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Just before dawn again. Sloane woke up to icy bedsheets and the sound of crying. Hurley had slipped out from under the covers and gone into the living room already, but it hadn't dulled the noise enough.
For the third time this week, Sloane stared at the ceiling and only noticed that she wasn't blinking when her eyelids began to itch. She battled herself, as always. Snarled at herself to get up while staying flat and still on the marble-cold slab of mattress. The only thing she wanted to do was go in there and help. The last thing she wanted was to go in there.
She rose after a couple minutes. At least it took far less time now than it had when she had first woken up this way weeks ago. Then, she had lain there not knowing what to do. She had hoped that Hurley might stop on her own. She hadn't.
Hurley hadn't bothered turning on the living room light. What filtered in through the blinded windows was gray, a gray that was almost tangible and that settled onto the skin. She was curled up on the couch, face hidden in her knees, body moving like it was trying to dry-heave. It was strange, how small she had made herself. She was small, of course, but she seemed more so now that her head was not held high, her chest not out, her stance not wide.
She never looked up, so Sloane eventually walked over. She sat down slowly and waited for her to notice the shift of the cushions. Hurley did, finally, and it was only an instant after meeting Sloane's eye that she buried herself in her chest. Immediately, she wept harder, like she'd been waiting for a cue. She clung ferociously, holding on in order to hold together.
Sloane wrapped her arms around her, too, pulled her in deeper. This part she could do. She could tuck Hurley into herself, right where she had always fit against her. She could wipe the sap that slowly dripped from her eyes before it hardened on her cheeks. Anyway, knowing how these things often went, this might be the only time she got to touch her all day.
She ran her hands through Hurley's curls of short hair but was careful to avoid the cuts in the wood on the back of her head. Before the change, they had been scars--deep ones, where strips of flesh had been permanently removed. The original injuries might have been nearly enough to scrape the skull.
Several weeks ago, hours after they had returned home from battle on the Day of Story and Song, Hurley had stood in the middle of the kitchen, hands slightly raised at her sides. Then she had collapsed with her hair in her hands and her forehead against the floor. After getting on hand and knee to attempt speaking with her, after all but trying to shake her bodily out of her panic, after knowing only that she didn't know what to do, Sloane simply held her while sitting there on the unswept hardwood. She stayed that way, stock-still and terrified and listening to the faint noises from outside, where crowds celebrated victory in Goldcliff's raucous fashion.
It had taken hours before she had calmed or exhausted herself enough to breathe. That was when Sloane absently brushed over the old scars, as she had done many times before, and Hurley finally spoke, to say that before she hadn't remembered where she'd gotten those marks. That she used to wonder about them. After hearing the bard's song, she didn't wonder anymore.
"You know how I said I joined the militia when I was really young? I remember why now. I used to look back and think, 'Why was I in such a rush? Why didn't I think it through more?' Now I know. It's because we were at war.
The Relic Wars. Sloane knew now, too, of course. Everyone did. And yet she still didn't know shit, really, even after remembering. In those days, she had already begun traveling Faerun. It would be years before she came back to Goldcliff, well after the city had been ravaged and ravaged again by people seeking a brown braided belt. Sure, maybe she saw some things at arm's length. Circles of black glass in valleys that had been green a day ago. The town up the road where she'd planned on staying the night, entirely turned to gold. But she just curved around and kept moving past it. It'd be more than a decade before she comprehended the real power of a Relic. Hurley had found out far earlier.
There was a certain violence to the way she cried. Like her body were trying to turn itself inside-out as she choked out the sobs. Sloane felt the jolts against her and didn't want to be there on that couch.
She thought that and deliberately bit the inside of her cheek. It wasn't even true, at least not exactly. Of course she wanted to be there for her. But every whimper that came out of her reminded Sloane of how little she could think to do about it. Her pain was contagion, and Sloane felt it seep into her skin like deep, deep cold. It made her want to shake as well, and when she couldn't allow herself, she had to just carry it. It shouldn't have surprised her, since Hurley's feelings always rubbed off on her. She felt in such big ways, the excess was too much for her body to contain. Even her happiness was like that. For all the time that she'd known her, she would walk in and right away make her joy as visible and warm as a light lflicked on in a room, and Sloane, regardless of what weight she'd taken on throughout the day, couldn't quite make herself worry as long as Hurley wasn't worrying. She'd always been the brighter of them, the better of them.
