Muted movements and sounds stirred the library. Helena, with one arm wrapped around the wood of the ladder and the other ruffled over the lines of books. In search of a new one to help her hole up within the stone walls and crystal glass of her bedroom.

Quickly as she could, Helena glanced behind her to the sitting figurine lounging upon the settee. As though she feels burning eyes on her skin, Ursula looks upwards.

Helena swivels back around awkwardly.

Continuing her search, her eyes ran over a thousand different fonts and names and descriptions. Gulping, Helena let her head turn in inches, shoulder following along at a slower pace until she could see Ursula. Whom was already looking. Eyes already set on Helena. Spinning around once more with a now crescendoing pulse, Helena busied herself with her task. Ignoring the huff from behind her.

Finally, she plucked one. The titular One Beating Heart. Helena had heard others speak of it in passing. A popular novel describing a mad scientist who raises people from the dead.

Feet touching the ground once more. Helena stared over to the couches to Ursula. Her head is bowed, eyes flowing over the printed Taranqian words with ease.

Helena pressed the book to her chest, clutching it tightly with her arms crossed over the cover. Her nose scrunched just above her nostrils. “Tell me something I do not know about you yet.”

Intrigued, Ursula swivelled in her position, leaning forwards just a tad, “Something you do not yet know?”

She began her list, “Very well. I dislike crowds.” Helena knew this already so she shook her head for another thing, “my favourite plant to grow are roses.” Helena also knew this too. “Hmm…You are also holding my favourite novel.”

Glancing down Helena bit the inside of her lip at her choice in novels. She had known it too.

Helena was not satisfied, taking a step forward she questioned, , “That is all?” Continuously pressing, as though she was daring her to say it. They both knew what she desired to hear. A simple six letter word.

Instead, Ursula ignored her question and asked her own, “And you? Do you harbour secrets I have not yet learned?”

“I have no secrets.”

Dark, mohagony eyes had the pale of her face disappear, with a shadow replacing her features. All that stood out now were the whites of Ursula’s daring eyes. “Do not utter lies to yourself Helena. I know you are a much more intelligent woman than that.”

“I utter no lies.”

“Oh?”

Helena’s face pinches, “Then, I am not the only one uttering lies.”

Ursula’s features soften yet her body stays rigid. “My apologies for not revealing it to you earlier. Now that you know me. See me.”

They find themselves standing in a trove of silence.

A small wrinkle sprouts between Ursula’s eyebrows, thin at first it becomes cavernous with every passing second. “Are you not scared? I’m a monster. Or have you forgotten? Divine retribution made me who I am.” Voice caught in half a whisper, Ursula’s eyes became hollow.

She never knew horror to be so gentle. Goosebumps brushing along her uncovered skin.

Helena repeats herself, so forceful that her cross bounces and skims across her collarbones, “That is my God, not yours. I am sorry for my actions earlier.”

Ursula continued tirelessly and unwaveringly. Her eyes set far away, “Now as you can see, as anyone can see, humanity eludes me. I have become a ghost of my former self. Both in actuality and in physicality. What a cruel joke,” She spat, “I was not always like this. I spent a lot of time hurting. Both myself and others. And so when I died, I became this. And now, when I look at myself in the mirror, I do not even see myself. Sometimes I cannot remember what I looked like when I was human. Perhaps it is a paradox, the way I felt. Part of me felt everything and part of me felt nothing. Perhaps I am better off as anything but human. Yet, funnily enough, I have never felt so human here, in this abode.”

Helena’s eyebrows furrowed, a woman whose humanity eludes her? This was not the Ursula she knew, no matter the ocean they stood across now, Ursula was a bright, compassionate woman. One who delicately created her garden, whom wrote poetry that the saints would deem godly and whom had taken in her in and sheltered her for months. Reaching upwards, Helena’s hands connected with Ursula’s face, holding her in her palm. “I am sorry to tell you, but you are wrong. If you lack humanity then I am not sure it truly exists.”

The glass stills and Ursula’s shoulder drop.

She had wanted her once magnetic eyes to be empty now. She thought she wanted the colours that swam in the fire of her irises to be dark, as if the fires had gone out in a rush. Helena believed she wanted anything but the black  and magnetism that she now saw.

But Ursula has such long eyelashes. But the lines of her cupid’s bow were too sharp. A transfixing sight.

Slow and sudden, their lips connect. A hesitance marking the movements as if Helena tried not to prick her fingers on the thorns and roses that covered Ursula. Her bones and tendons and muscles melted. It was not a delicate fire similar to what she had read in novels, this all-consuming fire ran up her limbs, filling her lungs.

Hands holding the other as tight and as close as possible. Ursula tasted of black tea; of its bitter sweetness and hints of distinct spices.

It is as if her lungs smelled of a sweetness from flowers I had long forgotten, Ursula noted, as her hands wrapped around Helena.

The kiss turned cold, biting like the snow that nips at her nose in the dead of winter or turns her ears to a scarlet so deep it burns. “Ursula…” Helena hummed against her lips, uttering the name so gently, so tenderly it felt akin to a prayer.

They break, a heavy sigh shattering their silence. Helena’s head cusps down, the tip of her nose running down the warm curve of Ursula’s neck. Her crystallised fingers trace the shape of her lips, they feel the texture as though is it new.

Then, feeling the weight of her cross around her neck, the colour drains from her face. Breath ragged and chest heaving, the blood was rushing to her head and to her cheeks.

It felt all too right; too easy and simply to let go and let herself be swept up in Ursula’s eyes. But that could not happen. Should not happen.

“I-I-I.” She ran. Ducking out of the library and the castle in a moment.

It seemed running was beginning to become a pattern.