just stop."  She slapped at her eyes. He was too blurry, wavering behind her lashes. “Stop saying that, acting like everything is okay. Nothing is okay.” 

Sebastian didn’t say anything for a long while.  Just reached down and squeezed her fingers,  but then, she’d never been able to say anything to him either, when it had been her, and all of it became too much for him. 

“I know. I know Annie, I’m sorry,"  he said softly, when her breathing had steadied.  “It’s really all a bit fucked isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t supposed to be you.”  The tightness ached at the back of her throat.  “I was supposed to look out for you.”

"You have, Annie. You  always have.”  His voice had become slow and slurred, sedative drafts at work again. " It's my turn now, okay?" 

He was asleep before she could argue with him.

Where had he come from?  This version of her brother who faced death with a grim sort of acceptance.  Where had that boy gone? The one who'd raged and cried when Solomon refused to keep looking for a cure.   Who'd refused to believe that nothing could be done.  More importantly,  when had they switched places?

~~~

The Tornado—though given her current state, perhaps the name was not as applicable—was stagnant when Anne left Sebastian.

The woman was turning a tightly wound scroll of parchment over in her fingers.   Was there a term for a deflated hurricane? With her many colorful hats and scarves, and overcoats,  flung unceremoniously over the couch, the woman almost looked normal, dressed only in a simple knit sweater and trousers. 

And then Anne thought that normal felt rather unsettling on her.

"How is he?"

Anne pulled out the chair across from her.  "Asleep, for now."

But the other woman was already nodding; she must have guessed it, and Anne raised her eyebrows at the scroll still twirling between her fingers.

“I thought I might write Poppy.”  She said softly. “If anyone would know about a phoenix, it would be her.”

~~~

It was nearly dawn when Sebastian emerged from his bedroom.   Anne, bent once again over Isadora's journals startled at the movement in her periphery.  He was too thin, even easier to notice now he wasn't bundled under layers of blankets.  

 "Don't look at me like that,"  Sebastian muttered, padding over to take a seat beside her.

 "You should be resting."

“I've been resting  for days.”  He grumbled. "If  I spend any longer at it, I'll die of boredom before the curse ever has a chance.”

She fixed him with a practiced stony look until his gaze slid to the journals.  

Sebastian’s face twisted. "Annie..."  

Too much a warning in that tone,  from someone who'd pranced around the Highlands gathering Dark Relics and spouting Unforgivables like a macabre fireworks display, all in the name of curing her. 

"Sebbie,"  Anne glowered further at him.  The idiot was really looking to rile her with that. "I swear to Merlin, if you try to tell me I shouldn't look for a way to fix this,  I will hex your eyebrows off again."

"I never really hated that, you know."

Anne was confused.  He'd severely protested his lack of eyebrows the last time. Screeched at her so loudly, Professor Sharp had come down from the Head Table to assign them both detention, and Anne had tried to argue that Sebastian had gotten what he deserved, trying to nick her belongings. 

"You calling me Sebbie."   He said quietly, and Anne stilled, breath caught in her throat. His cheeks looked even more sunken in the low light.   "That is, I hated it when we were kids, but after Mum and Da' left." He swallowed. "You sound just like her now, you know.” 

"Of course I knew that,  Sebbie.” She shoved it past that burning lump in her throat. “Don't be daft."

"I think I understand it now.” He continued.  “ Why you wanted me to stop looking."

"It was tearing you apart.  I hardly recognized you." 

"And it's doing the same to you now,” he snapped. 

Anne wanted to snap back at him.  Tell him he should have thought about that before he stole her curse and tossed his lifeforce away.  But now he’d met her with that earnest, pleading gaze.  Pathetic, really, how easily he could melt his adversaries.  Worse, how non-immune she was to it.  It had been with good reason she’d refused to see him. 

Anne chewed her lower lip. Back to the journal, “I can’t stop, Sebbie. You know that.”

“I didn’t do this lightly, Annie.”  And she could hear the strain where the force met his waning strength. "I knew everything it would cost me,  but I chose to pay it, because it meant you’d live. I didn’t do this so I could still watch it destroy you. I don’t want that.”

Merlin, they really were alike. 

Anne looked to her brother's tired pleading gaze.  It was a game now to see who’d look away first, and Sallow may as well have been synonymous with stubborn.

