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Sometimes, certain things will bring him back.
Memories come flash-flood sudden, and Abolish cannot help the way the current tugs him under.
A low voice, a white coat, a steady hand. A laugh, a smile, whiskey on the rocks. Concern, temper, the eye of the storm.
And green.
His eye was so, so, green. Green enough that it looked a little like violence, a bright spot stubbornly glowing in the muted gray-brown tones of a town Abolish had thought he'd forget.
He'd been struck by that color, the first time he saw it in the face of a man that was supposed to blur with all the others.
It hadn't.
Abolish—
That face, and those eyes, and that soul-deep something, hadn't fled with time.
It had just…settled, somewhere in the endless cavity of its chest, wrapped around its half-dead heart.
Chain or treasure, vice or shield, Abolish couldn't tell.
It had grown used to it.
That ache, that knowing, that almost, almost, almost.
(What would it do now, if it could do it all again?)
(Change nothing, it knew.)
(Change everything, it wished.)
(Maybe—)
Abolish would know that color anywhere.
He'd know it dizzy and drugged and dazed from blood loss and drunk off the hunger he thought he'd squashed.
He'd know—
It's him.
It's him, it's him, it's him.
His face is younger, lines etched just a touch shallower, but laughter still traces his eyes and sorrow still paints his forehead—
(Abolish had never crossed that boundary, never learned what the brushstrokes of that face felt like under its hands.
Never even taken its gloves off, never let skin meet skin, never let armor be discarded in the urge to blur the space between.
But oh, had it wondered.)
The shadow is still there. Shades lighter, brighter than the man he knew but—
(It had tried to crush every fantasy flickering through its head, terrified by the risk of a thing it couldn't name and—
And then he was gone.
And then Abolish was left scrambling for every scrap of memory, drinking down every drop of buried wonder cupped in his palms in some hope he'd find—that he'd find—)
He has the same eyes. Viridian, vibrant, endlessly kind in a way that ached.
He hadn't looked like that, in the final days. He'd gone dark, been left beaten-down and hurting and burning with the kind of anger born of shattered trust and twisted knives.
Abolish had known, then, that the time had passed.
He'd never known the clock was ticking till the seconds ran out.
(Or maybe that was a coward's reason. An excuse for the useless loss of the sun before he'd even pressed fangs against the flutter of a heart Abolish never realized it wanted to give away.)
Abolish is not supposed to know this man.
And maybe it doesn't, maybe he's just some kind of lookalike, maybe he's got a story alien to the one Abolish had barely begun to discover—
Maybe—
He isn't dressed in doctor's robes. A dark blue sweater, loose-fitting pants. Practical. Comfortable. This doctor lets himself wear sweaters sometimes.
Maybe he always did.
(Abolish wonders if blue is his favorite color.
God, it never knew his favorite color.)
"Ah, hello. I just moved into the apartment above yours, and I figured the neighborly thing to do would be introduce myself. So, I'm Legundo, nice to meet you."
He's Legundo.
He's Legundo, and Abolish knows his name before he speaks it into the air, and that's when daydream breaks the surface tension, and Abolish knows this is all real.
Abolish—
(He's so close.)
"…I'm Abolish." It manages, and it prays it doesn't come out strangled.
It thinks it failed on that front.
It can't quite tell if it cares.
It—
(He's so close.)
For a moment, the two of them just stand there, floating in the strange liminal world of the cream-colored hallway and Abolish's open front door.
"Please—um." It winces. Fuck, that sounded terrible, and the word is clunky in its mind but startlingly appropriate, because its—
(Sire, Doctor, Perso—)
Because Legundo is standing right there, new and different, but still so clearly himself that looking at him is-
(Is it shaking?)
Abolish wants—
"Please, uh, you're welcome inside—"
(Distantly, Abolish feels the way its stomach drops at the casual defiance of a rule it knows by heart.)
(But that heart does not belong to it, anyway, does it?)
It steps back, and Legs follows it into the sparsely decorated depths of its home.
(He's so close)
(Close enough to reach. Close enough to know.)
Legs smiles at it, warm and friendly and—
Familiar.
(Maybe one day, he'd be close enough to hold.)
and i know i've kissed you before
but i didn't do it right
can i try again, try again, try again?
—Lyrics from Pink in the Night, by Mitski