Notes from the Author:
Hi there. This is my first ever fanfic, so be nice, okay?
Anyways, about the story... I was thinking about the little people caught up in this terrible world. Cassie and Ferna are two of those people, and this is their story.
I always meant this to be a one-shot, but if you really, really what more, do say so, and I'll see what I can do. But if I ever do more, it will more than likely just be more stories told by different people.
I would like to thank my friend Dekaff for her part in this story; namely, lending me her V for Vendetta DVD and not careing when she got it back. There are reasons why I love that girl.
It's been two years. The world hasn't ended.
This is my story, told by me to the last. I wanted the world to know, I wanted someone to know… because otherwise, what do I have?
My name is Cassie Winters. I'm twenty-three years old.
We lived by the sea, when I was little. It was a tourist town; we lived off of other people. When I was young that seemed rather mean, to me, only my father told me that they didn't mind. They liked coming to our town and spending money so we could live. It was okay, and they chose to do it.
So that was all right.
I used to stay up late into the night, sitting by my window and listening, listening to the waves. My mother said that poets loved the sea, and I believed her; she said I was a poet, too, because I spoke in verse sometimes and I loved rhythm of any kind; the beating of a drum, the crashing of the waves, the sound of a voice…
I'm not a poet. I work at a shop. The other girls tease me and steal from the till; they say I do it, and people believe them. I'm just a strange woman who speaks in verse sometimes and loves rhythm of any kind, so why should they believe me?
They don't know.
My sister was afraid of the waves. She was born when I was nine, and I loved her right then. She had the deepest sea-green eyes and she never cried as a baby; she never made much sound at all. Her name was Haley.
When it started to go wrong, I was twelve and she was three. No one wanted to come to our town anymore. The sea was all sludgy and brown, and the sun didn't shine very often. Besides, there wasn't any money left to spend on seashells and postcards and little stuffed toys. We stayed longer than anyone else did; we didn't want to leave, we were afraid. My mother was afraid of the cities and the pollution; my father was afraid of the effect it would have on Haley and me. Haley was afraid because she had never lived anywhere else, and she was only three.
I was afraid to leave my home. I was afraid to lose the waves.
The day we left, I walked all round the little town, stopping at every door and shop and saying goodbye. Haley wanted to come with me, but she couldn't keep up. She was too little so I carried her all the way and she left flowers of every wall and window and doorstep.
We moved around a lot after that. I didn't understand at first, until I started to watch the news on the TV. After losing our home, my parents got… political. They started protesting and telling people that it wasn't fair, that we shouldn't have had to move, only it meant we had to keep moving.
It was around this time that we started calling Haley something else, because she wasn't really Haley anymore. We called her Ferna and she had the most beautiful red hair. I loved to brush her hair; it came down to her knees and she would sit on my lap and wriggle and I ran the comb through curl after curl.
Ferna hated moving. It was funny, in a way; one day she would protest a place, the next she defended it.
No one laughed.
She was six when she started at St. Mary's. I was fifteen, and too old for the primary school. I went to a different school and she begged me every morning not to leave her. I did anyway. I didn't have any choice.
The teachers called her Haley, and she was always in trouble. My parents were too busy, so I dealt with it. I would go into school and see her teachers, and say 'Yes, I understand', and 'Of course I'll tell our mother', and I didn't listen to a word they said. They didn't know her, anyway. They called her Haley but her name wasn't Haley.
Three years later, they came for our parents. I was at work, Ferna was at school. I got home that day to find a man sitting in our front room, and I didn't know him. And Ferna was there, and she ran to hug me, and she told me that he had come to get her at school, and the teachers had said to go with him and trust him because he worked for the government, and she wanted to know where mummy was. I couldn't tell her where mummy was. I didn't know where mummy was.
He told her to leave the room so he could talk to me. I told her to stay. She deserved to know. He said that our parents had been taken away for questioning, because they were suspected of treason, and under normal circumstances, we would be taken somewhere else too. But I was old enough to be an adult, now, so I could look after Haley, only she's not called Haley, she's called Ferna, and he was wrong. But I didn't tell him that.
She was nine. I was eighteen.
