THE LITTLE BLACKBIRD

He awaits the inevitable shift, the moment they recall their parting words and it becomes too hard to say what needs to be said. But Faolan has held onto his own this long, and Fionn to his, so what makes him think he needs to be said? “You didn’t want to come back,” he repeats, a little flatly, unable to decipher the look on Fionn’s face. “And yet you are here.” Why? He longs to ask, and bites it back just as quick, the arch to his brows a question enough. It is hard to tell if they are speaking of the present, or the aches of the past, but maybe this is a Faolan issue rather than a them issue. His head, after all, is so often stuck in the past he might as well have left it there.

Fionn steps forward, and the tension in Faolan’s shoulders settle a bit. There is no malice in his brother’s face, none of the violence he’s come to think he might receive upon seeing him again. No, it feels like the two of them are standing on a threshold as strangers rather than brothers. “Do not turn this around on me, I have never truly gone. If you wanted to find me, you need only find Cliodna, I checked in with her often in my travels.” He regrets not having more of a place for his siblings to find him, for not having a home in which they might know to find him, but he can’t be blamed for it. His home is in the glen where his family once lived, and it only recently has shifted, somewhat, to belong to the smithy in Lethe. “I have been here often. And I live here now,” he corrects himself, because he is not going anywhere. Where could he go? The glen? No, he visits there in snippets of time only, unable to bear the rest.

The lie is blatant, and he can only stare. “If you do not wish to tell me where you were, you needn’t make up a story for it. You could just say you do not want to share it,” he points out stiffly. He has no room to be offended, but he is. Foolish of him to think two centuries is long enough to make the hurt less palpable when Fionn lies to him. “If not in town, I can only assume you were running as you do. I hope you are not currently dying though, I do not think our family can handle anything else right now. I certainly cannot.” So much death, everywhere he turns. Fionn, looking like he’s one foot in the grave. Fiona, gone. Gabriel, only a few days away from joining the dead himself, in one way or another.

What is he meant to do? Lie to him? Fionn tilts his chin, and Faolan narrows his eyes. “Fionn, why are you–” An alarming thought strikes him into silence, but he must be wrong. Surely Fionn knows, surely he did not stumble into Lethe again by a pure chance? No, he has to know, he has to be playing with Faolan’s head for… No, he dismisses the thought, too, frowning and studying, so intent on figuring out if Fionn knows that he doesn’t realize he is closer to his brother until they are standing right in front of each other. Closer than they’ve been in two centuries, and he rocks a little. “You do not know. You think I am out here just for the fun of it,” he says, shaking his head.

He stops again, another thought hitting him. Does he… Would she tell him? If she fled? If she abandoned her phone on the water? “Fionn, do you know where Fiona is?” he asks, voice clogged with worry and hope. Let this whole week be a mistake of his own paranoia, let it be that she simply fled. Better running from them than the alternative.

Oh, he hadn’t missed this - withering, in front of Faolan. Yet you are here. His great, big bastard of a brother. Looking at him like, like some mangy cat at the rubbish. Nearly a father to him, Faolan was. In most ways that properly mattered. More a father than he’d ever been, to his own child. Christ, as those human things would say. Must be nice, having a proper god to blame, to beg, to believe in. “Right, yeah. Just find sister dearest, out in all this world.” Could have, if he’d bothered to look. But why would he? Fionn coughed out a laugh, arms crossed tightly, his coat soaked through. No spirit left, sadly, holy or otherwise. 

Right. Kentucky. That’d been where he saw the bottle thing, the bottles, on trees. Something - something about... fuck, he’d forgot the story of it. There was always a story. He was supposed to remember that sort of thing. Like he’d remembered where their little home had been, with his niece and nephew and that sister in law who’d wished him dead, or, at least, gone. Which amounted to much the same, didn’t it? He’d got gone, and wound up beat more than half to death in Galway. Far from anything like family. Glad of it, even scraping himself off the cobblestones, all a mess. Lethe. Faolan and Cliodna both, here in Lethe. With Fiona. 