"I just...people were dying, and a lot more people were out on the street with their homes unlivable, and I was going to go insane if I had to sit by and watch it happen for another day. I was seventeen."
Sloane caught, then, that she was wishing that Hurley would be happy again so that they would both be happy again. It wasn't right to think that. She still thought it anyway.
It was just frustrating, that was all, knowing that she was scarcely any help. She was, in fact, possibly the least qualified person on the planet to talk Hurley through any of it.
"There's a lightning strike and suddenly there goes a third of your platoon. Or you barely make it to shelter before a tornado touches down on the battlefield and tears up everything that didn't get out of the way in time--"
At the time, Sloane hadn't meant to make it obvious, how much her skin crawled remembering what the Sash could do and what she might have--maybe would have--done with it. She had failed. Hurley had noticed and cut off her words. Sloane couldn't even be there enough to hear her out about that.
Besides that, what did she know about death? About losing people she cared for, as if she'd had any of those for most of her life? She was just absurdly, unfairly lucky that it was the sort of thing she could only imagine happening, and she couldn't even handle imagining.
She was quieting in Sloane's arms now. The sun was coming up. "I think I'm going to go for a drive." Hurley's voice was worn.
"Okay." She didn't ask to come with. She never did. Hurley went to be unburdened. Besides, since her last race, since the tree, since her mistakes, since everything, she hadn't been driving much. In the first months, she hadn't at all, and it had taken many months more before she could even sit in the passenger seat while Hurley drove and reassured. She wouldn't have been able to take the wheel at the final battle had she not had Hurley by her side.
She was getting used to days like this. She went back to bed after Hurley left--not like either of them had much to do, when the races had been suspended in the aftermath of the Hunger. She would wake up at maybe 10, then get up after three hours of self-cajoling. By then, the leaves that grew from her limbs would have all started leaning and growing to one side, reaching for the sun coming through the window.
The remainder of the day would then be spent moving from lounging surface to lounging surface, thinking about what she could be doing, wondering why she wasn't do it, telling herself that there was no reason for her not to go and get up and do it, and not doing it. Not that she owed anyone anything, but she did get sort of mind-numbingly bored. There was no reason, for instance, that she couldn't noodle with some parts in the garage and see if she could come up with any improvements to the wagons' engines. Or there was the fact that she wanted to get back into making her own clothes, or the garden they'd started growing outside--though she didn't like going out there without Hurley. Without that distraction, there would be nothing but the whispers of the plants for her to hear, the language that she now understood more than she had ever wanted to. They all had the murmur of wind-shaken leaves. It went on endlessly. She had heard something like even before becoming a dryad, hissings that were almost words. She hadn't understood the language back then, when she had held and heard the Sash, but she still comprehended more than she should have.
It was just kind of a lot now. Going outside was a lot. Plants never shut up, it turned out.
At some point during the day, she would think about how she'd have to go to the cherry tree in the city center, which was a little ways from their house, which they had because suddenly being dryads now didn't automatically mean they relished the idea of living inside a magic tree's pocket dimension. She wouldn't go until much later, though, quite possibly not until the wee hours of the morning, when the streets were quietest. She didn't want anyone around while she tried to clear away the crap of the previous several days. All manner of it piled up in front of the trunk--strings of beads and fresh supermarket fruit and metallic dragon scales and books and hard candy and candles and copper coins and minor potions and plush toy owlbears and old keys and hearts, hearts, hearts of paper or plastic or wood.
It was bizarre at best, the offerings. (Honestly, what were either of them going to do with oranges? Even if they had still been able to eat, they could have just grown the things themselves.) Recently, it was a hassle, mostly. Before the Day, people had left things near the tree only here and there, but it was different now that Goldcliff had watched the two of them go up against the black ick falling from the sky. Now the stuff collected in drifts.
Hurley had never minded, though. She'd been amused. Once, even, she'd admitted that it made her kind of proud. She hadn't been coming around to the tree as often lately, though. Sloane wasn't sure if she still felt that way. She hadn't gotten the chance to ask.
