This was originally intended as a roughly-equivalent counterpart to my existing Poetic Bee fic, for the sake of fairness, but it kind of took on a mind of its own about, ehh, five pages in. Title inspired by the song of the same name by Daughter... and the fact that Daughter was involved in this fic's creation at all should tell you everything you need to know about the mood to come.
Enjoy?
All day long, there had been something in the air, riding on the flutter of leaves in springtime trees. Most people, if you'd asked, would have said it was birdsong, or wind in a hollow, but Beatrice knew every nook of these woods and was intimately acquainted with the things that birds said to one another. This was neither of those. The sound was quiet, but familiar, light and lilting, sometimes indistinguishable from the hush of breeze over a cornfield. She stood by the mill door and raised her head to the sky, perking her senses toward the thrill that trembled in the air and faded away again per breath. It was halfway a song, halfway a message, and meant for anyone who knew how to listen:
He'd come home again.
She waited until the sun went down before leaving to meet him. She tucked her younger sisters into bed, and sat quiet by the window as the last light faded from the sky. Her mother said nothing as they passed one another on the stairs, on her way to the door; they both understood the situation better than that. 'Beatrice is a busy girl,' her parents were known to say, as she went about the matters in her life that didn't concern them. 'Do what you must. Just don't get into trouble, dear.'
'I won't,' she always answered. She'd done a pretty good job of keeping the promise so far, but that could change at any time. There was, after all, something in the air tonight.
She didn't bring a cloak with her, and she didn't bring her dog, though he whined when she closed the door between them. He was a loyal hound, but tonight, there was nothing she needed protecting from. The eternally waxing moon hung heavy and high in the sky, like a bowl that had overturned to spill all the stars from its mouth. The night air was warm like breath, sweet like clover, and the song was playing still. Beatrice followed it across the bridge, up the river, and into the woods.
For many years – longer than she could really remember – the forest had been a place where one did not wander. Her brothers were prone to skirt about the edges in their play, even dip in and out on occasion for huckleberries or truffles or just in response to a dare, but the depths of the wilderness were not something to be trifled with, and only ever so much as approached by way of the roads that twisted through them. There had been a Beast in woods in those days, terrible and black, but he was long gone. What they now had instead, few really knew. But what Beatrice did know was that the forest was no longer the heart of terror that it had once been, not for her. The trees seemed to bow at her presence as she passed between them, and vines crept from her path to clear the way. The song was growing stronger.
The moon broke bright through the branches above as she finally stepped out into a small woodland glade, and there he was. Wirt sat across from her in the grass, his back to a gnarled Edelwood tree which sat squat and quiet in the night, its roots cured around his place on the ground in an almost protective gesture. His head was bowed over the voice flute in his hands, releasing tremulous notes into the air between them. The key was minor, and the resonance was strong. His fingers lifted a final time, and he let the last note fade with his breath. He didn't look up when he pulled his lips from the mouthpiece. "You're getting better at that," Beatrice said after a moment.
"Thanks," he said, and raised his eyes to look at her finally, his face tired but pleased. "It's no bassoon, but, you know…" Beatrice smiled. "It's been a little while since I stopped by," he said. "Sorry for the wait."
That was an understatement – the last time they'd met here, the trees had been bare and the earth scored with ice, the year different altogether. "It's okay," she said, because it was easier than trying to articulate how she actually felt. "You've got other stuff going on." That was the kindest way to say it. His wanderings had always brought him far and wide, but back to her less and less frequently lately. He could never linger in one place for long; the forest had a tendency to spring up wherever he spent too much time, in the middle of fields waiting to be plowed, or even inside homes. Not that his duties allowed him much time to rest. She tilted her head and realized that something was missing from the scene before her. "Hey, where's the…?"
He gestured around the tree. Beatrice stepped to the side and glimpsed a red lantern tucked into a cranny between the roots, facing inward so that its light was captured and did not shine out. "I know it creeps you out," Wirt said, running a hand through his hair. "I didn't want you to have to deal with that tonight." The gesture was sweet, and did not go unappreciated, though she was tempted to say that it wasn't that she found its presence creepy so much as perilously intimate. It was hard to express why. As warm and welcome as the golden light might be in the deep of night, she did not like to look directly into the lantern's mouth, or let it look at her. It made her nervous.
