Chapter Text
Takakura is not yet fifty when Archie dies.
--
The phone call is a shock. Not just because of the content, though it is enough to send Takakura crashing to his knees in the middle of his sad little cabin. But that Marian bothered to call at all is something of a miracle. Given their history.
"Heart attack," she says--somewhat dispassionately, he thinks, but then, he's always been jealous of her, the kind of fiery jealousy that sits low in his gut, easy to ignore right up until the moment it decides it's bored of being ignored. It twists him up in ways that make him see the absolute worst in her, even when none of those things are really there. In reality, she’s probably numb. Archie had also been not-quite-fifty, after all, and she, he knows, is barely into her early forties. And now she has to live another half of a life without her husband.
The love of her entire life.
"I'm sorry," he replies. It's all he can say. It's the truth.
"I know," Marian sighs. "There's going to be a funeral. Next week. If you want to come."
That she would invite him is another shock. He and Archie had fallen out of touch over the years mostly because she had never liked him, never trusted him, never wanted him within a hundred feet of what was hers. And he had hated her back with equal ferocity. Still hates her, really, for all that it matters.
But. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I'll come. When is it?"
She gives him the information in clipped tones, her patience wearing thin when he starts asking for specifics. In the end, she rushes him off the phone, offering a short goodbye that is not a goodbye at all. At least not the kind of goodbye a person would give to someone he or she cares for or respects.
Takakura drops the phone back onto the cradle. Puts his head in his hands. Sitting alone at his sad little kitchen table, surrounded by the four grimy walls of his sad little cabin, perched on the edge of a sad little property that belongs to solely to him only because his dearest friend had dropped his half into Takakura's lap and left with barely a backwards glance.
He had not thought it possible for a long broken heart to still hurt, and yet. The ache in his chest has returned full force, burning in that same dull way he remembers.
He doubts it will go away again for a long time.
--
He visits the city often, but makes a point to avoid Archie's--or rather, what had been--Archie's territory.
Takakura skips the actual viewing. He could have made it, probably, because the morning of, he'd woken up at three, the sky still a solid black out the window. But he had dithered, pulling weeds where he needn't have bothered, milking and brushing Bessie, organizing and reorganizing the old tools in the crumbling shed. This farm has been decaying around him, slowly, steadily, for years, but today--today, it seems thoroughly dead. Finished. Collapsed.
He's wasted countless days on pointless efforts.
Ten o'clock comes, and he wanders across the river and up through the pass--the city, though on the other side of a small mountain, actually isn't that far, for all that Forget-Me-Not exists in seemingly perfect isolation, so cut off from the rest of the world that time seems to move a different pace. Takakura, unlike most of the residents of the valley, has made the trek a thousand times in less than four hours. He sees no reason today should be any different.
It is just after three when he reaches the outskirts--buildings that crumble much in the same way that his farm does, leaning against each other as if for support. This is the bad neighborhood, Takakura knows, but he has always felt a certain affinity for it, as if they are kindred spirits, he and the people who live here. He prefers the bars on this side of the city, prefers the merchants and the shops, even the way people smile, with just a hint of exhaustion and no small amount cynicism.
Archie lives--lived--on the other side. The nicer side.
The differences, as he passes slowly through the streets, are gradual, but marked. The walls are cleaner, and painted brighter colors. The trash on the sidewalks is replaced with absurd, stunted trees. And the people--plaid button downs are replaced with tailored suit jackets. Well-made cardigans take the place of fraying sweaters. Scuffed brown boots vanish, with shiny black shoes filling the void. Rundown bars are replaced with neon dance clubs.
When he reaches Archie's townhouse--rising tall, formed of bright red bricks and deep brown accents, the windows lit with the kind of cheerful lights that seem almost obscene, given the occasion--he finds what appears to be a hundred cars crowded onto the skinny street outside it. Of course. Of course, where Takakura is isolated even from the isolation of Forget-Me-Not, Archie would be a social butterfly in this massive, crowded city.
(He was always a little bit jealous of his best friend, too.)
He hesitates at the bottom of the cement steps leading up to the massive oak front door. Stares up at the Christmas wreath, lingering into the winter's end and the spring's beginning. The streets are still dirty with sand and salt, but the snow has mostly melted. Takakura takes a deep breath and lifts his foot, mounts the bottom step.
The door swings open before he reaches it. A girl--a young woman--explodes out of the house and, before Takakura can properly react, crashes straight into his chest. He lifts his hands, almost thoughtlessly, and grips her upper arms as she sags against him, and somehow also away from him. Her face lifts--tear streaked, with big brown eyes, cheeks splotched red, framed by a tangled mass of brown hair--and his knees nearly buckle. The features looking up at him--they are Archie's, but they are also not. She is a strange combination of both of them--of Archie and Marian--strange, and difficult to look at. He feels it like a punch to the gut.