For awhile, now, Sloane had come to expect a few black feathers tucked into the tree's knots or stuck into the ground at its base. Not sure what people were trying to achieve with that--she'd collected more than enough of those over the years for a lifetime, even a lifetime as long as hers was shaping up to be. But now the trunk was iridescent with them. They stuck out of the bark and covered parts of the surface like scales. She found them bundled into bunches amongst the roots, strange bouquets of dozens. She didn't really know what to think about it, except hoping to the gods that folks were just finding them already dropped around town--otherwise, at this rate, Goldcliff's raven population would be bald and flightless within months.
Just in the past couple weeks, she'd started finding them with the ends of the shafts wrapped in bits of heavy white fleece, the sort you'd find in a common magic user's components pouch. There had been only a few like that to begin with, but there were far more now. Something to keep them from blowing away, she guessed. Or she had thought that, until people started drawing the same thing on pieces of paper left there. It showed up again and again, rendered in various styles and degrees of artistic talent, this image of the feather and wool. More often than not, the symbol was there as a signature of the bottom of a note, written as a thank-you or a plea.
Jesus H. Fantasy Christ, their pleas.
The gratitude was bad enough, but lately people had been leaving impossible wishes at her and Hurley's feet. A marriage that couldn't be. A beautiful girl in class the writer was too afraid to speak with. The notes nearly always ended in a cry for help with some love matter, and in the past week or so, she'd had a hard time reading any of them without wanting to crush the pages in her fists. It wasn't so much that the requests were stupid or the problems weren't real. It was more that she didn't know just what the fuck they expected her to do about it when they shoved such things in her face every day. Even if she'd had the ability to help, given her track record with godly power, she suspected that nothing good could have come of her interfering. She'd kind of liked it better when the rumors passed around about her had to do with how ruthless and savvy a criminal she was. That was something she'd actually been competent at. This? Love?
So, no, she wouldn't go to the tree during the day. Best not to run into any of the folks trying to drop off messages.
By late afternoon, she was still lying alone somewhere in her house, silent and angry as usual, and realized, again as usual, that she was angry at Hurley, and realized how ridiculous that was, because Hurley wasn't beholden to her or due back at some curfew hour, because she had her own shit to deal with and that was okay. Except Sloane was still mad at her after thinking all that. And the only difference now was that she was mad at herself on top of it, for being such an idiot.
She heard the front door lock click. She was disturbed to find that she found that surprising. Sometimes Hurley would come back a couple hours before sunrise, and Sloane would be in bed but still up and with the lights on. Not like she had ever minded staying up late before. She'd lie on her side pretending to read while Hurley slipped under the sheets beside her, and she'd ask, "Everything alright out there?" and Hurley would say, "Yes," and it wouldn't be a lie, exactly, because she had heard Hurley try and fail to lie before, and that wasn't what it sounded like, but this didn't sound like anything alright had happened either. Hurley would press herself against her back, but would not hold her as she usually did. In the night, in her sleep, she would turn over, and the two of them wouldn't be touching at all. Right. And people expected Sloane to play fucking matchmaker. That'd go great.
This time, Hurley stepped through the entryway while the light was still strong. She looked at Sloane and raised the side of her mouth in a half-smile that left more quickly than it had come.
"Hey," Sloane said. "How was your day?"
She had to think about a reply. Sloane hated herself for it, but had to admit that this was why she almost hadn't wanted to ask. At times, Hurley had been known to give that question an honest answer. Usually, Sloane loved it, the way she opened herself up to her, how she spilled everything onto the table to be shared. And she did want to know how her lover felt, now more than ever. But knowing meant having to do something about it, and that meant something else Sloane could screw up.
"The ride was good," she finally replied. "I tried some of switchbacks in the mountains."
"Badass."
"Yeah." It sounded too shaky to be a real affirmation. "I'm just...it really was fine out there, it's just that I'm feeling weird now. Restless?"
"Don't tell me I have to be jealous of the wagon now. Hope I'm not that boring." That was a joke, mostly. She hadn't intended to joke any more than a person intends for their heart to pump faster when they're frightened.
"It's not about you," Hurley murmured.
