Chapter 9: Whistles In the Wind
It burned.
Worse than all the gashes and tears from the farthest tumbles and highest falls over a lifetime of climbing fences and trees.
Worse than little Lucy girl daring to reach her hand into the open flames of the campfires and stoves, all just because Mama warned her not to.
Worse than holding all that flaming debris up with every shred of that mighty, tidal strength an entire wave of adrenaline could offer, all to free the boy who promised to take care of her. Saving his life to keep hers and find her way home.
None of that adrenaline did her much good now, having staggered and scraped her way through the brush and mud under sheets of rain that hadn't broken in all that time she'd lied under its cover. Afraid to move. Afraid to even breathe in fear of rousing that sound of gunshots tearing across the treeline back toward her.
But she'd made it. Sprawled there on the cabin floorboards, losing light every second she couldn't get herself to keep moving. With the bullet that bit across her shoulder and the other that lodged itself in the back of her leg, the last thing she wanted to do now was move again.
Her right arm was still good and strong, at least, with the left side taking that hit. It'd stung, but at least she could still do all of the things that needed the use of both. Her right leg, though... Didn't need to look at it to know it'd been in bad shape. All her bones and nerves were screaming it loud enough everywhere else throughout her.
Lying there with her eyes staring up at those wood beams above, she fought that trembling that came with every breath, so she kept them deep. Kept them slow going. And most of all, she kept those eyes open and as wide and awake as she could. Drifting off here now was taking that ticket waiting for her to Hadestown.
No, Lucy girl. You ain't going nowhere. Not today. Not yet.
She wasn't ready to ride that train yet.
Not without putting up some fight. She knew those odds were bad in that arena. She wasn't going to let this be the thing to do her in after beating all of them.
Move, girl. You've got to move.
She knew what to do. Had Billy Taupe to thank for that, actually.
The only second Lucy Gray let herself shut those eyes was when she couldn't help but laugh at just how bad that irony was bruising her. Like it'd shoved its fingers into the wound itself to dig that slug out.
Fucking Billy Taupe.
After everything, you're the one who's going to save me, now?
About time he did some good, at least. He could go right back to resting in peace after.
Yeah. There was that one time. Billy Taupe falling in with Spruce and his gang. She never knew what the deal was with him, until the day that stupid ass boy got to feel a gun in his hands for the first time.
Always knew she hated them for a reason.
And maybe it was just a thing with boys with something to prove. Like that rifle was supposed to make him a man all of a sudden. She remembered the look Spruce wore that whole time. Barely even convinced with this one, but he wasn't about to pass up on making some use of an idiot eager for the cause.
And—always—stupid, fucking Billy Taupe with something to prove. Insisting on the 'bigger barrel' when he'd only taken his first shot at some cans earlier that day. Saying he needed the practice and fighting over that damn rifle with one of the other boys.
And, of course, that horrible thing would misfire in his hands.
Why didn't boys ever listen?
I told you, didn't I? That those hands were best for making your music.
He'd always said as much to her. But it never sounded like a nice thing coming out of him.
Poor bastard, Spruce's boy. Landed a round in his leg for his trouble. And that was the thing, too. Billy Taupe couldn't even keep it the hell together watching someone else taking a bullet in front of him. Wasn't anything like shooting at cans and squirrels anymore. Though, she supposed, most people probably couldn't.
She certainly hadn't. Not that first time, and not the last.
Whole thing had Spruce yelling orders at the other boys over all the screaming. And all that goosehead could do was stand there, shell-shocked in his boots at what he'd just done.
"Hey, you! Your boy's useless! Come over here—"
So she did. Came running over, just a body with hands to lend to do what was needed. Hated every second of it, but the urge to help won out over the natural and very desired impulse to shut her eyes and look away.
"Got any moonshine on you? Anything hard works. The harder the better."
She'd been confused by that, wondering if it was meant to be a comfort for the poor screaming bastard. It was never her habit to keep drinks close, but Billy Taupe usually kept a flask on him, so she called for it.
"Good. You got a clean kerchief or something on you? Scarf works, too. Something you aren't keen on keeping."
