13. Touch (part 2)
She was aloft… She was unbreakable…
Peter.
Descending gracefully. A dandelion seed.
Green. Red. Pink. White.
Silence and sunlight.
A gust of wind. Raindrops. Snowdrops.
The air itself. Beverly would be his breathing.
She let herself drape across his back, the tense muscles of his shoulders, the greyness of his scalp.
She'd lost the volume of her body, her face, her fingers. She had no skin to brush against his own.
So, instead, she felt the emptiness that enveloped him. She glinted off the moisture on his back. She slithered into the cave within which his heartbeat echoed. His naked chest, her emerald bodice.
You're going to freeze out here, love…
This melody… The sound of him… A rumbling city of darkness and salt…
Keep playing… Don't stop just yet…
Ba-dum… Ba-dum…
Green earrings winked into the morning and Beverly felt unnervingly at ease, all at once.
She was as a pebble dropping into the sea. No point in fighting the pull. The only choice was to surrender to it. Each passing heartbeat was a pull toward the belly of this depthless ocean.
Peter, I wish you could see me right now…
A forgotten saturation of color. Green, glimmering from her chest, her ears. A shadow upon her face. Feathers. A tickle teasing her arms.
I can just imagine your reaction, heh…
She'd lived with winter forever and only now she acknowledged its power. It was cold outside, in spite of the sunlight. And she had no heartbeat to combat the weather with.
It felt funny, somehow, to miss her own pain. She felt incomplete without her heart.
I feel so light…
To wish out loud had been a fatal mistake.
A little too light…
Her gown spanned out and around him, absorbing the whiteness of the sky. She foolishly attempted to shelter him from the cold. But she was only sunshine and frost. A wafting memory. A quiver in his breathing.
Like I don't even exist anymore…
She couldn't warm him now. She had lost the fire in her chest and she was now a winter's daughter.
"Peter Lake."
The governess.
Peter Lake.
Beverly liked his name from the moment she heard it. It reminded her of the harbor. American water.
Machine grease, rusted metal, garages, too. A puddle of gasoline under a shower of rain.
Where are you from…
"Peter Lake."
Galaxies flood your belly.
Cecil had cautioned against speaking. So Beverly waited, like she'd waited for him each morning.
With her piano, and her crickets, and her cruel heart.
Your cruel heart…
He rose as slowly as the grass, crushed by the frost. But he did rise.
He didn't release that which he was embracing. Not until he was compelled otherwise, by an icy-cold voice, and glazy, loveless eyes.
"She's no longer there, that is just a body."
Beverly once promised to defend him.
If they speak a word of it to tease you, I will personally put them in their place.
It'd been the day they met, as it was nearing its end. Him, foggy black eyes steadying her own, his back to the wall. Dark clothes clutching his arms and his neck. He was the night that she craved. She'd taken off her shoes.
Will you walk with me?
She'd promised him…
My hero.
Beverly had always wanted to be a hero. Anyone's hero.
To rescue crickets from music sheets had filled her with plenty of satisfaction to drown out her anger.
He'd called her his hero, that night, with his back to the wall.
My hero.
And she'd believed him.
Because he'd been grinning. Lines breaking across his face. A map, unfolding, fanning out into a meadow of paper rhombi.
Peter Lake was no liar, she'd known, then. For he'd let her see him in his entirety. All the possible routes they could take. His willingness to accompany her.
She'd asked, "Will you walk with me?"
And he'd agreed within a breath.
"Yes."
He never hesitated.
She hadn't loved him then.
My life.
She could have loved him.
She wished, now, that she had. So that she could have treasured him more. So that one night could have been broken down into two. Or three.
My hero, my hero…
She'd waited for him the first night and she'd had no right to do so. No right, none…
My hero…
He needed a hero today. At this instant.
So Beverly lay down her hands and found her keys. She played a stringless melody. She couldn't hear the twinkling starlight from down here. A sky of water muffled all distractions.
She spoke softly.
"I'm here."
A cricket, harmonizing into the silent morning. She didn't hear her own voice.
But the breeze, somehow, thinned around her. Winter's fangs sharpened. And the governess quivered. And a dark satisfaction teased her shapeless fingertips. Green glinted from her ears.
I never left.
Peter Lake did release the body, though hesitantly. He kept his eyes shut as the corpse was dragged away.
Beverly looked at what he'd just released. Herself, pale, dead. She was terrified to find that she felt nothing at all.
Say "America."
It wasn't due to her emptied chest. Without a heart, she had seen him cry for the first time, and it had crushed her completely.
And the sight of him, now, curled into a ball, cold and naked and frightened and alone, completely alone… This filled her with a pain so intense, she suspected her feverish heart would have never been capable of coping with it.
But for her own corpse, her weak body, her paralyzed heart. Purple lips, closed eyes, a princess of frost, asleep in a flurry of bedsheets, surrounded by the tombs of a forgotten spring… nothing.
Nothing.
Because she was green, and infinite, and she was here.