Staring into someone's soul will do that.
Without saying anything, she approached him through the meadowgrass, and it seemed to pull away from her skirt hems as she walked. She put her back to the Edelwood tree and slid down next to him, leaving not an inch between their bodies so that she could reach to grab the edge of his cloak and wrap it around her shoulders as well. It was an old familiar gesture between them, and he did nothing to stop her. They sat together in the grass, bundled up like Indians, and he raised the voice flute to play again. It made hair prickle on the back of her neck, and the trees all around seemed to sigh.
The moon rose higher in the sky as he played, and at his side, Beatrice sat quiet. This close, she could feel all the miniscule movements in his arm as he fingered the instrument. It had been a long time since she'd paid so much attention to the little actions of a body, the twitches and pulls – not since her time as a bird, when the tiniest human gesture had the capacity to crush her, or snap her neck, or send her tumbling to the ground in a heap. She still viscerally recalled the fear that came with being small in a world that seemed to want to break her wings and leave her to die, and retained some nervous habits even to this day, in jumping at small sounds or wanting to flee when her brothers pounced on her in play. Right now, though, she felt strangely comforted by the small flutters of his person, and without thinking, placed her cheek on his shoulder to feel his bones under her jaw. He continued to play. She closed her eyes.
The lilting song finally faded out again, and once more Wirt laid the recorder in his lap. When she tried to move her hand from the ground, she encountered resistance from the small vines that had snaked up around her wrist while she sat still, but shook them off impatiently and without comment. Strange interactions with plant life were part and parcel to being around him these days. She reached up to pull the red cone hat from his head, and brushed down his hat hair as she did.
"Do you know what day it is?" he asked, turning to look at her as she laid the hat down at her side.
"No," she said, a little surprised he would ask. Exact dates were not something most people had a use for around here. "It's… springtime."
"I've been marking every sunset," Wirt said, and from somewhere inside his cloak produced a small leather-bound journal, wrapped in twine. He undid the knot carefully, and opened to page after page covered in hash marks that looked like they'd been scrawled out using charcoal from a fire. "I count them out every season or two. Just to get some sense of the time. I don't know why. I always regret it when I'm done." She looked over at him, at the bags under his eyes, heavy and dark. "I don't know if – if things exactly line up, in that way, between Here and There. And if they do, I'm still not always sure I get it right, the leap years and all that. But I do the best I can. And a couple of days ago I did a count and I realized that this was going to be -" He stopped and swallowed, and ran his fingers across the page, almost longingly. "It's the ninth of May," he said finally. The Edelwood branches creaked overhead. "It's… it's his birthday, Beatrice."
So that was why he'd chosen to come back tonight. Beatrice brought her knees to her chin and wrapped one arm around them, and the other around Wirt's back beneath the cloak. She didn't speak at first, waiting to see if he had more to say, but when that didn't happen finally asked, "So how long has it been?"
Wirt raised his left arm, where a delicate brown vine grew down from inside his sleeve and rested its leaf neatly in his palm. He tucked it back inside. "Nine and a half years," he said. The number rang hollow; Beatrice didn't want to believe it could be true. There hadn't been enough time spent together between them to justify nine whole years yet. "He's fourteen now, Beatrice. He's almost as old as I am."
As you were, Beatrice thought, but she didn't say so, because she wasn't sure it would help, or if it was even true. She herself had been much the same, in age and demeanor, for years beyond counting now, but Wirt had changed, in aspects easy to notice but hard to qualify. Had he gotten older? It was difficult to say when time in the Unknown was such a funny thing. She thought so, sometimes, but others she wondered if he wasn't just getting longer instead, stretching out like a shadow before the sun goes down. He'd become calmer over the years as well, quieter, less prone to neurosis, but she wasn't sure if that bespoke of maturity, or of a slow fade from the things that had once made him who he was. "Do you think he remembers me?" he asked.
