Lee Jheon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mind_overmatter) wrote2009-07-23 12:48 pm
mind_overmatter) wrote2009-07-23 12:48 pm
Entry tags:
live in the present
Original fiction about Lee and wildnobility/Alastair, two characters that are completely made up. Content warning for death.
---
“Great going, Moritz!” There’s a stuttering wail in answer and the yeller – Muirenn – looks particularly unmoved. It’s Alastair who claps Moritz on the shoulder, body unsteadily weaving as he does so.
“’S’alright, mate, ‘m sure you didn’ mean to give our location away to that camp!”
The whimpering continues from a very distressed Moritz and it’s clearly time for Lee to jump in. “No one was particularly quiet this morning, and the fault doesn’t matter anyway. All of you hush and keep walking.”
It works for about another quarter mile of retreat. The ambush wasn’t the worst they’d weathered, but Lee’s concentrating on healing an arrow she took to her shoulder and Moritz has a nasty head wound. Superficial, though they bleed a lot, and he’s shakily taking sips of one of his potions every several hundred feet. Muirenn keeps shifting her axe from hand to hand, on-edge but uninjured. And Alastair...
“Alastair?” It’s Muirenn who first notices, especially since Lee has just walked to the front of the line to try and convince their cleric that no matter how much of his healing potion he drinks, there’s still only so much healing to be done and he should be patient rather than waste it all at once. Everyone looks, of course, and Alastair immediately has the air of one needlessly put-upon.
“I’m fine, m’lady.” More aggressive than even Lee – and quicker to react – Muirenn smacks Alastair hard in the stomach and that’s when the atmosphere changes. He immediately doubles over and trips on his own feet, collapsing onto his side in a flurry of swears in multiple languages. Lee’s pretty sure she catches the phrase “may a dragon make marshmallows from the bones clearly in your brain” in Elvish in the time it takes her to dive over him.
“Alastair!”
“I saw him flinching, I didn’t realize his injury was so...serious.” Muirenn sounds at least appropriately apologetic. “How were you hiding that?”
“And why? Alastair, honestly, how stupid are you—“
He writhes away from Lee like a fish from a net, but Lee has the advantage of being on top of him in a moment. She rips his shirt up over his navel to see he’s managed to wrap rudimentary bandages on his middle – she recalls him saying he ‘got a mite bit punched’ by one of the ambushers and wanted to help brace his stomach against the soreness – and then Lee and their friends all stop, peering down at a clearly unhappy bard.
“...you should have told us.” It’s a breath, a sigh, and Lee moves the horribly bloody bandage aside to see that it’s actually far worse than the mood already feels.
“Lee, don’t—“ But she has, and there’s nothing that can erase the sight of the greenish fluid all over the outside of the stab, the eerie glow inside his belly. “’m working on a potion, it’s nothing a little alchemical reactions can’t fix. How d’you think they made this in the first place? Herbs and a bit of bad voodoo, sure, but between me and Moritz here we can... It’s nothing.”
Lee already thinks he’s lying and a glance back at Moritz, who looks ready to vomit or cry, confirms it. “Why didn’t you tell me.” It doesn’t even deserve a question, it’s a flat statement because anything with more emotion and Lee thinks she’ll punch Alastair’s head off before the poison ever has a chance to properly reach his heart.
“Because it’s fine.” Alastair is defiant, looks at all of them briefly but his gaze is getting more like a rabbit’s than a badger’s. Flighty, nervous. Lee feels his chest rising too fast under her thighs and she finally rolls off of him and just perches on the ground. Muirenn reaches out an arm and prevents Moritz from leaping forward to check his wound, obviously sensing the severity and sudden need for some pretense of privacy.
“No it’s not. I don’t...know a lot about curses, but that doesn’t look good.” Lee’s looking from Moritz to Alastair and not liking what either medicine-versed man’s gaze tells her. Somehow they both recognize the poison and know what it means, and if Alastair is this afraid but in denial... “How can we fix it, now that we do know?” She looks at him and for all his arguing, Alastair is silent. He swallows and then, slowly, his eye contact breaks and he fully lays on the ground, staring at the sky.
