Chapter Text
The celebrations start the second they enter the city. At first, the citizens are bewildered and wide-eyed, not knowing whether they’ve won or lost.
Then the cheering starts, and the people throw up their hands and scream along with the delegates, and everyone is shouting and there is confetti in the streets. In their hands the people hold flags, red and blue and white and gold, waving them so frantically they look like madmen. They don’t care.
Tommy is carried on the shoulders of the crowds, and everyone is happy. Niki’s cheeks ache from hard she is smiling, because Wilbur’s hand is clasped in her own and everyone is bustling around them and they’re free.
She looks at him and he grins at her and her face flushes but she doesn’t care because now there’s golden flakes of glitter raining down on them, and she holds out her hand to catch them.
There is music playing, lively and upbeat and though no one knows who’s playing it everyone is singing along. Everyone is shrieking and laughing and dancing, and Niki feels alive. She feels her lungs moving, feels her cheeks staining with tears, feels how her feet move in time to a dance she’s never learned before.
It’s magic and it’s madness, and everything is perfect. The music grows louder, and it sounds just like a victory song should. She doesn’t know the words but still she screams along, and the whole city dances.
She’s still holding Wilbur’s hand, so she looks at him, surprised to see him dancing too. Then he does the strangest thing, pulls his arms around her waist and yanks her closer so that they are dancing with each other. It feels special, more special than when he almost kissed her. Wilbur Soot laughs, and he is unmasked.
She can see how tired he is, but she can see all the beauty he hides behind stoicism and facades, she can see his slightly crooked nose — which never properly healed from his countless childhood injuries — and the way his hair falls in his face when he laughs, can feel how warm his touch is, like placing your hand on the dwindling heat of the forge.
She touches a scar on his cheek and their eyes meet, his golden gaze meeting hers. She smiles at him, as brightly as she is capable of. He smiles back, his cheeks flushing pink. Then he squeezes her waist, as if checking to made sure she’s still there. It tickles, and she snorts.
And then they dance. His arms on her waist, her hands in the air, his eyes on her lips and her eyes on the stars. He seems dazed, a little confused, but happier than she’s ever seen him, and it makes her want to keep going.
So they do, they twirl around each other and jump up when they need and let their feet do all the work, until physically they can’t anymore, and they are forced to stop, panting like wounded animals.
He still doesn’t let go of her, instead putting his arm around her shoulder and half leaning against her. She doesn’t mind.
Someone thrusts a drink into her hand, and she doesn’t see who because they scurry off handing out more into the crowd, and someone else hands Wilbur one. They exchange a look, shrug their shoulders and down them.
Niki laughs, even as the sweetly spiced liquor slips down her throat. It tastes like humid summer nights and sitting by a campfire. She takes another when someone carrying trays loaded with glasses passes her.
Her whole body is buzzing now, both from the drinking and from the feeling and from Will looking at her with that wildfire look in his golden eyes. She feels like she’s on fire, in the very best way possible.
The moon smiles down on them, singing a tune only the oceans can hear, watching with silver eyes as the city celebrates, as the world changes. Niki can feel it, can feel the universe turning on its head. Maybe it’s the alcohol or maybe she’s seeing things, but she feels it in her bones and in the pit of her stomach. Feels freedom crackling its chaotic way through every heart and every vein in the whole world.
It feels like flying. It feels like jumping from a cliff and landing in tropical waters, like falling in love and like being afraid and it feels like being struck by lightning. She’s intoxicated by it.
And under the blanket of a dazzling sky speckled with a million pinpricks of light, Niki thinks she won’t mind losing herself if it always feels like this.
If this kind of manic euphoria takes over her mind, at least she’ll die smiling. A morbid thought for her to have, and yet everything is beautiful. Even death, even betrayal, even all the losses they’ve faced before. All of it led to this, which makes it worthwhile.
She looks at the stars and grins at the moon, and she tastes the blood of soldiers and feels the hammering heartbeat of a nation, and is reassured that she is part of it.
~
Later that night, much later, she finds herself sprawled out on the grass under the wisteria. Her uniform has been unbuttoned, her hair is a mess, spread out around her and brushed so gently by the frosty grass. She breathes out, watches her breath turn to clouds as she exhales into the freezing night.
