Notes: Alternative ending where everything still more or less goes to hell, but differently. Tentative Rosalie/Oscar inclinations.
Things that Remain
Oscar wakes up, but refuses to open her eyes. She's meant to be dead, but she aches too much for that, all over.
She really had hoped it would be quick and clean.
Oh well.
She drifts again. Maybe she's really on her way out now?
A hand is pressed to her forehead, cool and dry; it vanishes quickly, and someone tugs at something on her arm. Lifting bandages loose from a wound, Oscar realises, feeling the unpleasant pull. Then the sting of alcohol. She flinches slightly, against her will.
Someone sighs.
"Oscar?"
She opens her eyes slowly.
Rosalie looks down at her, pale and exhausted.
"Oh, thank goodness," she says. "I'll get you something to drink."
This time she knows: short of the possibility of a new infection, she isn't going to die from her wounds. Damn it all.
They've cut her hair. It's down to her shoulders and uneven. It feels strange, light.
"I'm sorry," Rosalie says. "But it was so matted with blood, I just couldn't get it untangled..."
She's always taken such good care of her hair.
"I thought I would lose you as well," Rosalie says. "It seems as though almost everyone... I don't know if I could have stood it."
"You would," Oscar says, just stops her mouth from saying will. "You're tougher than anyone I know. But Bernard?"
"Gone," Rosalie says, voice flat, and looks away, stares out of the window through the narrow gap in the curtains. "They just found him one morning. He was shot."
Rosalie who has lost and lost and who is still sitting here by Oscar's sick bed, changing bandages and forcing broth into her, who can still manage a little smile when she sees that Oscar is awake, who has got stronger but not harder with time.
"Alain was alive this morning, though, at any rate," Rosalie says with an almost convincing brightness. "He was here with a little bread. I didn't like to ask where he'd got it from."
"Oh," Oscar says, and feels, for the first time since she thought she was going to die, a tiny ripple of relief.
"You should eat a little bit extra," Rosalie adds. "I think you're strong enough to be moved now."
And she stands up, smooths down her skirts, and strides away, as calm and professional as a doctor.
Moved? Where?
Out of the city. Somewhere quiet, somewhere she might have time to recover without being shot at.
Her first impulse is to refuse, to snarl at Rosalie and Alain for conspiring to treat her like a child. Force herself out of bed, back to the barricades, to give more than she has just to prove she can. But when she thinks a little longer she realises:
If she agrees to leave the city then Rosalie will leave too.
If Rosalie leaves then she'll be safer.
"Fine," she says, "but only until I'm fit for combat."
"Of course," Rosalie says.
Rosalie knows that it could take a long time.
Oscar knows that it will probably never happen. Alain knows too, she's pretty sure, but she doesn't know if he's told Rosalie.
Really, she would have much rather died in battle, been shot, been stabbed. But this is how things are, and she'll save what she can. She's starting with Rosalie.
She knew, in those last days, that if she fell then she'd never be able to get up again. She really doesn't know what to do with herself now that it's happened: she's lost all her momentum but her body hasn't give up yet.
"Come and walk with me," Rosalie says, and Oscar just wants to yell at her, tell her to go to hell, that she's too sad, that she's been abandoned by the person who allowed her to be all the things she feels like at once, without compromise. That she's dying slowly and that she doesn't damn well want to go for a walk or hear news from the capital or eat dinner.
"I," she starts, hears her tone of voice, falters, scowls.
"Don't you dare think for one second that I'm not hurting too just because I can get out of bed," Rosalie says, her voice carefully level. "Come."
They stare each other down for a moment, and Oscar caves. It's just Rosalie. She shouldn't be screaming at Rosalie, shouldn't be considering it. And she shouldn't be feeling so damn sorry for herself either. What would they say, all those dead people she used to know?
What would he say?
She gets out of bed, slowly and carefully. Pulls on the clothes that Rosalie has laid out for her, and remembers other days, getting dressed in other rooms, in more expensive clothes that had been laid out by the same careful hands. Long ago and far away, when Rosalie was in love with her and Oscar wanted to pretend that didn't scare her or confuse her.
Maybe they could have lived completely different lives, if she'd just thought about it a little more carefully instead of reacting. But then where would they have been?
She feels oddly disloyal at how the thought plays on her mind. But is she remembering old attraction that she buried, or fantasising about a world where she could have escaped the pain of losing André?
It might be both. And it doesn't matter anyway. It's just fantasy.
"Are you ready?" Rosalie asks from the other side of the door.
"Yes," she calls back, though her chest feels terrible, though she still just wants to sleep.
She takes a careful breath, fills her lungs as well as she can without breaking down in a coughing fit. Opens the door, smile in place, and offers Rosalie her arm.
And here they are again, just the two of them, a world away from where they started.
But maybe that's fine. Maybe she's fine being here, with Rosalie, for a while.
[end]