Lilies to Tread, a tin man fanfic

oOo

Lilies to Tread

oOo

The time came swiftly when the Black Moon was no longer a viable excuse. It had to be done. It must be discussed.

To Glitch, it must be fought like no other war.

He was willing to commit. But he would rather not.

He was willing to sit beside the glacial pool, the non-figurative pools in which fish danced and green water plants swayed. He wanted nothing more than to sit, to sit, to sit. Void of shoes, socks, and leave his feet in the water. Leave the world at his back.

But there had to be just this one final war.

I knew it, and I saw it coming. Like an eclipse across his eyes.

oOo

The week began with the interruption of Glitch's solitude. We'd left him alone far too long, after the Black Moon, and he knew what we had done. We'd let him down. Too much freedom. Too much time alone to think, sequester, and sketch pictures of disquiet across his thoughts.

I sketched him by the pool during that last hour. Remembering when we met. Fit to grieve. And I withdrew, too, when the meetings began.

Obstinate about himself, he liked what he was. A zipperhead, let that be enough. They had the cure, so they said. For Glitch, rebrainment was not enough. No cure, he said, for liking what he was.

'It's a journey into the past I don't want to take,' he averred. We sat in private now, our friends around us, yet leaving us in a sphere of our own. 'I don't want to go back. And you know it's true, DG, you can never, ever go back.'

Azkadellia worded it best: 'When you travel a road, you only see it one direction. And when you reach the end and turn around, it's not the same road. It's not what you saw.'

You might return to your home, but the flagstones would not lead you to the door.

I told him I understood. I told him I was on his side. 'You're fine the way you are.'

'DG,' he sighed and cast around for my hand, 'don't ever change.'

'I won't if you won't.'

'Done,' he said.

Done, he said.

oOo

But it was not as easy as that.

He was called away. Long hours of parley with a host of royalty. Their golden habiliments, their aureate sneers, silent flutters of invisible, make-believe wings. I knew their faces, their attitudes, like I knew my mother then; but I knew nothing of names.

Names I pretended to know. When ignorance dogged me, I its willing bride, the names became inventions.

At suns-down, the conference would end. Day's end, and every last glimmer of light would find me waiting just outside. Glitch always came to me, bedraggled, torn, weary, hopeless. I'd ask if a conclusion had been reached. Or he'd simply shake his head and I'd know.

One more day of defeat.

oOo

But I was the one who could make him forget the struggles of day by laughter at night. The invention of names came like rhyming slang, and he enjoyed the wit of it, the game. And it was the first game between us.

'The tall man with the beard, he is Blustery.'

'Blustery?'

'He smells mustardy. He became Blustery.'

'From mustardy?'

It was absurd, but the absurd was adoration, the key to his affection. The more absurd, the bigger the key. The bigger the locked prize of his heart, his mind, his love.

'And Criminal.'

'Criminal?'

'From seminal. He is always the first one there. The genesis. The cornerstone. The seminal royal advisor. And it's criminal of him to be up so early, before the roosters crow.'

Seminal. Criminal.

Words that would injure and endure.

I found them later when I found them in my heart.

oOo

The end of the seventh day of parley, the meeting ended before suns-down. He crept into the garden and found me treading lilies. That is what he said.

'Treading lilies, princess?'

But I looked at him, pinched in face against the glare of the orange light. The sky was sorbet and the trees swaying black twigs crowned in pompous nosegays. I caught the scent of aqua lilies, felt the spring enter my lungs, for his face was as youth eternally sprung.

This business of treading lilies, it was overture to the fixture. Delight, delight, I read it on him as words, as humility, and knew the worst was done.

He rolled to sit with me, the pond and the lilies, and kept his silence for a while before I tugged his arm.

'I got what I wanted,' he said. 'Old Blustery gave in. Your mother was the first to cave, oh, hours and hours ago. I will stay as me. My wish. Wishes so big don't normally come true, but this one did. And I wanted to thank you.'

'I didn't do anything.'

'You've always waited for me. Every meeting would end, and you would be waiting for me, to know what was said. You didn't know their names, either, but you invented your own. Such ingenious devotion! That's why I must thank you. For being you. For not changing. This could've changed you.'

He took the sketches I had completed, coloured pencil and crayon. Childish, puerile, disconnected.

'Beautiful,' he said.

I took the sketches back. I looked at them. The aqua lilies, misrepresented. 'They're not beautiful.'

'The lilies suit you.'

A pat at my knee as he rose to go.

'Lilies are meant for a princess to tread.'

'Glitch?'

'Yes?'

'What happens now?'

'Now?' He swivelled, smiling, and suddenly my drawings became connected. I understood the beauty he'd seen had not been in the shape or colour, or in the conclusion of my eye at all. But in the conclusion of his eye. Now the eclipse had gone.