If only he’d never come this way, in the first place. If only. 

His fingers, claw-like with the cold, were digging into his own arms. He was being scolded, again. And again. And again. This could have been centuries ago, and centuries before that, and back. Back to the Otherlands, the beginning. Lying. Running. Hiding. Dying. Fionn huffed, shaking rain from his hair, irate as any pony left out in the damp. Not about to dignify all that with an answer. Or - no. No. He chewed his lip, shivering. Watching the wet trees, dripping darkly in the gloom, rather than Faolan’s face. As his brother came forward, Fionn slipped back, shying nervously. “Ha. Like hell. When’s the last time you did anything at all for the fun of it, eh?” He chuckled, horribly. So he couldn’t hear that... that tremor, there, of a feeling. Some dread, damn feeling he’d rather not name, standing where he was. Easier to joke - until it wasn’t. 

Fiona. 

“Why would I know?” Then, fast, quick enough to crack. “The fuck do you mean, where she is? Where -” His hands had found Faolan’s shoulders, the words raw with genuine, electrical panic. “What’s happened?” 

@fionnolonan​

He was a strange man, this ragged thing that Jonas had found sleeping next to the dumpster a few months previously. Strange and beautiful, but broken most of all. A Caravaggio with a knife slash through the center, writ large on the world though it seemed he wished not to be. So much so that he drank himself half to death, meddled with harder substances, and seemed to care little about his own survival. Which was precisely why he had lugged the bastard upstairs that first night, and why he gave him shelter now. Food, shelter, clothing, and art supplies, here and there. Maybe he was a bleeding heart, but Jonas remembered the abyss and all its pull. That was why he let him continue on destroying himself, while Jonas tried to gently prod him towards some brand of self care. Like eating, periodically. It didn’t extend to not falling asleep at the drafting table in the back of the gallery though, or not plowing through a bottle of whiskey that was now resting on a half filled palette. Jonas sighed, unsurprised. “Hey darlin’, you best go sleep on an actual bed instead of this ragged old table.” Jonas said softly, brushing the hair out of Fionn’s eyes rather than shaking his shoulder. Either gesture would have earned him a flail, but this was preferable after he had spent ten minutes in bed worrying about just where Fionn had ended up. The flailing was quick to follow though, which was why he rolled back half a foot, grinning. “I didn’t cattle prod your ass, there’s no need for that shit.” Jonas glanced at the painting that Fionn had been working on, his smile warming even further. “Pretty gorgeous for somebody dancin’ with whiskey, I’d say. And don’t do that shit where you say it’s trash. I like it.”

There it was, for the moment. Specifically, staying in Lethe had been a mistake. He lurched awake to this; the epiphany wasn’t half to blinding as the hangover. One eye bruised shut from a brawl at... some bar, somewhere, last night, probably, Fionn threw a look at the man whose hospitality he’d been dragged into accepting. He sniffed, rubbed a hand over his face, shadowed by beard. “S’fine,” that, with a rap of his knuckles on the table in question. “Fine old thing.” Solid wood, respectable. Splattered by many canvases’ worth of paint. “Slept on worse.” He had. Much worse. With a scowl, Fionn reached for a bizarrely empty bottle of whiskey. Didn’t recall that. Might be enough for one last mouthful; he gave it a go, head back. Got precisely enough to whet the appetite. A bit of fume. Fuck. He set the mickey down, with a solid clunk. Pressed it to the table, really. Fighting the urge to throw the damn thing. Fuck!

“Not much for dancing,” he coughed, into his shoulder, cleared his throat from it. Kept trembling, after. Hard to stop, these days. “Used to be. I think. If I was, doubt I kept the steps...” Fionn was ignoring it, the painting. Didn’t like the blue in there. It had been a mistake, too. They all were. Only happened when he was off his face in some way or other. Kept his hands busy. He’d lost that violin he’d stolen. Not lost. Left. Left it with her, when he ran out. Christ. Him, and anyone else bothering to listen; Fionn didn’t care who, so long as something was on her side. Whatever that meant, now. Whatever Fiona might need. Wherever she was. If she was anywhere.