“It’s not what I wanted either, Sebbie, but here we are."

~~~

Sebastian's strength returned slowly, if never completely, through the following weeks. Now that Anne had breached whatever mental barrier had kept her away from her twin, she was hard-pressed to be sent away.  

And one afternoon left Sebastian grumbling something under his breath about how "Wanting her back in his life had not meant being mothered by her." And then some utter nonsense along the lines of "I’m a perfectly capable adult who can care for myself.”   And Anne concluded both that her brother must be touched in the head, and that this was the perfect opportunity for revenge.

They'd all insisted on her presence.  Pressed her to go to him.  Fine.  They could all deal with her taking up residence in her childhood bedroom for the foreseen future. An all-or-nothing approach seemed to be a trait both she and Sebastian had inherited.

Besides, someone needed to attempt to stop the newly goggle-adorned whirlwind from besmirching her parents' home with whatever manner of garish Christmas decor the woman had nifflered away from questionable origins.

Those singing baubles had definitely belonged to the McKinnons at the other edge of the hamlet, and, as none of their names were  Annabelle, Samuel,  Oliver, or Mary,  Anne concluded that the personalized stocking hangers had also been borrowed without permission.   And Merlin, when had Ominis's righteous moral compass infiltrated her psyche enough to make her boring?

"Sebastian almost sounds like himself with her."  Ominis mused one evening, as The Tornado whirled disastrously, prismatic chaos around Sebastian, and he watched her like some starry-eyed fool. Cheeks unusually flushed, outlined the woman's form in little hearts.  He probably slept with a photo of her under his pillow. 

Still,  as much as Anne wanted to despise the woman, she couldn't deny the truth in Ominis's phrase. That when Em was moved into his vicinity, her brother looked so much more like the curious boy he'd been before everything came crashing down. Both the boy and the echo of the man their father had been.  

~~~   

"Phoenixes don't migrate." Em had torn open Poppy's response with all the delicacy of a  Mountain Troll and flung the remnants about to assault Ominis’s tea cup. 

The latter grimaced.  

"But,"  She continued, "Poppy did say Poacher activity has increased in the area.   And... If Bartholomew felt threatened.  It's possible he relocated.”

“That still leaves us no way of finding him.” Ominis snipped. 

So they were back where they’d started. 

Anne looked over to her twin. "What if you just gave the curse back to me?”  

Sebastian gave her a look like she’d grown a second head.  "Absolutely not.  Finders keepers." 

Anne fixed her shared womb idiot with a glare. "You didn't find it. You stole it.”

 "For Merlin's sake, the pair of you," Ominis snapped. Tea sloshed,  porcelain clipped down on the round table.  "We are discussing a malignant dark curse,  not a bloody Puffskein. As far as I'm concerned, neither of you gets to have it!” 

~~~

The next attack came without warning. Without mercy.   The sharp crack of shattered glass, and Sebastian curled convulsing on the scrubbed wooden floor. Arms clenched, white knuckled around his middle, retching blood between shallow breaths.   Crimson pooled around his head.

And Anne could feel that sharp thing tear under her ribs and then the void beyond where his soul was ripping itself away from hers. Sebastian was screaming.  Sounds beyond pain or comprehension, and Anne's throat was raw with it. She didn't remember her knees or palms cracking against the ground, just that she needed to stop her twin from leaving her.    

Figures moved around them,  voices dim through the haze.  

"Annie."  His voice was far too weak. "It's okay." 

And there was that lie again. 

"I'll send for the Healers."  Ominis, concise and steady. 

"No,"  Sebastian gritted beside her.  Still curled in on himself, his nostrils flared with the pain. "I can handle it."

"Sebastian... please.."  Em, this time, somewhere on her brother’s other side.

"No, they can’t do anything anymore.  They'll just prescribe more sedative drafts......I don't want that." 

Anne squeezed her eyes shut,  one hand clenched around Sebastian's, and the other bruising divots into her ribs where that void caverned under her.  Maybe if she held it tight enough, she’d keep him from slipping past her without permission.  

Bodies moved around her, voices dim and hazy, the static of magic and her name.   Soft at first, cool fingers slipped under her eyes, and she was being hauled up and squeezed away until icy chill bit at her back, and she was held against that familiar slender form.   Tall enough to rest his chin on top of her head. 

The twisted Hawthorne told her they were in the garden.

"Sebbie." It choked her before she could stop it.   Pressed her face into his shoulder to stop herself from shaking.  This wasn't her.  This crying, shaking thing.   No, Anne was stronger than that.   Sebastian was the emotional one.  The twin with the outbursts and the temper that shattered all of their dishes one afternoon when he was eight.

“I know, I know.”  Ominis muttered it into her hair, fingers clenched into her back.”

“We’re so close, Omi.”

To saving him?  To losing him?  To watching the Sallow line end with its last male heir?

She didn’t know anymore, but the blonde nodded into her hair. 

“I am so tired of this curse destroying the people I care for most.  This is not….”  He shook his head against her. A soft hollow laugh brushed over her hair. “This is not how I’d intended to spend this Holiday.”

Anne’s face was still buried in his robes.  “And how would you have spent it, Omi?”

The man’s arms only tightened around her, words ghosting over her ears, hot against the starlight chill.  “Not right now, Anne darling,”

“Please, Omi,”  She whispered into his robes. “I need… something.”

Anything to distract from the ache where her brother’s soul clung to her by a thread.  

Did the fates watch it now?  Scissors poised, lethal and gleaming. And if it snapped, would she start to unravel with it?

"Let me," he whispered, voice as delicate as the snowflakes gathering on their shoulders.

"Please." Soft thumbs traced his whispers into her cheekbones, her eyebrows, her jaw.  A comfortable, familiar rhythm. Steady in the swirling chaos. "Just let me have this.”