Behind her Moritz is making clinking noises, presumably looking through his bottles of herbs and bone powders and ready-made potions.
“How.” A muscle in Alastair’s jaw twitches and a vial shatters on the ground behind them.
“Y-y-you can’t.” Moritz.
Well that inspires movement, because now Alastair’s curling to stand, wavering up angrily as if he’s been betrayed. “Yes you can, you just need a Chimera’s fang.”
“But we don’t have—“
“Or an equivalent! You can cheat with magic, it’s called being creative. Fine, now that you know, you’ll help me with the antidote.” Alastair grabs Moritz’s shoulder in a frightful parody of a friendly gesture, eyes wild and free hand pressed against his (no doubt newly-sore) stomach. “All of you, shush, because I’m not gonna just—“ and then he does just, clutching his middle and bending over in place, stubborn to stay on his feet.
It hurts Lee just to watch. “Sit down. You two, give...give us a minute.” She’s scowling but only because she’s afraid, and even though Moritz looks horrified Muirenn clearly understands and guides him away, murmuring in a low voice to him. Lee needs to fairly wrestle Alastair to the ground, and it’s only several shouts about not moving so the poison spreads slower that do the trick. “Alastair, what...what is this—“
He gives a sigh as soon the question starts, such an overdone breath that Lee’s free-hanging bangs flutter. “It’s deadly, obviously. Horribly so. Absolutely awful. And one-hundred percent curable if I’m able to have proper quiet and concentration t’work on it! Once we—once we make camp, it’ll be nothing to fix this.” He doesn’t look at her. Quick glances are all he dares and then he grimaces at her shoulder. “Lee, this is nothing, ‘swhy I didn’t mention—“
“This isn’t nothing. Alastair, if you might die, don’t you think I deserve to know?” He looks so broken at that word and accusation that Lee feels instantly bad, but her stomach is lead and she can’t take it back.
“’m not gonna.”
“...Alastair.”
“’m not gonna, alright? I’m not properly ready, am I? Are we?” ‘We’ has Lee shoving a hand up against her mouth to muffle a small dry sob and she grabs his angrily-gesturing hand. It’s like a sedative and Alastair slowly settles down against the ground, shifting in all sorts of discomfort. He squeezes her hand back and they sit there in silence for a minute. Their friends may still be there, or they might have wandered off – Lee can’t keep track of anything else right now.
“You can work on whatever potions you want, but I’m not leaving your side.” You won’t die alone, Alastair.
He blinks far too slowly and glances around, then finally up at her eyes. His own are filled with defiant tears. “...I think I might leave the potions t’Moritz. I dunno if I can...sit up and concentrate that long. By the time we make camp, I mean.” That admission says it all, and Lee nods after a few horrified moments. He’s dying, and he’s dying right now. They need ingredients they don’t have, and more manpower than even a properly-healthy Alastair would be able to lend to the effort, and there’s no towns nearby. The only people around are enemies, and even they have been chased off. “This is a stupid way to end it, isn’t it?”
“It’s appropriate with how much of an idiot you were in life, though.” There’s a small moment, like the top of a hill, where they both stop and look at each other, Alastair with affront and Lee with a small bit of worry, and then they both burst out laughing. The neck of Alastair’s shirt is stretched out with how much Lee has been worrying it with her fingers and she trades positions to instead run her hand along his cheek. Leaning in this close, she can feel an unnatural heat coming off the wound in his belly. “I love you.”
“...I love you too.” It’s a phrase they’ve traded before over the past few years, but this time it feels heavier. Lee heaves a deep breath.
“I know you wanna scold me, but can we jus’...jus’ talk instead?”
Lee sighs with knuckles digging into her watery eyes. “Yes. Of course.”
Once they set up camp, immediately nearby off their current path through the woods, Alastair and Lee separate to do just that, while Moritz begins to worry over a possible antidote. Muirenn watches between the two and eventually becomes Moritz’s cheerleader, though it brings no one any closer to the impossible cure.
