make me come away (undeadwood | arabella/miriam, joanie)

[fiachairecht]

make me come away (sunlight). undeadwood, arabella/miriam, joanie. in the after there is emptiness and in the emptiness there is miriam. 1.2k words, rated t. for maharetr in chocolateboxcomm round 5

Arabella's house is too big. It rattles around her in the harsh Dakota winds, vast and lonely and populated by more ghosts than living things. She'd expected it, almost — had known she was stepping into her sister's place, had known that she would need to plant her feet in the hollow steps of the dead. But nothing could have prepared her for the scale of memories, of emptiness in Deadwood.

In the after, there is what seems only emptiness.

It slices through the centre of her, filleting her life out into ever smaller pieces. The time with alive Cynthia and the time with dead Cynthia. The time before Clayton died and the time after Clayton died. The time when she and Miriam had almost—

and the time now, when she doesn't know what they had been trying to hold on to.

For a brief few days she'd been kept busy, had made plans and traveled and talked like she hadn't since Cynthia had left Atlanta, and for those days, amidst all the bullets, she'd understood why people came to Deadwood. Why they stayed through the winds that blew fit to bite chunks out of one's soul (not that she had ever much believed she had one of those) and the gold-studded ground that swallowed down what was left.

And now she has eyes dried out from the crying, fingers grown calluses from the guns she's never had to handle with such consistency, a voice roughened from yelling over the wind and from too much whisky that the dead don't even know is being raised in their honour. Has skin burnt by magic that lingers under her nails; has empty hands, and no idea what to do.

Oh, she has plenty to do — Deadwood is relentless even its quiet, and Arabella sorts through the remains of the surgery, of all the stacks of her husband's library, and she thinks in another world this might have made up a life. A world, she doesn't think, in which she wouldn't have to be so damn preoccupied with what comes after life, after death. But it's not the same as ...

She rearranges the pieces like her surgical tools. Not the same as having a sister. Not the same as having four friends. Not the same as ...

She's avoiding it. Not like she's avoiding her husband, easy with the house and his dreary routine. Easy to place a bookmark there, lock him away until such time as she needs someone to see her be a society lady. In the thing she knows better than to call desolation, Miriam would be easy to grasp — would want to be held, would kiss the questions from her lips without needing an explanation.

Avoiding is also a strong word for something she's barely been doing for two days, but Arabella didn't put work into cultivating the right mix of drama and self-awareness to put off as many men as possible for nothing.

She's saved, though, from having to consider the particulars of the word by Joanie. The woman appears at the surgery's door just as Arabella's packing up to leave for the night, and it's near enough to dark and Joanie's an unfamiliar enough sight that Arabella's grasping for her gun before she half realises what she's doing.

"Relax," Joanie says, even though her hands are trembling. "I'm not here to put snakes in your head or ... whatever. I'm here for Miriam."

Arabella thinks about Miriam's snuffboxes, dynamite and tobacco and Lord only knew what else. She can't rightly begrudge Joanie her needs, but the part of her that never learned how to let things go hates her for the reminder that she's not with Miriam now. "Well, she ain't here," she says, and has to make an effort for her voice to sound kind.

"I know," Joanie says, and when Arabella looks closer, squinting into the twilight, she can see the skin around her eyes is pale and bruised like maybe she's not slept since the last time Arabella glimpsed her, back when things had only mostly gone to shit. "Ain't no one seen her round since Fogg left. Thought you, at least, might want her to be left with someone."

Arabella pushes her bangs out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, dirt scraping along her forehead. "Fuck you," she says, but she can't muster the sort of heat she wants to. They both know Joanie's right.

Joanie smiles, thin-lipped and unamused. "It's Miriam's bed you ought to be warming. If you had any decency."

"I—" Arabella just stares, taken aback by the blatant implication. It isn't the first time she's heard some version of it, but people never quite said it so boldly, in Atlanta.

Joanie shrugs. "Don't need to be vulgar about it if you don't want. But she deserves it."

And with that she leaves, just the sound of the wind lingering in her wake like something pained. Arabella stares at her retreating back and feels like she should say something, though she couldn't rightly say what. 

But — oh, what the fuck. Not like she wanted to go back to her husband's house anyway.

She hurries the rest of her packing, makes her way across town as quickly as possible. Dan's alone behind the desk when she walks into the hotel, and he flinches back as the door slams shut behind her. He looks like he can't decide whether to jump to do her bidding or cower behind the desk and not emerge til she's gone. But Arabella doesn't have the heart to say anything reassuring, the version of her who'd once recited society platitudes easy as breathing buried somewhere under all the dust. She gives him a nod, instead, and he doesn't say anything when she heads upstairs.

Doesn't point a gun, either, and maybe that's all anyone can ask these days but she wants more, wants something closer to life for herself and Miriam — can't imagine wanting anything else, not when she knows the searing silver heat of magic in her chest and the warm rightness of being held in Miriam's arms, even though it had been something unthinkable that had first driven her there.  

And still Arabella hesitates before Miriam's door. She wants to see Miriam, she knows she would be welcomed — and yet this seems a worse threshold to cross than the edge of the grave. Wanting and absence tangle up in her chest like a badly buried set of bones, and she regrets not pausing at the bar for a drink first.

In the end, though, Miriam makes the choice easy for her. Opens the door before Arabella's more than half-lifted her hand to knock, with whatever sixth sense she has that's kept her alive in Deadwood so far.

"Hi," is all Arabella has a chance to say before Miriam's in her arms, tear-damp face pressed into the crook of Arabella's neck, and all Arabella can do is wonder why it took her so long to do for Miriam what the other woman had once done for her.

"A girl could start thinking you're dead, missing you this long."

"I know," Arabella says, pressing a kiss to the top of Miriam's head. "I won't leave tonight."

It's the most she can promise, and while it's not yet enough, one day she'll be able to promise something that is.