A/N: For dgray-contest on LiveJournal, week #3 theme Miranda Lotte.
Disclaimer: I don't own the original work this is derived from. This work is complete, and its brevity is intentional.
Enjoy!
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Watchtower
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On the roof, she counts her failures one by one.
It's cold today. The sky is grey, threatening rain, and the wind is sharp. She ignores it. If it rains, maybe it'll wash away a sin or two. Pain means atonement. Since she was small, since her father, since the very first dropped plate it has meant that. It has always been the only way through the guilt and so it is now. Even now.
She finishes counting at eight hundred and ninety-six. The number is low because she has stopped noticing the smaller failures-- the larger ones are numerous enough now to take over for them.
"I'm sorry," she says. One.
"I'm sorry," she says. Two.
"I'm sorry," she says. Three.
The wind blows and blows. Behind the stern grey clouds, the sun sets, but the moon will not rise. Not tonight.
"I'm sorry," she says. One hundred.
From the swallowing black of the sky overhead, the rain begins to fall at last, cold as November though it is still August. She turns her face upwards into it, lets the dark water from heaven wash it clean, or at least cleaner, if her hopes are more than cruel superstition.
"I'm sorry," she says. Four hundred forty-eight. Halfway through.
This is her most precious ritual. At the dark of the moon, while everyone else eats and laughs and goes to sleep and dreams, she finds the highest place she can and makes her confession to God. Unlike some of the others, she is a true believer. She has no trouble believing in a God who could create someone like her. She imagines him more like a person than a god, like a king or a priest, seated above all others but still possessed of all human flaws and graces. He made her broken and useless, watched and smiled as she tried and failed and wept, but he also gave her the Innocence, and her friends.
No matter how many times she fails, it will never outweight those gifts. They are beyond price.
Failure's cost is beyond her courage to pay, and so instead she sends a pittance a thousand times, every new moon, and hopes He can be satisfied with only this.
"I'm sorry," she says. Seven hundred and two.
"What are you doing, Miranda Lotte?"
For a moment, in her frozen delerium of contrition, she cannot place the voice. "God?" she croaks, because it is the only name she can remember.
The person, not God, laughs bitterly. "Sorry, but nah. Not sure he even knows or cares which name I'm using this week."
Ah, now it returns. "Lavi," she says, and wipes the rain and tears from her face. "Why--"
She is interrupted by the warm drape of his coat around her shoulders, and his sudden presence beside her, leaning against the grey wall of the bartizan parapet. He puts his arm around her and rubs her shoulder and back vigorously, spreading warmth wherever he touches her.
"How long have you been out here?" he asks, concern clear in his voice. "It's freezing out here. Nurse would kill you."
She shrugs evasively. "A while. It's all right, Lavi, it really is. I do this all the time."
"All the time? Are you nuts? Why?"
How can she explain? This is her ritual, her confession, her private apology to God. She doesn't want to let anyone in to listen, to judge, to tell her whether or not it's enough. Only God can answer her question, and he doesn't want to. There's no place here for Lavi. No place for anyone at all but her, the moon, and God.
So she says nothing, hoping he'll leave her alone.
"You know, I learned something today," he says, ignoring her silence as she'd know he would. "Do you know the origins of your name?"
She shakes her head. In her mind, she says I'm sorry. Seven hundred and three.
"Shakespeare made it up. It means 'worthy of admiration' in Latin. Even further back, it was used as city names and surname, an Occitan word meaning 'watchtower.' You have a warrior's name, Miranda. Who named you?"
Miranda lowers her head to look at the castle stones and hide her face,drawing her knees up further. "My mother," she whispers.
"I wonder if she knew," Lavi muses. "If so, she named you for strength."
"Too bad it didn't work," Miranda says with a bitter laugh. One more failure to add to the list-- eight hundred ninety-seven.
I'm sorry, she thinks. Seven hundred and four.
Lavi suddenly rolls over onto his hands and knees, facing her through the thin rain. It flattens his fiery hair to his head and drizzles down his earnest face. There is a furrow in his brow, just under the eyepatch cord. "You're wrong," he tells her intensely. "You're our guardian. You keep us safe better than anyone else could. Even if some of do get hurt sometimes, even if some of us die, it's not-- the ones that live are thanks to you, not the dead. We would have lost already if not for you."
The tears come hot and fast, invisible in the rain. "Don't," she cries softly. "Please, don't."
"Why?" he asks again, fierce, near to tears himself.
The rain begins to clear. A star appears overhead. She can hear him breathing, now, damp and desperate. "Because," she says, "I don't know how to be anything but this-- a failure. If I can't say sorry, I don't know if I'll have anything to say at all that God would want to listen to. That anyone would want to listen to. I... don't know who I am. Please don't take away the one thing I do know."
For a moment, he only stares at her, green eyes wide in the dim starlight. Then he breaks a little. She can see it happen, can see the splinter and crack in the lines of his face.
"Oh, Miranda," he says hoarsely. "I'm so sorry." Then he falls into her, his arms around her shoulders and his face pressed into the side of her neck, his breath hot on her skin. His tears are warm where they fall on her. "So sorry. I should have-- we all should have-- I won't let you live this way. I won't." He is a warrior, not a scholar, despite what he is and what he has been taught to be. There is nothing of the cold detachment a Bookman should have in him. He is warm and caring and bare to touch, nearly defenseless against every sharp edge.
"Oh," she says distantly, the understanding finally washing in like a flood. "You need me."
For what else is she good for than standing between sharp edges and those she loves? Her Innocence is made for it. She is older than him, an adult-- an adult with power to protect him. One of very few with such power. If she doesn't protect him, who will? Who could? And yet, instead of being there with him and all the others in her charge, she's up here on the roof where she couldn't even hear them scream. If anything unexpected were ever to find them, she would have been too far away to help them. They could all have died tonight.
She puts her arms around him and slips her fingers into his wet hair, clings tight in belated horror. "I'm sorry," she says.
"Again?" he laughs into her neck. "Maybe that really is all you know how to say."
"No," she says, surprising herself as well as him. He pulls away to look her in the eye, discerning and hopeful at once. She promises herself that she won't blink as she continues. She wants to see his face. "I think... that was maybe the last time."
It's better than she could have hoped for-- like the early dawning of the sun, the rising joy in his eyes, the heedless abandon as he pins her to the wall again and half-crushes her.
Perhaps she will fail again, even at this, and find herself up here trying to expunge her guilt again in the future. But she is needed, and it will be easier to resist in the future because of that. Perhaps she will still tell everyone how sorry she is, because to Miranda it means the same thing as I love you, and she wants them to know even if she's not strong enough to tell them straight out. She will still be afraid. They're all afraid.
She turns her face heavenward, to where the brightest star glows on the northern horizon. Dear God, she thinks, I will apologize for everything when I meet you. Until then, forgive me.
Dawn is still hours away.
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A/N: Not my favourite (so sappy, ugh), but oh well. Maybe I should have left Lavi out of it and just focused on her.