Somewhere, far from here, people are singing. When she sits up, she can see that every light in L’Manburg is turned on, a billion little glowing promises. She can smell the bonfires, all floral and comforting. She can hear the screams of joy and the cries of her people, and she smiles.
In the back of her mind, something is acutely aware of how utterly gone she is. In her almost twenty years of living, she has never been so drunk. Then again, she’s never been one to drink. Still, there is whiskey clouding her thoughts and cider quickening her heart rate.
She looks at the house, the place she knows as home, and watches the lights inside and hears the laughter and the music, halfway indecipherable, and in the ocean between herself and that place, she finds a comfortable acceptance, a quiet place to grieve.
And she does, she mourns the soldiers who lost their lives, mourns for the childhoods stolen by the war. She mourns for Fundy, who never got to be a kid. She mourns for Tommy, and for Tubbo, who grew up with arrows sailing through the windows of their childhood bedrooms. And she mourns for herself, holds a mental funeral for the girl she might’ve become if fire hadn’t rained down on her village, if her grandmother hadn’t needed to teach her medicine.
She would’ve been lovely , Niki thinks, half-delirious, I would’ve grown up to be lovely. My hands- my hands would never have touched corpses. I-…I would’ve been a lovely little peasant girl, with children and a husband and a lovely little cottage.
Then she cries. The sob sort of forces itself out of her mouth, and she makes an ugly, pathetic noise. Her fingers search blindly in the grass beside her, until they wrap around a familiar shape. A bottle, some unknown amber liquid that she ripped from Wilbur’s cellar earlier tonight, as she meandered home when her feet were too sore for dancing.
Where is Wilbur, anyway? she wonders, then forgets about it. Instead of pondering further she drinks, almost chokes. When she has swallowed so much fire that she’s sure her guts have liquified, she throws down the bottle and cries some more, until her tears are finished and a quiet, peaceful coldness closes around her.
Behind her, a twig snaps. She whirls around so quickly it almost hurts, but it’s Wilbur. He’s stood there, almost hunched over, holding a bottle similar to the one she just discarded. His coat has gone missing, his silk shirt is unbuttoned enough to expose some of his chest hair, and his lovely little presidential hat is lopsidedly positioned on his head, almost covering one eye. He looks a mess, but he’s definitely more sober than she is. She can tell by the charcoal hardness in his eyes.
‘It’s over, you know,’ he says, absurdly, ‘The war. It’s all over now.’
‘Yes,’ she says, surprised to find herself not believing him, ‘Yes, it’s over.’
‘Doesn’t feel over,’ he says, slurring his words, and sits down beside her, ‘Feels like we’re still gonna die.’
‘Do you think we’ll ever stop feeling like we’re gonna die?’ she asks.
‘Dunno. Never felt any other way,’ he turns to her, quirks his lip into a half-smile.
‘Hm,’ she answers, and lies down on her back once more. Something bites at the edge of her subconscious, nagging for her to notice it. She doesn’t remember what it is, but she’s sure it’s important.
‘I’m forgetting something,’ she says, carelessly, ‘I’m forgetting something and I don’t know what it is,’
‘Try remembering,’ he says, with a dismissive wave of his hand.
‘Already tried that,’ she tells him.
‘Oh,’
She sits up, looks at him. He looks at her. There is a thickness in the silence, a heavy kind of anticipation.
And then, quite suddenly, he grabs her by the cheeks and pulls her in close and then they’re kissing and it’s strange, because he tastes like whiskey and honey and chamomile, and because he’s not really doing a good job, and neither is she, but —paradoxically— she doesn’t even care. They aren’t even kissing properly— more just mashing their lips together, like they’re desperately trying to fuse into one being.
And then it’s over. It was only a second or two, but Niki thinks she might faint, and Wilbur’s face is flushed bright red (so bright he almost glows in the moonlight), and they’re both breathing heavily. Wilbur has this strange expression on his face, like he isn’t quite sure what just happened.
‘Oh,’ says Niki, when she’s almost caught her breath.
‘Oh,’ he agrees grimly, and then he stands up and walks away into the blue darkness, and she doesn’t try to stop him, because she only realises he’s leaving when he’s already gone.
She doesn’t see him again that night.
~
She can hear shouting still, even now it’s midday. She sighs. Deep. Heavy. Her eyes are shut, and her hair floats aimlessly, framing her face. The bath water is room temperature, but she doesn’t care. Even though it’s winter. Even though it’s ice cold.