Beatrice was so caught up in her own thoughts that she didn't realize at first what he'd said. "What?" she asked, sitting up and releasing him from her grip.
"Greg," Wirt said again, his eyes on the moon above. "Do you think he remembers me anymore?"
The question put a crack in her heart. "Of course," she said, placing a hand on the back of his neck, trying to soothe, like her mother did when her children were unwell. "Of course he does, Wirt. He'd never forget."
His mouth worked wordlessly for a moment as he bundled the journal back inside his cloak. "…I don't know," he said finally, turning to look at her full on. He twisted where he sat, and the cloak pulled from her shoulders partway. "When it boils down to it, I mean, Greg and I only knew each other for five years, Beatrice. Can you believe that? Five years, from the day he was born until… until…" Neither of them said it out loud. "…And by the end, I – I couldn't have told you anymore what life was like without him in it. I really can't remember. Even the stuff from before he was born, you know? Now it's all colored by the feeling of how long I had left at that point before he showed up." He placed an elbow on the raised Edelwood root behind him. Beatrice thought it had been flush with the ground when she first arrived. "It took me five years to forget how to be alone. But it's been almost twice as long as that by now."
"Wirt…" she started to say, but he finished his question nonetheless:
"How long would it take for the opposite to happen?" She closed her eyes. "How long does it take for you to forget what your life was like with someone, after they're gone?"
She said hotly, "You haven't forgotten him. Just… don't think about things like that." She knew it was a poor reassurance, and indeed, Wirt didn't seem reassured. He started to look up to the sky, but she placed a hand on his cheek and directed his gaze back toward her. She ran her fingers up the side of his head and was about to speak, but lost the thought as her hand encountered something hard buried within his hair. He must have seen her look of confusion, and brought his own hand to meet hers. A strange look crossed his face when he did.
"Oh," he said, sounding bitter. "That." Beatrice parted his hair from the area and squinted in the dark. Between the locks lay something small and sharp and black, growing from just above his ear, not unlike an antler. Or a branch. She pulled back. "It doesn't hurt," he said, pre-empting her question and rubbing self-consciously at the area. "When it gets long enough I'll be able to snap it off. I always do."
She wasn't sure what to say. "…I didn't know this had started happening."
"I never told you," was his only response to that, and he put his chin in his arms, crossed atop his knees. He looked far older now, in the moonlit glade, than he had any right to. "Just one more thing I can't control anymore." A little tickle at her ankle told Beatrice that the vines had begun to creep up her legs, but it was not the time to worry about that.
"You know, I hope he forgot." She took up a big fistful of her skirt when she heard him say it, but didn't respond at first. "I – I hope he doesn't remember me at all."
She swallowed, hard. "Why would you say that," she said, rather than asked, worried that if she raised her voice at all it might crumble under the weight.
"It's better for him," Wirt said, but his words didn't sound so steady either. "It's better that he never had a brother at all than… Whatever I am now. A freak. A monster." The words dripped self-loathing.
"…A beast."
Beatrice's blood flash-boiled in her veins at the word, and automatically she reached out to grab his collar like he was one of her brothers, having finally pushed her to the breaking point. "Don't you dare," she whispered, and yanked his nose close to hers. "Don't you ever talk about yourself that way again." He opened his mouth to speak, but stopped and just closed it again, with a look that was somewhere between desperation and defiance.
She hadn't the words for what she wanted to say to him. She'd been there when the lantern was blown out while they tried to free Greg from his Edelwood bed, nine and a half years ago now. She'd been there to see the Beast washed away from the world like candle smoke, and then to watch the moon go with him. There was a lot more to the Unknown, it seemed, than any of them had realized before. Without the woods, there was no world. Without a caretaker, there were no woods. So she'd watched Wirt light the lantern again, knowing full well the cost, in order to save her soul, and the souls of everyone else they'd met over their long hard months together. She'd watched the moon reignite in the sky, and the stars fade back in, and then after all else was said and done, she'd watched him take Greg by the hand, and say goodbye as well as he could, and send him on the path home, knowing that he could not follow.