~~~ 

When they returned inside and Anne peeked around Sebastian’s partially opened door.  It was to find him nestled into Em’s embrace, arms and legs tangled together with the blankets.   She wondered then if the woman knew how much he loved her.   If she could read it on his face as plainly as Anne could.     

~~~

Despite his steadfast resistance to the sedative drafts, Sebastian's strength declined heavily through the following days, and Anne tried not to count her brother's dimming hours of lucidity.   They'd been lulled into a false sense of complacency, and now, more than ever, she could feel time slipping like sand through her fingers.   That sharp ache under her ribs, and the void beyond.  Ripped truth into the faults she'd fought so hard to deny.  The thread stretched, taught and fraying at her fingertips. 

Who was she without her twin?   Even estranged as they'd been in the wake of his downfall, they'd still been bound.  Souls tied, and his existence like a promise she could return to.    

Anne shoved the thoughts away. They would tangle and pile if she let them. Build over on one another and leave her trapped under their weight, whispering futility. The hours Sebastian slept were hours she and Em spent in contact with Poppy,  scouring the country for word of the elusive phoenix.   Hours Ominis spent eliciting favors from people whom his name bought him contact with. 

Otherwise, they pored over Isadora's journals.  Each lead treaded and retreaded,  each line like worn footsteps sent them combing through desolate rooms, hoping for a window: a catch, a secret entrance, hidden knowledge, anything to give them an edge. 

Sebastian met their continued efforts with a fragile kind of protest.  Which Anne obeyed exactly as well as he'd done when their positions had been reversed.   

Was he really fool enough to think she'd simply sit back and let him keep her curse without resistance? 

~~~

Anne couldn't say what drew her down to the cellar that Christmas Eve.  There was no rhyme or reason anymore, just discordant efforts, bruised fingers grasping at shadows.  Maybe it was simply the only place she had left to venture.   They'd avoided it like an illness, she and Sebastian.   The room might not have existed, for how they so readily skipped over its entrance.  Boarded away with a steadfast reluctance to acknowledge it.

There was a still,  undisturbed quality here. Not picked over for valuables as Solomon had done with the rest of the house.

 It was like time frozen pre-catalyst. Books stacked,  cracked spines, pages marked: Spread parchments and dried inkwells. Quills poised over lines of script and half-written alchemy arrays.  Artifacts she couldn't name still ticking and whirring. 

 The glowing tip of Omnis's wand picked up a rapid cadence beside her.  New spaces always sent the semi-sentient instrument into overdrive.  His other hand slid to her lower back.  It was presence, more than pressure or direction.

She moved without purpose, languid steps,  fingers shifting dust from ancient spines.  Her father would be in a state, to know his protective charms had faded. His precious books left to gather age and dust. Sebastian, too, if he ever saw them. 

It was habit, more than anything, that drew her into the cushioned chair behind the oak desk and traced her fingers across the parchments. Muscle memory to dig into the drawers, past notebooks, and photographs to those secret places they used to hide coins and sweets.   To find she and Sebastian's initials scratched into the wooden leg.   Habit, to hook her foot on the underside of the desk to release the secret compartment.   Easier, now she wasn't a child.  