I know that these days they would have just taken us both. But they weren't quite in power back then, and they had to be kind to us; we had, after all, just found out our parents were traitors. They weren't traitors, but I never said. No one listened to me.
I left Ferna at St. Mary's. She still got in trouble, but she had friends there and I didn't want to move her. The first day I went to pick her up after school, one of her friends came up to me. I forget his name, now, though I knew it then. He was a kind boy, and I liked him. He told me that Ferna's mother was the one who come and got her from school and I told him I knew. He asked me where she was, and I didn't know what to say, wasn't sure how to explain to an eight year old boy that my parents had been stolen. Ferna knew what to say. She told him that Mummy and Daddy had gone away for a while, and we didn't know when they were coming back, but Cass is looking after me and isn't that nice?
She was lying. She knew they weren't coming back.
The first time I went to Ferna's parent's evening at school, I was nineteen. She was nine. I noticed how everybody gave me a wide berth, and spoke to me in short, simple words and sentences, as is I were a child or a bomb. I sat and talked to her teacher and I remembered the times when I wouldn't listen to them and they didn't care and they called her Haley and it wasn't her name. I wished those times would come back. I wished I were fifteen again.
I never went to parent's evening after that.
She was eleven at the time of the virus. In her last year of school. I remember when she came home coughing and wheezing and feeling sick, and I heard her tell me about her friends being taken away to hospital, one by one.
I heard mothers and fathers talk about cold white rooms where their children lay in beds surrounded by screens, and you couldn't touch them or hold their hand. You could only watch them die.
I wouldn't give them Ferna. So they took her.
I stood there, watching her, and I noticed two things. One was that even now, even here, no one even looked me in the eye. My sister was dying and still all they seemed to think about was the fact my parents had been taken away. They spoke to me only when they had to, and they told me they were doing everything they could to save Haley, only I didn't care about Haley, I cared about Ferna.
The other thing I noticed was this: her hair was still red and her eyes were still green. The other children there had faded into monochrome, and Ferna was still Ferna and she still had red hair and green eyes. I loved her for that.
She died on her twelfth birthday. I was twenty-one years of age.
I went back to our town, the other day. Its outside quarantine and I don't care. Her flowers were still there and they're dead now, but they're still there, dripping petals over every surface. Haley loved flowers. Ferna loved flowers too.
In all their lives, there was only one difference between them. Haley was frightened of the waves.
Ferna missed them.
It's been two years. The world hasn't ended. I wonder if it ever will.
My name is Cassie Winters. I'm twenty-three years old.
My life has been short and eventful. But not so eventful, I think, as that of my little sister. Her gravestone says her name was Haley Winters, only I scratched that out and I took a piece of chalk and I wrote a different name, her real name, and I gave her flowers with red petals and a poem about a little girl with red hair and green eyes who lived by the sea and never, never cried. And now I'll give her this.
It's not much; it's the only story I've ever written and the only one I'll ever write. I'll live on, only for the fact I died when she died. And I hope that you, whoever you are and whatever has brought you to my sister's grave, will read this and understand that she wasn't called Haley, she was called Ferna, and she had red hair and sea-green and she called me Cass and she never cried and she was my sister. And I loved her.
And I hope that you will do what I cannot, and bring her flowers all the time, and never, never cry for her because she wouldn't want that. And you can call her Ferna, and she can call you by whatever name you have, whatever name you prefer. And you can tell her from me that I'm sorry, and I miss her, and I will never meet anyone like her again, and she can tell you that she already knows, but thank you all the same.
I hope you don't live in the world we lived in, the world I still live in. I hope your world is better. I hope you read my poem and I hope you like it, and I hope you have someone you love. Only if you don't you can love me, and I'll love you, and that's all right, isn't it, because then we have each other.
My name is Cassie Winters. I'm not a poet, and I work at a shop. But thank you all the same.
Cassie.
'Red Hair and Reasons.
A little girl with bright red hair,
By sea as green as her deep eyes.
If one thing's odd about her,
It's that she never cries.
She hears the breakers break and crash,
She tells the sun and moon to shine.
And sings about Red Hair and Reasons,
Her own and private lullaby.'