Each hour brings a new symptom, but Alastair’s feverish conversing with Lee won’t stop - and when he starts shivering a bit too much to not worry about, she just wordlessly wraps him up in both of their blankets.
--
That evening their friends set up their tent, Moritz and Muirenn respectfully hiding themselves inside. Lee and Alastair have both silently agreed on the stars to be their companions for the evening, one final return to nature before the real involuntary reunion. Moritz, the bleedheart that he is, had insisted on trying to find an antidote, and Lee had let him – she hears the crackle of a fire and knows he’s trying to make a potion in what little time they have left. She hopes he can, but if he can’t...
It’s best that they’re outside on solid earth, not inside even something as thin as a tent. Alastair deserves better than anything man-made keeping him from his home at that moment.
At this moment. Lee’s watching him and he’s pale, breathing shallow and heavy as if it’s around a great weight sitting on his chest. “What?” he asks, exasperated, and when she winces he gives a grimacing smirk. “Don’t be so— so grave Lee.”
“Not the time!” she yelps and smacks his arm. He just grins for how she’s momentarily heedless of how weak he is. And, appropriately, falls over.
“Now look what ya’ve done.”
“I’ll do more than that by the time I’m through with you!” They have smiles to match now and Lee slinks down to the forest floor with him, amongst the twigs and leaves.
The light in Alastair’s face shimmers and then diffuses. “I ‘ope you’re not too through with me, yet.” And just like that Lee’s lungs disappear and her eyes sting and she stares very stubbornly at his face. She will not look away from his eyes.
“Alastair.”
“We’re not talking ‘bout this—“
“You just did—!”
“’m not ready!” Her anger punctured, Lee just watches the fear drain what little color is left in Alastair’s face. The poison pulses at his throat and she tries not to focus on the fact that his blue veins seem to be tinging green. He looks down, to her left, anywhere but her, like a cornered animal. When his gaze finds her again his teeth are bared but it’s a desperate, mindless sort of horror that guides him. “I’m not ready, Lee, and they’re gonna find a way to—to fix this. Or I’ll kick Moritz in his stupid cleric arse.”
“But what if you—“ but what if Moritz can’t fix it in time, what about when he doesn’t. But what if you die angry, if you die fighting, if you can’t move on because your soul is trapped in defiant fear. Her lips are stuck open and she’s not sure which one to pick, how any of them could sound less certain that he’s going to die and that’s not fair. “I just don’t...want you to suffer more than you need to. Why would you — no look at me – why would you risk not finding peace?”
“’Peace?’ ‘ve got plenty, I call it Vedis ‘n you ‘n our friends ‘n all the places we visit. ‘ve got no time for—for nonsense like this.” Alastair pants and then looks up through his damp bangs at Lee. “I wanna stay.” Plaintive.
She can’t help it – her eyes are shining with all her unshed tears, but when she goes to hold him it’s fierce and strong. Nothing like the voice that follows. “Alastair, I know. Everyone does. But everyone dies, too. Whether you do—whether you do tonight or tomorrow or years from now doesn’t change what we’ve already done, and it just fills in what was always to be our future.” She pulls away and looks at his white face, even paler with silvery moonlight painting it, and forces a smile. She tastes salt. “Besides, what did I tell you? You ate too much meat, you were always slated to piss off the Gods before me.”
Alastair lets out a mock-offended sound and then an honest laugh, one that Lee follows suit. By the time they’re spooning in the grass and retelling old folklore with Alastair’s classic ability to spin innuendo and excitement out of the most boring tale, Lee’s smile is anything but forced. When he has to pause to catch his breath, she takes over, back and forth, like the push and pull of the tide.
--
The moon has moved, draping long shadows across them. Lee thinks for a moment that it's that bright light in her eyes that has woken her, until the sound repeats. It's the barest sigh and then a vague shift, and she shuffles up from being wrapped around Alastair's back to curl over him, see his face. His eyes are bloodshot and hardly open but awake and when he catches her staring she sees panic somewhere in there.
