Author's Note: 

Such a quick update for me! Hip-hooray! Hopefully I can keep this up! I actually like this chapter, but it may be because I am running on a serious lack of sleep and a sudden(and very welcome) burst of inspiration. I hope everyone enjoys it. :) 

Song above is very fitting for Rose and Fenris. 

In her existence, Rose Ramsay had only ever known the life of an elite soldier. From birth, she had been coddled with professors that taught her formulas inconceivable to most. Raised beneath the suffocating guidance of fleeting teachers who showed her different methods to hack into the most secure programs in the world, ways to come out alive with the highest probability of remaining just that, and proved that bruises and broken bones and mental collapses were and would always be finite.

But, in the entire span of her life, Piper had always been beside her.

At birth, they had been paired together, naturally. Each of their own parents had once been Elysians. Rose's father had been one-half of a prolific Elysian team, before she died underneath circumstances Rose did not even know. But, with his Intelligence gone, Colonel Ramsay requested to be stationed on Earth. Piper's mother and father are legendary, there is no past pretense to it. There is no secret to the nature of what most Elysian relationships are, and Captain and First Mate Bradshaw-Yamura are no exception.

Piper and Rose were born in the same month, Rose in one of the many towers in the Republic of Elysium on Earth; Piper in a docked spaceship two galaxies away. To everyone, it was obvious what should be done.

Rose doesn't remember a time without Piper, without her body directly beside her, Piper's hands guiding her own, or her voice acting as an anchor when the entire world became one massive disembodied scream.

She's desperate to hear Piper now, to see her again, to feel and to hold and to touch the other girl until she remembers once again that everything is always finite. But not them. Never them. Piper and Rose were always going to be Piper and Rose.

The teenager sits on the edge of the mattress, the IVs are now gone, but Charles flicks a flashlight back and forth between Rose's eyes, trying to find any anomalies. It feels strange to be without Piper, to not have her in the same room, or the proof of her existence reverberating a pulse through Rose's absent Root.

"Other than, y'know, the huge blank space in your brain, everything checks out fine, Rose," Charles observed, stepping away from her to record their findings in the tablet Charles carried all over the place.

"Thank you," Rose tells the doctor before standing up from the bed for the first time. On the ground with numb feet, the room seems much smaller. On closer inspection, it seems set up hastily, as if Charles prepared for a quick change of scenery. "When will Fenris be back?" Half of the question stems from curiosity, the other from the inexplicable. 

"Why?" Charles's fine eyebrow lifts up in question, a smile that isn't well hidden dawns on their face.

"I have questions," Rose replies, honestly. Fenris left in a flurry of seconds after Rose confessed she had no recollection of him. She doesn't know how she felt in that moment, watching him turn his back on her, fleeing in a way reminded her of a surrender. 

"Rose," Charles's voice became sincere, enough that Rose's head lifted up to make eye contact with the young doctor, and for once, their nose is not stuck beneath digital files in the medical tablet. Instead, the doctor stares directly at her with solemn eyes.  "I know this is going to be hard on you, and I know it's very difficult for you to trust right now. The kind of environment you grew up in, was, at best, unhealthy in the nature of dependency you relied on from your superiors, and even Piper at times. Here, though," and where here exactly was, Rose did not know. "With Fenris, with Piper, with me, and with many others, you learned to be more than a soldier," Charles pauses thoughtfully before continuing. "You are more than a computer posing as human."

Her fist tighten in the sheets beneath her because what does Charles know? What do any of them know, and who gave them the right to give her sweet words and a tiny flicker of hope that felt absolutely suffocating? 

"What's your point?" She snapped, and regretted the malice in her frustrated words almost instantaneously as Charles's sharp features turned down, their shoulders creeping into their body and their hands curling in. It was a reaction Rose recognized, one that only looks natural on those who have been on the wrong end of too-loud words and gritted teeth backed with white-knuckled fists. "I'm sorry, I didn't--" Rose tries, softer this time, to backtrack as the doctor shakes their head.

"Rose, I know you. I know you, even if you don't remember me. With saying that, I know you aren't yourself right now, but you're still curious and desperate to learn more about everything you've ever forgotten," Charles moves from where they stand, in the direction of the glass door of the room. The doctor leans against it, arms crossed as they jerk their head towards the entrance like an invitation. "Fenris is never too far when you're around, little flower."

*

She follows Charles's instructions. All she has to do is walk out of the main entrance to Charles's corridors, and there, sitting on the ground with his head between his knees and his hands deep in his wild hair, Fenris looks as if his entire world imploded.

"Hey," Rose doesn't know what do, so she drops on the floor across from him. Her back lines straight to the other wall; her legs tuck in, in case anyone disturbs the space between them and need to get through.

Fenris peeks through where he hid himself behind the cage of his body. In ways Rose can't explain, he is frighteningly familiar. But, not in a way she remembers. A certain fierceness she recognizes in Piper blatantly paints across his face; the same goes for his bittersweet stare every time he meets her own eyes.

"I'm sorry I left suddenly," Fenris whispers, before sweeping a strong hand over his handsome face. "You hate that, or you did. We'd, uh-- nevermind, you don't want to hear it," his sad voice cuts himself off.

"No-- I don't mind... listening to you, I mean," Rose admitted, her words soft, as if she were scared Fenris would retreat further into himself.

