"Just... come home."
My apologies.
I have to go.
-
She remembered honeyed tea and salted rolls. She remembered the sound of chainmail being slipped on and the twisting of her hat on her head. She remembered when things felt and seemed much simpler, when her life didn't feel like water slipping between her fingers.
These are things she remembered, and he did not.
-
They'd dipped their feet in water pools, and she remembered the way his toe curled right up when an orange fish swept by.
"A dragon knight driven to retreat, by a fish?"
"Nothing to be more frightened of," he said. "Never doubt what the small and unexpected can do to you, Freya."
She had laughed, then.
She sighed, now. It had been the small and unexpected, in the grand scheme of things, that had changed all that she had. She should have been more scared of little orange fish.
It would never have helped.
-
The rain made the fields look tired and weepy. She had always liked it that way. It made it easier to see what would be coming in the distance.
"Don't you ever yearn for the unpredictable? There is a whole world out there, Freya - just out of our reach. Would you not want to see it?"
"This world is too big for us. Burmecia is where we belong. All that could be out there is rat-catchers and duststorms, why leave behind what we already know brings us satisfaction?"
"You can be so boring."
"Well, we will just see who is still standing, in fifty years."
Not fifty, but ten.
It seemed that she was the one kneeling, and he proud.
She had to stand again.
-
She used to stand taller than all the others in her class. She had been proud, then - with her hands tightly wrapped around a wooden pole and sparring with the idiots who could do little more than laugh. She took this seriously. A little too seriously.
She had met him the day she learned to hold a real spear.
And he laughed at her, when she dropped it and her ears flattened against her head, her hands balled by her sides. She almost threw a fuss, saved only by his own softened temperament and by the grace of his hands. He was in the year above, she remembered now, and he showed her how to hold it straight without it wobbling.
They'd pointed a spear towards the future, without fear towards their destiny.
They had hunted dragons in the fields.
Thundaga and lizard pelts and ripping claws and she was pinned and he was brutal and they had fought till their very breath was useless. The earth was in tatters and their skin the same - but they rejoiced in lizard gizzards and laughed when they ripped that shiny, wibbly heart out from beneath the grand creature's breastplate.
She'd never thought it cruel. She'd never thought it might have its revenge, in subtler ways.
"I love you" He'd said when they made love after, in lonely barren fields or down by the fire in his home. He'd whisper it in her ear, then let it tremor down her spine, breathe it through her hair, scream it in her bones. He said it so often, so many times, so hotly and viciously and piously that she believed it to be true.
"I love you, too."
When did she stop saying that?
He says it now, in the rain. She's slaughtered the greatest dragon, beast, monster of all - the concept of death itself. Her body should be aching, it should be alive with that same passionate fire, it should be on edge, singing with every heatbeat.
But everything feels soft and slow.
And he says that noise so sweet and hollow.
"...I love you."
She rests her head on his shoulder, her hair touching him where her hands will not.
He says things she can no longer understand, he haunts her with the ache of his memory. The dragon, the fish, the girl who could not hold her spear. She is all of them, and he has slaughtered her, run away from her, taught her everything but of all these things, he remembers none.
"I just want to cherish our time right now."
She is off to Alexandria, and he smiles brightly at her - cooking breakfast even though he knows she would prefer to eat on the road. (Then she remembers, he doesn't know, she doesn't know again yet, she must be patient.)
He implores her, Just... come home.
She still has the ribbon tied around her tail, the yellow one that Burmecian widows tie to trees.
Just... come home.
Her door was open, the kettle was boiling - outside, birdsong drifted through. She was home, she was here, and he was asking her to just come home.
She smiled a raw and broken smile - and walked right by the kiss he tried to give her.
The door was open in his eyes. The door she'd tried to long to find, the door she'd been aiming for years and years, the door she'd pounded on, wept on, scrabbled on. It was open now.
And there was nothing left.
He would never come home.
She lifted her head, her green eyes cast up towards the sky as she shut the door behind her.
A sense of light, gentle freedom began to wash into her. Her step had a kind of skip, a hop, a leap to it.
A little giggle rose in her throat, which turned to laughter at the gates of Burmecia, which turned to shrill choking half way across the fields. She laughed and laughed and laughed out all the sadness that had ever chased her, coughing up everything that had been locked up for so long.
It was... as if everything just came tumbling out.
She would never come home.