a dy enaid di tan warchae (y gwyll | mared/siân)

[fiachairecht]

a dy enaid di tan warchae. y gwyll, mared/siân. belonging to places is hard but caring for people within them is harder. 2.6k words, rated m.

"Siân."

The woman in the rain didn't move, just hugged herself a little tighter.

"Siân."

She shook her head, unruly curls made tame by the downpour and clinging to her cheeks.

"Are you going to make me order you to turn around?" Mared finally asked in exasperation, but she could tell she was doing a shit job of hiding the edge of fear shivering around the words.

Siân must have heard it too, because she did turn, at last, deathly pale underneath wind-lashed cheeks. Mared couldn't tell what was rain and what was tears. Probably for the best.

And suddenly, Mared had no idea what to say. So she defaulted to, "you'll catch your death out here."

Siân rolled her eyes. "Fitting, yeah? You've been after me for months, I'm pretty sure that counted as career suicide at last back there."

"I've not—" Mared cut herself off, sighed. She had been hard on Siân these past months, ever since her promotion to Detective Sergeant. And no matter how much she told herself that it was for Siân's own good — for her own good, she needed a DS who could keep up with her, who wouldn't allow the way she was torn between Aber and Cardiff to affect her job—

Mared jerked her head toward the car. "Come on. We're taking a drive."

Siân narrowed her eyes. "Why? Can't think of anything you'd need to say to me in private after that scene."

It hadn't exactly been a crowning moment of professionalism for either of them. Attracting Prosser's attention on top of it all had been the one thing that convinced Mared she needed to get both of them out of the station.

"But I can. Get in the car, DS Owens, that's an order."

Siân looked like she badly wanted to say something snippy in response, but she just tossed her head, stalked round to the other side of the car and slammed the door after her too loudly.

Mared breathed out, carefully, and wondered how she had managed to let things between them fall so far, so quickly, both of them watching and neither one of them making an attempt to pick up the pieces.

Mared drove, Siân still and quiet in the passenger seat with her knees pulled closer to her chest. No sound but the rain, and the windshield wipers, and Siân's hair dripping on the floor mat. The half-abandoned road wound them up into the hills, tyres skidding through mud as Mared bit her lip and tried to focus on what little she could see through the rain-lashed glow of her headlights.

Aber wasn't small, not like this.

"Going to murder me and dump my body somewhere in the hills, then?" Siân finally asked after nearly half an hour of silence.

Not funny. Maybe she didn't even mean it to be a joke. Mared thought about Siân's penchant for picking up too-dangerous informants, how she flinched when she thought no one could see her.

"An hour ago you were mad at me for trying to prevent just that from happening to you, Ms I can take down three cocaine dealers on my own, thanks."

Siân just snorted in response, pressed her forehead against the car window and felt the vibrations thrum through her skull. If she closed her eyes, if everything vanished —

— there would still be Mared in the seat next to her, wrapped up in a nervous care like no one Siân'd ever known.

They drove another ten minutes before they reached the hilltop, and there they stopped, Mared shoving the car into park with more force than she meant to as the rain faded to a drizzle around them.

"I would have backed you," Mared said, before Siân could start with the questions again. "If you'd brought this to me, to us, before. I would have made sure you had everything you needed."

"Right," Siân said absently. She didn't believe Mared for a second, and Mared could tell she was putting very little effort into pretending.

The car around them was stifling, the heat cloying as the storm faded outside. "I would have. You're my officer, a good one, and —"

"Oh, I'm good now, am I? What happened to impulsive and under-committed?"

Mared felt her cheeks flush at the reminder of her own words from a morning briefing last week. "Yeah, well, I didn't know then, did I?" She had thought it was true then. She still thought it was true, at least the first part.

"Fuck's sake," Siân snapped, releasing her seatbelt and shoving her door open.

"Si — Christ," Mared sighed to the empty car, feeling it tremble from the wind and Siân's slammed door. She banged her head against the back of her seat. She was a DI, for god's sake, she should be able to keep her officers — her friends — in some sort of line without this mess.

She and Siân were many things, but they were neither simple nor expansive enough to be friends.

It was still raining, though Mared could see the sky clearing in the distance, and she got out of the car too, thinking that it was at least a fitting place for such an uncomfortable conversation.