He pushed himself away from all that, and Jonas, and the painting, and the stool he’d somehow managed to stay hunched on. “You go on and like what you like, then.” Flat. Fionn turned back, pulled his palette over, his jar of brushes, and swayed to the sinks. Time to clean up. As much as he could, anyway. 

Date: November 04, 2020 Time: 4:52pm Location: On the trail, heading to the river. 

@fionnolonan​

His house is quiet in a way he dreads, and Faolan avoids it. Not difficult to accomplish when the last few days have been spent around Gabriel, trying to squeeze a century’s worth of talking into just a couple days. He’s leaving Gabriel and Aurélie for a day to themselves, and instead he’ll… What? Go rest at home, as his son had tried to threaten, but Faolan only snorts to imagine going home with all its painful silence. Searching seems like a better idea, and let his family call it hopeless wandering, it’s better than nothing, and it guides him from one moment until the next. When everything is gone, sometimes one step in front of the other is the only thing one can do, and he is very familiar with this type of dance.

He isn’t quite to the river, too busy debating which way to go, and which way he went last, when Faolan stops in his tracks. Empathy has a distinct feel to it after a while, and familiar people tend to hit it when they wander too close. His own empathy is wrapped up tight and stuffed in a box for safe-keeping on most days, but a stupid part of him hopes he’ll feel Fiona long before he sees her. This tug on his empathy, this familiarity, is enough to make him flinch for a moment, a desperate hope in his gut, one that’s swiftly doused as he prods it a little more. Not Fiona, no matter how similar they are. Gods, how hadn’t he noticed from the moment he met her that she was Fionn’s daughter? 

“Fionn,” he calls, swallowing his pride and his discomfort, picking up his pace and stopping. Just short of Fionn, unable to step closer when it feels as though an invisible wall is sprouting between them. It’s barbed with their last words to each other and poisoned by all the things to come after. Oh, and how that stops the breath in his lungs, too. What stories they have for each other, if they could give the other a chance to speak them, if Faolan can find a way back in. Does he want one? Hell if he knows. Faolan studies him, taking in the changes that two centuries have done to them both. “Where have you been?” Not for two centuries, no, Faolan isn’t sure he wants to know, because opening the door for those questions opens the door for the rest. But here, in Lethe, where was he while his daughter was gone? “Did not think you would be coming back.” And that’s a lie, he thinks, as soon as its out. Fionn is loyal, and his running is only the same trait he and all the other Meadowes share. “That you would want to,” he corrects with a weary sigh.

If only he’d remembered to bring the violin. Could have sold it off. As it was, he’d managed to steal and scrounge his way to his first speedball in years. It hit like a sledgehammer, and Fionn had spent some sort of time - fucked if he knew - spinning in the slow-moving, sinuous dark of a terrible trip. Terrible in both senses. Awe provoking, mesmerizing; he hadn’t gone that hard since... a while, anyway. That time the selkie had hauled him out of the Pacific, up in Vancouver. ‘93? Yes. After - after he let her go. 

Fiona. She hadn’t had a name, then. Funny, that they’d give her one so close to his. Fateful, even. If you believed in that sort of thing. 

But the trip. Terrible. As in horrific, too. What else could you call it, when you spent a few endless hours feeling ghostly, familiar fingers run through your hair, and close ‘round your throat, and shake you ‘til your neck felt likely to snap. He could feel the grasping claws of the rats along the Somme, and in the hold of the ship he’d stowed away on, leaving Ireland the first time, and scuttling through the alleys of Paris. And all of them, chittering in his ears, hissing about the shame of it. The damn disgrace. How dare he. To run from his own child, not once, but twice. Twice. 

