A/N: Probably the strangest fic I've ever written. Take notice that I very much condemn the practice of child marriage and I show it through Robin in here. It might be strange though, that I don't seemingly show to condemn incest. It's because it's a very complicated subject and I better shut up about it lest I trip on my own words. The twincest here is just to add an extra creepiness to the overall feel of dark romance in the story.
One last thing. If I may, I recommend certain tunes that inspired the feels for this fic: Child Bride(of course, duh), and Gravediggress. All by Cocorosie. Wonderful noise, I promise.
Child Bride
Robin watches with dull eyes as the man takes his sister's hand, kisses it. His tiny fists are tense at his sides and the skin over his knuckles has turned white as his fingers curl into his palm and cut with his nails. His lips are restless, though no words come out. He looks down as his twin turns to face him.
He can't face her, he realizes. Her face is painted - her lips purple. If he looks at her this will be the last image of her face he has, and he doesn't like it.
"Brother," she says. Even her voice is different. She has just said her vows to the man and the priest, all dressed in black, begins to walk away from his house. He goes down the dirt path and becomes a black dot in the distance. "You should take it."
She hands him a cage with a sparrow and he takes it with his head still down. He sees the man's large feet at his sister's side and he can imagine his big hands on her small shoulders as he pulls her away. Robin's father says something, but Robin pays him no mind.
The sparrow chirps and Robin bites his lips.
When night falls and Robin sits by the window in his room, he thinks to himself that it's his sister's wedding night. Twelve years of age, same as he, and somewhere in the house beyond the thicket at the back of his house she must be washing her body, putting on lotions and baring herself on a stranger's bed.
There was a chimney, he remembers. The man's house had a chimney. There is no smoke in the distance above the treetops tonight, but there was a chimney.
"Sparrow," Robin says and opens the cage where the little bird can't even stretch its wings. The bird finds perch on Robin's wrist and he caresses the little animal's neck with one finger. "You will deliver her my words from now on."
In a small rolled up piece of paper he has written the words that he can think of. It's not even a letter, but his sister and him did this; their favorite things they wrote down on a notebook and shared them with each other.
Tonight he writes: Winged ones.
The next day the man comes back, but his sister isn't with him, and he tells Robin's father that the sparrow interrupted them the previous night. And Robin isn't supposed to send more messages to his sister unless it's at appropriate hours, or the little sparrow will be shot down with his rifle next he sees it.
His father brings Robin to the back of the house and beats him with a stick, and he leaves him to bleed on the grass. His mother, Robin can hear her, hums to herself inside the house, so she wouldn't listen as the dry wood landed on his back and chest. Later, he thinks, he will ask her what happened to her bird. She used to have one too, the one that she had used to send messages to her own family after she was married off to his father. At age twelve too.
"My sparrow escaped," she tells him. "Because it could."
"Unlike you," Robin mumbles and earns a slap.
When he goes to bed though, his mother comes back and brushes his hair with her fingertips.
"Unlike me," she keeps saying with her lips on his forehead.
Over the next weeks, his sister replies to his messages with her own.
She says: Animal tears.
He replies: Mud inside the house.
She says: The smell of old books' pages.
He replies: Metal chink.
She says: Wood bowls.
He replies: The rim of wood bowls on my lips.
And as the years pass and he grows hair below the waist, the messages slowly change.
She says: Roots of my hair.
He replies: Dead branches.
She says: Weeping willow.
He replies: Hay bales.
She says: The swells of my breasts.
He replies: The skin of your back, that I dream of at night.
One day the sparrow dies. Robin waits for days for his sister's reply after the message he sends before sunfall, but he grows impatient and sneaks out of the house to go see her. Halfway through the thicket he looks down to where a feathery lump lays being eaten by ants. Attached to the bird's leg is the rolled up piece of paper Robin had sent.
Now he thinks that his sister must fear he no longer wants to speak with her and speeds up. Past the thicket a house in a clearing meets him and smoke from a chimney spirals up towards the bleak sky.
He looks in through the open window on one side and sees a feminine figure sweeping the floors. The white curtains blow and prevent him from seeing her face, but he calls her.
"Robin," she says, panicking. "Go!" she hisses at him.
"The sparrow is dead," Robin explains.
A look of sadness passes over her face. "Buy a new one," she says.
"I will, but wait…"
"What?" she asks, her eyes dart from him to the stairs that lead up to a room where humming is heard.
"I've grown," Robin says. "And so have you…"
She can see that, she tells him. He's grown handsome.
"Before I go," he says and leans his head into the house. "There is one thing a sparrow could never give you on my behalf."