And he called himself a beast for that?
Her hands clenched and she tugged him inward that last remaining inch, to close the space between them and pull his lips into hers. He made a small sound, whether of surprise or satisfaction, she didn't care. "Don't you dare," she whispered again against his mouth. He didn't. His arms fell around her shoulders and he kissed her back.
The woods hummed around them, singing night songs, writhing and growing under the moon. Once again, it seemed that she could feel every movement of his body against hers, the tremors and tugs, the beat of his heart, the grind of his bones. He was warm and solid and familiar beneath her, and the longer they embraced, Beatrice felt like she was slowly catching fire. Back at the beginning, their meetings between the Edelwood trees had always been made of this kind of secret time, little acts of ecstasy concealing grief, but somewhere those points of contact had all fallen away. Gradually, he'd left for longer and longer periods of time, and whenever they did see one another, seemed reluctant to touch. She'd let him drift away, if that was what he wanted; but now she wondered that if they'd never stopped, maybe things wouldn't have ever gotten to this point. She could have spent their time together reminding him he wasn't alone, and that he wasn't a monster. He deserved better for the sacrifice he'd made.
Everywhere their skin touched burned like a brand, and when he placed a hand lightly at the back of her neck, she squeaked unbecomingly. Beatrice realized that she was trembling like a leaf – or like a bird on the ground. She pulled away. His face was flushed and his hair was a mess. She couldn't have looked much better.
"Beatrice," he whispered, "I can't…" He looked bewildered and heartbroken, and as he pulled away, his fingers drifted to the side of his head where the antler still parted his hair. She pursed her lips and looked downward. He seemed frightened of their closeness, as though the darkness branching from his form could be infectious. It hurt her heart to think about. How long had it been since they'd last kissed? She remembered autumn leaves on the ground, but how far back now she couldn't say. Years. Then something caught her attention, and she reached out and cupped her hand firmly against the seam in his trousers, and the erection straining against the worn cloth. She looked him in the eye.
"Uh," he said, voice rapidly becoming less heartbroken than embarrassed. "…S-sorry."
Inappropriate giddiness rose up in Beatrice's stomach, and she almost laughed. He might have tried to tell himself that he was a monster doomed to walk the edges of the realms of men, but he always had been one for melodrama. No matter what he claimed, he was still very human.
What she wanted now was for him to remember that as well as she did.
Her hands shook, but she tried not to show her nerves. Deftly, she turned and lifted her hair from her neck. As she changed position, the vines around her ankles audibly snapped.
"Unbutton me," she said to him.
"What?" he asked. She couldn't see his face, but had no difficulty imagining his expression.
"Just do it," she said. For a second there was nothing, and then she felt the well-known pull of his fingers on the fastenings running down the back of her dress. They opened one by one, and with each she felt a blush of warm night air against her skin. She shivered as the last came undone, and the seam fell open fully to expose her spine. She turned to him again, her hands held over her chest as the dress began to slip past her shoulders. His lips were slightly parted, his back to the raised root extending from the Edelwood's trunk. Her mouth felt very dry. There was no way she was doing this again. She was definitely going to do it.
Beatrice dropped her arms to her lap and let the front of her dress slip down fully. Wirt made a small sound when it did, something between a word and a breath. His eyes ran up from her chest to her face, and back down again. "You… this… again?" he breathed, sounding terrified, but also halfway hopeful. Beatrice didn't know how to answer that, but was emboldened by his acknowledgement that they were definitely revisiting something. She leaned in to kiss him again, less forcefully now than before, but with greater purpose. She put her hands on either side of his head and ran her fingers though his stupid floppy hair, and in turn, he laid his hands on her shoulder blades, where the freckled skin was newly-exposed and sensitive.
She took his hand from her back and repositioned it on her breast, and then pulled out of the kiss and buried her face in his neck, breathing deep. He smelled like smoke and skin and earthy water. Blindly, she reached down to fumble with the button on the front of his trousers, pulled it open, and wrapped her hand around his freed cock. It was warmer than the rest of him, a little pliable under her fingers, but hard at its core, like wood or bone. Her heart skipped as she pulled her hand slowly up its length from the base. He let a small sound out of his nose and his fingers dug into her arm. She took that as a good sign, and repeated the motion, once, and then again.