In short, by the time he was truly dry again, cold as grave-dirt, shivering like a fresh colt, stomach spun in more knots than a schooner’s rigging, Fionn was already on his way back to that little town in the pines. He hitchhiked. He walked, freezing, stupidly, unless he managed to find a roadside liquor store to get a bit of something at. Or a lot of something. As he shambled into a half familiar bend of forest, Fionn left a bottle of whiskey, empty, upended on a branch. Saw that done someplace. Not here. But somewhere. Stuck with him. Like the memory of Fiona’s wide, blue eyes, staring, brightly, as he stumbled away. Again, and again...

His name. A voice he hadn’t heard in centuries, shouting his name. He spun, sliding in the thick mud. Cliodna had mentioned him. Your brother, she’d said. Though, at this point, Faolan was more hers than Fionn’s. Had been for a long, long, time. But Fionn knew that face, the strength of his stride - like it was yesterday he’d seen them last. He blinked through the damp haze of the day, and the drinking. Where had he been? Did he want to come back? He swayed, looking back the way he’d... had he come from the northeast? Was that northeast? Upriver, or down? “No,” he croaked. Oddly honest. Blame the alcohol. “No, I didn’t. I don’t.” But he was here, all the same. 

Sometimes, it didn’t matter what you want. Your feet knew what you needed. Often, in Fionn’s case, that turned out poorly. So everything was in order, then, wasn’t it? He took a step forward, unsteady, squinting at his brother. “Where’ve I been? Where the fuck have you been, eh?” That barked out, broken, from years and leagues away. “I - I went...” He swallowed, refused to admit it; that he’d gone back. To that home Faolan had had, over in the glen. Where they argued, so bitterly. Where he walked away. “I went to the city. To get some things.” The lie clattered out, obvious. Fionn raised his empty hands, shrugged shoulders that carried no bag, nothing but a ragged old coat. “Didn’t find them.” 

He hadn’t expected to see his brother. Ever. But, when he pictured it, and he’d done that much, it hadn’t been like this. There was something... something looming, closer than the past, and he didn’t like it. In Faolan’s voice. In the beat-down curve of him, as he stood there. If Fionn were painting the man, it’d be in blues, the cadet-greys of grief. No, he didn’t like this at all. Why was his brother in Lethe, in the first place? Faolan had never seemed the type to uproot. Neither had Caoimhe, matter of fact. “What’re you up to, ah?” He slurred, and raised his chin, like he was ready to offer some jaw up to those blacksmith’s fists Faolan had made for himself. It was half-defiant. Half-fearful - maybe more than half, actually. Rather more. Not of his brother. Of that... that something. “What are you doing, Faolan, out here, now?”

Persistence is key when it comes to her father. (Her father, her father – still, the thought is new enough to stop and start. Almost unnatural. Almost.) Regret will keep her up at night later on, she’s sure of it, but for now she pushes forward, arms wrapping tight for both of their sakes. Or so Fiona thinks, at least at first. His shuddering breath and rigid shoulders nearly send her reeling back, unleashing another bout of apologies until something caves. No way to be sure what comes first: the folding of his chest or the crumbling of the walls her uncle had taught her to assemble, but no matter which it is, Fiona is suddenly enveloped. By arms still so wrought with tension, by feelings that take all of her breath away, though she can only take partial ownership of them.

A belated answer is what she gets to more than one question, a glance of memory hitting her with staggering force even as she forces some begrudging distance between herself and Fionn. She’d hoped to hear him with more clarity, but instead she’s handed a fluorescent hum, an unforgiving shriek of machinery, and a staggering silence afterward. And then the wailing again, his and hers. Grieving together. All of it in an almost undecipherable cacophony, if only she wasn’t who she is. A familiar scene. One she’s borne witness to more than once, each time with utmost regret. But never more than now as the fate of her mother occurs to her with the weight of a sinking stone. She could look into what preceded it. She could know. But unlike with the truth of her father, Fiona knows suddenly that she wants this bit of ignorance. At least for now. Not exactly bliss, but better than the alternate. “No,” the girl finally murmurs, her father’s apology jarring her eyes open. Can’t be sure when they’d closed. Can’t be sure when these tears appeared, either, but she can only shake her head against them. Her own arms have wrapped around herself as some simple means of consolation. Self-soothing. The means of a child left alone. 