She comes close so he can whisper to her. Instead, he snatches her lips with his and pecks her several times.
"My kisses," he says. "They are yours."
He runs back to the house and gets his coat. He goes into town and buys a new bird. Not a sparrow this time, but a wren. That in itself is a promise, and it is his sister's name.
He trains the bird and sends it one day, no paper and no words though. The wren itself is the message.
She says: Raven feathers.
He replies: Honey berry smoke.
She says: Burnt log's ashes.
He replies: Sun's glare.
She says: Purple thread.
He replies: Turnip tongues.
She says: Dills seeds.
He replies: Wormwood crown.
He keeps her curled papers in a box under his bed. One day his father finds it and reads. The only thing he can imagine is that his daughter has been asking for ingredients for spells and rallies a mob for a witch hunt.
That day Robin walks the dirt path from the town, his lips mumble soundlessly the things he wants to write for his sister, but he stops meters from his house. There is smoke in the distance rising above the cluster of trees that separate his house from the house of the man who married his sister all those years ago. It's too much smoke to come from a single chimney, he thinks.
His fists tremble at his sides again.
One day he wakes up and he is old enough. That is what his father tells him in his deathbed. They present him a girl, of age twelve he guesses, and he is right.
On his wedding night he finds that his bride has trouble climbing onto the bed, so he picks her up. She tries wrapping her legs around him because not too long ago her mother still held her up like that and she had the habit of doing that.
I'm making love to a baby, Robin thinks later.
The same issue continues for the next year. He picks her up and sits her on the kitchen counter so she can watch over the food cooking. He has to kneel before heading out so she can wrap a scarf around his neck on cold days.
The practice continues. Nothing changes. He goes to bed with her and touches her the way he is supposed to, but he never kisses her. His kisses were for one person alone.
At the end of four seasons with her there is a black cloud in the distance. Robin's small wife is out in the back and she is caressing her sparrow's head. She sends it off with her message as Robin watches from inside the house. He is sitting with his mother, who has stopped talking since his father's death.
It startles him when his wife comes in and she tells him that there is a crowd in black coming from the town.
They take him to the gallows.
It's stopping, he realizes along the way and doesn't struggle. The rope around his neck feels like a strange embrace - death's grip, strong yet comforting. He has a moment to breathe in the chill of the approaching night and glances down at his wife and his mother who are kneeling in front of him, heads bowed in prayer.
He closes his eyes and thinks of his sister, and the words they shared.
Winged ones and animal tears. Wooden bowls. Weeping willows, hay bales, the roots of her hair and the skin of her back that he dreamt of at night. Turnip tongues and raven feathers. The sun's glare and a wormwood crown.
He loses the chair under his feet then and a thunderous cheer explodes. It's ending with him, he realizes. His wife - the last child bride.
He goes on a boat to the afterlife, where all the things he loved in life wait for him on Devil's Island. His father is not there, but his sister is. The skirt of her long white dress is wet from the waves that lap at her legs up to her knees.
She waited there, in that spot, for him. Her face is burnt.
She says, "Lion's tooth."
He smiles and takes her hand as they walk away from the shore towards the shadows of a forest. He says, "A flower in a prairie."
She replies, "A little dragon."
He says, "Silver bells…"
And they disappear in the shadows.
Final Notes: In the mood for writing some dark romance I started to develop a strange kind of tragic plot, which I very much ended up liking because it is unlike anything I've written before, I think. There is the element of a prohibited love that I adore thinking about because of its strangely alluring taboo and illicitness.
Have in mind that ultimately, all that was said in this fic is for the purpose of dark aesthetics. I did not intend to make it Gothic at all, but I can't help thinking that maybe it turned out that way, if only a bit?
Setting?: Think trials of Salem.
Winged Ones and Other Things: It's pretty evident, by just recalling the kind of things that Robin and his sister said to each other, in life and in death, that this was a self-indulgent story. Those are the things I like. The sound of the words alone. I wanted an excuse to write them and share them. Note how the things they say in life are somewhat less wild than the things they say in death? That was simply my attempt at representing that the afterlife offers them the freedom that they did not find in life, and also the wilderness of death.
Devil's Island: Robin goes to this place in the afterlife which isn't heaven - not that I believe in heaven or hell in their traditional depictions -, but he has all he wants there. Where did his father go? I don't care, and neither does Robin.
Music: Music is always a big part for me while writing and these songs just created the perfect atmosphere for me, and I think it shows. I thought would add to the immersion while reading.
Wren and The Wren: There is a particular distich in favor of the robin and wren: "The Robin and wren are God Almighty's cock and hen." Persons killing them will be met with dreadful misfortune.