"You, uh, you hated that. When I would go off after a fight. You'd raise your voice, and I leave, disappear for hours. I-- I stopped doing it, or, at least, I thought I did," Fenris explains, dark eyes dropping to her hands, where Rose played with her fingers as a nervous tick. "And you stopped doing that. Of course, there were nights when you had nightmares, and for an entire week you wouldn't even let me touch you, and then, when you were ready, you'd just grab my hand and it wouldn't be so bad."

Rose stared at her hands closer, realizing after a moment she could only stop her trembling fingers if she really focused, and even then, they would twitch every other second. "Nightmares? About what?"

"No," Fenris shook his head, voice suddenly defensive. "If you don't remember it, Rosie, then maybe this memory loss is a good thing."

Rose gulped at the harshness of his words before continuing. "Then it was bad?"

"Yes," Fenris admitted. He didn't say anything else, true to his words. The man only stared at her, searching for any sign of recognition, before he gave up, only to restart the process again.

Rose doesn't know what else to fill the empty silence between them with, so she says the only question that harassed her mind. "Were we really in love?"

Fenris freezes. For a second, she wonders if the Rose Ramsay he knows wasn't straight-forward, if she walked around questions and spoke in riddles. Blunt had always been Rose's route, or at least, for the Rose she used to be.

"Yes," he breathes out, honest in the way his voice cracks in half.

"I," Rose swallows as she takes her hands and curls them together, creating a passage between her palms big enough for her eyes to look through. Her gaze finds Fenris instantaneously. "It's hard to imagine loving someone like you, I don't mean it like that but--"

"You didn't love me at first," Fenris confessed. "There were times you hated me. There were moments when I thought you'd never love me back."

Rose gnawed on her bottom lip before trying to begin again. "What made me change my mind?"

Fenris stays silent, except this time, he doesn't offer any answers after a few minutes of pondering. His lips are sealed shut, as if the words he wanted to speak ached to escape, and if there weren't gritted teeth and an unwilling throat, they would be spilling out of the cavern of his mouth.

"There is a scar from your collarbone to your naval," Fenris pulls the words out of the still air, hardly loud enough for her to hear, but she does. Her hand flies back to her chest, and there, beneath the thick fabric of her sweater, raised skin breaks the smoothness of the valley between her breast, it curls down, until it nearly reaches her pelvis, and crawls all the way up to the beginning of her collarbone.

She knows scars. She lived in them. Every single one can be accounted for with a story, a time of when blood and sweat and aimless hope had tinged with desperation, when the need to survive had been greater than the paralyzing fear of actually dying. They sliced apart the constellations of freckles on her skin, and they did so to morph into new stars. For every white line raised up, every loss of pigment, or a wide discoloration, Piper always suffered worst.

But this one is great. It's thick, and terrifying, and it might've been used as the string for Death's pearls before it wrapped around her abdomen. She doesn't remember any of it, even as her fingers scrape against the raised skin, desperate to rediscover the scar's origins.

"I--" Rose tries to find the words to say as her palms dig up underneath the collar of her sweater, digging at her chest until she feels it, her bare hand pressed flush against the thickest part of the scar. "What made it?" She attempts to imagine what could have drafted such a line of malice in her skin, but nothing comes up in her frustratingly blank mind.

Fenris abruptly stands up. His height is still impressive and daunting, but she doesn't feel small next to him, not even as she remains on the floor. His heavy boots echo against the walls of the empty corridor as he paces, reminding Rose how alone they are, in this ship, orbiting in a galaxy she doesn't remember.

"I don't want you to know," he confesses, his eyes landing on anything that isn't her.

Rose's eyebrows stitch together in confusion. "You don't... you don't want me to know?" She laughs beneath her breath as she continues. "I forget everything and you don't want me to know this one thing?!" Her voice raises.

"Why does it matter?" Fenris bites back, dark eyes turned to slits as he stops aimlessly trailing around the hallway. Now, he stands directly in front of her, his jaw clenching as if he's trying not to say whatever troubled his mind.

"Because it's mine!" She jumps to her feet; the two of them stand so close that she can feel the heat of his body igniting an uncomfortable flame in her chest. "It's my memories, and it's my scar!"

Fenris takes a step towards her; maybe this was what they did. Maybe he would push forward and she would return it until they were both stuck to each other in a fit of rage framed with gritted teeth and clenching jaws. "You don't even know what you're saying," his voice becomes low, but blatantly strained, as if he's fighting to keep his words lower than a scream.

"You're right!" She takes a step closer, unafraid and terrified all at once. Something about body heat, feeling too hot and too close registers itself as bad in her hind brain, a memory that screams at her tries to tell her the touch of unfamiliar skin is equal to danger, even if Fenris's skin isn't supposed to be a stranger's. Rose ignores her thoughts for now. Instead, she shouts. Not out of fear, but from the same budding frustration she is growing tired of feeling. "I don't, I have no idea. For God's sake, I woke up this morning next to a stranger!"

"So did I, Rose!" He freezes up at the confession, eyes blinking wide before he takes a step back that resembles a stumble. His jaw tightens as his brows knit together in light of the revelation. "So did I," the repeated words are a whisper that sounds like a scream.  

Author's Note:

 I actually liked this one a lot! I hope y'all enjoyed it! In case y'all haven't noticed, all of these characters have gone through a lot, and as she begins to remember and more clues are given, she unravels their stories as well as her own. So, tears are probably coming soon to a Wattpad app near you. 

Tell me what you liked, tell me what you didn't. All comments are appreciated. :)