'Now I start over again. It's just one giant glitch, princess, from here on out. You are you. I am me. Ambrose is done. Forever and ever, by the grace of the willing suns.'

oOo

The next week, I thought he would go. The others had gone, and I wept my farewells, never knowing when I would see them again. Dear Raw, Mr. Cain, Jeb. All the men in my life, important souls, reliable, and who I knew. But they had gone.

In their absence, Mother decided to leave the Dark Tower and return to the palace in the city. The Old Witch had not ruined the palaces; Azkadellia had had the strength to win sparse battles. And Mother was rarely so anxious. Mother wanted to go. And Dad wanted to go. And Az wanted to…

I dreaded the loneliness. The newness.

And when he heard, Glitch chose to go. 'To the wild land, to peregrinate, to take my house with me.'

I wish to go with you.

The last friendly face gone. Even the suns and the sky and the singing birds became strangers. The world lay colourless in his wake.

oOo

I hated time. She never sat still.

But we arrived, and I had an old room, shoved in a corner like a cobweb. My old room, they said, Mother and Dad, escorting me in, giving the tour, recounting memories dead. The balcony doors squeaked, brass hinges whining against years of neglect, and Dad let the fresh air in, doing what the servants sent ahead of us missed.

'An empire elm.'

The tree crawled like a vine outside the balcony. I caressed a leaf between thumb and fingers. Soft, shiny, ancient emerald green.

'An empire elm,' I repeated, a glitch of my own. 'I've never seen one before.'

'You wouldn't, DG,' Dad said, 'this is the only one left.'

I sighed, eyes shut fast, and felt it pierce and wound me, such blazoning words.

Seminal and criminal. They were on their way.

The only one left. He'd gone. And I hated the noise in my head. It tried to replace the laughter with a serenity. It failed, and I failed. I found sadness and timidity.

The moon rose, lonely. I laid on my bed, lonely, and cried for both of us.

And then I cried for him.

oOo

Cheeriness bloomed, and even the sky was a curtain of spring about to raise on summer. Azkadellia was my sister, and I had the choice of getting to know my sister, getting to know a friend, or finding nothing to hold on to but grief, but a thousand unsung what-ifs.

The former was chosen. She was my sister.

I followed her into the courtyard garden. Central City Palace, an alabaster palace, marble or granite or quartz, I didn't think to ask. Ivy here, vinca there. Overgrown, determined hazards. Mother had yet to hire gardeners. 'Try it yourselves,' she said, her chuckle warm, soft, caramel.

Azkadellia surveyed this garden as her domestic domain. 'Have you ever done anything like this before?'

'I used to plant cosmos and cleome in the yard back on the Otherside.'

'With soil and shovels and seeds?'

'And other such things. And there were weeds.'

'But never like this?' She touched a forefinger to the fountain's statue. And from her touch the grime of years melted, and the three dancing water-sprites once again allowed their element to flow into the pool below. And from their water the pool rippled and morphed. The empty pool was filled.

I sat at the stony rim. It took but a scarce second for my will to be a wish, my wish to be real.

Azkadellia gasped as she saw what I had done.

'Mother,' she said later, 'DG made the lilies of the fountain grow.'

The lilies were not needed to remind me of Glitch. But all princesses must have lilies upon which to tread.

oOo

Mother was relieved when I stopped asking questions about Glitch. I stopped asking when no answers came. No answers bested my imagination. My imagination never bested my dreams.

And I settled into my new home. I spent time with my sister. We were at ease in each other's company. We sketched. She learned to watercolour. I learned to keep a journal. She learned to laugh. And I learned how to cry at night without startling the clouds from the moon.

Our parents were busy, reacquainting themselves with their positions of authority, reacquainting themselves with each other.

'They're horribly in love,' I observed. Summer was extending fast, and Mother and Dad waded through the roses, or the roses moved among them. 'I don't suppose you've been in love, have you, Az?'

'No,' but it sounded bitter and sweet, the taste of a lie. 'I wouldn't know how.'

'I don't think there's a guidebook.'

'I don't suppose you've ever been in love, have you, Deege?'

'In love? I don't think so.'

'In love, there are no rules.'

'Yes, that's what the guidebook told me.'

A page interrupted, a silver platter decorated with a pale envelope. He came to me, stooped, and I snatched up the letter. Without waiting for a private moment, there were none such things anymore, I broke the seal and ate the words.

My colour drained, and yet I was warm to the extreme. I turned the pages, hoping for more, hoping for more, and then it stopped at the end of the third page. Just a signature for an end. No closing statement. No hugs. No kisses. Just Glitch.

