Stitched Shut

Mirei’s hands were always hidden.

Long sleeves in the summer. Bandages when they weren’t. Sometimes she’d claim it was an old habit - she was clumsy, always scraping her knuckles, burning her fingertips on stove tops or hot glue guns. But that wasn’t the whole truth.

Her hands were stitched shut together, palm to palm.
Not literally, not anymore, but they may as well have been.

Faint lines crossed her palms, thin and pale, the ghosts of places where skin had once been pulled tight, thread biting deep into flesh. Her fingers remembered the tension, curling in on themselves even now, as if they still had something to hold onto. Black thread at first, whatever her sister had lying around. Then red. Then fishing line, clear and sharp, until her skin swallowed the knots and healed around them.

She thought no one knew.
Most people didn’t.

But Aren knew.
Aren, with her flawless scores and perfectly arranged notes, whose pencil never wavered but whose hands sometimes shook when no one was looking. Aren knew because she understood. Not the sewing, maybe, but the need. The desperate, gnawing ache to control something, anything, when the rest of your life felt too big to hold.

Caelis probably suspected. He didn’t pry. That was the thing about Caelis, he could sense when people were cracking, but he’d never push them to break open. Maybe because he knew what it was like, carrying too many questions and not enough answers.

But Gale?
Gale never noticed.
Not the way Mirei wanted him to.

There was a time when they sat side by side, close enough for her to memorize him without meaning to. The slouch of his shoulders, the crease in his uniform shirt, the uneven spikes in his hair. She could pick his sneakers out of a crowd, could tell when it was him just by the way his pencil spun between his fingers.

She never spoke to him. Not anymore.

They used to talk. Back when they were younger, when he called her "Dora" and she called him "Boots," and teasing didn’t hurt yet. When he gave her a ball of red yarn, and she tied it into a clumsy necklace, and he wore it anyway.

That was before the world stretched wide and cold between them. Now, they were just two people in the same room. Close enough to touch, miles apart.

Under the desk, Mirei’s fingers twitched, tracing phantom stitches into her palms. There was no thread anymore, no needle piercing skin, but the habit lingered. The need to pull herself tight, to stay stitched together so no one would see how easily she might unravel.

For now, she held.