vaki þú, góð kona (jordskott | esmeralda & klara)

[fiachairecht]

vaki þú, góð kona. jordskott, esmeralda & klara. esme tries to pick up the pieces, but has to find the missing one first. 671w, rated t. for genprompt_bingo round 14, 'autumn'.

Groa spake:
"Long is the way, | long must thou wander,
But long is love as well;
Thou mayst find, perchance, | what thou fain wouldst have,
If the fates their favor will give."
— Grógaldr (Groa's Spell)

Autumn comes to Silverhojd with the turning of September, as it always does. The leaves fall in rivers of flame, red-orange-yellow blurring across the sky and carpeting the ground, until they're trampled into a rich brown nothing that yet needs winter ice to speed its transformation into spring growth.

Esmeralda stands in the middle of one of the cleanings Klara hadn't yet had the time to take her to and slowly, carefully, bends her knees and curls her body backwards until her hands are planted in the soil and she can see the treetops sweeping the cloudy floor.

Her thin black tanktop slides down, just a centimetre, baring a sliver of her abdomen to the air. Her hair falls, too, piece by piece out of the messy bun she had tied with cold clumsy fingers before she left Ylva's cottage. The length of ivy has snapped, and now her hair sighs softly in the wind as it brushes through the leaves.

Anyone looking wouldn't be able to tell where her hair ended and the leaves began. She had just been starting to learn where Klara ended and the forest began.

Is she in the trees, now? Esmeralda had asked, when the first red-gold blooms started to appear.

No, Ylva had said, and it hadn't quite been pitying but it had been soft, softer than usual, like maybe she knew that Esmeralda had already known that.

Klara was not meant for the trees, not like Ylva. Esmeralda had not yet learned what people like them were meant for, so now she holds herself upside-down in the forest, because nothing is right-side-up anymore.

Mist drips from the branches as night starts to fall, collects in the hollows of the ground, beads across Esmeralda's stomach. She blinks away the droplets and finds the world desaturated, pale under an early, turbulent echo of the frost.

Nothing is dying, either, in the silence of autumn. But Klara isn't alive.

Esmeralda's wrists buckle, her feet sink too far into the ground. There's one perfect moment where the trembling stops, when everything is golden, but it never lasts and she always falls, lies flat on her back, beneath the layer of mists. Opens her mouth and doesn't know how to breathe it in. Dreams, anyway, that she is drowning.

Come back, she says, voice without breath. Come back, please. I miss you.

Give her back, please.

I'm sorry.

Maybe Klara is in the mists. They're one of the few things now that sing like she did.

She thinks, sometimes, about digging up Klara's body. Perhaps she wants to say goodbye. Perhaps she just wants to know, for once, the truth.

It's her own voice that haunts her now, the only ghost that matters. Her own sorry, too late, spoken to a living phone in a dead woman's hand and she hadn't known. Shouldn't she have known?

Esmeralda stands in the middle of the clearing where Klara died, and she cannot see her bare feet for the leaves. Her arm is bleeding, an unnoticed cut from the unremembered walk. Slowly, carefully, she bends her knees and curls her body forward until her hands are planted in the soil and the tips of her toes walk across the ceiling of the sky.

She cannot see, now. Her loose hair covers her eyes, the ends pooling in the dirt that lies over Klara's heart. The ivy is around her wrist now, clumsily tied in an imperfect replica of the infinity knots strung through all the clothes that Klara made them.

Give her back, please, she says, voice without breath, blood dizzying in her ears, behind her eyes, dripping slowly down her arm where it mingles with the leaves.

Red-red, she thinks. Red like Klara's hair. Not like mine.

I won't leave again. You don't need her like this.

Esmeralda's wrists buckle, her legs swing too far forward. There's one perfect moment when the trembling stops, when everything is golden, but it doesn't last and she falls.

Lies limp in Klara's arms.