The Last River

by The Wayfaring Strangers

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. -J.R.R. Tolkien. (The cost of loving her brother was losing him. But Wanda would gladly pay it for Pietro, though her heart broke within her.)

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
-G. K. Chesterton

. . .

Wanda sees him everywhere: a glimpse of silver hair across the battered kitchen table, a phantom kiss on her brow, a ghostly laugh somewhere above her ear. When Clint had offered her a place at his farm – into his home! - she had accepted, nodded automatically through a leaden haze. Wanda says nothing far more often than not because she keeps expecting Pietro to answer for them (them that's really only her now; she needs to remember that.)

And the worst part is that it (It, the empty space beside her) won't stay put when she stops looking at it. Wanda keeps thinking, thinking while her life shifts from barracks and snow and industrial lights to apples trees and misty hills and children's toys, that he's only gone somewhere and she has only to hold out until her other half returns. But every time she turns to examine the alien bubble of hope in her chest, it pops, iridescent. Because he's never coming back. She knows that now, even if her heart refuses to believe it. She saw his body (wouldn't leave his body, the Vision told her later), and she knows it was because he looked only asleep and if she just stayed long enough he would sit up and start complaining. Only Pietro will never sit up or complain or run circles around her again, lying as he does under a plain grey stone in a mossy churchyard.

And that truth is so vast and terrible that she quails before it. Wanda had been almost happy when the archer laid a hand on her arm and gave her a place to stay, because he was kind - and who should be kind to someone like her? But now, trailing down a long, wooden hallway after his wife, a laughably light bag clutched in her fingers, she can't help but feel like she's drowning. Everything about this place and these people is different, beautiful, and horribly confusing.

'I hope you don't mind sharing a room with Lila,' Mrs. Barton ('Just Laura,') says and Wanda shakes her head mutely, tangled hair swinging into her eyes. The little girl and her brother are barefoot and dark-haired, studious at the kitchen table with books and papers sprawled around them. The both of them smiled at her when she came in, and chattered so that she hardly needed to say anything. That was a kindness. Lila and Cooper. These are not names she knows.

But their faces hold something familiar from long ago: hope, hope that goes unnoticed because it has never not been there and no-one's ever not come back, not for them. Clint's children are what her grandmother called summer children. Wanda envies them terribly, and grows terribly afraid for them. It is late spring here, flowers bobbing outside the window as she lays her bag down, but it is winter for her. There once was a steadying arm about her shoulders, a confident voice at her back, a warmth at her side, now absent; the very not there of the one she loves (loved) most is cold, cold, cold. The sunlight streaming over weathered wooden floors will never warm her because there is no familiar shadow lying next to hers.

Once and long ago, a Sokovian priest told her that Death was only a river, the Last River. And when you died you had only to swim across it. Then Death would be over and there was to be God's country on the other side. Ten-year-old Wanda clutched Pietro's hand and imagined their mother, sharp-faced, freckled, beautiful Mother, wading through the black water with Father holding her hand and smiled a little. Nineteen-year-old Wanda rolls over in the night sometimes and sees Pietro in that River, his hair floating in the current and his face slack beneath the icy ripples, and shivers. Though he left her standing on the shore, she has waded in the River too, for he is her twin and they are each part of the other. His death froze her to the bone.

And the worst part is that she cannot force herself to remember that she is alone. And every time she doesn't see him there it hurts all over again. Wanda would not be all surprised if her tears froze to her cheeks or her fingers burnt black with frostbite.

But - but - if this is the cost of loving and of being loved - the price of having had a family, a brother (and in him hope and hearth and home) - then she will pay gladly for Pietro, though her heart break within her.

. . .

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of The Ring

. . .

I had so much fun with this. A little odd stylistically, but I wanted to get inside Wanda head - and maybe she would think this way? The River metaphor has nothing to do with Eastern Orthodox tradition as far as I know, but I wanted to include it for artistic reasons. I hope no-one is offended.

On a broader note, this may be the last story I publish here - I have other two plot bunnies, but no solid ideas yet and College is looming in the distance. So don't write me off as a lost cause just yet, but if I fall suddenly silent, at least you will know what doom (DOOM?) has befallen me.

Thank you all once again! God be with you,
-RandomCelt