"I'm sorry." She draws away a little, steady now, and Takakura lets her go immediately, as if burned. His hands drop to his sides and hang there, awkward, large, slick with sweat.
"It's okay," he says. His voice comes out gruff, coarse, and he swallows, but cannot seem to rid himself of the lump in his throat.
The girl drags her fingers beneath her eyes, through large shadows and shiny tears. She blinks once, twice, before she focuses on him fully, her gaze glassy.
"I don't--I don't know you, do I?"
"No." He feels as if he is choking. He cannot catch his breath. "No, I knew--I knew your father a long time ago."
She squints at him for a long moment.
Then she says, with the strangest smile on her face, "Forget-Me-Not Valley?"
Takakura stares. Inhales and exhales.
"Yes," he says, somewhat stupidly.
The girl's smile grows. She wipes her eyes one more time--useless, really, because her face is patched red and her makeup is running everywhere and her nose is almost purple and still dripping a little. But she offers her hand a moment later, and Takakura takes it without hesitation.
"I'm Jill," she says, almost brightly, a stark contrast to her appearance.
"Takakura," he says slowly. And he almost--
almost
--smiles back.
--
The letter comes three weeks later.
He had only spent five minutes with Jill that day. Five minutes, and then a half hour of painfully awkward mingling, and then an escape to a bar in the not-so-nice part of the city to drown his sorrows before he stumbled back over the mountain, across the river, and into his bed. He'd woken up the next day with a pounding headache, feeling as if his mouth had been stuffed with cotton, and a small sheet of paper tucked into his front pocket, a phone number scrawled quickly across it.
He remembers her giving it to him. In the front hallway of her absurdly nice home, beneath a sharp light, still with that strange, cracked smile. They'd been hiding from her mother, or so she'd said, and she'd taken a pad of paper out of a stunted, decorative table and written the number down and asked him to keep in touch.
Takakura had sat in his bed and stared at the little piece of paper for a long time the next morning.
The letter begins with chastisement. You never called, it says, and Takakura, sitting at his sad, round little kitchen table, winces. The little piece of paper is sitting on his counter, carefully folded and pinned beneath a coffee mug. He's looked at it a lot in the past three weeks, and he's thought about picking up the phone, but he--he doesn't know what he would say. They'd barely had a conversation at the wake, and he doesn't know her, and she doesn't know him.
(He's also a little bit of a coward.)
I've been doing a lot of thinking, she goes on to say, about my father, and myself, and what I want for my future. And I was wondering if I could visit the farm.
That train of thought does not make any sense to him. Her dead father, her undoubtedly bright future, and his shitty little farm. But then, he has never understood people very well, and she is of a different generation on top of a different world, and he is at a severe disadvantage.
Takakura leaves the letter on the table and does some pacing. Runs his hands over his head and stares out the front window at the rundown barn, at the tilting tool shed. Bessie's rear end is just visible on the opposite side of the barn, and he can imagine her wide mouth working, chewing and chewing and chewing on the grass in the tiny, tiny grazing field.
He can't let her come here. He can't let her see what he's let become of this place in her father's absence. He can't. He can't deal with the disappointment he is certain he will see in her large, brown eyes.
He turns, stalks to his bedside table, and rips the phone from its cradle. He does not need to check the number on the little piece of paper to dial it--he has looked at it enough lately to recall it perfectly.
Jill does not answer the phone, but her machine does. Hi, her voice says, brightly again, and he is startled by how well he remembers it--you've reached Jill! I'm not around right now, but I promise I want to talk to you! Leave a message after the beep! I'll get back to you ASAP!
And then a tone, extended, hardly a beep.
And then--
"Okay," Takakura says. He doesn't think about it. His mouth just opens and starts talking without any cooperation from his brain. "You can come by whenever."
--
He panics a little later that afternoon.
The farm is in absurdly rough shape, even his distorted judgement aside. He cleans as best he can that day, and then the next day, and then the next. He weeds around the bases of the buildings, the tiny fields he’s never planted. He mows the pasture as best he can, Bessie trailing his steps with half hearted interest. He scrubs the grimy windows of every building.
Fevered work fueled by impending humiliation at the hands of a girl he’s barely met.
--
Jill appears on the fourth day.
--
She smiles at him, that same strange smile, when he opens his door and finds her outside it.
"Hi," she says. "I'm here."
Takakura blinks. He's wearing a ratty tank top, and he hasn't brushed his teeth yet, and even though he's milked and watered Bessie, he hasn't managed to accomplish anything else since. He's been working nonstop to try to make this place presentable for three days, and he's no spring chicken, and he's tired.
"Yes," he says after too long a pause, and a little stiffly.
Her smile fades a little. "I didn't--I mean, I haven't. I didn't come at a bad time, did I?"
"No!" Takakura says, probably too loudly. He pauses, takes a breath to collect himself, and continues, "No, I just. I need to get dressed."