She pulled one out from her pocket while he took out the knife always hidden under his vest. Seeing it got her nervous, but she steeled herself for whatever was coming. Couldn't lose her stomach then, knowing that whimpering boy in front of her had it all worse.
"All right. I'm about to dig that round out, you hear?"
He was looking at her when he said it, but it felt more like it was prepping the kid to brace for it. Even gave him the leather sheath to his knife to bite down on.
Lucy Gray had never heard someone scream bloody fucking murder as bad as when she'd watched him sink the point of that knife into that wound. Spruce's other boys did their best fighting to keep his limbs still from all that thrashing, just so he could make it quick. It'd been a horror to see, and yet she couldn't look away. She felt the water in her eyes while her breaths got short in her lungs, making her lips tremble where she had no voice to scream along with him.
And finally, after agonizing seconds that felt far too long, he'd popped that mangled piece of metal out of him.
"Hold him!"
Hardly over yet, when she'd watched as he poured whatever Billy Taupe had onto that gaping, bloody hole in that boy's leg. The rest of them practically had to pile themselves on him to keep all that convulsing down. Even that piece of leather between his teeth had fallen out by that point from all his wretched screaming, sick and spittle spilling from his mouth.
"Hey, doll! Get that cloth over here—!"
It'd taken a moment before she could catch her breaths up with her head, and another for that head to move those two feet on over. She stared at him with all the wits she still had about her.
"Press it down over it. Open hands, firm pressure. Don't mind his jerking. They all got him down."
She nodded, only managing to keep it together by his clearheaded guidance after all that barking at his boys. All with the one 'useless one'—hers, apparently—hovering in the background of it all, still panicking in his weeping curses watching it all go down.
Should've made for a valuable learning moment in hindsight. But those didn't ever seem to sink in for the stubborn ones. Especially those sorts who've always got something to prove. Important thing, though, was that she got to learn plenty.
Right, Lucy girl always itched to learn the kinds of things people never cared enough to show some dumb Covey girl.
Hope you saw just what my hands could do then, Billy Taupe. I'm more than just some pretty words and a guitar.
And those smaller, nimbler hands, too, had helped with cinching one of their belts tight over her kerchief on the wound. By the end of it, they had that unlucky boy somewhat calmed down. At the very least, the screaming had been over with.
"Sh-Shouldn't...we take him to...you know, a doctor?"
Of course, it was only because he'd felt bad. But that stupid question coming out of Billy Taupe's mouth? Always told him, too, the one he had was better for singing songs with.
Doctors were bad news. Everybody knew that in Twelve. And Spruce had said as much, taking a swig from what was left in that flask before giving the rest to the one wearing a new hole in his leg.
He never did think too far ahead sometimes, and it took a band of rebels to remind him how bad a bullet wound was going to look when guns were supposed to be banned. So they fixed up a brace for their boy to make it look like it'd been a bad break. Made him some makeshift crutch to hobble around on, too.
"...Won't mind if he hangs onto this for you now, do you, Clade? Consider it...a bit of a reparation payment for damages?"
She'd known Billy Taupe to get temperamental over how full (or empty) his bottles were. That was his daddy's old flask he'd lost that day, too. Had nothing to say to it, humbled silent with nothing but a nod and his head hung low. Part of her wanted to welcome Spruce and his boys, right then, to the rest of what he'd kept tucked away in all those corners and cracks back at their house.
"Your girl here, though? Good job keeping that head on your shoulders. Lucy, was it?"
That's Lucy Gray.
Couldn't remember why she hadn't corrected him that day, but it was all right. Not that she'd liked it, but plenty of people didn't get it right the first time.
The memory of that blood and all that screaming crippled her to the marrow, but she knew what needed to be done. She'd be left crippled worse if she kept lying there doing damned nothing.
Let's go, Lucy girl. You know what you've got to do. Move it.
She lamented how all that red already had her skirt stained through. Silly as it was, as if the earth and soil of the woods weren't already going to do it. Lifting the hem away, she braced herself for the mangled sight.
Count your luck before the stars cash 'em in now...
