A/N: hey, long time, no post. mostly cuz i switched over to AO3 and like the format there better. but i've gotten a wild hair and decided to start cross-posting the fics i've written since the switch. there are a lot of them, mostly TW. so brace yourselves.
"Wow."
That didn't even begin to cover it. The setting sun in the distance gilded the landscape, painting the enormous formations of stone in gold and red and purple as far as the eye could see. The canyon below went on for miles and miles, but it felt like even more. Like it went on forever. Like they could start walking now and never reach the end of it.
Laura stood at the very edge of the Grand Canyon and closed her eyes. Even the air felt different here. Purer somehow. She filled her lungs with it, slow enough to feel the expansion, the pull of muscles in her chest and rush of oxygen to her brain. She counted the beats of her heart, thinking of all the beats it had missed.
Over 85 million, if she had done her math correctly. On average, the human heart beat approximately 115,200 times per day, and Laura had been dead for over two years. That was how long it had taken for Derek, and later Cora, to find a way to bring her back. Two years, one incredibly intricate and risky spell, and millions of heart beats later, here she was. Alive and whole, blood pumping, lungs expanding. Experiencing a world that had continued on without her once already and would do so again when her next end came.
But for now, she lived. And she stood and watched and saw in a way she had never done before.
Cora stepped up alongside her, balancing right on the lip of the gorge despite the numerous official-looking signs advising them to keep a safe distance from the deadly drop. If they were being unsafe by human standards, at least no one else was around to see them do it.
"The view really is spectacular," she said. Her voice was hushed, but it carried anyway in the silence of the open space.
Laura turned to look at her, the little sister she had thought long lost. Before the attack, she had already spent six years believing Cora to be dead. When she had woken up, dragged back from the darkness of wherever the hell she had gone in death, to find a grown-up version of the baby sister she had lost staring down at her, Laura had been half convinced she'd finally made it to heaven.
But Derek had been there too, a little older and more worn than she remembered but there, and that was what had convinced her that she was alive again. She just couldn't accept a world where Derek had been lost. He was too much of a fighter, a survivor. She had always known he would outlive her one way or another. She hoped he did so again.
Now Cora's face was lined in gold just like the canyon, backlit by the setting sun until she looked like she was glowing from the inside out. She stood tall, so much taller than she had the night before the fire, eleven years old and still a scrawny little pipsqueak. She was almost as tall as Laura now, her head held high and bright eyes scanning the horizon.
"Yeah," Laura said, breathless with wonder, more enraptured by her sister than by any feat of nature, no matter how stunning. "It is."
No sight would ever be better than this.