This was terrain they had not walked together in years, but she felt she remembered it well.
He laid his hands on the Edelwood root behind him, clutching madly at the bark in response to her ministrations. With every few strokes his face creased and he would pant, bending or stretching his legs compulsively, and she sat still with her head under his chin, listening to the rhythm of his heart, to how it changed as she worked on him. Hesitantly, she drew her lips along his neck and up to his jaw, embarrassed at how intimate the action seemed, even with her hand already around his cock. She could feel a heavy pulse in the center of her palm; whether hers or his, she couldn't tell. It was kind of a romantic thought, actually.
He was starting to make different noises now than before. She wondered if that was her sign to continue, or to stop. He gritted his teeth: "Oh my God," he said under his breath, and arched his back and raised his chin, cutting a sharp profile across dark woods surrounding them. The bottom dropped out of her stomach at the sight, and she knew exactly what she wanted to do.
She released his member, and used both hands to pull his face to hers again and kiss him deeply. He laid his arms on her waist and returned the caress, now with abandon to match her own.
She hardly noticed that they were working together to position her atop his lap and pull apart her skirts and petticoats until there was nothing left to separate them. Beatrice felt positively intoxicated, like their sweat and saliva had turned to honey and wine in her throat. She lowered her body ever so slightly and felt something press between her legs, with a thrill that made her jerk involuntarily.
Wirt's face was flushed, but he was clearly trying to keep his head on straight. He started to say, "Are you sure you —?" but she knew what he was going to ask, and frankly thought it a very stupid question. She pushed herself down onto him without waiting for him to finish. That was her answer right there.
The sensation of having him inside her again after all this time was hard to describe. It wasn't really a sensation at all, so much as an idea and subtle pressure. He perfectly filled a space she had all but forgotten existed, and it was completing, even if it didn't really feel like much. Wirt, contrarily, appeared to be feeling quite a lot of things. He leaned his head back, panting, twitching a little bit every time she so much as moved. Charmed by this, she moved some more. He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. "Nnh," was all he said.
She rocked back and forth again, eyes on his face. "God," he gasped as he rolled his head back, and the sight tickled her, so she did it once more. The second time, the tickle she felt was a real one, thrilling and bright, and she placed a hand on her belly with a small whoof. It felt like something on the inside had caught, and a tiny spout of flame bloomed in her core. It felt nice. She did it again. It felt very nice. And then again. Each time, the fire got a little bit hotter. So did the expression on Wirt's face.
She leaned down and rested her teeth on his collarbone, still shifting back and forth atop him. The feeling was exquisite; the noises escaping from his throat were more so. But though his face flickered back and forth between blissful and strained, and he squeezed her shoulders and ran hands down to her chest and her waist and then back up again, she was entirely in control. He did not clutch or direct or thrust. This deep in the act together, he was still afraid to be forceful. She snickered out loud, and he made a noise of confusion.
"Pushover," she murmured, and pressed his wrists above his head, into the root he lay against. "Just do it."
"Do what," he panted, lifting his head to look her in the eye.
"Oh, please." She stopped moving and squared her weight above his arms, bearing down on them with a look of great intensity. The moon had fallen over the both of them, washing their skin in silver light. "Fuck me," she said, like the challenge it was meant as.
A strange expression flickered across his face for a minute. "Beatrice I – I don't know what I –"
But she was not going to let him go back to living his life like a shadow, never touching or being touched, asking for nothing and expecting just that. He had never frightened her, and he wasn't going to start now. "Do it," she said, leaning in so their noses touched. He seemed frozen, whether with anticipation or fear, she didn't care, it needed to go. "Let it go and fuck me," she commanded again, and turned her head to gently sink her teeth into the lobe of his ear.
Beneath her hands, she felt his wrists suddenly seize, and his body jerk, and then the world turned upside down.