The water is safe, within it she is not Niki Nihachu, revolutionary extraordinaire, or Niki Nihachu, part-time doctor and acclaimed war hero. She’s just Niki, a girl with blonde hair she’s never really liked the colour of. A girl with callouses on her hands and scars on her cheek. She is Niki, the daughter of a merchant, grandchild of a doctor. A strong willed, loving girl, with hazel eyes that swirl like liquid gold.
People are singing, out in the streets. The national anthem, hurriedly composed by Wilbur in a single afternoon. She thinks of his smile, and doesn’t even have the decency to feel ashamed for thinking about how good it felt when he put his hand on her cheek, how his warmth had felt, how his beating heart had danced for her.
She thinks of how very badly she’d wanted him to kiss her again, even though it wasn’t a very good kiss. She thinks of how badly she wanted him to tell her he loved her, or say some poetic bullshit and confess his feelings like in a romance novel. That, she does feel ashamed for. He was drunk, and so was she, and it had been a stupid, impulsive kiss. It didn’t matter, certainly not to him. After all, he’d just left the second he pulled away. Just up and walked off.
But it wasn’t even her fault, was it? She hadn’t fallen in love with him, not on purpose. She’d more slipped into it. Tumbled into adoration, all clumsy and flustered. She had fallen, yes, but it hadn’t been with grace, and it had never been her intention.
And how could she have stopped herself? When he spoke like that, when his eyes crinkled at the corners every time he smiled, when his laugh sounded like bubbles and summertime, when his tired eyes met her own like she was something exquisite? He looked at her like she was special. Like she was incredible.
She absentmindedly reaches for the hand mirror she placed on the bathtub rail earlier. She uses it to examine her face, determine how deep the bags under her eyes are, how red and splotchy her cheeks. Her head is throbbing dully, and her mouth is far too wet, and her mind is all frazzled. Hangovers, she decides, are not worth it.
Then she notices it. Just a tiny detail, something she wouldn’t have seen if she’d not been paying attention. Behind her reflection in the tiny mirror, is a dark spot in the water. She stares at it, tilts the mirror this way and that, and just as she realizes what it is, just as horror begins to crawl over her face, the clawed hand grabs her by the hair.
She tries to scream, gets out a syllable- interrupted by the flood of lukewarm water entering her open mouth. She snaps it shut immediately. And now she’s kicking, and grabbing- one of her arms reaches behind her head and grabs senselessly at the fingers entwined in the longer section of her hair. She kicks. She scratches. She screams.
Dimly, she is aware of pounding on the door and shouting in the hall, but it doesn’t matter because she’s going to die.
She’s literally going to die. No- no, no nonono-! she thinks, and remembers the mirror in her hands, I’m dying, she thinks, I’m drowning- I’m dying-
With her free arm, she brings the mirror down - hard - on the porcelain tub, feeling the glass shatter. She scrambles for purchase, grabs one of the shards and holds it tight. She is aware of the blood sliding smoothly down her wrist - but it doesn’t matter, nothing mattersI’m dying I’m dying I’mdyingdyingdyingdying-
Then she slashes. Feels a weight vanish. Pulls herself out of the water as quickly as she can. She vomits bath water all over the floor, and then she’s sucking in air in big monstrous gasps, her eyes teary.
In less than a second she’s backed up against the locked door, naked and shivering and bleeding badly from her hand. Someone is pounding, kicking at the door, and they are talking and shouting and she doesn’t hear a word of it.
Deliriously, she takes the shard of mirror, still dripping with her blood, and looks at herself. Her hair. She stares at it. She stares and stares and then she stands up and unlocks the door, not even noticing herself doing it.
A very worried looking Tubbo peers at her, his hands glowing. The door had been splintering. She looks at the wood, and only now does she notice that it had begun to sprout tiny branches. He was trying to rip it open with magic.
Her blood lands on the floor. Actually, it lands on Tubbo’s shoes, but some of it also lands on the floor. She looks at Tubbo, and suddenly wonders what sort of face she’s making right now. Then she looks down at the ground and up at him and now she’s touching the place where her hair used to be.
‘It’s gone,’ she says blankly, and then she falls into Tubbo’s arms and suddenly she is sleeping, sleeping so very soundly.
