Epic long Changeling tat

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

[cross posted from my IC livejournal]

I

The Birmingham court was brisk and busy. Carin was rather taken up with Aria, who was slim, beautiful and slightly intimidating. Jack in the Smoke was bouncing around somewhere, and Rosie had lost sight of Doug entirely.

In the centre of the room, the Dominion of Domdaniel sat together. The room seemed to move around them more cautiously. People looked at them in a way that Rosie couldn't quite read. She'd been warned about them. They were...different. She wasn't quite sure in what way, but they seemed to inspire something that was close to fear.

There was one of that Motley who wasn't sitting with them, but standing behind them. He was handsome - a Fairest like Rosie - but dark where she was bright. He was tall and rangy, with long black hair that fell down his back, and had a coldness about him. Still, he smiled a little when Rosie wandered across, and when she commented on the way that everyone was avoiding his Motley he grinned.

"They are Autumn," he said. "They like making people afraid of them,"

Rosie looked up at him and realized that she was smiling too, and also realized that he wasn't cold at all.


II

There had been a hospital in Putney once. Now it lay empty, and slowly it was falling apart.
Yet it was oddly beautiful for all that. In the Chapel of Rest, fine tendrils of greenery were beginning to grow from the ceiling, hanging over the bed where so many had slept their final sleep like a canopy. In the courtyard, which had one been neat and smooth with concrete, the grass had come back, pushing aside cracked concrete slabs.

"What do you think?" Rosie asked her companion. "I wanted to find somewhere which was sad, like Winter, but also beautiful, like Sping. Somewhere we would both like,"

And she beamed at his response, because he liked her choice of a place to go for an Adventure (or maybe a date, but Rosie didn't know much about dates, and so had settled for an Adventure) as much as she did.


III

Rosie knew very little about how one is meant to fight with one's boyfriend.

Well, she knew a little. Many months of observing Carin and Aria had taught her some things. They had taught her that arguments should feature very loud noises, a lot of shouting, and preferably physical objects like plates which should be thrown in an apparent attempt to do as much damage as possible.

Once one had done that, the other party in this argument would should back, possibly throw things himself, and then there would be some form of dramatic making up.

Drago, however, did not seem to fight this way. In fact, Drago did not act like any of the men Rosie had ever known before. Drago's anger wasn't like Carin's, which was hot and explosive and warmed you, whether you liked it or not. Drago's anger was cold and sharp and hurt to be near. And fighting with Drago was nothing like fighting with Carin, or Aidan or any of the forceful men of Summer that Rosie had known.

Rosie had tried to fight with Drago. She had been upset with him, so she had shouted. In the absence of physical plates she had attempted to throw verbal plates, which consisted of nicely jagged sounding words. But he had completely failed to react as expected. He hadn't even shouted back. Instead he had vanished to some kind of horrible cold miserable place.

Really, arguing with one's boyfriend was not as easy or as Romantic as Carin and Aria made it seem, and no mistake!


IV

The tiny Hollow in Hatfield was the first place Rosie had ever had which was hers. It was the first place it felt right to invite Drago. It wasn't Carin's house, where she felt quite strongly she shouldn't invite strange men, or the Motley Hollow in Cambridge, where Rosie always felt like an interloper. This was her own Hollow, her very own, where it was quite right and proper for her to curl up beneath blankets by the fire with Drago, and sleep with her limbs tangled up in his.

In the evenings he could read, and Rosie could determinedly plait his hair with ribbons and feathers, and then laugh when he pulled faces at her. Or she could make him teach her words from his own strange tongue. Rosie, sadly, had a bad memory for words, and after several months her serbo-croat was nearly as bad as when she first asked him to teach her.

Some evenings Drago would just sprawl on the sofa, and watch Rosie fussing over a bonsai tree, or smile as she chattered nonsense at him.

And when the dim green hedge-light faded entirely, and they both drifted into sleep in the golden glow thrown by the fire, Rosie found a kind of quiet happiness and safety that she had never felt as a human before.


