Telling the bees

[andhiswife]

It's warm enough that, under different circumstances, she might describe the night air as pleasant. A little cool, perhaps, but nothing a shawl won't fix. Of course, most of the more positive adjectives -- 'pleasant' or 'enjoyable' or 'nice' -- are still rather out of her reach, and what passes for a 'good' day anymore is one in which she can feel her way into a sort of resigned neutrality.

Today has been one such good day, though it's still left her feeling vaguely impatient with herself. Losing Thomas wasn't like losing her husband, but the grief is just similar enough to edge toward redundancy. It's like dreaming of completing one of your usual chores, and then waking to find out it still needs to be done, and that all that dream-work was for nothing. Surely she shouldn't have to retread this miserable path again.

But she does, because this is Darrow, and because apparently the price she pays for not being lost is being the one who does the losing.

Maybe it's because she isn't feeling particularly tender towards herself that she's out here, waiting up for Sweeney. Not that she expects him to be unsympathetic -- it's more that she trusts him not to dole out the sort of horrified, weepy commiseration that she wouldn't be able to bear. There's a point where other people's horror on your behalf just reminds you that you have something to be horrified about, and she doesn't need that sort of confirmation at the moment. Numbness is preferable.

That, and she thinks he ought to know. Presuming he hasn't already figured it out: that he doesn't have some fae sense that informs him of such things, that he couldn't taste it in the offerings she left on the windowsill. It's like the way beekeepers would deliver bad news to their hives, back in the Village. Someone ought to tell the leprechaun.

She isn't sure how leprechaun senses work -- if the exact 'where' of the offering matters more than the intention behind it -- but she's willing to guess the intention matters more, and at any rate, she's not going to precariously balance a glass of whiskey on the windowsill and risk it falling. Instead, it's sitting across from her on the patio table. Her own glass has been doctored into a hot toddy, less on account of the slight chill and more because drinking whiskey by herself (for as long as that lasts) is a little less depressing under the thin pretense of it being medicinal.

Meanwhile, she hadn't fully considered the optics of an expectant glass on the other side of an empty table, and she pulls her shawl a little closer around herself and frowns, looking out across the yard. He'd bloody well better show up soon.

Comments

[andhiswife]

"Oh, that's right," she says, slumping sideways and propping her head up with one hand. It'd happened to Biffy, hadn't it, around when Robin showed up? If she were entirely sober -- and not trying to avoid thinking about her myriad losses -- she might've remembered. "But it's usually an all-at-once sort of thing."

Which isn't what Sweeney's describing.

"Are they, er... good... memories?" she asks, more than a little uncertain. She rather doubts it -- the brief reverie he'd slipped into hadn't looked like a happy one, and optimism is a hard sell at the moment.

[onlythebranch]

"Some," he answers. "And some not so good. Like anyone's life, yeah? Not everything can work out all the time."

And the longer a person lives, the more shitty memories they have. That's just unavoidable.

"Funny thing about it," he says slowly, weighing his words in a way he usually doesn't bother. "All of this... shit just comin' in seems to imply I might be a bit older than I've been figuring all this time. These memories, they're from before. Before I went fuckin' mad, before the curse, before the battle. Before that whole life, I think."

[andhiswife]

"From when you were a King," Greta says, remembering that detail. The other funny thing about it is that she'd sort of assumed he did remember -- or how would he have known to tell her in the first place? But it was all rather long ago. Perhaps he only knew he was a King in the way she knows she was a newborn baby once upon a time: because that's how it was, not because that's what she clearly recalls.

"How old do you think it makes you?" she asks curiously. "Whatever the answer, you've aged marvelously," she adds, thinking the jot of levity might do him good.

[onlythebranch]

"Always been a handsome fucker," he agrees, smirking over at her before he shakes his head, a touch more serious. When he tries to reach back, he can't quite touch it. The memories come when he's not trying, when he isn't waiting for them, so he tends to mostly just leave it alone and let it happen when it happens, but that means he's not doing a very good job of working it all out or making sense of what he's remembering.

"Don't know exactly," he admits. "Couple hundred years maybe. Maybe more."

Or maybe he's wrong about all of it. Maybe these aren't his memories, but something else that Darrow is doing to him. This place is a clusterfuck of magic and power, so he wouldn't even be surprised to discover none of it is real.