~
When the dream comes, it is colder. The sky glitters, the galaxy swirls, a brilliant portrait of what chaos might be. The sweet, sweet smell of moonflowers and wisteria floats purposefully through the air, like music notes across a concert hall. And, half-muffled, the melody curls around the blades of grass and parts the winds to reach her ears.
She stares, blankly, at the sky. This is not the first time she’s seen this starscape, and yet it will always feel fresh in her memory. Every time it comes to her, she relives that first time here, relives her whole life to see the endless colours. She hears a voice — his voice — humming along to the tune in the air. For some reason, she joins in.
A wisteria blossom rains down from the tree, and lands - featherlight - on her nose. She giggles childishly. The humming stops, but the music, played on the instruments of memory and nostalgia, carries on.
‘You’re back,’ says Schlatt, appearing overhead. He peers down at her curiously.
‘Yes,’ she says, and then remembers why she even fell asleep, ‘I almost drowned,’
‘Yeah. You did. Good thing you had that mirror, eh?’ While he’s talking, she sits up straight and realises quite suddenly that in this world the house doesn’t exist. She looks at where it should be, and all there is are trees.
‘I almost drowned,’ she says again, more to remind herself than anything else.
Next she’s grasping at her hair, at the uneven layers left in the wake of her slash. She runs her fingers through it, almost compulsively.
‘It’s gone,’ she says unhappily, flicking the messy (and slightly damp) strands.
‘Well it was either your hair or your life,’ Schlatt shrugs.
‘I know, I just-…It’s hard to think about the dying bit, so I’m choosing to think about my hair instead,’ she responds.
‘Fair enough. Nearly dying is almost as bad as actually dying,’ he says, and sits down beside her. She turns, and for some unknown reason she touches the flowers in his hair.
‘Moonflowers are really pretty,’ she says absently, ‘They’re the prettiest night-blooming flower. So strange how something so pretty can kill you, right? They’re just pretty white flowers, but if you ingest one, you’re dead,’
‘I’m already dead. They used to be my favourite when I wasn’t, though. I always thought it was nice how they only bloom at night. Makes ‘em special, right?’
She nods noncommittally. And then she leans in, and kisses his forehead. ‘I’m really sorry. I’m really sorry you’re dead,’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry too,’ he says weakly, and gently she pulls away and sits on the grass. She curls her fingers into the dirt and feels briefly relieved.
And then the dream floats into silence, and Schlatt puts his hand on her wrist, and he winks.
‘You’re an independent nation now,’ he says sheepishly, ‘You happy about that?’
And for a fraction of a millisecond Niki knows everything in the world, and she answers truthfully just as consciousness begins to set in.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, and wakes up.
~
When she opens her eyes, the first thing she does is sit up and look at her hands. She doesn’t even register the rest of the room, just looks at her hands. They are shaking, and one of them has been clumsily wrapped in cloth. It might be bandages, or it might be someone’s sleeve.
Someone clears their throat, and she is pulled from her trance. She looks up. Tommy and Tubbo are standing beside her bed, looking uncomfortable. Fundy is beside them, his tail flicking anxiously from side to side. Phil and Techno are in the corner, talking in hushed voices.
‘Where’s Will?’ she asks dumbly. For some reason, it’s the first sentence out of her mouth.
‘He’s off doing Presidential shit,’ Tommy says, gesturing vaguely towards the window.
‘Are you alright, Niki?’ asks Tubbo, whose face is so white she thinks he might have lost all his blood.
She realizes then that she doesn’t know. She almost died. She doesn’t know if they’ll believe her when she explains what happened, though.
‘Only,’ he continues nervously, ‘Only you were in the bath and then I heard like- part of a scream? And then it just sounded like lots of splashing and watery noises— uhm- so I ran upstairs, and I tried to open the door- but it was locked, so I started using my magic to break down the wood, but then you just walked out with your hair all short and you were bleeding, and you had this weird look on your face, and then you just fell,’
Niki blinks at him. The memory registers in her mind.
‘I really do faint a lot. Much too often, if you ask me,’ she says, ‘I’m like a character in a horror novel,’
Tommy looks at her, snorts. His arm was bandaged yesterday, probably by one of the medics. She hopes someone used a little magic to help heal him. He looks pale, and there are bags under his eyes. He looks shit, if she’s being honest.