It's time, and he knows it, and the realization is like being dunked in ice water. "Hey, stop kicking me." The high-pitched, frenzied giggle she gets in return is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.
"You're th'one roughin' me. Could hardly move all night." They don't need to discuss the real reason he'd had trouble jostling enough to wake her.
Lee moves in from above him, brushes their lips and then presses into a kiss - but this is beyond that. In a moment she's simply hugging him for all she's worth and she feels his fingers itching along her back, weak like gripping wet stones underwater. As that fades she moves back, their cheeks no longer touching, so she can stare at his face. They don't need to kiss, anymore, just trading shallow puffs of air. The heavens stare at Lee from the corner of each of his eyes. "I love you."
"Love you, too." Alastair makes a small sound that would have been a teasing tut yesterday. "This's just...a way 'f getting out 'f picking me a present for m'birthday, isn't it?"
"You figured it out." Lee's surprised she can talk with how small her throat feels, but her cheeks are dry. She feels along his eyebrow with a finger; he’s shivering so hard it’s a fine vibration throughout his body. "I thought you might like a vacation. It's been a while since you saw your parents, hasn't it?"
For a moment she's afraid that's the wrong thing to say, and wouldn't it be terrible with no time to correct it - but the hurt on Alastair's face bleeds out into a sudden broken happiness that nearly snaps her resolve. "Yeah. Guess that's acceptable. For an early present." When he starts coughing, though, Lee doesn't bother responding. She just runs her hand through his hair and watches him watching her, until she sees his pupils suddenly constrict.
"A bright light," they say together, and it's just enough to send them both into a small burst of hysterical laughter. Lee presses her forehead against his, and then it's there and gone.
When Alastair Godwin dies, it's with a chuckle as the last breath to pass his lips.
Lee stays there holding him for a long time, a steady stream of useless words passing through her just in case his recently-departed soul stays around long enough to hear. Promises and secrets and memories, all things he would already know and yet everything she feels the sudden need to say. She chants and prays and then finally, when the first grey fingers of dawn begin competing with the moon, it dissolves into tears.
It’s not long before Moritz hears her and comes out to place an arm around her shoulders, Muirenn watching from the doorway of their tent, and Lee hopes Alastair has likewise found his family on the other side, to hold him while he adjusts to being nevertheless alone so abruptly. It’s another hour before she relinquishes her husband’s body so they can all perform a proper funeral pyre at the nearest lake’s edge.
--
“Shin! You can practice out here. If Grandma and Grandpa haven’t already gotten used to you playing so near the yurt, it’ll never happen.” The child buzzes right out of the small traveling home, making a line straight for the one place marker on the endless plain. A tree stump that’s been dragged about with her parents as both a curiosity and a seat, Shin lands on it and sprawls like a tired kitten, but his fingers are clever on the violin. Under the moonlight, his violin looks a ghostly green, silvery like stumps in a swamp.
“It’s okay, they don’t ever wake up, Mama.” It’s true – many a day in this visit to her parents has had six year-old Shin clambering up the walls of the yurt with energy while the older folks slept in til the terrible hour of “just past dawn”. Lee often ended up taking him outside to supervise him running around or, like this morning, to play-wrestle. She’s gotten pretty good at watering down her martial art to a joking tumble or three with her son.
It’s still a bit of a relief when Muirenn comes back around and the two of them can properly spar, of course, and Lee’s probably even going to let her little warrior watch this next time. He attacks both his violin and the wild world with equal vigor and as much as her stomach clenches at the idea...he’s going to need to learn how to actually defend himself, some day. She knows what urges run in this family.
She moves to sit near Shin, contemplative and quiet. With the moon full and its supernatural mischief floating through the air, Lee hears more than just Shin’s grandmother Vedis singing through the violin. She hears his father, too, that chuckle vibrating through its strings, reunited once more with part of his family and contentedly waiting for the rest of them.