That is just a body.
She was… here. Everywhere. Anywhere she wanted.
I feel so light.
She needed to see her family. Her mother, too. Wherever she was.
And Cecil had told her not to worry about Peter. He'd told her so much and she'd listened to most of what he'd said.
You cannot touch him. Not with these hands.
But she did worry about Peter. More terribly than she'd ever been capable of, back when she had a heart that could shatter or a number of days she could burn through.
He walked and she followed.
His hair was black and greasy with sweat. His skin, purple under the eyes, red around the nose. Dark eyes so pooled with shattered strength that the white in them looked muddy and grey.
She floated away from him and green cloth clawed at her neck. She tried touching his face.
"Do you feel me?" she dared to ask.
She spoke and heard nothing at all. Peter trembled.
She'd never tasted the universe before. It was akin to touching a rusty spoon with the tip of her tongue.
Galaxies flood your belly.
She didn't speak much afterwards. But she never forsook him.
She simply took advantage of her lack of shape. Of her hollowness and lack of sound.
Beverly has died.
Piano keys, slamming. Her father was awake and he'd finally given up the firelight.
He waited for something that Beverly didn't want to see. She saw so much that, even if she could speak painlessly, it would be unfeasible to put her visions down into words.
There were not enough words she could use, none that could properly turn her own sight into speech.
Peter…
She never forsook him. She merely broke herself into pieces and let them float upon the house, like breadcrumbs. A handful to him. A handful to others.
Miss Penn is dead.
She heard everything except the sound of her own breathing. Or the drumming of a heart of flames. She missed her fever. She hated how lonely she felt.
Miss Penn is dead…
Little Willa's dark head, drowned to white with sunlight.
Your sister is dead.
The moisture upon her cheeks. Her little hands, gloveless, folded upon her own lap. Her white little feet dropping soundlessly onto the carpet. She meandered the halls with vacant black eyes.
I'm dead, little one.
Windows, glass. Showers of sunlight. The earrings trembled and green teased the corners of Beverly's gaze.
You look more dead than I am.
Willa's eyes were so alike Peter's.
Dark eyes had always looked sadder to Beverly. Sadder than blue eyes, or green eyes, or grey eyes. Darkness. Black. Brown. A city in perpetual twilight. Starved for color. Hence why they were so responsive to it.
Where are you from?
She slithered through curtains of yellow and cream. Let herself collapse silently onto the bed, still unmade. She lay behind him. Peter Lake retrieved his clothes.
Peter… Peter… I never told you how much I like your name…
Beverly clung to him by any means she could, looping herself in rings of sunlight. She dove into the white of his eyes, his wet face, his lips, open and crooked, frozen in a silent whimper. His harbored breaths. The heaviness of his chest.
How much I love you now… As you are…
She had no senses to stimulate, no way to experience the texture of his skin. But she did as she could. She pressed herself to the space between his shoulder blades. She dropped kisses of sunshine upon the skin she found there.
She shone upon Willa's face, but she could offer nothing but cold. The empty air she could breathe upon.
Then her little sister broke into a run, into the tent, into Peter's arms. And they hugged for a while. And Peter wept into Willa's shoulder, and Willa wept into Peter's hair.
"I'm sorry- I'm sorry, Willa…"
"Don't say that…"
"She was right next to me…"
His voice was distorted by whimpers. Broken into splinters of wood. Beverly had no eyes to weep with. No arms to wrap around them. She was as useless as ever. A pebble, dropping, dropping…
"She was in my arms… She was- I- I- I didn't- I-"
"Breathe," Willa whispered. She struggled to speak for a moment, but she managed to say: "You loved her… She loved you… You did nothing wrong…"
Oh, my friend… My miracle…
She was the air they breathed.
My life…
She never forsook them.
Author's Note: To anyone who is here today, thank you for reading.
I took longer than usual to get this chapter done, but I think I spent all this time productively. And as a result, I really like the look of this chapter.
And, again, I legitimately love writing from Beverly's POV. I think that this is a perspective from her that we definitely needed to explore in the film. I don't know how they would have portrayed her as a spirit, but that makes things more fun for me, to be honest. I get to invent my own ghosts. So... that's lovely.
I therefore wrote her as infinite, as rays of sunshine (in the movie she appears as rays of light, so I explored that, and I love writing about these sort of things cause... they're just so pretty :3), but, naturally, being invisible, she cannot touch Peter, or offer any comfort. That she is basically air - so, she is the air they breathe, I thought, which is not only poetic, and a little cheesy (cause I am the way I am and this is my re-interpretation of an already-cheesy and wonderful film XD), but... also reinforces one of my favorite original lines of dialogue from "A Star in the Lake," where Peter calls Beverly "his life" in Chapter 69. I love that line, for real. I love it :3
So... now Beverly really is his life. And, in both the movie and my re-interpretation, Beverly literally contributes to Peter's life continuing. You'll see.
Again, thanks for being here, you make my day by just showing up. Thank you. See you next time!