Siân was leaning against the car, idly tossing a pack of fags from hand to hand. "Light?" she asked.

Mared shook her head wordlessly. She'd left the station with nothing but her keys. Probably a bad idea, in hindsight.

Siân shrugged and slipped the pack back into her pocket. "At least it's gorgeous from up here."

Like you, Mared might have said, if they were any other two people. Windswept and angry Siân was a force to match anything in nature, and Mared always found it more difficult to remind herself why she was angry with her at times like this.

She always did do better outside walls. Siân did better in, where she couldn't run and where she could channel the fury with which Prosser threw them at each other into casework.

Casework. Siân's case. She wrenched herself back to practicality with difficulty. "We're going to need to set up some sort of protection detail for you."

"No." Flat and final and just a little bit smug.

"You might be okay playing games with your life, but I'm not. I—" Anything she could possibly say would be too much truth to bear, and the words died in her mouth.

Siân smirked. "I'm not playing games for once. Trust me, I don't need it."

Mared closed her eyes against the visions that conjured. "And if we start pulling bodies from the sea?"

"Don't make me say something stupid." And she almost, almost sounded sorry. Her smile was almost, too, and sad when Mared opened her eyes.

"Damn it, Siân. No one else can know." Mared sighed and ran a hand too tired to be shaking through her hair.

Siân shoved her own hands deeper into her pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind. No fucking shit. Mared wasn't quite glaring at her, but the landscape was doing a good enough job of it for her. "You weren't supposed to know." It sounded horrifically petulant, and she wanted the words back before she'd even finished saying them.

Mared narrowed her eyes. "You're a sergeant. Not a bloody child. Why didn't you come to me with this?"

I didn't think you'd care. I thought you'd care too much.

The moon was rising, silver light washing the colours out of Mared's face and jacket, and it took everything Siân had not to reach out for her.

"I thought — I don't know what I thought."

Lie. Siân knew Mared could see it in her face.

"What was this, then?" There's a pleading note in her voice that she can't shake. "Some attempt at burning bridges again before you run off to do god knows what in Cardiff and leave me?" Siân's head snapped around, too fast, and Mared added, "At that station, alone?" but she knew she'd already managed to say too much. They never really talked, the two of them, they solved cases and fought and fucked and it worked, but talking?

Mared was becoming increasingly sure that the only reason anything about them worked was because they were both too stubborn to admit that anything was wrong.

"I'm —" Siân slumped further back against the car. "Where the land forgets its name I'm foreign in my own country." The words coiled around something in Mared's heart and pulled.

"And rivers everywhere flow back to the sea." Mared could quote poetry too. "What the hell are you running from, Siân?"

Siân tilted her head back, eyes shut against the rain. "Who says I'm running from anything? Leaving's just the done thing now, isn't it?" Mared didn't believe her for a second, and it barely took that long for Siân to deflate under her silence. "Fine. I don't want to leave, really. But I don't ... I don't think I know how to want to stay, not for the right reasons."

"And what sort of reasons do you think you need?" Mared asked. The tenderness in her voice surprised her, almost. The soft cold of the night was draining her anger more rapidly than she had realised. She was so, so tired.

Siân shrugged. "You have reasons. Family. I have ..." A job. An ideal. A future. You. "Used to be it was enough."

"Used to be a lot of things," Mared whispered, and the wind stole the words before Siân could work out whether the regret she heard in them was her own imagination.

Siân sighed, dug the weathered toes of her boots deeper in the sandy dirt. "I'm here now, is the point. I don't ... do shite like this for places I don't care about."

Mared stepped forward, so close she could feel the heat from Siân's body even through their jackets. "I'm here until the end of time. And if care was the only thing I had for Aber I wouldn't still be here."

"Liar," Siân whispered. So close that the Mared thinks the words brushed against her lips. "You run away too." Words as biting as the rain, and Mared couldn't stand it anymore. Wrapped cold fingers around Siân's thin wrists and pinned her hands flat to the hood of the car.

"But I come back," she said. "You run away like you want to drown before you have to make a choice."

Aberystwyth was only small enough to hide in if you let it suffocate you; Cardiff only big enough to get lost in if you had city lights in your blood instead of the wind.