Until then, Lee pulls Shin into her lap and listens to the strains of past, present and future echoing around them out on the steppes. “I love you, Shin.”
“Love you too, Mama.”
wildnobility/Alastair, two characters that are completely made up. Content warning for death.---
“Great going, Moritz!” There’s a stuttering wail in answer and the yeller – Muirenn – looks particularly unmoved. It’s Alastair who claps Moritz on the shoulder, body unsteadily weaving as he does so.
“’S’alright, mate, ‘m sure you didn’ mean to give our location away to that camp!”
The whimpering continues from a very distressed Moritz and it’s clearly time for Lee to jump in. “No one was particularly quiet this morning, and the fault doesn’t matter anyway. All of you hush and keep walking.”
It works for about another quarter mile of retreat. The ambush wasn’t the worst they’d weathered, but Lee’s concentrating on healing an arrow she took to her shoulder and Moritz has a nasty head wound. Superficial, though they bleed a lot, and he’s shakily taking sips of one of his potions every several hundred feet. Muirenn keeps shifting her axe from hand to hand, on-edge but uninjured. And Alastair...
“Alastair?” It’s Muirenn who first notices, especially since Lee has just walked to the front of the line to try and convince their cleric that no matter how much of his healing potion he drinks, there’s still only so much healing to be done and he should be patient rather than waste it all at once. Everyone looks, of course, and Alastair immediately has the air of one needlessly put-upon.
“I’m fine, m’lady.” More aggressive than even Lee – and quicker to react – Muirenn smacks Alastair hard in the stomach and that’s when the atmosphere changes. He immediately doubles over and trips on his own feet, collapsing onto his side in a flurry of swears in multiple languages. Lee’s pretty sure she catches the phrase “may a dragon make marshmallows from the bones clearly in your brain” in Elvish in the time it takes her to dive over him.
“Alastair!”
“I saw him flinching, I didn’t realize his injury was so...serious.” Muirenn sounds at least appropriately apologetic. “How were you hiding that?”
“And why? Alastair, honestly, how stupid are you—“
He writhes away from Lee like a fish from a net, but Lee has the advantage of being on top of him in a moment. She rips his shirt up over his navel to see he’s managed to wrap rudimentary bandages on his middle – she recalls him saying he ‘got a mite bit punched’ by one of the ambushers and wanted to help brace his stomach against the soreness – and then Lee and their friends all stop, peering down at a clearly unhappy bard.
“...you should have told us.” It’s a breath, a sigh, and Lee moves the horribly bloody bandage aside to see that it’s actually far worse than the mood already feels.
“Lee, don’t—“ But she has, and there’s nothing that can erase the sight of the greenish fluid all over the outside of the stab, the eerie glow inside his belly. “’m working on a potion, it’s nothing a little alchemical reactions can’t fix. How d’you think they made this in the first place? Herbs and a bit of bad voodoo, sure, but between me and Moritz here we can... It’s nothing.”
Lee already thinks he’s lying and a glance back at Moritz, who looks ready to vomit or cry, confirms it. “Why didn’t you tell me.” It doesn’t even deserve a question, it’s a flat statement because anything with more emotion and Lee thinks she’ll punch Alastair’s head off before the poison ever has a chance to properly reach his heart.
“Because it’s fine.” Alastair is defiant, looks at all of them briefly but his gaze is getting more like a rabbit’s than a badger’s. Flighty, nervous. Lee feels his chest rising too fast under her thighs and she finally rolls off of him and just perches on the ground. Muirenn reaches out an arm and prevents Moritz from leaping forward to check his wound, obviously sensing the severity and sudden need for some pretense of privacy.
“No it’s not. I don’t...know a lot about curses, but that doesn’t look good.” Lee’s looking from Moritz to Alastair and not liking what either medicine-versed man’s gaze tells her. Somehow they both recognize the poison and know what it means, and if Alastair is this afraid but in denial... “How can we fix it, now that we do know?” She looks at him and for all his arguing, Alastair is silent. He swallows and then, slowly, his eye contact breaks and he fully lays on the ground, staring at the sky.