‘What happened?’ Phil asks gently and pats her hand reassuringly. She didn’t even notice him walking to the bedside.
‘Uhm,’ she says,’…Well, I was just…floating around in the water, and then I was looking in the mirror, and then— You won’t believe me, but something just-…grabbed my hair and pulled me underwater and I thought I was going to die so I-...I broke the mirror and I used it to- I used to cut my hair, and then the thing went away,’
Techno tilts his head at her, and then looks at Phil. There is a strange sort of silence. Tense. Nervous.
‘Right,’ says Phil, ‘We’ll, uhm, we’ll get to that, then,’ and then he and Techno walk away. The door clicks shut behind them.
‘D’you think the house is haunted?’ asks Tommy, a little more excited than he should be.
‘Maybe. Maybe Techno can exorcise the thing,’ says Niki, and tries her best to smile warmly. She doesn’t know how it ends up looking, but Tommy smiles back.
‘Maybe,’ says Tommy, and nods wisely.
‘Was it cool? Almost dying, I mean. Was it cool?’ Fundy says, as he jumps onto the bed, spreads his legs out in front of him. Tubbo smacks him upside the head
‘Don’t jump on Niki. She’s just been traumatised,’ he scolds. Tommy nods in agreement.
‘Sorry, Niki,’ says Fundy, ‘But was it? Was it cool?’
Niki thinks for a moment. She smooths out the imaginary wrinkles in her nightdress, and then she looks up again.
‘No,’ she says decidedly.
Fundy pouts at her, and then he leans over and kisses her cheek.
She laughs, ‘What was that for?’ and he smiles and she reaches up to ruffle his hair
‘Bye, Niki. I hope you feel better,’ says Fundy, and then he hops off the bed and runs off into the hall.
‘I’m fine,’ she promises Tommy and Tubbo, as they share concerned looks between them, ‘I’m not even sick. Let me go downstairs, I’ll clean up and make some lunch-‘ Tommy puts up a hand, interrupting her.
‘Listen, Niki, you are not getting up. And that’s coming from me. I literally got shot yesterday,’ he says matter-of-factly.
‘He’s right. I dunno what’s been going on with you, but you need a chance to rest. Anyway, Tommy’s had some healing done and you haven’t. So no arguing, just stay here a while, okay?’ says Tubbo, ‘If you need me, I’ll be in the greenhouse,’
‘And I’ll be-!’ Tommy begins, but Tubbo interrupts.
‘In bed. You’re just as bad, you reckless idiot,’ Tubbo says, and Tommy scoffs indignantly, but before he can argue, Tubbo is dragging him out of the room, smiling brightly at Niki.
‘I’ll send Wilbur up to see you later, when he’s not busy,’ he promises, and then closes the door.
Hope this doesn’t end the way my last bit of alone time did, she thinks miserably.
~
Despite everyone’s insistence, Niki doesn’t stay in bed for long. She can’t. She’s too antsy, too pumped full of adrenaline, and besides; she’s got this horribly overwhelming feeling that she needs to be doing something, anything.
She needs to get up, to move around, to just not be thinking about the hand in the bath water or the way the shard of glass sliced so cleanly through her palm. She thinks of how gnarled, twisted, the fingers had looked. The image of that hand, grabbing her, touching her, makes her want to throw up.
So she gets up. She stumbles her way to her dresser and tears off the-…she’s not wearing one of her nightdresses. She’s not even wearing her own clothes, for goodness’s sake. And suddenly she is filled with a rush of embarrassment, remembering how she had just stood there in the doorway — naked — staring at Tubbo like she didn’t know who he was.
And someone had needed to change her into different clothes. It makes her want to scream into a pillow with shame. She’s not a baby. She can change her own clothes. That’s irrational, of course; she’d been unconscious, so it wasn’t surprising that someone needed to put her into different clothes — but still, she doesn’t like the thought of needing others to do things for her. It makes her angry, for no real reason at all.
It’s so stupid to be upset over this, she thinks, but it doesn’t stop the unhappy feeling in her gut.
But now she looks in the mirror, and realises she’s wearing a shirt. One of the army uniform shirts. It’s too big for her in every single way, and it’s so long that it covers most of her thighs. She’s wearing a coat too. It smells like cider. It also, inexplicably, smells like Wilbur.