Unsurprisingly, she had little to say when Hurley asked about her day at home, or after that.
Maybe half an hour passed before Hurley stood again, straightening her pant leg. "I think I'm going to go out."
"Again?" Sloane said to her back.
She stopped walking before she turned around. "Can I not go out twice?"
"You can. I was just wondering why you came home first, then." Next to her, the couch cushion was rapidly losing its warmth. The AC was on too high.
"Did you ever think that maybe I wanted to see you?" More quietly, she added, "That I wanted to talk to you?"
Before, Hurley hadn't seemed to mind it when Sloane went quiet and only wanted to touch. Plenty was different now, though. This might as well be, too. "Talk about what?" she asked stupidly.
"I don't know, exactly." She watched and waited for another several seconds. Then she turned back around and walked down the hallway.
Sloane got up and leaned a little against the wall at the other end of the corridor, watching her lace her boots. Now was the chance to talk, like she had wanted. She had to say something. Anything would be enough. Anything would be better than nothing and anything would have been better than standing there with this full-body lock-up she'd been feeling for days. She said nothing.
Once again, she was not the one to make the first move. She noticed Hurley's hackles raising, the way her body stiffened as though she had taken a sudden chill, a moment too late. "Are you just going to keep staring at me?!"
And with that, Sloane slammed spine-first into rock-bottom. The impact took her breath away. Hurley had been angry with her, sure, plenty of times. Furious, even, and often rightly so. But Sloane had never heard anything from her quite like that. Her voice landed like a whip.
Hurley spun around, after she didn't reply for many, many moments. The former tension in her face had become unwound. It looked slack with shock now. "I'm sorry," she whispered with a voice like the crunch of dead leaves. "Sloane, I'm sorry."
"It's alright." Her guts were tumbleweeds. "I'm sorry, too."
"What are you apologizing for?"
"I don't know. Staring? I don't know."
"No, no. Don't be sorry. That wasn't like me. That wasn't...like me..." She stood turned away from Sloane a little, looking like she'd caught sight of something in the distance. But she was facing a blank wall. Then, without warning, she rushed into the bedroom. The door closed behind her.
Sloane was left to wonder when she had become needy. She'd stood well enough on her own for many more years than she'd stood beside someone else. She didn't know when she'd started leaning, or why she was so unsteady now that she couldn't anymore. She'd seldom had to think about it before. She'd seldom had to think about anything but safes and motors.
She put her hand on the bedroom doorknob. By the time she took the next step and turned it, the metal had grown warm.
When she walked in, Hurley was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked around and looked around again, as if it were the first time she'd seen it, as if it were the first time she'd seen anything, as if she'd been dropped into existence and left there moments ago. She put two fingers to her wrist and then seemed to remember that she no longer had a pulse. Neither of them did.
"Hey, Curls, are you doing okay?"
"What," she said, as a placeholder more so than a question. "I'm...was my watch always up there?"
It took a moment to recognize what she meant by that. Sloane searched before her gaze settled on the heavy silver timepiece on top of the dresser, then drifted back to Hurley. "What do you mean?"
"I don't remember putting it there. I thought it was...I don't know why I don't remember." Her words were cumbersome--by any measure, but especially for her. Usually, she spoke quickly even when calm and responded to others right away, as though she were confident that everything she said was worth saying. As though the conversation at hand were the singular thing on her mind. Usually, talking to her, in the moment, felt like being the only other person in the world to her.
"Hurley, you probably put it up there before bed last night." Sloane padded closer, close enough to see her eyes. They were a pair of glass beads. It was unnatural, how little they moved, how little they saw. Everything in her body had gone dormant and passive. It was not the look of death but of suspended animation. Rigid and still, not peaceful.
She'd seen this look before. She had seen it more often after the two of them had moved in together, but even back when they'd only ever met in the garage and the street racing strips and the backmost booths of dingy taverns after 2 AM, there had been glimpses. Before the Day of Story and Song, it had always been in passing. Just a momentary freeze, like someone who'd walked into a room and forgotten what for. She would shake it off in moments, forget about it entirely in minutes.
Just because Sloane had seen it before didn't make it feel any less foreign. Hurley focused on what was right in front of her, sometimes to a fault. This stasis was something else. And now that she had remembered, it was something that lingered.