Behind her Moritz is making clinking noises, presumably looking through his bottles of herbs and bone powders and ready-made potions.
“How.” A muscle in Alastair’s jaw twitches and a vial shatters on the ground behind them.
“Y-y-you can’t.” Moritz.
Well that inspires movement, because now Alastair’s curling to stand, wavering up angrily as if he’s been betrayed. “Yes you can, you just need a Chimera’s fang.”
“But we don’t have—“
“Or an equivalent! You can cheat with magic, it’s called being creative. Fine, now that you know, you’ll help me with the antidote.” Alastair grabs Moritz’s shoulder in a frightful parody of a friendly gesture, eyes wild and free hand pressed against his (no doubt newly-sore) stomach. “All of you, shush, because I’m not gonna just—“ and then he does just, clutching his middle and bending over in place, stubborn to stay on his feet.
It hurts Lee just to watch. “Sit down. You two, give...give us a minute.” She’s scowling but only because she’s afraid, and even though Moritz looks horrified Muirenn clearly understands and guides him away, murmuring in a low voice to him. Lee needs to fairly wrestle Alastair to the ground, and it’s only several shouts about not moving so the poison spreads slower that do the trick. “Alastair, what...what is this—“
He gives a sigh as soon the question starts, such an overdone breath that Lee’s free-hanging bangs flutter. “It’s deadly, obviously. Horribly so. Absolutely awful. And one-hundred percent curable if I’m able to have proper quiet and concentration t’work on it! Once we—once we make camp, it’ll be nothing to fix this.” He doesn’t look at her. Quick glances are all he dares and then he grimaces at her shoulder. “Lee, this is nothing, ‘swhy I didn’t mention—“
“This isn’t nothing. Alastair, if you might die, don’t you think I deserve to know?” He looks so broken at that word and accusation that Lee feels instantly bad, but her stomach is lead and she can’t take it back.
“’m not gonna.”
“...Alastair.”
“’m not gonna, alright? I’m not properly ready, am I? Are we?” ‘We’ has Lee shoving a hand up against her mouth to muffle a small dry sob and she grabs his angrily-gesturing hand. It’s like a sedative and Alastair slowly settles down against the ground, shifting in all sorts of discomfort. He squeezes her hand back and they sit there in silence for a minute. Their friends may still be there, or they might have wandered off – Lee can’t keep track of anything else right now.
“You can work on whatever potions you want, but I’m not leaving your side.” You won’t die alone, Alastair.
He blinks far too slowly and glances around, then finally up at her eyes. His own are filled with defiant tears. “...I think I might leave the potions t’Moritz. I dunno if I can...sit up and concentrate that long. By the time we make camp, I mean.” That admission says it all, and Lee nods after a few horrified moments. He’s dying, and he’s dying right now. They need ingredients they don’t have, and more manpower than even a properly-healthy Alastair would be able to lend to the effort, and there’s no towns nearby. The only people around are enemies, and even they have been chased off. “This is a stupid way to end it, isn’t it?”
“It’s appropriate with how much of an idiot you were in life, though.” There’s a small moment, like the top of a hill, where they both stop and look at each other, Alastair with affront and Lee with a small bit of worry, and then they both burst out laughing. The neck of Alastair’s shirt is stretched out with how much Lee has been worrying it with her fingers and she trades positions to instead run her hand along his cheek. Leaning in this close, she can feel an unnatural heat coming off the wound in his belly. “I love you.”
“...I love you too.” It’s a phrase they’ve traded before over the past few years, but this time it feels heavier. Lee heaves a deep breath.
“I know you wanna scold me, but can we jus’...jus’ talk instead?”
Lee sighs with knuckles digging into her watery eyes. “Yes. Of course.”
Once they set up camp, immediately nearby off their current path through the woods, Alastair and Lee separate to do just that, while Moritz begins to worry over a possible antidote. Muirenn watches between the two and eventually becomes Moritz’s cheerleader, though it brings no one any closer to the impossible cure.