The small hidden door dislodged from the left corner of the desk and there, a small velvet box stared back at her from within its depths.   An unexpected memory illuminated in a steady scarlet pulse. 

Could the answer really be that simple?   Hidden here among their belongings from the start. 

Anne pulled the blue velvet from its depths with shaking fingers.  It opened as smoothly as it had when she was a child, preserved from dust by the goblin-forged metal that lined the hidden compartment.

Inside, a circle of intertwining gold bands ending in two hands clasped around a pale iridescent stone. 

Ominis shifted his wand beside her.  “Is that—“

“It was Mum’s." She pressed the ring into Omnis's hand to let him feel along its details. As though by doing so, she could secure the reality of its presence.  

"Annie?” Sebastian's voice carried to them, strained and weary. He must have woken long enough to note the discrepancy in the wall.  The partially opened door that never was.  

Omnis's fingers twitched against her shoulder.  “We’re here, Sebastian.”  

A cautious warning thing, but her brother's staggering shadow had already emerged at the base of the stairs.  Shaky footsteps, undeterred by logic or his own limitations.  "What… are you doing down here?" 

Anne stood. Of course, the idiot was trying to climb down the stairs.  Could hardly leave his bedroom without collapsing, and he'd gone and tossed rationale away again.  Still, the undercurrent of anxiety in his tone would tug in that annoying sisterly affectionate place.  Even more, knowing what he'd found the last time he went looking for someone down here. 

Sebastian staggered against the wall; his weight braced against the stone.  Even from this distance, Anne could see the glistening sheen across his forehead, the rapid rise and fall of his chest. And then that anxious concern twisted up the corner of his mouth with a devilish sort of mirth, as his gaze locked onto the gold ring Anne now realized Ominis was trying to hand back to her. 

 “Are you proposing already, Gaunt?"  Sebastian’s eyebrows had risen, near enough to threaten his hairline. "I think we’ll need to have some words first in that case,”  He added weakly.  “‘I’ve not given you permission to marry my sister,  and really,  I've some serious concerns about your choice of location."

“I would, very much like to, yes," Ominis said quietly, fingers sliding down, resting against her hip.  "But no, that's not what this is."

The declaration was so matter-of-fact, so nonchalant from the blonde, it sent her heart skittering in a most undignified way.  One that left her mind scrambling for the hidden meaning within.   Anne Sallow was not often a woman rendered speechless; she didn't like how it felt now.  Slicing glances between the two men, composure snatched away, however briefly, before she found her footing.

"Last I checked, it was my permission needed, not yours," Anne huffed in her twin's direction.  

"Apologies, Anne dear. " Another whisper against her ear.  It was much too hot, too close for present company.  "Simple formalities and such."

Her brother made a face that mimed retching.  Anne thought it was quite hypocritical, given how much time the Paper-Mache Tornado spent in his lap. 

Sebastian’s expression changed just as quickly.  Flipped over on itself in an instant.  Anne knew in the moment before she felt that aching cavernous thing rip open under her ribs again.   Before her brother's nostrils flared and he slid to the floor with a low, drawn-out, inhuman sort of whimper. 

She was moving now; the ring snatched from Omnis's grip even as he rushed behind her.  The icy stone bit at her knees. 

"Don't you dare, Sebbie," Anne snapped.  It was about all the sisterly authority she could manage. "You're not dying down here."

He made a weak sort of noise then.  A fragile, pained thing that tried to be a laugh and choked on itself between clenched teeth.  "That would be a bit ironic, wouldn't it.” 

"No, it would be about the worst thing you've ever done.  I'd never forgive you for it."   Her voice was too high, too warbled.  Her composure was really too strained.

Before she could begin to question it, Anne snatched up one of her brother's hands and pressed his fingers around their mother's ring, before he could distinguish exactly what it was.  He'd not realized previously, too far away to make out the details of it.   Sebastian had always leapt too recklessly toward the sun, and really, she didn't think she could handle watching that plummet again if she’d gotten this wrong. 

Anne watched the change as if in slow motion, though in reality it must have been only seconds.   Those subtle expressions she knew as thoroughly as her own reflection.  The gentle softening across his cheeks and along his jaw.  Jagged breaths, steadied.  The tinge of color in his cheeks.  Or maybe it was the way that tearing under her ribs eased. 