Unanticipated strength broke her grip on his arms, and with a grunt she was rolled down onto the ground with him above, on his knees and driving needfully inside of her. She rolled back her head in the grass, mouth slightly open as he pushed and pulled out of her body, jerking, breath ragged. The percussion of their bodies sent shockwaves through her system, and the new curve of her spine impeded breathing, but she was breathless anyway. She was like a hundred shards of glass shivering on a windchime, like sun that changes on the ground as the leaves move, like a bird bobbing on the tip of a branch, at the mercy of the weather.
Like a very small, very vulnerable bird, held close to a body that could fall and crush her with the slightest mistake.
She closed her eyes and bid herself not to ruminate on that. It wasn't where she'd wanted her mind to end up, but now it was the only thing she could think about at all. She gripped Wirt's forearms and wrapped her ankles around his back, to bring them closer than they already were, to feel the enormity of themselves together. She was not helpless any longer, and she would not be broken by unwanted memories.
She was still human. They both were. And it was their imperative, in spite of all fears, to never forget it again.
Their movement gained a gradual momentum, rolling together, breathing together, pressing their foreheads together and filling the space between themselves with sounds of satisfaction. He gripped her thighs to change his angle inside of her, and she felt for the first time a sort of impact between the two of them, somewhere deep inside her belly. It was neither painful nor fully pleasurable, and she bit her lip with a hiss. His in-and-out movement was a freefall of sensation, progressing from deep pressure to high fiery thrill and back again. She felt lightheaded. She felt free. The swoops in her stomach were like flying. That was the one part of a bird's experience that she was more than happy to recall, and with that realization the weight on her heart lessened. Enough, anyway.
No matter how much she hated to remember the time she'd been small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, she found comfort in remembering that the hand in question had always been his.
With a moan she threw her arms above her head, and felt something wrap around her wrists. The Edelwood vines crept around her arms and down the lines of her pelvis, fast, thicker than normal, almost predatorial. Weakly she tried to pull away, but found them too strong for her shaken limbs; she could have asked for some help, but that would have meant calling for a break, so she let her hands stay where they were. The trees seemed to be murmuring around them, but Beatrice could hardly hear it over the beat of her heart in her ears. There were flowers made of fire in her stomach and her throat and her hips, undulating open and closed on the rhythm their bodies made together. Wirt began to sound more ragged, some voice in every breath, dragging his hands through the wild auburn hair that had come tumbling from her bun in their commotion. The vines tightened around her thighs and her wrists. Their binds hurt, but it was still good.
"Wirt," she whispered as the ardor inside her sparked promisingly bright.
"B-Bea…' he panted in turn. She tried again to pull her hands from the vines' grip, and failed, arching her back upward with the effort and turning her chin to the sky. At her movement, something between the two of them finally clicked fully into place, and his every thrust no longer produced just a spout of flame, but a crackle of gunpowder at the base of her spine, lit, stoked, ready to explode. She was hanging over a cliff, and she didn't know when she might fall, but the fall was absolutely inevitable.
She gasped, "Oh-h," and turned her face into the crook of her shoulder, feeling the need to bite down on something, even her own flesh would do. "Oh my God…"
"Uhn," Wirt moaned, and his hands were tense around her waist and his frame was wracked and trembling. His face was desperate with need, and perhaps it was just the moonlight, but it seemed like there was a bit of a glow to his eyes. "Bea – Beatrice, I'm –" She didn't need to hear the rest of it. She knew. He let out a soundless cry and made three, five, countless short fast thrusts with his body pressed against hers, and at each pulse she found an old familiar sensation – imperceptible, almost, but warm, and liquid, and unmistakably him.
Even after all else, that was the feeling finally pushed her over the edge. The blooming flowers dropped their petals altogether. The fire turned white-hot.
The gunpowder trail met the keg.
The whole world exploded around her. From an infinitesimally small point at the center of her being flew shockwaves and shrapnel. She dug her nails into the grass, clenched his hips tight between her thighs, cried out, and felt her mind settle wildly on the movement in the forest all around – shifting, creaking, wrapping around them as if to make a cocoon in which to preserve this moment forever. She was lost in liquid and movement and moonlight, and caught on the little aftershocks that always come when the earth shifts beneath your feet.