Each hour brings a new symptom, but Alastair’s feverish conversing with Lee won’t stop - and when he starts shivering a bit too much to not worry about, she just wordlessly wraps him up in both of their blankets.
--
That evening their friends set up their tent, Moritz and Muirenn respectfully hiding themselves inside. Lee and Alastair have both silently agreed on the stars to be their companions for the evening, one final return to nature before the real involuntary reunion. Moritz, the bleedheart that he is, had insisted on trying to find an antidote, and Lee had let him – she hears the crackle of a fire and knows he’s trying to make a potion in what little time they have left. She hopes he can, but if he can’t...
It’s best that they’re outside on solid earth, not inside even something as thin as a tent. Alastair deserves better than anything man-made keeping him from his home at that moment.
At this moment. Lee’s watching him and he’s pale, breathing shallow and heavy as if it’s around a great weight sitting on his chest. “What?” he asks, exasperated, and when she winces he gives a grimacing smirk. “Don’t be so— so grave Lee.”
“Not the time!” she yelps and smacks his arm. He just grins for how she’s momentarily heedless of how weak he is. And, appropriately, falls over.
“Now look what ya’ve done.”
“I’ll do more than that by the time I’m through with you!” They have smiles to match now and Lee slinks down to the forest floor with him, amongst the twigs and leaves.
The light in Alastair’s face shimmers and then diffuses. “I ‘ope you’re not too through with me, yet.” And just like that Lee’s lungs disappear and her eyes sting and she stares very stubbornly at his face. She will not look away from his eyes.
“Alastair.”
“We’re not talking ‘bout this—“
“You just did—!”
“’m not ready!” Her anger punctured, Lee just watches the fear drain what little color is left in Alastair’s face. The poison pulses at his throat and she tries not to focus on the fact that his blue veins seem to be tinging green. He looks down, to her left, anywhere but her, like a cornered animal. When his gaze finds her again his teeth are bared but it’s a desperate, mindless sort of horror that guides him. “I’m not ready, Lee, and they’re gonna find a way to—to fix this. Or I’ll kick Moritz in his stupid cleric arse.”
“But what if you—“ but what if Moritz can’t fix it in time, what about when he doesn’t. But what if you die angry, if you die fighting, if you can’t move on because your soul is trapped in defiant fear. Her lips are stuck open and she’s not sure which one to pick, how any of them could sound less certain that he’s going to die and that’s not fair. “I just don’t...want you to suffer more than you need to. Why would you — no look at me – why would you risk not finding peace?”
“’Peace?’ ‘ve got plenty, I call it Vedis ‘n you ‘n our friends ‘n all the places we visit. ‘ve got no time for—for nonsense like this.” Alastair pants and then looks up through his damp bangs at Lee. “I wanna stay.” Plaintive.
She can’t help it – her eyes are shining with all her unshed tears, but when she goes to hold him it’s fierce and strong. Nothing like the voice that follows. “Alastair, I know. Everyone does. But everyone dies, too. Whether you do—whether you do tonight or tomorrow or years from now doesn’t change what we’ve already done, and it just fills in what was always to be our future.” She pulls away and looks at his white face, even paler with silvery moonlight painting it, and forces a smile. She tastes salt. “Besides, what did I tell you? You ate too much meat, you were always slated to piss off the Gods before me.”
Alastair lets out a mock-offended sound and then an honest laugh, one that Lee follows suit. By the time they’re spooning in the grass and retelling old folklore with Alastair’s classic ability to spin innuendo and excitement out of the most boring tale, Lee’s smile is anything but forced. When he has to pause to catch his breath, she takes over, back and forth, like the push and pull of the tide.
--
The moon has moved, draping long shadows across them. Lee thinks for a moment that it's that bright light in her eyes that has woken her, until the sound repeats. It's the barest sigh and then a vague shift, and she shuffles up from being wrapped around Alastair's back to curl over him, see his face. His eyes are bloodshot and hardly open but awake and when he catches her staring she sees panic somewhere in there.