The bullet had gone in just above the cuff of her boot. At least the stains on the leather were something that could be cleaned, a relief that it hadn't been torn through completely by the shot. She could manage for the time being without needing to peel the thing off with her leg as messed up as was.
So Lucy Gray went about doing as she'd seen Spruce do. She needed her tools. Still had that knife on her. She hadn't been too keen on the idea, but that orange scarf she'd eventually found again shambling her way back through the brushes could make for workable bandages. Billy Taupe, again, would come through with the third thing, when she'd remembered one of his favorite stashing spots under some loose corner floorboard. Inside, a bottle of that brown whiskey he loved so much, unopened. The black labeled stuff from District 9 was contraband only the shadiest dealers at the Hob were peddling. Even with her leg firing up all sorts of agony, dragging herself across that cabin floor, the bitter part of her had to wonder how much of their earnings he'd burned for this.
And bless his drunken sod soul for it.
No matter how much her body seared from the inside, how hot and sweaty her brow and palms had become from all her exertion, that knife still felt like ice in her hand. She recalled just how Spruce brought its tip to the wound, and that trembling in her bones would only worsen the closer she got hers.
Move, Lucy girl.
That boy's screams rattled through her skull the more she tried to keep her head straight.
You've got to do it.
She couldn't afford to lose out to her nerves here.
Move it.
But the shrieking. That thrashing. All that blood. She didn't even have anything to bite down on to take it all. Her face crumbled as she felt all that terror welling in the corners of her eyes. How her breaths sputtered in the cold air, already feeling halfway into her grave.
She closed her eyes to her tears. To the quiet, to the solitude. Let herself escape for as far as those breaths could carry. And the girl left behind gave herself the only gift she had left to her. The only thing remaining that was truly hers.
A requiem.
A swan song.
Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
Move.
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.
The lyrics came, natural as a billow in the breeze. Like it was the things that moved her soul that chose them, knowing who they wanted to sing for. Hers was just their voice to borrow.
She tried to think only of how Spruce's hands maneuvered that knife's edge when she plunged it into her flesh. How precise, how deft, how merciless it needed to be. Even as she cried in what felt like death throes, her voice never wavered in its song. Both her comfort and her confidant. Her last lifeline. It was all she had now.
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt where none abide,
—The sweetest thing that ever grew
Upon the mountainside!
How many attempts she'd given it. She neither knew nor recalled. All of it just hurt like hellfire. And still, she'd sung through the pain. Through the suffering and through the grief.
The wonder of what had happened.
How had it all come to this?
The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
How did she end up here? Lucy Gray, the solitary child. Wandering the woods. Caught in the storm.
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.
All alone.
Her entire life, Lucy Gray had never been truly alone. Not after she'd lost her family. She'd always had the Covey and with them, her home.
Not when she'd been thrown onto that train to the Capitol. Dumped into that zoo enclosure. There was Jessup there right beside her.
Not even in that arena, running for her life. She'd had her boy then. In her hands, when she'd clutched tight onto that silver compact. In her heart, when she'd curled away into herself in those cold and dusty tunnels.
They wept—and, turning homeward, cried,
"In heaven we all shall meet";
—When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.
And finally.
The sound of that twisted wad of metal clattering onto those floorboards. How Lucy Gray wept as every single cell that made up her nerves, her veins, her tendons and bones writhed in the brief respite to her misery. She fell backwards onto the floor, bloody knife slipping from her gnarled grasp.
And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, not ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.
...Just a few more seconds. Please.
She begged for just a bit more of them, but her fingers had already clutched themselves around that bottle of whiskey at her side, knowing better. This couldn't wait any longer. With all that adrenaline coming back at the assault on her nerves, she'd gotten that sealed cap off with surprising ease.
They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one
Took a heavy swig for herself. For Billy Taupe in his hereafter.
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none.
She poured the drink. Like watering the weeds. Seeing them grow into brambles cutting into the soles of your bare feet. Their thorned vines climbing up that leg and straight into the bleeding hole in it. The screams that followed were enough to halt her song, burning every last shred of her lungs as they came out.
"F-Fuck...fucking Billy Taupe...!"