Sebastian swallowed and blinked down at the thing resting in his palm. 

“Mum’s?” was a half-whispered question and a realization in one syllable. 

Anne nodded as much to herself as to him. “It was in the desk.  It's been there this whole time and we never..."

Sebastian looked to her and back to the ring.”  I asked Solomon about it when you...."  He shook his head.  "He tried to blame me;  said I must have lost it.  I...I thought he'd sold it."

"We should have known," Anne muttered.  “Mummy always kept it in that compartment while they were working down here.  She never wanted to risk the stone absorbing whatever experimental magic they were working with."

"As lovely as this all sounds, I would rather appreciate some clarification."  Ominis sniffed behind them.  “The curse,  it's not gone, is–?"

Footsteps drowned away the rest of his sentence.  Frantic stormy things and The Tornado came thundering down the steps in a ridiculous amalgamation of bathrobes and fuzzy socks.   

"Seb!" 

 It must have been an alarming sight; she and Ominis on the ground, huddled around him.  Anne couldn't quite bring herself to resent the woman for the edge of panic in her voice.

"It's fine, Love.  I'm fine," and with a surprising amount of strength, he pulled the woman down to him so her legs draped across his, arm around her back. "See?  I’m okay."

Em shook her head. "I don't understand."

"It's this." Sebastian raised his other hand to her eyeline.  "Well, the stone, actually." and there was something then in her brother's voice then.  A quality Anne knew appreciated the sentimentality of it, perhaps even more than it being the only thing tethering him to life. "It belonged to my mother."

The woman bit her lower lip. 

"I am still in need of clarification."  It was that snippy, haughty tone Omins got when his understanding lagged behind where he liked it.

Anne leaned back, "It's..."  

Where to begin?

"Mum and Da' struggled to have children."  Sebastian began quietly, "We weren't the first, Anne and I.   There were three others they lost before us, and that's when Mum said it was too difficult, she didn't want to try anymore.  Maybe a family was just out of the cards for them.   So, they focused on their careers.  They were Curse Breakers, you know, before they started teaching, and the way Da' told it, Mum was sort of fearless, 

 "She had absolutely nothing in the way of self-preservation, and I both adored and abhorred her for it,"   Anne quoted.   “Mum got hurt quite badly, though.   She came in contact with a really foul curse on one of their assignments and had to be rushed to the Hospital.   That's how they found out she was pregnant.”

"With us,"  Sebastian added with a smug little grin.

"Obviously," Anne huffed.   “The problem was,  the Dark Magic was slowly killing her, and the healers couldn't fix it without the treatment harming the pregnancy.  They could either heal her or let the Dark Magic take her and save Sebbie and me.  It was a choice they said, but either way, the healers couldn't save all of us."   

"Da' wouldn't accept that."  Sebastian continued where Anne stopped. "He refused to lose any of us. Said that he would find a way or make one.  And he did, with this. " Sebastian tipped his head to the ring in his palm—"The stone is infused with phoenix tears."  

 Em gaped, "How is that—”

"Possible?"  Sebastian shook his head.  "I don't know,  Mum never let Da' tell that part of the story.  But whatever he did, it worked.  As long as the stone was touching her skin, it kept the Dark Magic in check until she could complete the treatment. And now it's—”

“Fighting off the curse,” Em whispered.

Sebastian nodded. "I think so.  It’s not gone; I can still feel it.  But it’s weaker now, like it’s stopped biting. 

“This is what you needed, Em,  is it not?”   Ominis queried with all the practice of a diplomat.  “To use your Ancient Magic as we spoke of before.” 

The woman bit her lower lip, rolled it around under her teeth.  The hesitation in it sent Anne’s eyes on an orbiting path that would have earned her a stern talking to from her mother.  Merlin, the woman, had barged into Anne’s home so sure of it before.  Anne made to snark as much at her. 

“Can you really do it?”  The sound was so small from her little brother,  so earnest Anne faltered before the ire could leave her. 

And there was that stupid hope, alighting again, poised to break him if she didn’t keep him steady.   She reached for his hand, still calloused and ink-stained as their father’s had been. 

“Yeah, Sebbie,” Anne said softly. “Yeah, she can.”

“I can.”  Em nodded, steadier this time.  “I think I can at least.  I’ve never done it.  It might hurt a bit.”