It's time, and he knows it, and the realization is like being dunked in ice water. "Hey, stop kicking me." The high-pitched, frenzied giggle she gets in return is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying.
"You're th'one roughin' me. Could hardly move all night." They don't need to discuss the real reason he'd had trouble jostling enough to wake her.
Lee moves in from above him, brushes their lips and then presses into a kiss - but this is beyond that. In a moment she's simply hugging him for all she's worth and she feels his fingers itching along her back, weak like gripping wet stones underwater. As that fades she moves back, their cheeks no longer touching, so she can stare at his face. They don't need to kiss, anymore, just trading shallow puffs of air. The heavens stare at Lee from the corner of each of his eyes. "I love you."
"Love you, too." Alastair makes a small sound that would have been a teasing tut yesterday. "This's just...a way 'f getting out 'f picking me a present for m'birthday, isn't it?"
"You figured it out." Lee's surprised she can talk with how small her throat feels, but her cheeks are dry. She feels along his eyebrow with a finger; he’s shivering so hard it’s a fine vibration throughout his body. "I thought you might like a vacation. It's been a while since you saw your parents, hasn't it?"
For a moment she's afraid that's the wrong thing to say, and wouldn't it be terrible with no time to correct it - but the hurt on Alastair's face bleeds out into a sudden broken happiness that nearly snaps her resolve. "Yeah. Guess that's acceptable. For an early present." When he starts coughing, though, Lee doesn't bother responding. She just runs her hand through his hair and watches him watching her, until she sees his pupils suddenly constrict.
"A bright light," they say together, and it's just enough to send them both into a small burst of hysterical laughter. Lee presses her forehead against his, and then it's there and gone.
When Alastair Godwin dies, it's with a chuckle as the last breath to pass his lips.
Lee stays there holding him for a long time, a steady stream of useless words passing through her just in case his recently-departed soul stays around long enough to hear. Promises and secrets and memories, all things he would already know and yet everything she feels the sudden need to say. She chants and prays and then finally, when the first grey fingers of dawn begin competing with the moon, it dissolves into tears.
It’s not long before Moritz hears her and comes out to place an arm around her shoulders, Muirenn watching from the doorway of their tent, and Lee hopes Alastair has likewise found his family on the other side, to hold him while he adjusts to being nevertheless alone so abruptly. It’s another hour before she relinquishes her husband’s body so they can all perform a proper funeral pyre at the nearest lake’s edge.
--
“Shin! You can practice out here. If Grandma and Grandpa haven’t already gotten used to you playing so near the yurt, it’ll never happen.” The child buzzes right out of the small traveling home, making a line straight for the one place marker on the endless plain. A tree stump that’s been dragged about with her parents as both a curiosity and a seat, Shin lands on it and sprawls like a tired kitten, but his fingers are clever on the violin. Under the moonlight, his violin looks a ghostly green, silvery like stumps in a swamp.
“It’s okay, they don’t ever wake up, Mama.” It’s true – many a day in this visit to her parents has had six year-old Shin clambering up the walls of the yurt with energy while the older folks slept in til the terrible hour of “just past dawn”. Lee often ended up taking him outside to supervise him running around or, like this morning, to play-wrestle. She’s gotten pretty good at watering down her martial art to a joking tumble or three with her son.
It’s still a bit of a relief when Muirenn comes back around and the two of them can properly spar, of course, and Lee’s probably even going to let her little warrior watch this next time. He attacks both his violin and the wild world with equal vigor and as much as her stomach clenches at the idea...he’s going to need to learn how to actually defend himself, some day. She knows what urges run in this family.
She moves to sit near Shin, contemplative and quiet. With the moon full and its supernatural mischief floating through the air, Lee hears more than just Shin’s grandmother Vedis singing through the violin. She hears his father, too, that chuckle vibrating through its strings, reunited once more with part of his family and contentedly waiting for the rest of them.
Until then, Lee pulls Shin into her lap and listens to the strains of past, present and future echoing around them out on the steppes. “I love you, Shin.”
“Love you too, Mama.”