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It’s strange, to speak with words made by the mouth, the tongue. Red and Blue have changed their hearts and lives with letters. How to trust one’s feelings and thoughts on the fleeting vibrations of air produced by minuscule parts of the throat, created on the spot, without the forethought required by shaping words into lava or grafting them onto fish?
Red doesn’t know. It has never been difficult to speak to mortals of the times she visits, to other members of the Agency, but in front of Blue she stands defeated by the Time itself, by the way moments flee into others while the circuits of her brain try to transform beats of the heart into sound waves.
They’ve found each other and their secluded bridge between strands, the secluded spot outside time that should escape notice in a short while. Now Red, strangely bereft of words, starts by employing other languages. Touch. She takes Blue by the shoulders, lets her fingers feel the delicate skin of Blue’s wrists, holds on to Blue’s shudder. She leans across to feel Blue’s breath ghosting on her lips, puts her fingers into Blue’s hair.
Shyly, as though she is not the woman who danced across cracks in time with a laugh and saw empires rise and fall, she presses her lips on Blue’s in that other language of the mouth, a simpler one that goes right between the heart and the lips. She lets her breath quicken in an almost human manner when Blue kisses back, when Blue’s warm hands brush the nape of her neck. She hears Blue’s breath, smells the scents of earth and grass and epochs and blueberry that seem to float around her.
She holds Blue in her arms, foreheads pressed together. With each breath, her body seems to transform into something more organic, further away from the future she so long fought for. And Blue seems to become more real against her body and her face.
She takes Blue’s hand and brings her to the house she picked, here between the strands of time. From somewhere, a dog comes running at their feet, yapping in excitement. A startled laugh escapes from her lips, and before she knows it, she has spoken words. ”A dog, just like you wrote.”
She swallows. It’s the first word either of them has said of the letters. But Blue smiles, and says, her voice soft and like wind in the trees: ”I was hoping we’d find one here.”
Red wants to kiss her again, a thousand times, but she also wants to take Blue into their house and make it a home. So she brings Blue and the dog inside, finds a bowl in the kitchen, fills it up with water from an anachronistic tap, and puts it down on the floor for the dog. Then she puts water to boil, and looks for tea in the cupboards.
”Allow me,” Blue gently says, and steps by her side, so close that more of Red’s circuits become nerves and blood. Blue rummages through the cupboards, and quickly finds an exquisite pu’erh perfumed with roses. Red allows her to make it, wanting to see how she likes her tea. She, in turn, finds biscuits in the cupboard. They’ll have to figure out how to find food, drink and other items later; they can’t count on the place between times to constantly turn up what they need. They’ll need to build defenses out of thin air and figure out how to continuously outwit those they used to serve. But for now, they sit down for biscuits and tea.
Red takes Blue’s hands between hers, and thinks she could live forever from this, from touching Blue, seeing the sparkle of her eyes and the curve of her mouth, feeling the unsaid words of her fingertips and the eloquent sentences of her body. Maybe spoken words are overrated. The dog curls up in an eloquent statement between their feet, making a happy dog-sound.
She kisses Blue again, just because she can, and because she wants to feel it again. When she pulls back, Blue smiles, and Red could swear she can read a whole letter in her smile.
”We’re here,” Blue says. ”You’re here. We’ll figure out the rest.”
”Yes,” Red says, trusting her voice enough for that word, and perhaps one or two more. ”We will.”
The dog at their feet lets out a contented sigh of agreement, and Blue lifts the teacup to her lips.