Hurley opened her mouth, but it was several more seconds before she spoke. "Am I...I don't feel like I'm here."
"Okay, okay, Hurley?" Sloane went around to her and got down on her knees so that they faced each other. "You're here. It's alright. You're here, and I'm here, like it or not."
She swallowed and blinked hard at nothing. Sloane had her hand on the bed near her knee, but not on it. "I don't see how that's possible right now."
"I know you don't, but I promise you're not making this up. You couldn't have made me up, could you?"
Hurley stayed still. All except her eyelids, which slowly opened wide and wider before snapping shut. They squeezed together like her eyes were trying to shrink and recede back into her face.
"Sorry, don't worry about that." Sloane gulped back the thing that burned like dread at the back of her throat but that did not rise up in her long enough to be really known. A few things, she had always been good at. "Can you answer some questions for me?"
"I'll t--yes."
"Okay. Could you tell me five things you can see in here?"
She shuddered as she took in a breath and then started to look around at last. "Uh...there's my red slippers under the chair. And the books on the nightstand I've been wanting to read. Should I, um, should I tell you what they are?" She sounded short of breath.
"You can if you want."
"The Water Dancer, which is fiction, and one I picked up about tattoo designs. Okay. The old-fashioned porcelain knob on the bathroom door, which I know you hate. It's got a flower painted on it. A blue one. Your scarf over the lampshade? I still don't know why you leave them there all the time. It just blocks the light. And the closet light's still on."
Sloane's gaze moved around with hers, looking at each object she mentioned. "Mm-hmm. I see all that, too. You're not imagining it." Perhaps this, at last, was something Sloane could do for her. It wasn't too hard. She was just doing what Hurley had done for her before, whenever she was the one feeling like her brain had been shrink-wrapped and her body were not quite there. That is to say, whenever she felt as the Sash had made her feel, dispersed and spreading out of herself like sprawling roots.
"Okay," breathed Hurley.
"Four things you hear?"
"I think I hear the people all the way from the square, just faintly. It sounds like they're still celebrating."
And so it went on. When it came to touch, she said, "The bedspread, the sun on my neck..." and then she paused. She placed a hand over Sloane's but did not hold it. Her fingers tried to find the minuscule grooves in the swirling grain of the wood. "You. I feel you." Her fingers over what had been Sloane's lifeline and was now a crack in wood, over what had been the joint of her forefinger and was now a crack in wood. She looked at the palm as she did it. "Your fingerprints have stayed the same, you know. I guess both of ours have."
"How do you know that?"
"I went digging for your records in the militia's backlog a long time ago. I saw you got booked at least twice." Her fingers moving in small circles over where there had been bone before.
"And you...memorized what my fingerprints looked like?"
"Not exactly. Not right then. I just noticed your hands a lot after that, I think. Especially when you got the black grime from the tailpipes on your fingers."
She bit down steadily on her lip until the surge of feeling, good and bad, settled back into the darkness of her gut like boiling water taken off heat. Then she shrugged. "Been arrested three times, actually, but once was when I left Goldcliff for a few years."
"Three? I didn't know that."
"Well, it's not that interesting. Stupid petty theft, long before the Raven came on the scene. I was a kid. Rookie mistakes. Try to keep talking about what's going on here, though."
"Right. We're onto smell? That's not hard. The clean-clothes smell from the closet and whatever it is you're growing right now." Hurley looked back at her. "Why are you growing hyacinths? I'm worrying you, aren't I?"
Sloane became aware of the purple flowers that had started to spring from her shoulders, huffed, and quickly willed them to wither. "We can talk about me later. Or not, that'd also be great."
"Sloane..."
"Taste. One thing."
Hurley instantly opened her mouth as if to argue--good, so she might have started to recover--then closed it with a heavy exhale from her nose. She paused and thought. "Sick," she answered quietly. "The inside of my mouth tastes sour."
"Ok." Sloane hesitated. "How do you feel now? Any more grounded?"
"Yes. Kind of. I'm just..." She trailed off then, but just as Sloane was worrying again about what she could say next to keep Hurley's mind in the present, she spoke again. "How am I alive?"
