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Mon Cœur Glacé
Chapter 4: The Fish
Author's note: I am officially on study leave now, so lots more time for writing! :D I believe I have about three or four more chapters to add to this fanfic in total. I'm also working on another Enslaved fic, a bit more expicitly romantic, which I will post up in due time.
Thanks very much to all my readers and reviewers! Every time I get a new review, I feel encouraged to continue writing. Please do let me know if you enjoy! :)
Trip wouldn't like to admit it, but Monkey knew she had been upset by the fish. Maybe to him they were just fish, but to her they represented something more, like a wish, like a hope, and when the mech had smashed the ancient tank so they lay on the hard ground writhing and gasping to sudden death, her heart too had been choking in some way that was unfathomable to him. Her tears had fallen bitterly upon the saltwater and the glinting shards of glass.
When it happened, he hadn't known what to say. Monkey was no orator: words did not come easily to him and he had little occasion to use them. But it remained in the back of his mind, the way she had dimmed after that event, the downturn of her eyes, her drive which had once been so strong now muted by probabilities too desperately horrific to imagine, and the understanding that perhaps he had been too uncouth, overly dismissive of the home she was battling to return to. Driven by a guilt he was not keen to decipher, an unacknowledged but resolute part of Monkey waited for a chance to console her.
One day they reached a massive crack in the land, a ravine where the metropolis had been sundered in two. The mighty crevice had undermined the foundations of decayed skyscrapers, reducing them to trembling frameworks of the structures they must once have been, and causing some to partially collapse into perilous bridges storeys wide and spanning the entire canyon. Broken pipes and conduits jutted out into the gorge, yellowed bones protruding from the fractured carcass of the city. The land ached to close the gap, plastering the steep sides of the intervening rift with shrubs and creepers, and a river ran at the bottom of the chasm like blood in a vein.
Monkey walked to the edge. Looking into the distance, he could see the jagged valley stretch on deep into the centre of the Old City, a gaping scar across its face. There was no way to cross here. Trip came to stand behind him, although she positioned herself further from the sheer descent and was hesitant to look down into it.
He, however, did not suffer the effects of vertigo, or if he did he made no outward display of them. His gaze dropped down, down like a stone, all the way to the bed of the ravine. The indistinct sounds of the stream reached their ears. Its waters were an impossible shade of bright translucence, seemingly unaffected by the pollution of the city. He could make out irregular bodies, moving like birds move through curtains of leaves, and after a few moments he realised that it was fish flitting far below, tones of green and blue flashing erratically across the surface of the water. Their scales winked silver in the sun.
Monkey was not a symbolic man. He did not care for figures of speech or convoluted allegories when he could concern himself with tangible facts, with the everyday reality of where to head next, how to find your next meal, how to survive another day. But even Monkey could see that there was meaning to be found in life in this wasteland, that the chance of hope was meaning enough.
"Look, Trip. There's fish down there." It didn't seem sufficient, so he carried on. "Fish in the water, birds in the trees. Deer in the forest." His words sounded more clumsy than reassuring to his ears, his diction inelegant and rambling from years of disuse.
He kept his sights fixed firmly on the canyon below. Trip watched him from the periphery of her vision. She had to take a second to grasp that he was actually trying to be kind to her, albeit in a roundabout way, but when she did, it gave her a strange tender sensation which felt all at once both risky and the safest, most secure thing in the world.
"And us," she said.
His voice was as coarse as it had always been. "And both of us."
When he raised his eyes to look at her, her lips had formed a crescent: not quite a smile, but a quiet, curious blend of surprise and appreciation, and it was enough. She moved on past him, head up now, eyes alert, unfastening the dragonfly from her hair to show them the way. It was then that Monkey learnt the meaning of symbolism, how a sliver of midday light on the collarbone of a young woman could translate to a slice of golden warmth in his own heart, and the intangible, elusive force of hope.