A/N: Written because 15 months and 7 days ago, rjdaae sent me a prompt about Christine and her father being cast off a ship in dead waters and fetching up on an island too small to be inhabited but which has one resident: Erik. Erik is drawn out by the sound of her father's violin and they come to an arrangement by which he will help them to survive in exchange for playing it. They find happiness on the island, while on the far side of the sea Raoul stops receiving letters from Christine and goes in search of her.
I envisioned a swashbuckling adventure of romance and swordfights and taking over a ship and getting rescued...but when I sat down to write it, it turned into this. Decidedly not a swashbuckling adventure, but still with romance! And plenty of island life. Some key elements of the plot remain.
Reader beware, this is a very strong T rating. So T that at times I fear it teeters at M, but I've done my best to rein that in. It is a somewhat darker fic than expected. Here are the warning tags I've given it on AO3, and I suggest you heed them: Blood, bones, animal death, rituals, sexual references, inventing religious beliefs. I particularly suggest you heed those first three, but this fic is, reasonably, un-angsty.
So. There are three chapters and an epilogue after this. Updates will come on Tuesdays. I don't expect everyone to like it, but at least try it, and if you do enjoy it please please do review!
She is not certain when it was that she lost track of the days. Two months ago? Three? Before or after her father died? (And those days of illness at its worst blur into one in her memory. He was frail to begin with, before they started their journey, before they were cast away, but life on the island, the damp heat of summer, only made his chest worse. She knew he was going to die before it ever happened – could feel it in her bones and tried to deny it.) All she knows is they've passed through the cool of spring and humidity of summer, the grass has dried to white and the nights bring dampness that spurs an undergrowth of green.
It is autumn, or must be. The year turned three-quarters round, and no true way of knowing.
Erik says the winter brings storms that lash the trees with wind and rain and rattle the shelter he's built, and allowed her into. She's always liked storms. The land is so peaceful when they've passed.
The shack might fall apart around them in the wind, bury their bones together not much more than a stone's throw from where her father lies. And who would ever find them? The goats in their scavenging. A panther attracted by the smell. The birds would pick their bones clean, ants take up residence in the spaces between. And eventually, someday, someone will find them. Some fellow castaway, who will excavate what's left of them and assume they are lovers left from an ancient race, know not their names or faces (or that Erik once wore a mask, long gone, his face become the same as hers) and might invent a tale of them for their own amusement. A queer sort of immortality.
(She gave up her last belief in the immortal afterlife when her father rattled his last breath.)
Sometimes, she thinks, she has become just as hard as Erik.
But he no longer flinches from her touch.
And the travesty of his face is not so very terrible, knowing they are the only two.
It was after her father died, that he first accepted her touch. Not the first night, nor the second, but one night she flung her hand out in the darkness and his hand was there, his long callused fingers squeezing hers back. And she has wondered, ever since, whether it was merely a happening, a coincidence. Or did he choose to lie so close to her that night, decide that, perhaps, he should. Did he fear she might die too, and leave him alone again?
She has not asked. She has not the words to ask. But every night they lie close by each other, touching only at the hands, and his heat seeps to her between the goatskins that wrap them, and perhaps she will trace her fingers lightly, lightly, up his wrist, and he will shiver and try to pull away but the firelight flickering over her shoulder makes his eyes glow through the darkness and she will fix him with her gaze and he will still, submit to her fingers as they stroke the marks of what can only be shackles around his wrist. And his eyes will close, and he will sigh, and she will return her fingers to his and squeeze his hand before she, too, allows herself to sleep.
They do not speak at night.
They speak little by day. His voice is hoarse with how long he has been on this island, but most of the creaking roughness has eased since she and her father landed here, and she quite likes the gravel his voice has retained in its depths. It flows down through her ears, tingles in her fingers, catches beneath her navel. If there are men sirens perhaps this is how they sound. This aging wisdom under their words, their hair peppered grey flowing down their backs and hands rougher than their voices but gentle too, so gentle. His voice makes her long to press herself close to him, to feel the full length of his body, to pass her hands over his back, his chest, to feels for scars and ease the tremor that sometimes catches his hand and makes his eyes grow distant. She has never touched a man before, not even in the chastest of ways, though there have been kisses (and she must not think of those, must not remember the face that received them, that bestowed them, so different from the one that lives here with her. And so she does not remember those kisses or that face. They are all part of a different world, a world long past.)
They do not speak of their pasts, not in detail. She knows there were travels, to far distant lands, a war, a captaincy of a ship. And she has told him of leaving her homeland, of ports and ships, and a stretch of water still as glass when the wind did not blow for days. But it's a silent agreement that what happened to bring them both here is not for putting into words.