Then it all suddenly comes together in her head, and she makes the connection. They had put her in Wilbur’s clothes, likely because they were the only ones that were semi-clean and not currently being used. It makes sense. Perfect sense.
She still blushes though, because she is ridiculous. A ridiculous girl in a ridiculous situation, fallen madly in love with a ridiculous man. She wants to cry, and then she wants to run out of this room and find him and beg him to kiss her again.
Instead, she takes off the borrowed clothes, and tosses them onto her bed. She would throw them on the floor, but that’d just mean she’d have more cleaning to do. She changes into a dress, today, because there is peace and she wants to force herself to believe that.
The dress she puts on is green, like misty water and the taste of mint. It’s pretty, and has a matching ribbon to go in her hair. She doesn’t put it in. She just brushes her hair, roughly, so it hurts, and leaves the room feeling a far too many things to put accurately into words.
When she leaves the room, her breath is bated. She feels anxious. Walking down the hallway, lined with beautiful portraits and a little dusty — she hasn’t cleaned in a while, because of…everything — she tiptoes. She doesn’t want to be caught, to be scolded like a naughty kid for not rotting away in bed while everyone else does the important work.
I don’t need rest, she thinks angrily, I need to feel helpful. For once in my life, I need to feel like I’m not some useless child, running around idiotically, begging for attention from anyone who sees me. I’m not a child. I don’t need their pity.
She makes an angry sort of noise, and then she continues down the hall, stopping outside of Techno’s room. It’s stuffy, even though she cleaned it a few weeks ago, and the whole room feels…empty. Techno isn’t there, he’s probably off practicing how to stab things, or talking to Wilbur in a hushed voice.
She stares at the walls, and wonders what sort of person Technoblade really is. The lack of an answer to that question unnerves her, so she leaves. The door shuts behind her, with a click so quiet she almost doesn’t hear it.
When she gets downstairs, she finds her cleaning supplies. No one is home, at the moment — excluding Tommy, whose snores she can hear from where she stands in the kitchen — probably off healing the injured and beginning L’manburg’s new era of peace.
Maybe they are rebuilding. Tubbo once told her of a courthouse he planned on building in the sky when he was older. She hopes, now that he doesn’t have to fear for his life constantly, that he finds the time to build it. She hopes he finds time to do everything he couldn’t when the war was still raging.
She thinks of the others while she cleans. Thinks of Techno, and Phil, and Tommy and Tubbo and Fundy. She doesn’t think of Wilbur. Or tries not to, anyway. She doesn’t want to face that. She doesn’t want to keep asking herself how she feels about him, doesn’t want to think of his lips on hers or his breath on her face, or the fact that he left her alone by the tree. It doesn’t matter. She isn’t upset.
She cleans. It’s good work. Easy. Distracting. She dusts every wall, polishes every countertop, organises and then reorganises every ornament, washes the floors, cleans the rooms, does the dishes and scrubs the blood off of everyone’s old clothes. She even polishes Techno’s crown, which he’d left on a stand in his bedroom.
When she’s finished she wanders through the empty house, adjusting portraits, checking for dust. The house feels suddenly cold, empty of laughter and the sound of running feet. She wonders what it might have been like when Phil was still raising the boys here. She wonders what sort of a mother they had.
She imagines she must have been kind, like Phil. Delicate and sweet. Maybe she had Wilbur’s eyes. Maybe she spoke like Techno does. Maybe she smiled and it made them feel safe, feel cozy. She must have been clever, to have survived raising them, must have been all wise words and comforting advice. Maybe she smelled like lavender, in the way that Wilbur does, maybe she shone like summer sunrises, the way Tommy does. Maybe she could fight, maybe she was like Techno.
She must have been wonderful , Niki thinks, and then she is standing by a painting she’s never looked at before. It’s of a woman, with the kindest eyes in the world. Brown, like Wilbur’s, but so…warm. So full of life that it flows from the canvas and into Niki’s heart. The woman in the painting wears a black veil, pushed out of her face by a headband, and a dress that looks like a starry night sky, purple and blue and shining like jewels. She is beautiful. So elegant. The painting of her radiates wisdom, and kindness and sweet orange-tasting joy.