Siân tilted her head, blinked once, twice, and Mared watched the rough swirls of emotion rising in her eyes. "What if you don't like my choice?"

Her challenge clear in her voice, and neither of them were going anywhere this time.

"Try me." Mared hardly had time to get the words out before Siân was pressing herself up as far as she could between the car and Mared's body and kissing her. Messy and hot and practically vibrating with all the emotions Siân kept barely contained under her skin, and Mared was kissing her back almost before she realised what they were doing. Parting her lips for Siân's tongue, leaning forward to chase some sort of better leverage.

"What are you doing?" Mared asked breathlessly, wrenching her mouth away from Siân's with no little effort.

"Choosing," she said simply, flipping her wrists out of Mared's grasp and tangling her fingers in her short hair. Close, she was so close, so unbearably real. Mared's own hands fell limp to her sides. There were a thousand reasons why they shouldn't do this, and a hundred reasons why she shouldn't be so quick to believe Siân now but —

Siân choosing her.

Siân choosing Aber.

Siân choosing her.

Mared shifted forward, slipped her leg between Siân's and settled her hands on her hips, and kissed her again, again and again, Siân's fingers tightening in her hair every time she pulled back for breath, shivering against her as if Siân wasn't the only warm thing in a land that so used to loving though the cold.

"Please," Siân finally whispered, hand falling to the button of her own jeans. "Mared, I'm not good at this, feelings or choices, but please..."

Mared tripped so sharply over Siân's admission that she wasn't good at feelings — don't talk about feelings, the unspoken rule that Siân was always so much better at keeping to, at wanting to keep to — that she almost didn't process what she was asking. "What, here?"

"Yes," Siân hissed, grinding herself down against Mared's thigh, and Mared could feel the heat radiating from her even through both their jeans. Her grin was wild, the first true smile Mared had seen from her in weeks, and it made her want the way only Siân's smiles ever could.

They shouldn't. She shouldn't want to. But here, swathed in the green-greys of hills and sky, raindrops clinging to the edges of the world around them, after everything this day has wrung from them, she did want, and they would.

This high up Siân didn't even entertain the thought of more than undoing her jeans, and the angle, as Mared tried to brace herself against the car's hood without crushing Siân against it, was terrible, but all of that fell away as she brushed her fingers through rough curls and over Siân's clit.

Siân moaned, head falling back as Mared worked her hand further inside the tight confines of her clothes, to slip a finger inside her while continuing to circle her clit with her thumb. Her hips rocked down against Mared's hand, still as easy as it always was, and Mared leaned back as far as she could to watch her face through half-lidded eyes.

Like this, desperate and breaking in her arms in the thin air of the almost-night, Siân looked more free than Mared had ever seen her. She came with a cry, more vocal in their isolation than she had ever been, and Mared kept stroking her until Siân's moans took on a distinctly irritated edge, desperate to keep her looking like this as long as possible.

Gradually, Siân's breathing slowed, and when Mared slipped her hand out of her pants she tipped forward to rest her forehead on Mared's shoulder. "So," she said, voice hoarse. "Now what?"

Mared blinked. The question, too, was new, their encounters usually too rushed to allow for anything other than a quick cleanup before getting back to work. She had a daughter to go home to; Siân, she knew, had a cat. They both had mountains of paperwork, statements about drug deals and informants and god knew what else. Neither of them had left the station with anything more than what was in their pockets.

Carefully, she disentangled their legs and went to look for a tissue in the car. She was still planning what to say when her mouth, entirely of its own accord, said, "Come and have dinner with me."

She couldn't see Siân's face when she said, "Okay," but her voice was sincere even if the word seemed too loud in the stillness around them.

Real, not real, future, probability. It would take so long to find out.

Was it really pretending they would be fine if she hoped so desperately that they would be? It would have been so much easier if she had never come to see Siân as such an essential part of her life in Aber, if Siân had understood just a little more the sort of town she had come to. But this, she reflected, was what they had now.

And it would be enough, in all its fractured, bittersweet whole, for the moment.

Siân (mis)quotes from Gillian Clarke's 'Border', Mared quotes from one of the narration pieces in Riverdance