 Sebastian let out a pained, breathless sort of laugh.  “Brilliant, I was hoping for more of that before morning.”

“Stop that.” The Tornado blustered. “I’m already nervous.”

Sebastian offered an apologetic sort of half smile.

“Right then….right… I’ll need some space.”

Ominis dutifully stepped back, plenty of room for the woman’s hopefully curse-ending shenanigans.  Anne, on the other hand, remained dutifully where she was and dared The Tornado to protest.  That was her brother after all.  Her twin.  Her Sebbie.

“Annie,” Sebastian squeezed her hand.  “It’s okay.”

She looked back at the woman kneeling beside her twin.  That disastrous, messy tornado who'd held him so carefully in the aftermath of his last attack.   

“I’ve got him, Anne.”  

It was as soft as she’d ever heard from the woman.  Enough sincerity, Anne almost believed her.  At least enough, she allowed Ominis to pull her to her feet and back toward the desk.  Arms wrapped around her from behind.  That calm, stable anchor he’d made himself for her.  Only the furious, uneven patter against her back spoke through to the apprehension they shared. 

Em was kneeling closer now,  one hand slipped inside Sebastian’s partially opened shirt, palm over his heart, the other cupped against his cheek.   His lips moved.  Quiet words, Anne couldn’t quite make out. 

‘I trust you?  I love you?’ 

They were one in the same, really.  

The woman’s forehead tipped against his.  Her hand rose and fell against his chest with every unsteady breath. 

It felt like something too intimate.  A stolen moment Anne shouldn’t be privy to.

And then the magic flared under the woman’s palm. 

Small and pulsing at first, a silver outline around her hands, and then growing,  bright and steady.  The thrumming cadence of a heartbeat.  Waves of light flowed in rings from between her fingers, widening with each new pulse to fill the room.   Anne could see her brother through the light, teeth clenched, knuckles protruding white, and still the woman held him steady.    

He made a soft,  pained noise.  Or maybe it was only soft over the steady thrum of magic.  Anne felt that sharp hollow thing under her ribs again.  Soul strand white hot and melting into itself,  reforging.   She cried out at the same time Sebastian did.

Ominis’s grip tightened around her.  Body spun so she could face him. “Steady, Anne dear,”  he cooed.  “It’s working.”  

How he could know that without sight, Anne couldn’t figure, but she turned again.   The dark tendrils bled from her brother's skin, pooling on the stone until, with one final rush of magic, it released, and Anne seized her moment. 

A twist of her wand scooped the writhing dark thing into a conjured jar that she stashed in her parents' old desk.  

Finders keepers indeed.

As the last remnants of light faded,  Em fell against Sebastian’s chest.  Anne and Ominis followed, collapsing to their knees.  A horrible tangle of arms and legs all wrapped around each other. Anne was sobbing and saying, stupid, emotional, affectionate things to her twin, like  “I love you.” And then she was actually thanking The Tornado and holding on to all of them so tightly her arms ached.  

Ridiculous, really, how they all stayed there on the cellar floor wrapped around one another in a messy sentimental puddle.   Crying into each other's shoulders.  Relief and release all mixed up into one.

Even more ridiculous was how little Anne wanted it to end. 

~~~

The garish Christmas decorations were rather delightful when Anne and Ominis ventured upstairs sometime later, sans Em and Sebastian.  

The soft glisten of the tinsel and baubles in the firelight.  Something simmered on the stove: Orange and cloves, and cinnamon.  Everything was softer now, warm and lovely inside this tiny home. 

Ominis brought her tea in her favorite mug. Routine was not deterred, and together they curled on the sofa by the fire.  They talked of everything and nothing of importance, watching the embers or otherwise the twirling snowflakes beyond frosted windows. 

“Were you serious about it, Omi?  What you said to Sebbie down there.”  She asked when the tea was gone, and conversation lulled.  

His gaze remained turned to fiery embers. “In truth,  I cannot think of a time I’ve ever been more so.”

Anne swallowed; her heart was doing that unusual fluttery thing again. “I…We’ve never discussed—”

He turned then, fingers sliding up her arms and coming to rest in her hair. “We've had other rather pressing matters to attend to, but there is no future I can imagine where you are not by my side, Anne.  So yes, I should  think I’m very serious.”

“Oh,”  The sound left her in an odd little flutter.

“Have I made a mistake?”  His eyebrows twitched together, mouth pulled anxious lines down at the corners. “I’ve been too forward?  I’ll understand if–”  

“No,”  Anne breathed,  giddy spirals twisted into the firelight. “No, it just took me by surprise, is all.”

She watched the grin spread over his face,  boyish and carefree in a way Ominis Gaunt rarely let himself be.  When he kissed her, she forgot everything else then.  The entirety of the world vanished.  Just the familiar heat of his lips against hers and his fingers twisting in her hair. 

“Was this meant to be you asking me?” She whispered against him when they allowed enough space between them for words. 

“No.” She felt his smile against her lips, the soft, breathy laugh into her mouth.  “There’s a certain amount of decorum I’ll insist on for that, Darling.”   His lips brushed over her again.  More the whisper of a kiss than the actual thing. 

“I will ask you properly someday,  Anne Sallow.  That, I promise you.”

