how tall the trees (zone blanche | camille/marion)

[fiachairecht]

how tall the trees. zone blanche, camille/marion. it's worse when the crows have marion's face. 655w, rated m. for corvusumbranox in chocolateboxcomm round 5

Marion's three drinks ahead of everyone else at the party by the time she appears at Camille's side. Her hair's come undone from its ponytail and she's left her jacket somewhere, but her eyes are unnaturally bright. Camille knows without asking she doesn't feel the cold — Marion never did.

"So serious," Marion says cheerfully, slinging an arm over Camille's shoulders. She curls in close, presses her drink into Camille's hand.

Camille takes it. She can't do anything else with Marion looking at her like that, eyes so wide and mouth so secret.

"You don't like this any more than I do," Marion says as Camille drinks, and: Camille can see her, earlier that night in the middle of the dance with Cora — glimmering in the strings of fairy lights like something alive.

"Not true," Camille says. "I just — there's more people, than I usually like."

Marion's arm slips down around Camille's waist, her lips press against Camille's ear. "I can fix that." She turns them towards the gap in the buildings, to where the path further into the trees opens up. Camille shouldn't follow her, she needs to stay, because ...

She had wanted to avoid Marion, because ...

The noise of the party swells around her, voices overlapping, and underneath, Marion, so quiet: "Please. Don't you owe me? Don't you want to remember?"

Camille blinks, and the shadows cast themselves sharp across Marion's face, her nose, her lips narrowing down to the beak of a crow. She couldn't have spoken, but, "No," Camille answers anyway, "But I do."

She lets Marion guide her into the forest, brambles sticking through the leather of her boots with every step.

Marion doesn't say another word.

**

It's worse when the crows have Marion's faces. At least like this she doesn't have to see those glassy, dead eyes, so full of light with nowhere else to go.

Only Villefranche looks out from the birds, preternaturally intelligent. She knows why the forest is cold.

If her skin splits beneath their beaks — if her ears ring with their cries, if every word of her studies ends up spoken in their hoarse inhuman tongue—

It's better.

It has to be.

**

The tree bark is rough against Camille's back, scratching though the thin fabric of her shirt more unforgiving that Marion's nails. Marion's hand has long since slipped inside her jeans, the flat of her palm pressing against Camille's clit. It's not hard enough to be pleasurable, not hard enough to be anything, except a reminder that they're still exactly this close together.

It's all they'll ever be, anymore.

Camille digs her own nails into the bark, feeling the blood and sap well up underneath. "I miss you," she says.

Marion shifts, presses closer. Her head is on Camille's shoulder, the cold of her cheekbone sharp and jagged enough to tear through cloth. "But I'm right here," she says. "You made sure of it."

I know, Camille doesn't say, I know, you're never gone, and that's why I miss you — why I miss when you weren't here at all—

"But you dream of me," Marion says, and: oh, of course, why does what she speaks matter here? "Why do you keep asking me back? Why didn't you leave me in the bog?" Plaintive, like she never was in life, and it pulls at something in Camille that's still flesh and blood and bone underneath the leaves and feathers.

She doesn't know how to lie anymore. "I don't know."

Marion's hand curls, the tips of her fingers sharp against Camille's cunt. Not inside — like she knows, maybe, that Camille's body can only hold so much guilt at once. "Do you want to know my last secret?"

No.

"I miss you too."

The crows alight on Marion's shoulders, and Camille sobs.

But there's no one to hear her.

**

Under the roots of the bog, Camille opens her eyes.

The crows are silent.

Marion's hand is in hers.

'How Tall the Trees' by Oceans of Slumber, preview on Apple Music