V

The Cambridge Court seemed terribly busy. There were lots of people there, and they all seemed very competent. They bustled around, talking to each other about the various problems of the Freehold, about the war in Scotland, which Rosie knew very little about. Satrap Sam and Steampunk were talking about London and she tried to join in the conversation, but had a nasty feeling that she had mostly talked too much nonsense and been a bit of a nuisance. She was also oddly uncomfortable with how people kept talking about Lady Spindlefingers. She didn't quite know why, but it put a horrible sick feeling in her belly, and a kind of twitch in her chest.
No one seemed to understand. But most people's Keepers were tucked away in Arcadia. They were bad memories, nightmares, in the past. And although there was always the fear of being taken again, no one else had a Keeper who was actually right there.

Rosie shivered.

She wanted someone to cling on to, but her Motley were far away and Drago seemed terribly brisk and busy today. He was busy being the Winter Monarch, and although he let her slide her hand into his briefly, and lean against his shoulder, he had scouting missions to organize and combat to plan.

So she plastered a bright smile on her face, and went to talk to Satrap Sam, because she liked him and he was one of the few other dolls she knew.


VI

Battles, Rosie was realizing, never went as planned. The battle with the Reavers was short, nasty, and bloody. Rosie had already had to burn up a tiny piece of herself, sacrificing to the goblin who had taught her how to mend people, just to bring Altair back from whatever horrible place he was going to, with a spear stuck through his chest.

Someone, somewhere, was blowing a horn, harsh and discordant. The sound it was making felt...wrong. Rosie wasn't quite sure what was wrong, but then Rosie rarely thought too deeply about these things. Either way, the horn seemed to mean it was time to retreat into the castle.

Time to go, and then...

...movement, too quick to see...

...Catalina...fallen...

...Chip, reeling backwards off the castle battlements with an arrow in his eye...

...Drago...

...there was a spear, thrown by a Reaver. Drago staggered backwards, and suddenly there seemed to be a lot of blood falling out of his chest.

No one moved at first. There was silence, and then movement and noise. The Reavers were pulling back, but Drago was still lying there, with no more blood coming out of his chest, but a nasty blue colour in his lips and a horrible stillness in his limbs.

Rosie was still oddly calm. She could heal him. She could mend him. She just needed to be able to see him. Then she could make him better. It would burn away a little bit of her - her will, her self, something like that - but it would make him better.

That was what the goblins had said.

She tensed, her eyes on him.

It didn't work.

People were moving now, grabbing Drago and Catalina, running for the castle.
Drago's arm trailed in the dirt and his blood left a long stripe across the ground as they pulled him.

He wasn't get better.

He wasn't moving.

He was dead.

And then Rosie's world fell apart.


VII

Worthy found Rosie in the Hedge. She was curled up underneath a tree where she had stopped when her legs gave out, about half a mile from the Castle. She wasn't crying, but she was shivering, and when Worthy touched her, her skin was as cold as stone.

"I was sent to look for you," Worthy said, frowning slightly because she didn't really know how to deal with flighty Spring Courtiers. "We need to go back."

Go back...

The words echoed around in Rosie's brain. Back? Where to?

Her brain didn't seem to be working. Nothing seemed to make sense.

Where could she go back?

Worthy knelt down beside the shivering girl.

"I can't go back," Rosie said, and she didn't seem to be able to see Worthy. She couldn't see much at the moment. Every time she closed her eyes another image of Drago lying broken on the ground flashed in front of her eyes, and they increasingly didn't go away when she opened them.
Inside she felt, more than ever before, as if she had broken. Nothing worked. Her stomach was twisted, like metal after a hurricane, and there was this horrible empty feeling inside her chest where her heart used to be.

Worthy managed to urge her to her feet.

"We'll go back," she said, and an idea floated through Rosie's mind.

"Back..." she said, and then it all seemed simple.

"I have to find Lady Spindlefingers," she said. Worthy stared at her in blank astonishment. Rosie didn't even notice.

For the first time in years, she wasn't afraid of Lady Spindlefingers any more. It turns out, she would later say, that there are worse things than being broken by one's Keeper. In that moment, she couldn't imagine feeling any worse than she did right then and there, and Lady Spindlefingers torments would at least freeze her and numb her; take away that horrible horrible hot feeling behind her eyes.

Worthy was quietly wishing that the Cambridge Court had sent someone else to find Rosie.

"We can go back to London," she said, in mildly dubious terms.