'Who's it from?'

I answered her. The letter unsettled my hand, created a bump in the paper, and I gave it up as lost.

Nothing else could be done.

'Art imitates life,' I said, and left her for the shadowy indoors.

Who needs spring? Who needs kisses in a rose garden?

Drab and grey and dead.

The heart is eternal winter.

oOo

He wrote nothing about returning. He wrote about his travels. 'I was here, here, and maybe here but I don't really remember.' He wrote of the things he saw. He wrote of things he wished he had all the money in the world to buy for me.

And one day he did buy something for me.

It came in a brown papered box. So light in my hands I knew its fragility before I ever held it.

It came in the morning, at the rising of the house, beyond the rising of the suns. The page brought it to my rooms, and I was alone with it. This little box and I. A scribble of my name on the front, the wax and seal of the House of Gale, to inform the pages that the package was from a trustworthy sender.

I broke the seal as I had done the letter. And out of the paper I found the gift.

'What's that?' Azkadellia arrived in my room a few days later. Any change was new to her, so rarely did she visit. She found the gift and inspected. 'It's beautiful.'

'It's an aqua lily.'

'That I know, dearest sister. I know my aqua-flora. But where'd it come from?'

'A shop.'

'You are exasperating. What shop?'

'Don't know. I'm thinking of going round the city this afternoon to sketch architecture. Would you like to come?'

'Only if you tell me the story behind this flower.'

'It's southern glass.'

Azkadellia snorted, half a laugh. 'Southern glass! A fortune for a small flower!'

'Glitch sent it.'

I paid no price for honesty. Oh no, not just yet.

oOo

The sketchbooks were laden with impressions of Central City. We'd captured it all, as fast as we could, our pens flying so fast that our minds were unable to keep up. Azkadellia had become an accomplished artist. I had become an accomplished gardener, proficient in magic, air kisses on her cheeks when we said goodnight, and hugs of love to Mother and Dad. She was good company, my sister, the best. But after a day of art, of talk, of gossip, of tea and crumpets in little shops on Bondfaire Street, we could scarcely carry supplies through the door. Footman and pages aided. Azkadellia sighed and slipped into the first chair.

'That's what servants are for,' she said. Her face was flushed. A hot day. Evening promised cool breezes, out of the north, a song among the grass.

I left her to find my own way through the darkened palace corridors. Evening was my time, the time my heart soared with hope, with gratefulness. I'd made it through another day, somehow, and I was still a possessor of magic, a sister, a daughter, a princess. I loved to watch the moon rise and imagine if such a cold goddess could send me just one more test.

In the kitchens, I found granola and nuts laid out, the servants knowing our adoration for a past-midnight snack. In a little bowl, I stole treats to my room. The moon was rising, and I wanted to see her play on the petals of the aqua lilies. From the balcony, I looked down to the gardens, the best view of land, sky, beyond. The best view of all.

The chaste moon readied herself for the lilies. An obstruction ruined the show. A shadow moved before the fountain. Such a tremble of fear, at first, afraid of a stranger. But instinct grabbed hold of me, my eye aligned with memory and silhouette, and I knew, I knew.

It was the longest run of my life.

oOo

I crept from the hallway, through a glass door that trembled beneath my trembling hand, and became a silhouette like the tall plants, like Glitch beside the plashing fountain. He seemed affixed to it, akin to it, stone and statuary himself. He swivelled at the hissing of my feet against grit and grime.

'DG?'

'Glitch, what are you doing here? It's so late, and I thought—I didn't know you were coming back.'

'I didn't mean to.'

He found my hands in the silvery radiance. He found my arms, my shoulders, and I found myself wrapped against him. I remembered the softness of his hold, a softness that glowed amethyst.

Then he let go, but he did not wholly let go, an arm at my waist.

'Lilies,' he said to the fountain base, 'somehow I knew you'd find lilies. Wherever you go, you find them.'

'I got your lily.'

'Did you? Not in pieces, I trust?'

'In one whole piece. It's beautiful. I'm envious of its beauty sometimes.'

'Envious of a flower. DG, don't do that. They live a short time. Their beauty is not forever.'

As he finished, he demonstrated the shortness of their life by plucking a bud. He fastened it behind my ear. The perfume was inhaled, and the exhale as gentle breath upon my skin. I lifted my hand, the need to touch him exceeding sense.

DG, DG.

DG, don't do that.

'I think we should talk about this.'

But he didn't seem to mind the silence, my hand, my touch, or the vastness of the night above our heads. Moon and stars and lilies, and he was close, close. And that was all I knew.

'But you came back,' I said. 'Why did you come back?'

'Because I wanted to know.'

'Know what?'