"What?"
"How is it that I'm alive and they're not?" she questioned, and now she was starting to speak quickly once again, too quickly, chest rising and falling fast as though in anger. "The people I fought with. How am I still here when I saw them get wiped off the face of the earth?"
"Hurley," Sloane began, almost pleaded, "you are alive. You made it out of something that was fucking horrific. The last thing you should feel about that is guilty."
The blankets strangled between her fists. She had already looked away, and now her eyes shut again.
This, too, Sloane almost understood. Every day, she walked past mirrors to see five-petaled pink blossoms blooming behind her ears and at the corners of her eyes, see the leaves on her arms reach for sunlight. All around her and crawling all over her were the signs that meant that, absurdly, she lived still. Unlike the dark elf who had died at the bottom of a pit. Unlike the dwarf who had burned, and a town along with him. Unlike the elf thrown from a moving train. Unlike the sheriff of the timeless town and the liches now dead twice over. She'd heard vaguely about some of them before, but now everyone knew of them, the casualties and refuse of the Story. And she could add to that the ones she didn't know about. Nearly everyone who'd ever held a Relic and been held by it. The very ones that Hurley had fought. It wasn't the same, of course. All those people hadn't been her companions, had had nothing to do with her. But they did now.
And here she was. Her new, sprouting, lush body was the very vision of life. Skulking, stealing, lying, selfish, fuck-up her. It was kind of hysterical. "Do you ever think you don't deserve it?"
This time, Hurley looked at her, really, finally. "Sometimes," she whispered after awhile of staring.
"That's fine, you know. Well, not fine. You know what I mean. It's, like, okay to let yourself feel that. It makes sense that you would." She took the cold air deep inside her. "I get it. I do. But even if you were a shitty person, you'd still deserve to be alive, and you're far from shitty. In fact, I didn't know people as good as you existed before I met you for myself."
Hurley shook her head. "But some of us shouldn't have survived while the rest didn't! They...they didn't deserve dying either."
There was a small, toothed part of Sloane's mind that snapped out of the dark, So the last few years of us knowing each other were nothing? But it was small indeed, and she beat it back right away. That couldn't have been what Hurley meant. It wasn't about her. "Of course they didn't. Nobody should've died. But, Hurley, it wouldn't have been better if you'd gone along with them. I know you know that."
"Until a few weeks ago, I didn't even remember them."
"You're remembering now. That's the best you can do for them now, I think."
There was a moment of quiet before, wordlessly, she moved towards Sloane. Hurley didn't embrace her, just tipped forward until her forehead leaned against her shoulder. Sloane took that as a cue to wrap her in her arms, to cocoon her.
How long they stayed that way was unclear. All Sloane knew was that, outside the window, the sun was becoming overripe, going from yellow to gold as the day turned late. "Do you want to go for a drive?"
"I don't think I can get behind a wheel in good conscience right now," Hurley mumbled into her chest.
"I'll do it."
She felt Hurley move against her slightly before sitting up and giving her a surprised stare. "Are you sure? You don't have to."
"No, I can. I want to. At least if you like that idea." She attempted a slow grin. "Anyway, I mean, it feels like awhile since it's been the two of us, doesn't it?"
Hurley spent another few moments blinking softly, then returned the smile back to her bigger and better than it had been. It wasn't quite as wide and joyful as usual, but it was there and it lit her up, and oh, gods, had Sloane missed the way she could beam, the crinkles around her eyes.
She felt Hurley's eyes on her all the way up until they made it into the wagon, watching for signs of her nerves. Sloane tried to watch herself for that too. She settled into position and sucked in the evening air to stave off the wave of vertigo. Her belly felt as it had when she'd fallen off a cliff. But only for a moment. She'd been getting better about it. Her knuckles loosened and grew less white around the stick-shift as she started pulling out of the garage.
The wind was the wind. It was always the same, like cold water in a weary face. The longer she washed herself in it, the more it stripped away. It carried off her exhaustion and fear like it carried away the fluff of a dandelion head, leaving her as just herself, just anyone, hurtling down a highway. It seemed so long since she'd purged like this, and it wouldn't last. It never lasted. She'd come to believe, lately, that she'd probably spend her life trying to get free and never succeed, except in small moments. But she could accept that. Now she could. She could love dancing out of the grasp of the heavy things that held her, even knowing that they would come back to catch and pin her down as soon as she stopped moving.