It'd simply been easier to keep screaming at him then, with his bottle in her hand and splashes of his drink setting her maimed leg on fire. And because at least she never needed to wonder what he was feeling back. If he was hurting like her, too. If he was just as sad. Just as angry.
...Anything.
Anything at all, just to not think about him.
Coryo. Her boy.
And just for that moment, her single deliverance was to rage at a dead one who wasn't hers, instead of the one who was left and gone. Knowing he was somewhere out there in the world, living away from her. Existing in spite of her.
No, it hurt too damned much.
Wondering.
She didn't want that soul in her hurting like her body and breaking like her heart. That would've been the end of her with all certainty, and she didn't want to die like this.
She didn't want to die.
Once her cursing quieted and her cries quelled, only her muted sobs were left to fill the cabin. She lied there. Silent and cold.
Afraid.
Alone on that cabin floor, the only other sounds to take comfort in had been the fall of rain on that worn roof overhead. So she wept with it. Pretended it was raining for her. That the heavens wept for poor Lucy Gray. Like everyone had in that ballad. The lost ghost girl wandering the woods for all time.
She let herself be just like her for once. Be that child—cold, alone, and afraid. She let herself cry until her lungs choked and withered, until those wells within her raw, swollen eyes had grown barren of any tears left to spill. She let herself be the simple, innocent little girl she'd never been permitted to be.
The Capitol didn't think she ever was one. Hardly human, let alone one who'd been nothing but a child.
...And Coriolanus Snow?
Perhaps he had stopped believing so as well. As Capitol as they come, thicker than the blood in his veins, finally brought back to his senses.
'I'll do my best to take care of you.'
She wasn't supposed to be alone out here.
'We're responsible for each other's lives now.'
You said you'd come with me.
'You're mine and I'm yours. It's written in the stars.'
But he was gone.
His guns and guilt with him.
'You're pure as the driven snow.'
Maybe it was just her own damned fault for trusting too much. For needing it so bad that she'd wanted to believe she was being given as much as she gave.
Twice burned. By two boys who simply hadn't thought she was worth their trouble. Saved and condemned, and condemned and saved. Maybe she just wasn't meant to have anyone. To belong to anyone. Just like how she'd never quite belonged to anywhere.
How much time she'd given for death to come, waiting on that floor. She couldn't remember. Long enough to grow numb from the cold. Enough for the shock of that pain to dull with it. How red and weary her eyes must have become, crying along with that mourning sky above. They stared open and still, ahead at nothing in front of her. There'd been nothing there to see, anyway.
Here, there was no one except for Lucy Gray. And now with the clarity returning, so, too, had the thoughts settled, and with them all their doubts. Sinking deep beneath her skin and down into her bones with the cold and the rain. It hurt her more than the gunshot ripping into her, more than the knife burrowing down to find that bullet, more than the cleansing liquor on the open wound it'd left.
She was terrified.
There, all alone.
With nothing left to herself other than the words that found their way back to her breaths. And they sang again, all on their own. It hadn't been over yet. Not while the mockingjay still had its song to finish.
—Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
Heavy as those breaths had become, she'd heaved that melody forth on each brittle swell. The words along with it hardly a whispered hush on her lips.
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
It was only her now. Her and these woods. If she could ever walk again, she would walk them for the rest of her days. Let those trees take her into their fold.
She would continue on among them.
Her new therebefore.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And her voice would trail wherever she went.
A marker.
A reminder.
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
Lucy Gray was here.
.
.
.
She wakes with a cold sweat and a burning in her body. There is a cry locked deep in her lungs as her legs blindly kick at her sheets. They feel like an iron curtain bearing down on her body, hot and suffocating and immovable against all her efforts to shake it away. There is a need, a desperation to uncover it all—that brand she feels searing into her flesh beneath those covers.
A panicked breath escapes through her teeth as she finally manages to claw the layers away, her body feverish as it jolts upright with the memory of those damp cabin floorboards imprinted where she lies.
The fire she feels is so real and all too familiar.
She looks with her own eyes, searching with her frantic gaze.
Sees.
There is nothing alight there. The flames beneath her skin, only imagined. There is none of the blood her mind has her fooled into believing should be there.