One wave, and then another, and a third, diminishing each. Her heart seemed to hesitate to beat again one last time –
And finally with a thump she was pushed back down into her body, and the only response she had left to her name was to gasp.
"Oh-h my God," she choked. They were both soaked in sweat, and her skirt was rumpled around her waist and stained with grass. There was no way she was going to be able to explain that away to her mother, but somehow, she couldn't really care right now. Wirt still knelt between her legs, but didn't look like he was going to be able to stay upright much longer. With an unprecedented burst of strength, Beatrice finally wrenched her wrists away from the choking vines, and averted his collapse by putting a hand on his shoulder and guiding him down to lie next to her, which he did, gratefully.
Their long limbs tangled around one another's bodies, equally spent, equally satisfied. Her eyes almost closed, but she didn't want to sleep. She stared with half-lidded eyes up through the deep thicket above their heads, to the moon, swathed in mist, crisscrossed by a net of vines and eaves. Her gaze dropped and the view blurred, turning to black and white. She'd changed her mind. She did want to sleep. And yet…
Vines and leaves?
No. It couldn't be. Beatrice's eyes snapped back open fully, and she whispered, "What the hell?"
What she had thought to be some kind of warped perception formed in a delicate state of mind had turned out to be very real; the Edelwood at their side had lifted its roots and vines in an arc above their bodies, grass grown up around the edges to meet it, the end result something like a birdcage. Wirt sat up next to her halfway, as high as he could go before his head impacted the branches.
"Oh, no," he said, with a tone that could only be called chagrin.
Beatrice reached up to tug at the branches, and when she found them too supple moved instead to kick at them with her bare feet. She had no success, and Wirt placed a hand on her leg to get her to stop.
"It's okay," he said, and indeed, the roots creaked like limbs in a low wind and obediently began to pull up and away from the two of them, clearing their view of the sky again and leaving them encircled in a nest of wood and soft grass.
Beatrice sat up, a little light-headed, crossing her arms on her chest with a strange sort of modesty. Wirt came in close behind and slipped his arms and legs around her person as his chin rested on her shoulder. She smiled a little, though she wasn't sure he could see it. "Mm," she said, and pressed her cheek against his forehead. "That's a new trick."
"I'm sorry," he murmured into her skin. "I didn't mean for that to happen."
"Stop apologizing for everything," she muttered back, trying to sound annoyed, but she wasn't doing a very good job. "At least you're less boring than you used to be." She thought she could feel him smile wearily against her shoulder. She turned to him and was about speak, but her voice caught when she got her first good look at him since they'd gone down on the ground.
"Oh," she said, and immediately regretted it. It sounded much more dismayed that she'd intended.
"What?" he asked. She didn't say anything, but he followed her gaze and reached up to finger the spindly, antler-like branch just above his right ear. It was grown out thrice as long, suddenly, as when she had first noticed it mere moments before. His expression turned from confusion to fear as he realized what had happened, and then started to close off altogether. Beatrice's heart sank. This was not what she'd wanted. This was the exact opposite of how she wanted him to feel.
"Hey," she said, and caught him by the chin before he could bow away. She tried to smile, but the bags under his eyes were heavier than ever. "Whatever bad thing you're thinking about yourself right now, you're wrong."
"It will never get better," he said, lowering his gaze, turning his head so the branch was lined against the moon. "Sometimes I can fool myself, but I – I can't keep it from happening. I'm… It gets worse every day. Nothing's going to stop that."
She leaned in to kiss his cheek, to lift his chin, to try and make him understand that it was okay. "Maybe not," she said, breaking away and murmuring into his neck. "But we can try." She raised a hand and ran a finger along the antler's smooth bark. "And I do mean we."
For a moment the air was heavy, but finally he nodded, and they each laid a hand upon the wood. The branch was dry and cleft, and it was not hard to snap off, just as he'd said. Beatrice rose to pull the red lantern out from its nook at the base of the tree, and they broke the twigs and tossed them into its hungry golden mouth. As it burned hot and glad, Beatrice turned to look at Wirt's face in the light.