“No, you shouldn’t, um,” her bottom lip quivers and she shakes her head again, shame and tears leaning into her words. Arms unravel and cheeks are swatted at before Fiona gives another attempt. “I’m sorry.” Familiar territory. Makes it easier, even as watery gazes meet with so much between them, shared and otherwise. “I believe you. That she… that she loved me.” It aches to say, so sweet and so sore. Her sentence stammers in its midst, the foundation bowing under the weight of it all. “And I-I’m sorry for you, and for Aurora. For, um, my mother. That you had to go through that.” Unimaginable, almost, the panic, the pain. She’d seen it from strangers at work so frequently. This suddenly intimacy with it, though, is deafening. “You must’ve been so afraid.” And how can she possibly feel anything but pity for her father, then? (Her father, her father – who hadn’t raised her, but who’d held her. Who’d maybe even loved her, brief as it was.) Pity and guilt, that’s what it is. A baby to care for in in the midst of all that mourning. A burden even then. “I’m so sorry. For that, and um, for this. I-I shouldn’t have asked that of you.” Retelling that story, or caring for her for that fleeting period? No way to know.

There’s a ringing in her ears still and Fiona initially tries to fight against it until she realizes it’s a welcome sort of sound. One that’s staggering to her even now, so foreign, so wanted. Now is not the time, except for the fact that it lifts this shroud. It bonds them with something other than these bouts of loss. “That thing you said,” her lips quirk with the approach toward the foreign sound, but she gives it a go all the same with how it echoes in her. “A cuisle. You, um, you called me that before, right?” Before. Before their separation, a quarter of a century’s worth, before she’d started anew, before she’d taken on a life that wasn’t hers at all. It could be his memory, it could be shared, but it’s sturdy and sure like the arms that had held her as a child, even among the tumults of all of this pain. A cuisle. “Do you mind me asking what it means?”

How was it so difficult, and so... so unstoppable, at the same time? Take the wrong stone out of a wall - at least, the walls he remembered, stacked high between the sheep fields of home - and the whole thing came down. Even the sheep knew. Which was why they didn’t jump; it hurt, to fall. Same reason Fionn hadn’t said her name in... in nearly thirty years, apparently. Aurora. That long. Because it hurt to fall, and so his heart did, cracking and bruising all the way down. Believed him? Fionn sniffed, snuffled, eyes away. Why would she believe him? And yet - if anything, he was glad of that. If Fiona was going to make a mistake, tonight, if she was going to make the specific mistake of believing anything he had to say, believing in him, at least she’d picked the truest truth he had to give. Her mother had loved her. Would have loved her. 

Still did, if you believed in that sort of thing. Fionn could, sometimes. Only sometimes. Hallucinogens worked wonders, didn’t they? A magic all their fucking own. 

Hadn’t he told her to stop apologizing? Hadn’t she told him? Oh, they weren’t going to manage it, between them. “No, you - you’ve the right.” Fiona did. She had the right to ask. “She’d want you to know, anyhow.” No, Aurora would have wanted to tell her. How had he finished his drink so fast? More rightly, how had it taken so long, given the circumstances? 

Fionn set his emptied glass down, tapped his fingers on the worn table, nervously, needy for distraction. A cuisle, echoed back at him, wasn’t it. Stupid slip, that. Stupid. Sharp, too. He took a deep, deep breath, nodding, uselessly. “It’s -” his hand had found its way to those stitches, padded by thin, peeling, damp bandages. He pulled his damn fingers away, quick, curling them in on themselves. “Ah... it’s Irish. Gaeilge. That’s - there’s a fae language, you know -” except, she might not, and that was his doing too, “but I... I spent a long while, in Ireland. Sounds more like home than anything else, so...” So what? Why would she care? “Means my pulse. Like - like the beat of my heart. A cuisle mo chroi.” Didn’t have to break it down any more than that, did he? Not that he could, at the moment, throat wrung tight and hoarse.