~~~

Anne’s curse was missing the next time she went to check on its new location.  Moved from the desk and hidden carefully in one of her most secret spots.  

The lack of it sent her seething to the source of its absence.  

She found her brother hidden away in the cellar, as such miscreants are apt to do with stolen goods.   Bent over more documents, reading glasses pushed up onto his nose, and her curse on the desk beside him, pounding its angry little fists against the reinforced glass.  

“Who said you could touch my curse?”

“Your curse?”  He raised incredulous eyebrows at her.  “I think it's our curse now. Besides, I found it fair and square, finders keepers.”

“You weren’t supposed to find it.  It was hidden! ” It would have been a screech if her whispered tone had allowed it.

“Hardly,” Sebastian snorted.  “I know all your hiding spots anyway; they’re not that difficult.”  Anne made an offended sort of noise, the idiot didn’t even have the decency to acknowledge.  “Actually,”  Sebastian rubbed at the back of his neck.   “I  thought I might study it.” 

Anne dropped into the chair beside him.   He was still thin, still pale.  Despite his progress, it would take several months, Em had said, before the curse would be gone from him completely.  The lingered there in the heaviness just under his eyes.   

 “It nearly killed you.”

“Really? I’d never have guessed.”  Sebastian snarked. 

Anne resisted the urge to kick him under the desk.   

He tapped the documents in front of him. “I’ve applied for the research program at St. Mungo’s for next Fall.  The curse will have worked itself out fully by then, and—”  He prodded the jar with the end of his wand. “ I’m going to get all the use out of the ugly little bastard that I can.  Imagine what we could learn from it.

Anne’s gaze followed the wand down to their mother’s ring around his pinky finger.   Sebastian must have noticed because he stopped prodding the jar and twisted the gold band from his finger.  The change was subtle.  Only noticeable to her, probably.   

“Here, I should have given this back before.”  He shrugged.   “It was Mum’s, so she’d probably want you to–”

“No,” Anne pressed it back into his hand.  “ You should keep it.”

“It’s not really my style.”

“Obviously,” She was going to pull a muscle rolling her eyes as often as she did. “But did you see the way Em looked at it?

His cheeks flushed scarlet.  “Do you—Sebastian chewed the question apart on his lower lip until “ Do you think Mum and Da’ would have liked her?”

Anne stood and ruffled her brother's mess of unruly curls.  “They would’ve loved her, Sebbie.”

~~~

Ominis asked Anne to marry him as they rang in the New Year— As spontaneous as she'd ever known him. A rushed, breathless question in the midst of all their friends.   Decorum abandoned between cheers and midnight kisses.  

The words hung there, suspended in confetti and glitter, and for the second time in days, Anne found herself struggling for speech.  

It was most unlike her.  

The blonde's cheeks were flushed a pretty rouge, no blaming the Butterbeer for how quickly it had spread all the way down his neck or across that most undignified grin.  Were all men this helpless when they spoke of love and marriage?

And her heart did that unhelpful skittering thing again. 

It was Sebastian who'd noticed first,  when Anne nodded and flung her arms around Omnis's neck.

Anne found her brother's gaze over Omnis's shoulder in those sparse moments before the realization of she and the blonde's sudden engagement spread through the rest of the crowd. Her left hand, newly laden with a sizable gem.  It was ridiculous, really.  Absolutely ludicrous.  Completely impractical.

She was never taking it off.

Across the room, Sebastian met her gaze with a half lopsided grin that tried to act reluctant and failed miserably.

Idiot: [affectionate.]