She remembered, perhaps most of all, the sunlight.
Saix must have been two or three, just born, sisterless. Rikku had taken him for the weekend, told her it was time she relaxed. She didn't understand. She found being with her son the most relaxing thing of all, certainly better than being left alone. The house ached when she was left alone.
But Seymour took time off work.
She didn't know why that seemed so significant, enough to make it its own sentence. Enough to make it shrouded in importance. Maybe she should have decorated it, in little girlish scribbles, dotted the single i with a loveheart. She could do that easily, in her memory, she supposed. Maybe she should write it down. Maybe it was better as just a dream.
He took time off work, and took her to the country. Not that they didn't already live in the country, but the real kind. Where they stayed - it was domestic, forlorn, lazy. Near a beach, near a wood. Sometimes they made bonfires, on special days - but Saix would complain about the smoke and go running off. That must have been why those days stopped… she was going off an tangents again, fast-forwarding the years. But twenty years all seemed to bundle up together, mix and reel and flow back and forth, like a sea of memory. Nothing changed but the children's ages, as tough they were weathered rocks rising out of the ocean, battered by it. They marked time.
He took her to the sun.
It burned orange on her skin. She remembered the light. Unreal. The early morning caused the sky to be bleached of colour, stripped down to the palest blue. But the sun stayed like a hole that threatened to suck her up. And maybe she was, in a way, sucked up into it. But she didn't burn. She felt safe in its centre. In its warmth.
A bird with a voice like a bell sung. The grass was green. There were no trees for miles around, the horizon so big that she couldn't wait for the stars. He took her to were there were still wild horses.
Before the sunlight, and the bleached skies, before all that - they had went sneaking through the fields. He'd kept his hand over hers, tried to take her weight where he could. Be her pillar of strength (a buzzword he seemed to like repeating. She never really understood.) But she liked the walk and the hike, even when the sun was hidden and the grass chilled and the sky fell around them like thick fog.
They hid down in the grass, hid in silence. She refused to let it crack. He whispered something, his voice snaking through the air. But she didn't say anything. She just waited, patience of a saint.
And then the horses came.
Black shadows, trotting round one another. Unaware of them, or perhaps aware - but uncaring. The memories had long become faded, blurred - but in her dreams they still seemed so real. Like she'd zoomed into them three times over, each and every hair on their skin magnified. And they danced, in her memory. Round and round one another, floating on air. Hooves glittering when the sun finally burst the seams of the horizon.
She saw them fight.
Two males, tussling in the dirt. Bloody, muscled, sweat dripping from them as their throats breathed thunder and ache and strength. She wanted them to stop. He held her hand, shook his head. She'd kill herself. They wouldn't stop.
It was ugly. It was beautiful.
She saw them leave, running off into the horizon - dark shapes and long manes and heavy hooves zip-zipping away. It was like they'd just decided enough was enough, and they were gone.
She wondered if it was just a dream, sometimes. Because he promised he'd take her back. Make a tradition out of it. But then she fell pregnant, again, and he grew busier at work. They just forgot about it, meant to make something, out of it, meant to come here again. They just forgot. Or maybe it never happened.
She remembered the sunlight, though. She couldn't have dreamed that.
They'd gone running. He promised to teach her how to ride. She asked if it was cruel, to ride horses, to break them in and stick pointy things in their sides. He said that many things in life were cruel, and that it was just their lives. Think of it like a job. She'd been breathless, then, with running, pretending she was a horse. Breathless and laughing. Work for hay, maybe it didn't seem so bad, if she saw it that way. She worked for nothing.
He never taught her.
She wished he had. They could have gone riding on the beach. She'd name hers Ixion. He'd choose something historical, after Napoleon's horse, or something else. A warhorse, though, she was sure. He had a fondness for war. Maybe she'd have broken her limbs. Maybe he'd snap his hair clean off, she'd laughed, when she told him that fear. He'd smirked.
After they'd set up the tent (she'd insisted on a tent, though he complained of the bugs. Said he didn't particularly want to sleep on the earth. Couldn't they just find a hotel? She'd been stubborn) they played chess. He kissed her every time she took one of his pieces. Deepened it when she took his queen. Made love to her when she won.
He always liked it, when she destroyed him.
…
She still dreamed of those horses. They made circles in her brain. Some symbol that was supposed to have meaning, bleeding in and out of her thought, dreary and restless. Muscular, tired, fighting forever. For what? Why did they fight like that, cut each other open, like that? Was it for love? Did they like to be destroyed, too? Two knights on a single checker patch, struggling because of invisible fingers poking and prodding them in one direction.
No, she thought. Chess didn't involve fighting, she remembered now, what Seymour said. Pieces just fell down. It was instant. The slaughter was painless.
…
She remembered, maybe even more than the sunlight, them walking away. She'd like to walk with them, sometime, go wherever it was they went. Maybe even fade out of the rim of her memory, with them. Vanish into the horizon.
"Once, when I was a teenager, I wanted horses tattooed on my chest," he'd whispered to her in the night. She'd rolled over, placed her hand on him. His skin had glowed (like he'd sucked up the sunlight.) She'd arched how brows, laughed.
"You, with tattoos?" He'd pressed his head to hers, said something, made her laugh again. "I can't imagine it…" And then, "Maybe you should."
He never did.
She'd laughed when they had went running. She'd pretended they were horses.
Maybe they'd been fighting. Maybe they were like chess pieces. Two knights, on a single checker patch.
She'd won.