They speak, instead, of the goats. Of the sky, and the birds. Of the panther, the snakes, the shy deer so difficult to hunt. Of making arrows, and pitfalls, and sharpening fine edges onto stone. They talk of fruit. And they talk of meat, and fire-building, and blood. The consistency of blood, the binding of blood, the colour of blood, different types of blood and what they are good for, and the island gods are ever present in his words.
She wears ragged goatskins when she bleeds. And when the cramps come he heat smooth flat stones in the fire, his knuckles knead the base of her back, ease the pain away with the stones against her stomach. And she thinks, maybe, this is how people lived once. Before there were cities, before there were ships.
In goatskins, in shacks. And paint pictures on rocks with blood.
She does not know why he decided to reveal his face. There was simply one morning, long after her father died, when his mask came away, and she saw him for how he is. The skin pale as bleached bone under the sun. The hollows of his cheeks. The gaping hole where his nose ought to have been. His lips are thin, but they cover his teeth. His eyes, and she already knew his eyes, but his eyes glowed brighter than ever from deep in a face like a skull.
It was a shock, at first, but when he made to put the mask back on, she stilled his hand.
His face was soft beneath her touch.
It was her father's last request, for Erik to play his violin. And as she held her father's hand, so numb it was as if she had been hollowed out inside, watching his closed eyes, the shallow rise and fall of his chest that weakened as his breaths grew more distant, longer spaces in between, and blood trickled from his lips no matter how much she dabbed it away, as she sat with him, and tended to him, the music flowed over them both, the fire their only light beneath the stars.
And when, at last, his hand grew cold in hers, and the blood stopped coming, she realised she could not remember the last time his breath rattled in his throat. He simply lay there, still and silent beneath her touch, and the music stopped.
It was Erik who wrapped him in goatskins. And it was Erik whose fingers trembled as they stroked over her cheek, and came away damp with tears.
She has not cried since.
And the violin has not lain silent a night.
Sometimes they sing. They sing, and his singing voice is higher, purer than his speaking one, and it twines with hers to ring over the island, as if they are ancient gods set down here. And sometimes she wonders if that is how he came to be, if he is one of the island gods of which he speaks, if he is not truly a man but a fallen angel. It would explain his voice, its strange hypnotic power, explain his face, and she asked him, one night as they lay beside each other not touching, if that is who he is, if he is the island given form. And he got a far away look in his eyes, his lips twisting, and whispered, "not quite, my dear."
He cuts her hair, one day in late summer, with a sharpened edge of flint. And after, they braid the golden strands into ringlets and set them aside. She cuts his in turn, and they bind the strands together, his and hers entwined.
"When winter comes," and his voice is low, "we will dip them in blood and hang them. To appease the gods."
The island gods. He talks of them often, the way they give and take, how they bring life and change the seasons and send the worst of storms when they are dissatisfied. The gods are sacred and on a cool summer's evening they sacrifice a kid goat and paint the blood onto their arms.
When, at last, the last of the dried scarlet flakes off, he nods, pleased.
"They are appeased."
They sit and braid necklaces by the fire. Snake teeth onto leather, wear one each and hang the rest around the shelter with the ringlets of blood-set hair. It is as horrifying as the stories of a shaman's hut, but there is something of a shaman in Erik, and how he reads the animals and the signs and calls forth fire on the coldest nights, his hands never hesitating.
And she looks at their offerings hanging from the ceiling, and his lips twist into something that approximates a smile but is not a smile, not really, more a painful grimace that someday become a true smile.
"For the spirits."
He keeps three nanny goats, and milks them every morning before the sun is up. The milk is rich and creamy, the smell of the goats warm, and it fills her up to drink it.
With water she crushes violets and little bluebells and makes a new pigment to paint alongside the blood. She runs it over her arms, her face, her bare legs, staining her skin red and blue and green with grass stains like a woman in a travelling fair and she might parade herself for spectators while Erik played and hid his face, and they would walk away hand-in-hand, coins jingling in their pockets.
But there is no one to see on the island, only Erik, and he sees her efforts and nods approvingly.
The sun filtered through gaps in the hides, cast the inside of the shelter a golden glow, and she painted with her colours on the inside of the warm leather, Erik stood behind her with his violin, so close she could feel his breath on the back of her neck, as she daubed scenes of what she did not know but which together might tell a story.
He taught her to survive. Taught her how she might live here, how she can live with him. Taught her about fires and goats and weather and what to eat and how to make clothes.
And when the winter storms come, lashing the island with wind and rain and cold bone-deep, they break their own vow of distance and press themselves as close as they can.
She teaches him, that night, of kissing. The wind howls outside. The fire flickers and dies. And she presses her lips to his on impulse. He shrinks back and she follows him, parts those thin hesitant lips with her tongue. And when, at last, his tongue brushes hers in response, she holds him tighter, and they vow, silently, in the darkness, to never let each other go.
They both know that they are never getting off the island.