Nothing like Niki. Nothing like the messy, frightened girl who thought she could be a hero. Nothing like the wreck that stands before the portrait, staring into acrylic eyes. Niki turns away, because she doesn’t want to be reminded of how much better she should be.
She marches past the painting, avoiding the eyes like a frightened child avoids their parents. And then she opens the big double doors and now she’s outside in the open air and the sky is blue and the clouds are wispy and soft, and the air tastes like stream water and lemons.
She breathes in, so deep you’d think she’d been drowning. She shoves the thought of drowning somewhere deep in her subconscious and makes it go away - or tries to, at least.
And then she walks to the wisteria, because it’s the only place where she feels like she belongs. She doesn’t look at the plaque, doesn’t smell the blossoms, just sets herself clumsily down under it. And then she lies on her back and holds out her bandaged hand in front of her face.
The bandage needs to be changed. She can already see the dried blood seeping through. It’s turned a reddish brown, and it stains the white cloth and makes her want to rip it off and clean it. She feels angry, inexplicably angry.
She’s angry at Wilbur for kissing her, and she’s angry at herself for letting him, and she’s angry at the thing in the bath for trying to drown her and she’s angry that she had to cut her hair to escape and she’s angry that, even though the war is over, she can’t even have a single day of peace. It’s not fair.
It’s so infuriatingly unfair that she can’t even relax under the wisteria because she’s too busy trying to categorize all of her anger into little imaginary boxes. She gets up, too irritated with the world to keep lounging idly.
And now she’s walking, trudging, in some uncertain direction. If someone were to stop her and ask ‘Where are you going?’, she’d blink at them uncertainly and say, ‘I have no idea,’ and then push them out of her way.
She’s going nowhere, off on an adventure that will end at the edge of an hourglass, as the sand slips through trembling fingers and the years pile up in a desert. She doesn’t look at the ground, or at the sky, or anything at all. She just looks.
And then, when she finds herself almost falling into the stream on the edge of the White House Estate, she turns mechanically on her heel, now following the water to see where it leads, as the winding paintbrush of blue fades away behind thick shrubbery ahead of her.
She wonders, absently, if she’s going insane. Or maybe she’s already gone, maybe she’s taking herself on a trip to the edge of the world where she can fall into the stars, or maybe she’s been walking so long that she’s already dead and has forgotten to notice her unmoving heart. But then she breathes in, and she’s alive again, risen from the grave like a spirit.
She waltzes on along the stream, half annoyed and full of all the emotions that make a person alive, and steaming with a feeling that could never be explained. The water is clear, and it smells fresh, and it looks like a flowing waterfall of diamond, bubbling mesmerisingly along.
She doesn’t know what to think about anymore, so Niki thinks about nothing, until she finds herself following a poorly defined path into a forest she didn’t know was there. It’s dark, and little ribbons of sunlight reach their slender tendrils into the canopy to illuminate her journey and reflect off the surface of the stream.
Eventually the path transitions subtly from a thickly forested wood with mossy dirt and dead leaves decorating the earth, into a grassy area where the trees are spaced more evenly apart, and then - as noon comes and goes - into a sandy hollow, where the smell of salt and moon flowers permeate like thick clouds. Something claws incessantly at the back of her mind, but she deliberately ignores it.
The path gives way to an open area, where the stream is banked on either side by shimmering white sand, and trees overhang the clear blue water. The smell of salt is overpowering, and then Niki realizes that she can hear the sea, and that the trees are all hanging low with big white blooms, screwed tightly shut in the daylight. Moonflowers.
The smell is suddenly familiar. Seawater and moonflowers, and then she’s running —and she really doesn’t know why she’s doing that — but now she’s coming to a space where the moonflowers thin out into nothingness.
And she’s on a beach. Strikingly familiar, and yet utterly unknown. The sand is the colour of the handkerchief tucked securely into her apron, and the sea smells so strong that it stings her nose, but it doesn’t matter because suddenly she’s thinking of the last time she was at the beach, and she’s half smiling and the memory.
Her mother, waving from where she lay on the sand, her father, splashing water into her face as he clutched her tiny hand. Her grandmother, picking herbs and seemingly worthless weeds over by the place where the forest meets the beach. And her siblings, two of them chasing one another on the beach, her older sister beside her and their father, knee-deep in sea water and holding a sleeping baby — Alexander — in her arms, gently rocking him from side to side and making soothing little cooing sounds.
