#charis writes

Nightfall finds her sitting amid the corpses of the past season’s growth, with only her own thoughts for company. She should feel elated, flush with the victory she’s waited years to claim, and yet …

Be careful what you wish for, as you just may get it. Words from a lifetime ago that she had once brushed off; how could she not wish to reclaim what had been stolen from her? Had she not suffered enough to have earned herself a reprieve – a return to what had been, to normalcy, to happiness?

If the choice had been given to her along with knowledge of the present, what would she have picked? Withered tendrils shred beneath fretful fingers no longer gnarled, join other fragments scattered brown and faded green across the drift of white skirts, the colours muting in the deepening dark until she can no longer tell them apart. An impossible choice, to give up one or the other, and meaningless – for how could she have known? How can anyone ever truly know what a moment will bring until they stand in it, with no road back?

The truth he holds close to his heart is this: he had loved his wife.

To look on his daughter’s face pains him with the memories it wakes, the ghost he sees looking back more and more with each passing day. He had never thought to lose his wife, and so long as the girl is there he never will, but she brings the woman he loved both closer and yet impossibly far, and the older she grows the more difficult it becomes to look upon her.

“You should be standing here, and me in the ground instead. They needed you. They don’t —” Need me, and though the thought is bitten back it does not make it any less true. The children they shaped but never claimed are grown, have moved ahead, moved on, mended the world they had broken in the blindness of their own youth. It feels as if only she stands here still, rooted, chained to a past she cannot let go, all of her meagre wisdom spent, all of her energy leached into the earth that has claimed so much that she never dared reach for.

She is bleeding. The wound inside will never heal, and she does not want it to. Not when it is all she has left.

The trees above her whisper, oak and birch and ash, leaves shivering in the breeze. If she closes her eyes she can imagine his voice mingling with their sounds, his presence a ghost in this place that had been the only home they had ever been theirs, prison and sanctuary all at once. It is her imagination — how can it not be, when she still holds one end of a broken tether — but that does not stop her from turning her face upwards, searching for something she knows she will not find.

He had been up one of those trees when they first met, a lanky shape in Specialist blacks clambering between branches, but she knows better than to expect him there now. It has been years since either of them had time for such things — if, in truth, she ever had.

I should have made time. Another admission she swallows down, releasing the stone as she steps back. The greens bleed into each other, fade into the grey of the sky, blunting, blurring even as she tries to blink away the moisture welling in her eyes. I should have told you to let me go, to be free — that I wasn’t worth this. That I needed you. That this isn’t enough.

And yet —

(“Ms. Dowling would have known what to do.”

“Farah isn’t here. We have to figure it out ourselves”)

But she had been. She’d heard — both what he said and what he meant. And she’d tried to protest, tried to push a denial across the shattered remnants of what had once been an unshakeable connection, but that had been an older magic, ancient and implacable, born of the stones and soil of this place and the blood he’d spilled to call her back, and it would not be thwarted. A life for a life, but what kind of a life had he won for her, when half of her self was gone?

(“Forgive me,” he had whispered, and the confession had been the first inhalation her restored lungs made. Her first exhalation, when she realised what had happened, had been a scream.)

“It should have been me,” she says again, rough and hollow, as her hands fall lax at her sides.

(How can she forgive him this?)

She’s not used to hearing her first name from anyone, much less in such sing-song tones, and so she just ignores it as she does so much and continues across the deserted courtyard. From across the pond she can hear the music from the party her students think she is unaware of — though how they can imagine that, when the bass echoes into her bones from this far away, is a mystery — and it’s only the absence of anyone but the owner of that voice that prevents her from lashing out.

“Rosalind!”

He’s persistent; she’ll give him that. He is also, she realises the moment she reaches out to the fringes of his mind, definitively drunk, thoughts muzzy and tangled through with alcohol. And though she does not begrudge her nearly-graduated pupils from preemptive catharsis, knowing what they will face all too soon, it does not mean she is pleased to have one of them chasing after her like this.

“Andreas,” she replies as she turns, voice sharp enough that it would normally be a warning. It’s a measure of his current state that he does not heed it, no more than he heeds the way her arms fold across her chest as she waits for him to approach.

Drunk as he may be, he is still steady on his feet; if she didn’t know better, she might take him for sober, in which case he would be a fool without reason instead of simply someone whose inhibitions have been washed down with a beer or few. When he stops before her she tilts her head back to study him, taking in the slight lack of focus in his eyes — the only thing that betrays his intoxication outwardly. Silence stretches between them until she cocks a brow in tacit prompting. If he has nothing to say, then she has far better things to do than be standing here on the shadowed edges of the quad waiting for him to find his tongue.

“I won’t let you down.”

The words come out in a rush, possessed of an urgency that doesn’t quite make sense. It would be easy to push into his mind and find the reason behind them, but she’s intrigued now, and so she just watches, unblinking.

“Your battalion,” he continues, as though it explains everything instead of nothing at all. “It’s an honour. Whatever it takes to end this war, I’m in.” The urgency is echoed in the intensity of his gaze as he looks at her, as though he’s trying to communicate something more than just what’s in the words. It feels like he’s willing her to dip into his thoughts; perversely, that makes her want to do nothing of the sort, no matter how it would sate her curiosity.

“I’ll hold you to it.”

His frustration is palpable now; one hand rakes through already-unruly hair as his jaw works beneath the scruff of a beard still growing in. She feels the corners of her mouth twitch up in a smile that she doesn’t bother to hide, more sardonic than anything else. This would be infuriating in most circumstances, but the glimpse she’s getting of his inner workings is worth the delay in getting back to her reading. She knows his skills in the field; he didn’t earn top specialist for his looks. But while four years have given her insight into his personality, this is a part of him she’d not seen before.

There’s a question he wants her to ask. She could turn away now, leave him out here to fumble his way back to the party, but she’s just curious enough to indulge him and so she gives it to him, the single syllable hanging in the warm summer air.

“Why?”

“I want to be more.” One arm sweeps out, encompasses not just their surroundings but something far greater. “The sort of person they’ll write stories about.”

It almost makes her laugh; the sound is on the verge of bubbling free when she realises he is still looking at her just as intently as before, pupils wide and dark as they focus on her properly for the first time since he’d stopped before her. Just like that, her mirth at his naïveté catches in her throat.

For you, he thinks, though she can hear it as clearly as if he’d said it aloud, and it startles her enough that she remains motionless as he leans forward, lips just catching the edge of her own before they press against her cheek. For you, and there’s so much threaded into those two words that it batters against the edges of her mind, reaching, hungry for something she cannot name and does not recognise.

For you, and it echoes as he rocks back on his heels, looking at her expectantly. The colour flooding his cheeks is not just the flush of his drinking.

“Go to sleep,” she sighs in exasperation, threading compulsion into the words. The speed with which he complies surprises her; she scarcely manages to prevent him from smacking his head against the flagstones as he goes limp, redirecting him towards the grass instead. As he shifts to get more comfortable she studies him, wondering — not for the first time — if she’s making a mistake with this choice. It’s not his usefulness that she doubts, but his discretion.

For you. He might as well be a child with a head full of stories, dreaming of knights and oaths and noble quests. She is many things, headmistress and general and fairy and warrior, but she can say with certainty that she will never be the sort of woman who belongs in those tales, no matter what he may imagine.

(The remnants of his sloppy kiss burn at the corner of her mouth as she turns away, heading back inside to the work awaiting her. At least, she thinks, she can be assured of his devotion, no matter how reality will inevitably destroy his dreams.)