"Tegan, I -"

"What, Sara?! I let myself finally feel taken, like I was yours, and this is how you repay me?! I spent three years chasing after someone that would only break my heart in the end, you sat by and mended me, and then you throw it all away because, oh, 'you were drunk'!"

The twin who spoke first stepped forward, hands replacing the tears on the other's cheek, trying to convey the desperation - the need - for understanding she felt. Tegan took a step back, her chest heaving with betrayal and anger, the tension in the air enough to suffocate her already drowned lungs. She took one last look at Sara before she slammed the bus door, storming out in a hurry after grabbing her coat. She jammed her hands in her pockets, her eyes focused on an image in the distance that shook her to her very core with a paroxysm of emotions - some she recognised, some she wished she could. There, underneath the dim lighting cast off by the streetlight, a bed was dishevelled as two bodies worked their way around the sheets, half covered and half naked to the fuming onlooker. The one she recognised due to constant exposure to curled her fingers into the sheets just below her hips, her head tilting back into the pillow as her thighs clenched with the effort of keeping back an orgasm. The one topping the aforementioned female smiled knowingly, kissing her way back down to where her fingers had just been. She licked off the remnants of a night spent fucking and Tegan lashed out at the nearest wall, her skin splitting open and bones cracking under the force applied.

She should have shouted due to the pain, but the cry she let out was the result of a broken, shattered heart crashing to the ground, into several pieces as she pictured the woman that had been pleasing her sister standing before her fist. She didn't care if her hand was probably broken; she struck out again and again, until she couldn't process anything more than what she was doing, until the world was a blur of red and white, until a hand on her shoulder whirled her around and she was suddenly face to face with the last person she wanted to see.

"Sara, I'm fucking warning you right now..." Tegan started, her bloodied hand tightening at the sight of her counterpart. The other tried to say something that would ease the situation, but Tegan's rage boiled to an irrepressible level, and she struck out, her first colliding with the jaw she once thought of as perfect. However, now that someone else had marked their territory - which had been hers since birth - she saw nothing beautiful about it. Sara stumbled back, too caught up in her own emotions to fully understand what just happened, and, before she could get back onto steady footing, she was knocked down, her shirt taken by the fistful into shaking hands.

"Why?!" Tegan screamed, jerking the body beneath her. "Why did you do it?!" She was stuck between sobbing and shrieking, her voice both low and high at the same time. She wanted to hit her sister over and over until she got the answer she searched for; she wanted to hit herself for acting so violent, but, most of all, she wanted to wake up from this nightmare. Her hands let Sara fall back to the ground, not another hit having been inflicted upon features more hurt than the physical world could show. She turned her back and kicked out at the streetlight, the metal sounding out in response to her wail of despair. Sara stood up, clearly on the precipice of daring and cowardly, her hand half-outstretched in an attempt to console her older sibling. She thought of all the masochistic, deprived people she'd seen on the streets of India previously, begging for money or solace from their trouble. She thought about the people who'd never known love back in the day, who'd been beaten, starved, robbed, and considered those fates better than her present; she thought about the animals in the wild that would harm themselves or others for the respect and acceptance of their more experienced brothers and sisters, friends and family alike, and deemed the situation similar to her own.

"Tegan, please, listen to me..." she tried, her voice quiet and pleading. The older of the pair turned back around, her hands waving about in the air as her feelings of distrust and sadness took a chance at escaping in a healthier way.

"I don't want to hear it, Sara. What don't you understand about leave me alone?" She growled, leaving her fellow musician to open and close her mouth several times, obviously having been caught off guard by the response. Perhaps she hadn't expected a chance at explaining herself, and maybe that wasn't the scenario she was in at all, but she took so much time in considering her options that her opportunity to do so was ripped from her grasp just like Tegan's trust and love had been when her confession had torn their relationship by the seams.

"Sara," Tegan began, taking a deep breath to calm herself. "I don't want to see you right now. I don't want to hear your voice, and I don't want to hear your name. I don't want anything to do with you anymore." She finished with an involuntary shake of her limbs, fury rendering her powerless for a minute before she collected what composure she had left, and turned back to the bus. Once inside, she threw what little belongings she'd had with her that weren't shared between herself and her sister into a suitcase, zipped it up, and shoved past the figure at the doorway. Sara knew not to ask where she was going, and even if she had, Tegan wouldn't know the answer. She was going somewhere Sara wasn't, and that's all that mattered.

...

Pushing open the door to the poorest excuse for a hotel she could pay for, Tegan set her luggage down on the bed, ran her fingers through her hair, and swore. The recent turn of events left her with both an adrenaline rush and an overwhelming sense of fatigue, the contrast enough to make her want to sleep the days away. However, the activity in her mind was enough to fuel three nuclear power plants working at top production for hours, and she couldn't find it in herself to stop the chain of accusations she was thinking up.

She wouldn't... There has to be a mistake; she wouldn't... She loves me...

The irritation building up in her body left her muscles feeling as if she'd been working out for weeks without stopping, acid placing its unwanted mark against her tissues the same way Sara's kiss had left her imprinted for any of her future partners to see. She didn't know what she was doing, nor did she care, but she knew that she only had a few days before Sara would come looking for her, regardless of the warning not to and the harsh words exchanged thereafter.

A compilation of memories took hold of her better judgement, and her aggravation simmered down to a calamitous depression. Tegan's eyes began to water and she immediately sat back on the bed, her head in her hands as she expelled her anguish openly into her palms, honey coloured orbs darkening to an almost brown shade as the organ pumping blood cut itself off from the rest of her body to wither away in solitude, the red string tied around it that had once reinforced its strength through all her troubles being pulled so tight in her twin's attempt at reconnection that it felt as though she were cutting off her circulation, letting blood fill her lungs while the soul she had given up so wholly and absolutely was fragmented beyond repair.

Curling up into a ball and hiding under blankets that were too weak to protect her from the outside world, Tegan shut out reality and gave in to her dreams, where Sara hadn't cheated on her; the final thought in her mind before it was pulled into surreal slumber ringing out into the night.

I was yours, right?