And yet, she feels all of it. Still so viscerally ingrained into her flesh as fresh as that day. The wound in her leg is no longer open and angry, but its ache burrows impossibly deep into the memory of those very nerves it'd torn through. She stirs her leg sprawled against the covered downs there, seeing nothing but what that bullet has left behind, still a remnant, still unchanged. With caution, she moves her knees, drawing them up as though to test her own senses herself. Just to know it's not some wicked deception. That she's not still there in those woods, at the mercy of those conjured spirits that walk them and all their mischief.
No. They're not about, she has to remind herself. There is nothing natural where she currently is that would entice them to follow her all the way out here. It's only their touch that still lingers. Traces of the time she'd walked so close to them, straddling this world and the one just a step beyond its bounds. Alongside all those spirits and their tales hidden in its trees. The phantom pains that will never leave her, always reaching back through those visions time and again, never permitting her to forget.
It's only when her skin is reminded again of its bareness by the morning chill that the burning in her leg begins to quell. With the grasp of the hour dawning, dimly blanketing her white room in its pale shroud, a different numbness starts to settle inside her by the time all her waking senses have resurfaced. She begins to remember more.
All the traces of the night past still left behind on her flesh.
The spectral trails on her hips. How they bloom across her bosom. Their naked touches on her neck. Her lips. Between her legs.
Traces of him. All there. All over.
She feels all of his marks, but the vestiges of all the decadence he'd left have long faded from them. All that lingers are the soiled remains of everything in his claim. And how profoundly it all echoes in his absence.
Lucy Gray fills her tub with the hottest water that her skin can bear. She lets its mists fill the room to ward off the morning air. Lets herself sit in it, because she needs it to fill what that chill has left hollowed out in her. She lets it scald. Lets it burn deep. Erode away everything that remains sunken and buried between all those layers she can never see. All the places she can never reach.
The water will never be hot enough to do all that. She knows this. But maybe if it hurts her enough, it can drown enough out from her nerves, from her memory. It's only temporary relief, but she can savor even the briefest respite she can find.
She steps back out into her room, all dressed and cleansed of whatever the night left with her. It's a funny thing, she notices. There's hardly any visible wreckage of it left by them in these walls, his marks nearly absent everywhere except on her. Sown even deeper than that, the rest unseen are all woven into the very fibers beneath her skin.
She shifts her weight off her bad leg.
Nothing new there, really.
But she knows as well as any that it's impossible to erase everything.
Or, maybe it's that he lets himself linger by choice. The way he'd left behind the supplies they'd brought to that cabin—for whom? The wood ghost who would haunt that abandoned place forevermore? Or maybe it'd just been more trouble than it's worth with one less pair of hands to help carry it all the way back.
Sure. That seemed more like his line of reasoning. Always brutally practical, Coriolanus Snow.
So she looks around. This room has been her little cabin in the woods. She searches for what traces he hadn't bothered to take along this time. He isn't a man with a lot of tells, but he also isn't one to do too many things without purpose. Maybe there'll be something that lets her see more of what those dead glances across the room won't say.
His red rose still stands tall in her vase of flowers by the door, right where she'd left it. She wants to find it a proper spot, a proper home, so dreadfully out of place among that arrangement. Seemed like he'd had similar thoughts, when she'd caught him right as he'd reached for it last night. Right before...everything.
At her feet is the lone, discarded glass still on the floor where it'd slipped from their fingers. So perfectly polished clear, it'd have been easy to miss against the spotless white of the carpet, if not for the drops of red still welled at the bottom of the toppled glass. On its rim, too, are traces of his lips that sampled it. His lips on hers. His claim.
Every bit as much as it was hers.
It'd been her lips that drained what was left from that glass. Hers that drank, too, from his own. Her claim.
Mine and yours.
She sets it back onto the table beside the other he'd poured for her, waiting untouched and forgotten.
And somewhere else between there and the bed, another spot of red catches her eye. The little clip of petals she'd given him. Probably lost between the mess of their entangled lips and limbs and all the clothes that fell at their feet along the way. She picks this up too. She'll make sure these all find their way back where they belong. It isn't as though she's out to wreck his things, after all.