She could have been imagining it, but the dark look in his eyes seemed less prominent. He was actually smiling, if only wryly; maybe that was just in response to seeing a part of himself that he hated and feared go up in flames, but she would take what she could get. She took his hand and pulled him down next to her in the grass, where she wrapped her arms around his neck and began peppering him with kisses until his demeanor cracked. He chuckled and tried to squirm away, and when she would not relent finally went on the offensive, capturing her arms and making it his own quest to land a kiss on every freckle across her upper body. Their laughter rang in the glade madly, joltingly, punctuated with caresses and coughs until they had no breath left between them.
Finally, they laid still in the center of the meadow, breathing deep, watching the stars above fade into sight again as the moon slipped out of view. She felt his mouth near her ear, the grass on her skin, the little pool of molten lead still nestled in the depths of her body; she hadn't realized before how much she'd missed this. He rolled over and crossed his arm over her chest, pulling his cloak over both of them like a blanket. She closed her eyes. He did the same.
"Are you sure you can't stay any longer?" she asked. She wasn't ready to go back to the real world quite yet.
"You know that I can't," he said, though he tried to smile to soften the blow. She bowed her head.
"Alright," she said simply, and entwined her fingers in his between the blades of grass. "Where are we headed tomorrow, then?"
Wirt looked taken aback. He pulled away a little to look her in the eye. "Beatrice, you couldn't. Th-there's no – I'd never ask you to abandon your home for me. Your family..."
But her family had been the center of her existence for years beyond counting now. It was time for her to take a step out of her comfort zone. "Oh, just try to tell me that again," she murmured, and pushed her face close to his on the ground. "You're not getting rid of me that easily, Wirt. I'm not a girl you can just keep on the side for fun." She pinched him gently. "And I can't go home looking like this, can I? Torn petticoats, hair undone… I'd be my mother's greatest shame."
He flushed. "I didn't mean to –" But she put a finger to his lips and laid her head on his shoulder.
"Shut up and figure out when someone's making an excuse," she murmured. "I'm tired of waiting behind while you're off keeping the world running. I'm done watching the horizon like a war widow. And I know this can't go on forever." She squeezed his forearm, still flesh, nothing less. "But there's lots of time left, and I want as much of it as I can have."
He was quiet for a long while. "You won't like a lot of it," he said. "There are things that need to be done that I – that I'm not proud to do." The Edelwood's shadow swept across their ankles on the ground.
"That's a huge burden for one person," she said, and pushed a hand up against his cheek. "So you could probably use another set of shoulders, huh?"
He turned to look at her with a smile in his eyes. "Maybe I could use the company," he said.
"For a while," Beatrice reminded him.
"For a while," he agreed, and they rolled onto their sides into a long slow embrace that softened them against the earth and sent them soaring skyward. Wherever form tomorrow took, things were going to be okay. Beatrice felt that in her bones. Whoever, whatever they might be – human, bird, beast, or something in between – they could be it together, and they would carry one another in that.
At least for a while.
The forest breathed gently, and their two tall shapes curled together on the ground. They fell asleep with the grass between their toes and the cloak across both their shoulders, held so close to one other that there was no clear certainty whose body was whose anymore, and no reason to be concerned that they should ever completely sort that out.
All day long, there had been something in the air, riding the susurration of leaves in the summertime trees. Most people, if you'd asked, would have said it was the wind, or the distant laughter of children, but there was no breeze so pure, and anyone intimately acquainted with the noises children make could have told you what it wasn't. It was a quiet song, familiar, calm and clear, sometimes indistinguishable from the creak of an open door in the night. It rose across roads, between trees, over hilltops and mountains, through all of the Unknown. Men and women raised their heads to the sky to listen to its swell and fade, and ended with smiles on their faces, small but real.
They said it was a madrigal, a solo, a duet that asked to keep the days long and the wilderness watchful. It was half lilting voice, half the flute playing in accompaniment, and a message meant for anyone who knew how to listen:
They were coming home again.