That was when, to Worthy's great relief, Switchyard Sullivan arrived.


VIII

The Cambridge Court was very still and quiet. Rosie was still having trouble standing up. Her legs felt very wobbly, and she had to dig her nails into her arm to make sure she concentrated on what Mark Dourif was saying.

"I tried to bring Drago back," he was saying. "I offered him my forgiveness...all of our forgiveness...but its not our forgiveness he needs. It's yours."

Rosie stared blankly at Mark.

"What do I need to forgive Drago for?" she asked, bemused.

Mark blinked, surprised at the question.

"Well, what he did in the war, of course."

Rosie frowned a little. She was aware of Drago's past, but it had never bothered her, any more than the scar across his chest had bothered her. The past was the past, and Aidan had explained that many men come back from the war with heavy sins on their conscience.

But she wanted Drago back.

She knelt down beside his body, and took his hand in hers.

"Please come back," she said. Something prickled about her eyes, and she suspected she was about to cry.

"Please, Drago," she said. "I love you. I need you. I don't know how to be a person without you. "

The tears were beginning to fall, in hot streams down her cheeks.

"Mark says I have to forgive you, but there's nothing to forgive. Not from me. You saved me, Drago. You made me a person, and now I don't want to be a person without you. So please come back to me. Please be alive. Please..."

She was crying too hard to see his eyes open, but she felt his hand move slightly in hers.
And then Rosie was in Drago's arms, holding on to him so tightly that no one could have persuaded her to ever let him go.


IX

"I think," Rosie said to Rosalba afterwards, "that Mark was not entirely correct. I do not think I had to forgive Drago. But I do think that this proves that True Love's Kiss is real, after all," and she wrapped her arms around herself and and exhaled in mild relief.

"I really should have thought of it before," she said.

Her eyes drifted back to Drago, across the room where he was talking to Chip. She had barely taken her eyes off Drago since he came back. When she closed her eyes she could still see him lying there, in the dirt, with all that blood around him.

The Court was wrapping up, and Drago walked away from Chip at last, and smiled when Rosie came scuttling across the room to slide her hand into his and hug his arm possessively.

"Come home with me tonight?" she said hopefully.

Drago smiled and kissed her.

"If you wish," he said. It wasn't quite 'as you wish', which would have been the most Romantic thing he could have said, but Rosie decided that considering the day he had had it was a perfectly satisfactory response.


X

Love, Rosie thought, did not seem to work in the way that the stories said it should. The stories did not really adequately warn one of all the peculiar additional emotions which seemed to get tagged in to 'love'.

They didn't explain that love could sometimes be quite disappointingly prosaic, and mostly feature warmth and security, and the comfort with comes from lying with someone whilst they sleep, and sometimes mutter stray words in languages you don't understand.

They also do not warn of the other emotions that can come from love - the horrible emptiness, when you think you don't have someone any more, the terrifying gut twisting fear that comes from losing them. They don't explain that loving someone means not having all of one's own heart, and having to rely on the other person to keep that space where one's heart used to be filled up with something else.

They don't explain how hard the prospect of losing someone could be, and how sometimes watching one's love die doesn't immediately inspire any kind of grand plans of revenge, or dramatic duels. They don't talk about the weird feeling where you don't quite understand why you're still alive, when everything inside you feels broken and destroyed.

Maybe that's because if the stories included all those things, Rosie thought, no one would ever want to fall in love. She was quite sure that had anyone warned her how horrible being in love could feel, she never would have been quite so open to the idea of Drago courting her.

She sighed, and glanced over to the low and narrow bed, where Drago was sleeping, with his hair falling across the pillow like a wave.

She was still a little afraid. Chip had come back from the dead and had not seemed entirely happy with being alive. Drago, she desperately hoped, did not feel the same. Still, that was something she could deal with in the morning.

She padded across the floor to the bed, and slid beneath the covers beside her boyfriend. He reached out for her, still mostly asleep, and pulled her towards him. He smelt a little of cigarettes and leather, like he always did, with a faint scent of wood smoke beneath that all. Rosie buried her head in his neck for a moment, inhaling the scent of him, letting the rightness of his presence soothe her.

"Don't ever die again," she whispered.

Then she snuggled up to him, before she too, drifted into sleep.