'What a lily would smell like if it were in your hair. Is that a good enough reason?'

'It's the only reason.'

'Oh I wouldn't say that.'

'What's the other reason?'

He shivered to speak. He was too far away from me to be endured. I gave in. I destroyed the space. He held back, that final second, and the pressure of him I felt against me. My arms, my legs, the contact of our faces, nose to cheek, cheek to nose, a lock of his hair.

'You, you, you,' he breathed. 'Just for one night, you.'

oOo

I woke in the morning to find the lily in a glass of water. She existed as a reminder on my bedside cabinet.

Glitch was looking over my sketches, sitting in the chair. It was either incredibly early or incredibly late.

'Glitch?'

'Princess?' He left the book and fell, elbows first, upon the bed. It was nuzzles up my arm, to my neck, and feisty kisses, and a tumble or two.

I grabbed for the clock. Obligations, damn them, wet blankets on my day of triumph. I wanted warmth and cosiness, a thousand hours alone with Glitch.

'It's only nine,' he said. 'I wouldn't have let you sleep so late. They've missed you at breakfast.'

'Do they know you're here?'

'I'd say that's a definite "I have no idea". I haven't spoken to anyone. I just know you were missed at breakfast. They might send someone to—'

But he got no further. A rap on the door. A grunt from him with my sigh of protest. He read in my face that I wanted no announcement of this, no declaration of what we had done and would do again. He read it on my face, but he understood, and he agreed. While I scrambled for a dressing gown, throwing it on somehow, he vanished. A spot so clever not even I found him.

Behind the door was a maid. I thanked her, I blessed her, for being no relative. She brought me breakfast, sent by Mother, and asked if there was a message for the queen. I relayed it, stuttering, aching, nostrils filled with the scent of tea and fruit juice, longing for the better scent of him.

Go, go, I begged her to go. Go!

The door closed. She'd gone at last.

I turned around, he was still there. I don't know where he hid, but he was still there. The brush of his fingers down my body tickled as I held him close.

'Breakfast?' I asked.

He laughed, shaking his head. 'Not on your life. I want for nothing.'

'I understand.'

'But it was only supposed to be for a night, DG.'

'I can't believe it.' I slipped away to the edge of the bed. Out of habit, I looked at the glass lily. I looked back at Glitch. 'I can't believe I agreed to such a ridiculous term. Please stay.'

'And tell them what?'

'We don't have to tell them anything. They don't have to know.'

'You would keep a secret that enormous from your family?'

'I would.' The front of his shirt was wrenched, till he fell beside me, till I kissed him fiercely, as I had last night. 'I would fight for you.'

I'd paint you into the lies of my life, if you'd just stay with me forever.

'Lying is always a fight.' He was a sage, not a puritan, for puritans don't kiss like sages do. Sages kiss with words, with wisdom, with love, life, power, the intangible excess of happiness.

'Then lying is what I'll do. Just stay. Please don't go away again. Please stay, kiss me at night, sneak around the corner in the morning and kiss me then. Tell me you love me in little hidden notes I might never find in places you think I might never look. Fight with me. Fight my little wars with me. It's a small price to pay.'

A small price to pay.

'You won't tell your family?' He doubted and suffocated under this law.

'Someday I might. Just not right now. They're still new to me. I'm still new to them. They wouldn't understand.'

'You don't give them enough credit, DG.'

But he wrapped his arms around me, where I wanted to be. I heard the air moving between us, and felt his heart beat, and felt my own. The eternal night of our cores that would never see the light of day, never see the suns. It would have to be that way. His lips brushed my forehead, and I wished for all my mornings to be like this.

'I'll tell them someday,' I repeated. 'But this is new.'

'But it's criminal.'

'But it's our choice.'

But it's seminal. It's criminal.

I knew why. I knew it then.

'Stay, Glitch.'

'How long?'

'Until you don't love me anymore.'

'You seem determined to think a day will come when I will stop.'

He did something, touched me somewhere, at the base of my neck with a trailing fingertip, and I was in longing.

'Stay.' With all my force pinning him down, I demanded it. An answer, any answer, even never or no or a riddle. I'd take it.

'My dear,' he played with a coil of my hair, 'I arrived last night with no intention of ever leaving you again. Now throw your arms around me and kiss me twice for luck.'

I did this, and only after the second kiss did I ask him what the luck was for.

'For nothing but that this is really morning and that I am not merely dreaming.' He looked at me with humour, gladness, the essentials of his qualities that I adored. 'If I am, don't ever, ever wake me up. I dream of you treading on lilies.'

With him close, I sighed, content, lies or no. In the future, I would be the mistress of lies, but a warrior of them too. A warrior who fights for moments like this.

oOo