writing_shadows

This was originally written because I said I'd write something about perceptions of Nyght Star, and I knew I wanted to also write a proper ending for Rosie and I thought I could blend them together.

Then I just wrote about Rosie and not enough about Nyght and I definitely still owe Johanna a piece. But I thought I'd write this up anyway. This is my ending for my Rosie-girl.

She could have done worse, really...

“I knew a star once,” Rosie said thoughtfully, and then said nothing else. That, she had decided, was the only problem with the new life that she and Alex had made for themselves. Most of her life she loved. They had stayed six months in Tanzania, before the creeping corruption of the Wildlife Management College had gotten to Alex. She’d been expelled after defenestrating one of her biology lecturers for trying to grope her. Apparently he had promised her better grades if she said yes. Alex had said afterwards that it wasn’t really that which had bothered her so much as the lecturer earlier not knowing the difference between the spleen and the pancreas.

So, they had left. They had left the little bungalow with the corrugated iron roof beneath the banana trees, loading everything they had into battered suitcases and taking off on the back of a lorry, bumping along the dirt track roads. Eighteen lorry rides, two plane flights, and one lovely week acting as crew on the yacht of a rich man from Italy (who astonishingly liked the dogs. Or liked Rosie. No one was sure) they had ended up in South Africa, where Rosie picked up a new placement with the Catholic Overseas Development Agency working in a street clinic, and helping an overworked doctor who tried to give out free inoculations to street children. That lasted six months, and then they moved out to the country, where Alex worked as a guide in one of the wildlife parks and Rosie started drawing and writing little black and white comics. She didn’t write about Moorcroft, or Dominic. There was no heroism in her tales. Instead, slightly oddly, she started with the tale of a wombat in a hole, and his long walk to freedom.

She wrote about hope being kept alive, alone in the dark.

They made friends in South Africa, Rosie and Alex. They made friends of locals, and other expats. Alex engaged in a brief flirtation with a slender young backpacker and then stopped the minute she became aware that Rosie was seriously considering murder. Rosie let a handsome young game warden hold her hand and tell her that he loved her, and then stutteringly had to explain that actually, the rangy woman with long red hair was actually her wife and could he please not and yes, she knew she didn’t look like a lesbian.

And eventually, they found themselves settled in a large rambling house, overlooking a waterhole, which had been run as a hotel for the last thirty years by an elderly couple who now needed some help with the place. They agreed they would stay there for a year, before moving on (probably to Mongolia, where Rosie had heard rumours that they needed nurses who were willing to travel by horseback) and it was on the porch of that hotel that they were sitting when Rosie looked up and noticed the star.

Alex hadn’t really noticed, as she was distracted by the large wooden demon mask that she was quietly cleaning with the intention of sending it back to England as Tor’s Christmas present that year. Rosie had a sneaking suspicion that it might actually be possessed and was going to cause almost as much trouble as the large piece of gleaming cut quartz which she had acquired from an old man in Nairobi, who told her that it was a diamond. It wasn’t, of course, but the irate ghosts who had died for it over the years would not believe it and the whole thing had turned into a nuisance and a half. Alex, however, insisted that Tor would love the mask and was determinedly clearing out some alarming rust brown stains from around the eye sockets.

The elderly woman who owned the hotel, and increasingly who relied on Rosie to run the house and Alex to run and arrange the safari tours, also did not notice as she had had six gin and tonics.

The one remaining guest, who was sitting with them and sipping very slowly at his drink, however, raised an eyebrow.

“You knew a star?” he asked.

Rosie nodded, and sipped at her sangria, and wished she knew what not to say. She suspected that ‘everything’ would be safest, but the stars were very bright tonight and she was tired of secrets, once again.

“Well, she called herself ‘Nyght Star’” she said. “So, maybe it was just a name. But she was very bright in some ways. Just like a star,”

An odd wave of nostalgia was slowly floating over Rosie. These days, her life felt oddly normal. Each day had its routine, its pattern. She knew what would happen, and she had begun to dislike surprises. There was less magic now, at least of a literal variety. Admittedly, the hotel security was, these days, done by a pack of African Hunting Dogs, which thankfully no one had noticed yet, but she no longer rode a dragon on great quests into the Hedge. Alex was a lean, rangy woman, with a long plait of red hair which fell to her waist, whose body shape varied slightly due to the occasional packages that Tor sent from home, and very rarely for any other reason. Rosie was happy here. Happy with this life, with this way of being. And yet tonight…

“She was…well…she owned the hotel that Alex and I used to live in. In Scotland, before we were married.”

Rosie chewed on her lip thoughtfully, trying to think of a way of describing that time. She couldn’t say ‘Alex used to be a man called ‘Ywain’ ‘ or ‘I rode a dragon’ or ‘Nyght Star was a ninja assassin elf’. Instead she said “things were different then. I think all the people we knew were a little peculiar. Nyght Star more so than most. She was beautiful, but she was angry all the time, and she liked to hurt people. So, that bit isn’t much like a star. But there was something about her which sort of glowed.

Outside, in the night, there was a sharp barking sound. Rosie tilted her face up into the night air. Who’s call was that? The call sounded again and she nodded in quiet satisfaction. Tawney, the alpha female of the pack, was reporting that all was well on along the eastern boundaries, where there had been trouble with poachers two nights ago.

Alex glanced across at Rosie with a fond smile.

“There,” she said, with some satisfaction, putting the mask down on the table. “Nearly done. Tor will love that,”

The others clustered around the mask, making impressed noises. Rosie smiled back at Alex, with that familiar rush of warmth running all the way through her. Yet still, that nostalgia lingered and for the first time in years she felt a small tugging at some almost forgotten part inside her.

“Alex,” she said, a little tentatively, “why don’t we give Tor his present in person?”

Other people floated through her mind in a rush of emotion. She could see Rose, who was beautiful and soft and had danced with Rosie to old time swing in the Court of Domdaniel on the first day they met. She could see Cormac, cold and yet absolutely comforting, and see his affectionate and amused smile as she babbled about lions and hunting dogs and the exact meaning of the wombat creed. She would see Phoenix, her brother, again, and she would see Gale who she hoped had forgiven them both a little bit for running away, and who might smile at Rosie in the way she had always dreamt she would see him smile.

She would be able to talk about Moorcroft and Aria and Carin and Dey and Aidan and all the people whose lives and deaths she had had to keep quiet for years, unwilling to lie, yet aware that the truth was an impossibility.

She could return the skull that Jack in the Smoke had left in her bed last time he came to visit.

Alex tilted her head to one side for a moment, looking at Rosie quizzically.

“Really?” she said.

They could go back. They could go back to snow and ice, to madness and death. They could go back to a world where neither of them had expected to survive to their wedding at midsummer. They could go back to all the hurt and frustration and confusion felt by a hundred hurt and bruised and broken people.

Outside, the air was warm and thick with the heavy of blossoms, even at night. Soon, she would need to drag out the bin bag of meat that she placated her dog pack with. After that, she’d come back to clean up the kitchen and lay the table for breakfast tomorrow. Rosie couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.

“Maybe,” she said, “we should ask Tor to come and visit us out here instead,”