She turned from the red sun in front of her to glance Hurley's way, only to meet her eye. Summer hadn't ended yet, and the desert days still scorched so that it seemed like it never would. Right now, though, there was just that much more of a nip to the cooling evening. She knew just by looking at Hurley that the change was coming. Both of them were a strange and different mix of plant and person, and while Sloane still had hair nearly as black and sleek as before, Hurley's resembled the petals of their shared tree far more these days. Now, the fluff of pink on top of her head had taken on tinges of orange and scarlet at the tips. Soon it all would turn to fall brilliance. The purifying fire of autumn, come to renew. And it would remind Sloane of the beginning, of a certain redheaded halfling she'd met years ago.
"You know, no one else is really out here right now," Hurley said. "You could go a little faster, if you wanted, couldn't you?"
"Are you asking me or telling me?"
"Well..." She half-shrugged, but her smile made it clear that she already knew what Sloane would do.
She laughed quietly in response. There was the familiar, satisfying shunt as she heard the gears shift.
"You're poetry when you drive," Hurley said when Sloane shook out her flapping hair. "Have I said that before?"
"Probably. It was sappy then, too, I'm sure."
"You love it."
A couple times, when the sky was nearly soaked through with the color of pitch, Sloane mentioned that it was getting late. Hurley nodded while resting her chin on the edge of the open window, saying nothing. Sloane kept going.
They got far enough out that the stars just kept on multiplying. With the lack of other light in the deep desert, it seemed that there was more of them than there was of darkness. Most times, when Sloane glanced over, Hurley would be looking up at the sky. The rest of the time, they'd lock gazes.
It might have been near midnight when the road ran up against the coast of the continent. Strange and abrupt, the transition between the seemingly endless desert and its inverse, the ocean. The sand of the dry lands simply turned into a sparse beach, which might have been popular during the day but now lay cold. They parked and sat on the hood with the blanket they kept in the trunk and huddled under it until their bodies formed a single mound.
The sound of the waves hit them, and they could faintly see the white foam come toward them before skittering back into the swallowing black. Had it not been for that, they might not have known that they were looking out at the sea. Everything before them was the same darkness. At this time of night, not even the seabirds cried.
Out of the silence, Hurley said, "I'm sorry if I haven't been the person you know."
Sloane whipped her head around at her. "What?"
She pulled her knees in closer against her chest. "I just know I haven't been acting like myself lately. Some things might have been easier if I hadn't remembered. I know that's selfish to say."
"Oh, shut the fuck up."
Hurley snorted. She could still laugh like she always had, at least.
"Of course you're the same person," Sloane went on. "I wouldn't be out here right now if I didn't still like you."
"I guess that's true."
"Don't be sorry for that, gods. It's not your fault. I'm just sorry I'm no help."
When she heard no reply, she ventured to turn Hurley's way, to find her with her brow furrowed in disbelief. "Sloane, did you forget what happened a few hours ago?"
"Yeah, when I started shit by pissing you off. My finest hour," she mumbled.
"Sloane."
She sighed, but relented.
Hurley took a deep breath and continued, "I don't honestly know what I would've done without you the past. I think...I think maybe I need more help than any one person can give me. No, I know I do. But I needed you. Just you being there, that was more help than I think I could ever tell you."
"Anyone could have just been there."
"Now you're just trying to irritate me. I wouldn't have wanted anyone else to do it, you idiot."
For a long time after that, the ocean kept breathing. They were both up to their ears in the sound.
Then Sloane murmured, "I guess nothing's ever okay for very long."
"No, I guess not." Hurley's whisper nearly blended with that of the waves. She moved closer to Sloane. "Sometimes things are better than okay, though. I think it evens out."
Under the blanket, the clean sweetness of lilies-of-the-valley. Had Sloane looked, she knew, she would have seen the tiny white blossoms hanging like miniature lanterns from their curved stems. Both of them were growing them. They spread evenly over her and Hurley as though the two had mounded together into one body, one hill from which the flowers sprung.