Lucy Gray looks over all these traces. All that he's left behind—
Flame red, passion red, love red.
Defiance red, pain red, anger red.
She's seen all these things exist in his eyes. It's hard to know which is there at any given moment. Most times, she thinks it might just be all of it, all at once. Sometimes, she can't even shoulder the weight of it, just being in his presence. So much for just one man. Too much for the girl standing at his side.
She'd felt it burning in his lips. She'd felt it in every way his hands roamed and his breaths whispered. She'd felt it all bearing down on her as she lied, ruined to pieces beneath him. So utterly dismantled, she could only take reprieve in the mercy of his departure.
And yet he leaves her completely lost.
He leaves her bereft.
He leaves her alone.
Somehow, he manages to leave her feeling as though she'd never left those woods.
It's just past noon when she decides to stop by the greenhouse. A bit earlier than she normally does, having decided to forgo lunch altogether. She'll probably hear about it from her keeper in due time, but she simply has no appetite for it that day.
And on the subject of devils and their unuttered names...
Lucy Gray stops dead in her steps when she sees him there at the end of the path, crouched over his roses—the yellow ones at the farther side that she'd plundered for own vase earlier that week. The habit she's made of her soft and steady footfalls is still well ingrained in those feet, as it seems his attention remains entirely occupied by the blooms in front of him. At least, she prefers to believe that over the simple distraction of his task at hand. Of the fact that this is the most hallowed of his private spaces, where he permits himself the leisure of leaving his guard at the gate when he passes through it.
And yet somehow, it's as though her mere presence, plain and soundless, is what manages to unsettle his thoughts, able to reach even beyond what the senses can realize. The glass house becomes a field of graves, where the whispers of his flowers billow across his ear like the voices of specters. Like the trick of the trees that swallowed the boundaries of District 12. All of it summoned back by the emergence of their lone revenant that has never left him.
It stills his hands like the coming of winter, silent and sudden. How it descends on him only now, that she's brought those woods he's tried so hard to burn from his memory back with her. They will always follow wherever she walks on this earth, it would seem.
In the end, it had been he who'd opened his doors to it all. An invitation to his world with open arms and a promise.
The inexplicable, almost clairvoyant intuition that beckons at every grain of his being ushers his gaze. He turns his eyes the way a solitary man keeps vigil for any looming apparitions watching from his shadow.
Lucy Gray reads enough familiarity between his motions and his form to think it's somehow become a habit of his. The same way she's made one of how her steps tread.
...Just me, funny face.
She's no ghost, but maybe it's just that he's still too used to thinking of her as one.
A beat is all it takes for Coriolanus' sights to soften when he realizes this for himself as well. There's a sense of solace that appears to wash over his entire countenance then, where her own only lingers, back again as its imperfect reflection steeped in nothing but its own wilting consternation.
Inside and out, the dissymmetry is too much for her to bear, so she tears her eyes away before anything can sound from his parting lips to spread the fractures any deeper. Her feet steer back around with her eyes too swiftly for her to even glimpse how his being perishes there before her. This man. The most powerful of them in all of Panem. Left withering like the transitory phases of the very flowers he stands among. These blooms, his entire glass house are but nothing in the face of the immutable sentinel evergreens that keep her.
"Lucy Gray, wait—"
It's almost desperate, the sound of his voice just then. Hardly even an utter, but it'd been enough to halt her in her feet. And yet, the part of her that's still lost in those woods screams at them to move.
Of all ironies she's had to live out, this one had been especially spiteful. She couldn't even run anymore, even if she wanted.
She hears his rustling by those rose bushes. The clattering of his shears and shuffling of his soles against the mosaic ground. Even the cadences of those uneven breaths he's making all that effort to still.
"You don't have to go."
Several breaths pass, but she still doesn't respond.
"I know that...you usually come here to be alone."
The glass walls of this space seem to only magnify the despondence his faint pitch carries. There is a resignation left in its ebb that draws her regard at last.
"...Didn't mean to walk in on you," she tells him quietly. Apologetically. "I'll leave you to it—"
"Stay."
