Work Text:
When she awakes, the day greets her with its teeth bared. She wakes with a sharp pain beneath her abdomen, her spine aching, and harsh sunlight through the window rendering it impossible to differentiate cruel dream and crueler reality.
Then there is a hand on her shoulder and, through the spiteful daylight glare, a face looking at her. A face, from which comes a voice: “My queen.”
“Paulina,” she says, her tongue leaden and her throat parched. Still tasting, just barely, of blood, from where she must have bitten it while fainting. Fainting. “My son is dead.”
Paulina bows her head, the skin beneath her eyes dull and dark. “A doctor confirmed it. You’ve been out through the night, and the King hasn’t been faring much better.”
It is his title, not his name, but a cold shock nonetheless. She is thrust into the memory of him, fingertips pressed to her cheekbone, lips parted in what might have just been an apology, a mending, before—
She sets her jaw. “I didn’t ask after the king.”
“I see.” Paulina’s hands have wrapped around her own. “Shall I tell him you’ve awoken?”
It is what she should do; he surely knows now that the oracle spoke truth. She could return to her heirless throne, the Queen to a remorseful king. She could have grief-soaked peace.
But that king cast her daughter into exile. That king commanded the grief which brought her son to the grave. That king betrayed her and killed her children and remorse is no remedy for sin.
“Tell him I have died,” she commands. She forces the tremble from her voice, straightens her spine, renders her expression as regal and cold as the stone goddesses in Paulina’s statue garden. “My son is dead, my daughter gone, my people lost to me. If I could do that which men are allowed, this kingdom would be ruled by its Queen alone. But since I cannot do the same to him, let him believe he has killed me.”
Paulina nods, and the Queen is rendered ghost.
The first days are quiet, hidden away in the statue garden. Paulina visits her, stolen food in her basket and story on her tongue. Hermione rests her head on Paulina’s leg. She curls into her lap, and sees herself as a child.
(And she may as well be, she thinks. If woman is either child or mother, one is a title she can no longer claim.)
She sinks into Paulina’s lap, lets the woman give her stories. She favors the fantasies, their hallowed heroes and towering monsters, who kill and betray and whose wickedness resides in their blood. For if it is in their blood, no one need ever waste isolated hours wondering why they killed, why they betrayed, what had turned their bestial hearts evil, and how could she have stopped it?—
Paulina tells truer stories sometimes.
Recounts the brazen young men haggling prices at the market she’d visited that morning. Tells of skinned-kneed children grabbing at ankles, nearly toppling her over as they went. Describes a husband, helping his pregnant wife over to look at the selection of breads, the two of them glowing with such love that Paulina did not dare look elsewhere.
These feel as much a fantasy as the monsters.
Does the world keep moving without her in it?
“He mourns you, still,” Paulina tells her, some many years after her death to the world. She sits before Hermione, humming as she twists Paulina’s hair into tight braids against her scalp.
Her hands falter as her expression does, but she has always known how to force her voice flat. “I mourn still my children,” she says, then says nothing more.
Her hair grows long, cascading down past the curve of her hip. Her lips forget the stain of rogue; her body, the feel of corset and brassiere. Tight-toed shoes are a fleeting remembrance for bare, calloused feet, and her mouth abandons the knowledge of a gentlewoman’s too-tight smile. She is, as she ever was, a ghost— free from earthly life, pale from lack of sun, adorned in billowing white gowns that dare not constrain her. If Leontes saw her now, would he think her apparition, or think nothing, unable to recognize the woman she has become?
Does that woman even care?
She wanders the statue garden, feet long immune to the sharp of gravel, fingers passing over foliage and stone alike. Her hands have crafted pottery, stitched lace, penned tales, but they’d never been fit for carving stone the way Paulina’s were. Still, she’d traced over the every divet of every statue, learning the intricacies of her only companions outside of their crafter and her own worrisome thoughts.
She is near the edge of the garden, so close that she can catch glimpses of the forests past the open pavilion Paulina keeps, when she hears music. It is a tune stolen from her childhood, merry and high with flutes and strings. Her body aches for the dance— and she is shackled to no throne, to no obligation of any type.
And so, she spins.
She spins into the open pavilion, sees Paulina leaning over her worktable, notices discarded stone and tools and not a musical instrument in sight. She calls, “Paulina!” and the movement of her legs— long bounds and turns— pull the wind through her hair and flutter the fabric of her gown.
Paulina looks up, expression painted not with confusion, and turns from the impossible source of music. Before another word is breathed into the air, Hermione catches her by the wrist, and pulls her into the dance.
They spin.
And they spin.
They are spinning and gravity has relinquished its power over them, age has abandoned its sovereignty. Spinning, they are girls, as they had once been. Spinning, they are planets, as they have always been, abiding only by the pull of one another. They are the sprouts beneath their feet and the sun that warms them, the shining flash of her hair and the rich of Paulina’s laugh and the occasional, warm brush of fingertips. I allow this world, she thinks, to spin as it will, the people live as they will, but now they are the ones frozen in time, for all that exists is us.
That infinite moment, in time, slips from her grasp. The next, she finds herself, limbs splayed out over the cobblestones, near cheek-to-cheek with Paulina, laughing as they hadn’t since they were too young and too enraptured in the brightness of friendship to see anything but each other.
“We are too old,” Paulina laughs, eyes fixed on the sun that paints her in dark-gold hues and illuminates her belying smile. “For spinning games.”
“We are ghost women,” Hermione counters. “That which does not exist, cannot hope to age.”
“There is but one ghost between us, if any.”
The music has faded, but she cannot remember whether it had ended as they spun or before or after, or if it had never existed at all. Paulina has always known how to twist the world, and Hermione had always known fear too well to ask.
Fear, like so much else, is now forgotten to her.
“Are you a witch, Paulina?”
The woman grins, and Hermione knows the gap in her teeth as well as the divets in the statues, the wrinkles in her cheek as well as the silver in her own hair, the glint in her eye as well as that centripetal, perpetual force of spinning.
“How else could I keep a ghost on earth?”
She does not know Time, in this life of hers, only the sun and the moon and the seasons, and lives by when they choose to reveal themselves to her.
So she does not know what year or day or moment it is that Paulina finds her in the pavilion, breath short from running and eyes wide and dark. She does not know Time, except that it stops when Paulina says,
“Your daughter— Hermione, your daughter is found.”
And she is not the same woman who gave birth to her daughter, but neither is her daughter the babe too young to be given name. In time, though not much, she will embrace Perdita. They will be as they are, two exiles sixteen years from home, the lost finally found, and they will learn the women they have become in separation.
But not yet.
For now, she clasps her hands around Paulina’s forearms. She nods. She smiles, something unpracticed and uncontained and wholly hers.
“Then it is time for ghosts to walk the earth.”