‘Papa?’ says Niki, and her father looks down at her, scooping her up into his arms so she can see all the way into the distance, ‘Why don’t we live by the sea forever?’
Susanna laughs, almost making Alexander wake up, ‘Nikita, if we lived by the sea we might be hit by a flood,’ she said, smiling in that ever-amused way only she could.
‘We can swim, can’t we, Susie?’ says Niki.
‘Can’t out-swim the ocean, dearest’ said her father, and looked at her with an expression that held a million stories she would never hear.
Niki shakes her head then. It’s over now. She’s older now, and those memories don’t mean anything anymore. She grew up. She out-ran those years.
She still takes off her shoes, and lifts up her skirt and starts walking up to the place where the tide meets the sand, but then she sees him.
Wilbur. Standing in the water, letting the salty spray bathe his skin. The wind ruffles his hair, and Niki wonders how she didn’t notice him earlier. She turns to the side, and sees his hat and socks and boots, resting carelessly in the sand.
She wades in after him, holding up her skirts to stop them from being wet.
He must hear her approaching, because he turns around and, when he sees her, his face seems to split into ten thousand different expressions. He looks surprised, and then he looks confused and now he’s embarrassed and then, eventually he settles on a bashful sort of guilty.
‘Niki,’ he says, sounding strangled, ‘You’re— uhm-, You’re here. Out of bed and…—here,’
‘I’m here,’ she agrees, and thinks she might be going mad.
‘Yes,’ he replies awkwardly, turning stiffly to gaze at the horizon.
She joins him, and feels that she should say something. Uncountable feelings rumble indescribably inside her, and she feels like a ship in a storm, pulled this way and that. She’s struck by a memory, and so she turns to Wilbur.
‘You kissed me yesterday,’ she says accusingly.
He looks at her like she’s shot him.
‘Uhm…Yes-..No-, Actually, yes—…Uh…Sorry,’ He musters, looking like he might start crying.
And then — and this happens completely without her wanting it to — she laughs, and it’s a wild, hysterical laugh but it’s the first time she’s felt happy and sober simultaneously in ages, and it’s so stupid, but it’s so funny and his expression changes a million times without her properly noticing and now he’s laughing too- and they’re both insane but who cares?
The entire universe has gone insane and the war is over and he kissed her and that’s so funny that she starts to tear up and has to fight for the ability to not collapse onto her ass in the ocean. She actually does fall over, but that’s funny too, so now they’re just laughing harder and the cold water doesn’t even bother her, because everything is so funny .
Wilbur is laughing, so loud and so wild that he doesn’t even sound like himself anymore, and then when neither of them can breathe enough to keep laughing, he bends down to help her up.
He pulls her to her feet, her dress soaked and dripping, and then he grins stupidly.
‘Dance with me,’ he says, grasping her hand and pulling her closer.
‘There isn’t any music,’ she says, shaking her head and almost laughing again, ‘And we’re stood in the ocean,’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he tells her, and gets onto his knees, holding one of her hands in his own. He looks like he’s proposing, and now she has to stop herself from laughing aloud at that — and he kisses her hand, like a real gentleman would, ‘Please, Miss Nihachu, do me the greatest honour of dancing with me in the middle of the ocean,’
And for some reason she finds that so funny, and his legs are soaked and he’s stifling a laugh, so she’s nodding at him,
‘You’re a ridiculous man, Wilbur Soot,’ she says, and pulls him to his feet, letting him spin her around,
‘Maybe I am,’ he says, and smiles at her in a way that reminds her of the rising half-moon.
So they dance, letting the cold water claw at them and sing along to an imaginary orchestra and Niki hopes that if she dies her ghost can live in this moment forever, and while she dances with him, her heart floats away to a sky full of stars and a head full of dreams.
Again, she is dancing with this boy. Again, she is made of freedom and the world is once more beautiful and it doesn’t matter that she’s been here in her dreams, or that the world might end tomorrow, or even that she might’ve died a few hours ago. That’s not important now.
What’s important now is that he is dancing with her, and she isn’t angry and she doesn’t feel guilty or sick or afraid, and she’s so deeply, so truly alive that she thinks she can feel every fish in the ocean, every bird in the sky or bug in the dirt. Life is overflowing from within her, and it will be gone soon, so she loves it like fire.