She's slow to meet his eyes, but it's clear enough from her hesitant gaze that she needs more than just an invitation to.
'Convince me.'
All he needs to do is cross that sea.
"I...I was just about to finish here anyway."
Part of him is sure it's hardly a competent enough lie when it's obvious that he's barely gotten anything done yet. Perhaps she even sees through him enough to know he shouldn't even be there right now. That President Snow normally makes his visits to his flowerbeds in the evening hours at the end of day.
He knows it's also why she only ever comes earlier and well before then.
Lucy Gray never explicitly asks it of him, but he leaves anyway.
Coriolanus returns later when the sun grazes the horizon, and the wash of violet into midnight spanning both ends of the horizon colors the transparent ceiling of his glass house. He walks down the aisles of buds closing with the dying light of the day, following each of those tessera-lined paths all the way back to his nursery of roses.
And of course, he sees nothing but traces of Lucy Gray, right here where he'd left her. All of his routine tasks have been finished. Beds watered, leaves pruned, and blooms harvested. Sitting on the glass table by his tool cart are the collected cuttings that bear her unmistakable Covey touch—choices in a full array of colors his own muted tastes could never compose.
And he sees, too, another of her signatures—a shred of twine probably scavenged from some corner there, fixed around the plain porcelain vase. Holding it together is the familiar little stolen flower clip she'd given him the night prior. There is a stippling of remorse that touches his faint smile then, when he realizes he hadn't even noticed he'd forgotten it in between everything. Though forgivable, his mind and body having been elsewhere entirely, it had been her gift to him. A gesture. A token. Something he thinks he'll treasure more than any of these roses in front of him, simply because it'd been hers.
'Don't forget, now,' he can almost hear her telling him. And he likes to imagine she'd done so with a smile. That she'd put together all of this with the weight gone and a glow in her heart, bearing that crooked little tooth at the corner of her lips while she adjusts each bloom just so. Makes sure the twine is secured on just right.
She's done all of these things for him, his sweet Lucy Gray. Something of his, made into her own, and made just for him.
No...I won't forget.
Coriolanus takes the flower clip, but leaves the arrangement until he can find a place for it somewhere.
His route back to his chambers always brings him past all the other corridors to every other guest room in the wing. Like a natural impulse, his steps begin to slow as he comes to the very last of them, just before the turn that will take him to his room. He lingers at one end of the hallway while staring down the other at that last door on the right. The one he's made a ritual out of visiting almost every other night now in the short time it'd been taken residence.
There is hardly a discernible thought that ushers him to do just as he had those previous nights. Only an instinct. One that drives him, natural as gravity's attraction, or the joining of equivalent polarities. There are no formed words on his mind yet, even as he softly brings a knuckle to the carved alabaster face of that door.
A slower and more hesitant rhythm sounds this time. And even slower still, the seconds seem to pass as he waits there. His lips press thin as his fingers stir at his sides. The ones tucked away in his pocket absently knead at the smooth petals of the clip he's stowed away there.
It's silent from his side of the door. Enough for him to hear the reticent tide of his own breath in its subdued draw. By the end of it, his gaze descends until it finds the polished shine of his shoe, lifting with the single, idle tap of his toes. And that single tap is all he spares to know that he's given it enough time waiting at that door.
It would have opened by now if she'd cared enough to come to it.
He has no business disturbing her any further, so he turns around and paces back down the path he came. He makes it a few steps before his ears catch the faintest slide of latches to hinges. The shifting current in the still air brushes the back of his neck like a beckoning touch that halts his footfalls.
Coriolanus slowly turns his gaze around.
Lingering there, framed by the sliver of her half-opened door, she stares out like a little ghost girl. Like she's just found an unfamiliar stranger at a lost turn.
Maybe he should just go, he thinks as his feet bring him back around where his gaze lies.
Maybe he should just leave her be, he reasons as he drifts closer where those natural, cosmic forces tether him.
Maybe...
...All thoughts quell to nothing when he comes to the threshold. When she's swallowed in his arms. When her impossibly small hands have him cradled where their lips meet.
