Ah fuck, this thing again...
The hoodie was folded in the back of the wardrobe like a secret no one was supposed to find. Void hadn't meant to dig that deep - she was just trying to avoid thinking, and her fingers wandered where her mind didn't want to go. But the moment her hand brushed that familiar fabric, everything else stopped. Black cotton, as soft as Aura's sorrow. Worn elbows, sleeves stretched from Aura's habit of pulling them over her hands when the world felt too loud. Void stared at it like it might vanish if she blinked. Then she pulled it out and pressed it to her face.
It still smelled like her favorite perfumes. Not in a sentimental, flowery way - Aura never did that shit. No, this was just cherry and the faintest whiff of soldering flux, like something between witchcraft and lightning. Void didn't cry. Not really. But her throat got tight. Like someone was threading a needle through her windpipe.
She pulled it over her head, arms slipping into a second skin that wasn't hers. The hoodie hung off her shoulders like a ghost trying to possess the wrong body. It was Aura's. And wearing it felt like theft. Holy theft. A sin Void couldn't quite name. She paced the kitchen in it for a while, teeth clenched, fidgeting with the hem like it might turn into a noose. Finally, she tore it off and slammed it onto the counter like it had insulted her.
"Fuck this," she muttered, and stormed off to her room.
At the bottom of a cluttered drawer, under wires and bits of scrap leather and buttons she'd stolen off old jackets, she found the patch. It was something she'd made weeks ago in a haze of caffeine and insomnia - just a rough-cut rectangle, frayed and snarling with metal thorns, violet thread glowing like phosphorescent plastic under UV. It was angry. It was hers. It didn't belong on anything. Which - in Void's mind - made it perfect for the hoodie.
She grabbed her old sewing kit - rusty scissors, needles that looked like they'd been used in street fights, black tangled thread - and dragged everything to the kitchen table akin to a surgery prep. The hoodie lay flat in front of her, quiet and still. The patch firm, sturdy like a terrible secret about to be confessed.
"Alright," she hissed. "Let's fuck this up. Like so many other things you already did."
The first stitch went in crooked. The second one stabbed her finger. "FUCK." A drop of blood bloomed on the black cotton. "Fuckin' christ in Mikoshi." She wiped it on her jeans and kept going. Her hands weren't made for delicate shit like this. They were made for soldering wires, for smashing keyboards, for punching walls when grief got too loud. The needle hated her. The thread tangled like it was mocking her trauma. She kept going. Out of spite more than anything. Each pull of the thread was like dragging barbed wire through her gut, binding her to a girl who no longer existed.
Halfway through, her hands were shaking. Her stitches looked like a drunk spider had tried to web a memory together. But the patch was holding. It clung to the fabric like it belonged there. Like Aura's calm and Void's anger could exist in the same breath. She sat back, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, staring at the hoodie like she'd just committed an act of treason and art in the same breath.
She slipped it back on. It was still Aura's. Still soft. Still haunted. She looked at herself in the mirror, the jagged rectangle framed on her shoulder, defiant and loud. This time she didn't want to take the hoodie off. It felt earned.
It didn't make Void calmer. Didn't resurrect the dead. But it stitched something together. For now that was enough.