'There's a natural goodness built into human beings.'
Her words echo back from those woods.
'You know when you've stepped across the line into evil...'
His hands cling to her as though she might just vanish with the winds again. As if the trees might just spirit away what's theirs back from his grasp.
'...And it's your life's challenge to try and stay on the right side of that line.'
No, she isn't theirs. She was never theirs.
Here in his arms, to have and keep, she is back where she belongs. Safe and sound.
And his.
Lucy Gray, too, doesn't forget. She wants to believe it. She wants to believe this is the reason why she is here.
He came back.
He found me.
Her boy.
Better late than never. Even if it hurt so damned much all those thousand and one nights, and the thousand more after. Wondering and waiting.
He'd come back for her in the end. Wasn't that what mattered most? Could anything else weigh as much as this?
Her boy kept his promise.
She wants to leave those woods and that cabin. Let those memories die there in the rain in her place. She's tired of wandering. Tired of being alone. Wherever he means to take her, she will follow this time.
For that moment, they slip right out of the bounds of space and time beyond the walls of that room. Beyond the glass house and the woods. Where they stand in the warm arms of the sun in the meadow, where the grass and wildflowers sing their gentle refrains like whistles in the wind.
Here, they are a boy and a girl and nothing else in the world. The bed upon which he lays her is the simple and provident earth. He settles perfectly entwined over her, as though they were formed solely for one another. With one hand threaded within hers, he cradles her in his other. And she embraces his rapture in return, envelops all of herself in and around him whole. Makes him hers with her lips, her hands, her heart.
The fires have gone, and all there is are two half-souls yearning for their mates in the ashes. Lain bare and in longing, they search within each other's skin, lost in the folds and layers between them. They search between each other's legs, their weeping eyes and desperate breaths like lacerations rending them to tatters of themselves. It's a vain pursuit, chasing each other until they've used and spent everything they can give.
And still.
None of it is enough.
The meadows afford them only a brief respite before the world pulls them back. The waking sun of this one is duller and colder as it skims along its horizon. The pale light it brings, enough to ward away the comforts of slumber.
As they often have, it is the shadows that teem at the edge of even the faintest colors that disturb the calm such benevolent nights might bring. Coriolanus is wakened by their stirring, bringing unto him all the disquiet of their capricious whispers always plaguing the hidden recesses where his mind is most sound. How he had hoped that they might leave him be that night, with his heart and her warmth lain beside him.
How wrong he was to think so. Fool.
Nothing will ever be enough to keep them at bay.
But he refuses to let them bring their ruin upon her. So he slips away, out of her bed. He gathers his things. Takes his quiet leave before the sun climbs any higher. He will lie the rest of the dawning hours sleeplessly in the stone-hewn bed of his own making.
Lucy Gray is left to wake to the shining light in her eyes that carry none of the incandescence that held her in the hours before. She turns to find the empty space beside her. Stares as if to trace the outline of the form that had existed there. But he is gone and has left nothing behind. Not even a touch of his warmth against the sheets, all stolen away with his departure.
She closes her eyes then, hoping in vain that perhaps what her body remembers might fill the void. But there is only darkness. She crawls over to that space then. Occupies it. Knows far too well that her small frame won't ever fill it. All that remains of them is the lingering scent of roses where he'd lain, and beneath it the stains of her tears upon his pillow.
Like the memory of their days past. The memory of that meadow. Of all things so loved. It all goes as swiftly as it'd come.
Just like him.
And just as it was in those woods, she will never forget. No matter how hard she tries. No matter how desperately she wants to.
She will never forget what his traces will always remind her.
Like the solitary song whistled in the wind.
...Coriolanus, too, was here.
Notes: ^_^ Hehe, I couldn't help the small reference to Hadestown! It's my absolute favorite musical, and I've been seeing parallels between it and this story in all the months I'd spent keeping notes. (And there'll be more future shameless plugs here and there, lolol...)
Thank you everyone, as always, for all your patience and for following along! I ended up spending a bit more time on this chapter than expected, and it got longer than I thought it was going to be, haha. But I hope this was worth the wait... ;u;
12/14/23