"Oh," Jill's eyes trail from his face down to his feet. It’s enough to burn him alive--he’s honestly surprised he doesn’t spontaneously combust right then and there. Heat floods to his cheeks, to his absolute horror, and he wills it to stop, he wills his face to stay as pale as it was when he looked in the mirror that morning. But--with her looking at him--again, he isn’t young. He’s muscled, certainly, and it isn’t as if he has not groomed himself over the years, but. It’s early. It’s early, and he is all too aware of the grease in his hair, the stains on his clothing. The wrinkles on his face. Jill lifts an eyebrow, though, and says, "Isn't this how farmers usually dress, though? You don't have to change for me."
Takakura stands there for a moment, his brain ground to a halt. He looks at her, standing at his front door, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt of her own, the sun beating down behind her. Bessie honks in the field, the sound muted by the barn.
He’d painted the tool shed two days ago. It hadn’t done much to help.
“Okay,” he says. “Just, give me a second and I’ll give you the tour.”
He is not leaving this house without brushing his teeth.
--
Jill is wildly enthusiastic about just about everything.
She cooes over Bessie, who responds in kind, butting her large head against the girl’s hand, honking some more, flicking her tail and batting her large, beady eyes. Takakura scowls at the cow--never so responsive when it’s just him, which is--it’s just typical. So he’s not the most cuddly person in the world. He still takes particular care of Bessie. He is still as kind as he knows how to be.
Some appreciation would be nice, is all.
Jill is also kind, but in a more overt way, and only comments on the size of the buildings, not on their state of disrepair. And she crouches beside each of the open plots of land, running her clean hands through the soil. The patch of trees at the top of the property gets another long look as well, and Jill eventually turns to him and asks, “Why don’t you just cut this down, create another field?”
Takakura stares at her. “I’ve barely used the other two,” he says. “And there’s only one of me.”
A strange expression crosses her face at those last words, that last excuse, but before he can even begin to parse it, she’s turning back to look at the trees.
“Oh,” she says again.
--
It is not until later in the evening, the sun setting behind eastern edge of the valley, lighting up a sea trees just beginning to sprout tiny, green leaves, that he finally understands.
She had asked to see the rest of the valley after the tiny, pathetic farm, and so he had shown her--walked with her to the inn, up the street to Romana’s enormous and pointless villa, back down through the twin’s and Cody’s settlements. Jill had stopped them on the beach, crouched to run her fingers through the sand much as she had the plots of soil on the farm.
The waves beat gently against the land barely five feet away from them, a soft, continuous song.
“Am I like him?” she asks, so abruptly and so quietly that it takes him a moment to recover, to understand. And then--
Takakura does not speak often, but it is not for lack of things to say. He is rarely at a complete loss for words. And yet this girl has stumped him. Has reached into his mouth and torn out his tongue and rendered him utterly speechless.
He is silent so long that she actually turns to look at him, standing, her eyebrows flickering in concern. She takes a breath to speak, in all likelihood to ask him if he is okay, and he doesn’t have an answer to that either, so--
“No,” he blurts.
Her face falls. She looks away, back towards the water, colored angry reds and oranges and yellows and purples as the sun dies, dies, dies again.
“And yes,” he continues, because he cannot stop himself, and he does not like the hint of sadness creeping into her profile. “You are like them both.”
Jill smiles. It is like the strange smile of before, but also somehow different. More complicated. There is negativity there now that was not there at the wake.
“It’s okay if I’m not like him,” she says after a moment. “He didn’t want to stay here.”
Takakura stares.
Jill looks back to him. The light of the sunset casts her face in extremes--the right side, the side facing the ocean, is orange, and red, and open. The left side is shadow, and unreadable.
“I think I might,” she tells him softly, like it’s a secret. “I think I might want to stay here.”
--
And in the end, she does. Stay, that is.
She goes back to the city that night--he protests a little, because it is dark by the time she finally decides to leave and he has another perfectly stable, if a bit musty, cabin sitting on the property. Jill smiles and touches his arm, a fluttering little thing that sets his heart pounding furiously in his chest.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m a big girl. I can handle a little mountain.”
And she does. She leaves and then comes back three days later with a duffel bag stuffed full of clothes, dropping it on the ground in front of the barn, her hands on her hips as she surveys his sad little--their sad little farm.
“I’m ready,” she tells him when he joins her. They’re both looking at the other cabin, the cabin that’s now hers. “Are you ready?”
Takakura has to swallow a little before he nods. His voice still comes out a little strained when he says, “Yes. Yes, I’m ready.”
Bessie honks from the field, as if in agreement.
And that is how it starts. So very simply.
--
Jill settles into the cabin. Spring has begun in earnest, the soil thawing in the fields, Bessie mowing down newborn stalks of grass rather than the decayed remains of last year’s growth. She insists Takakura give her a proper tour of the valley now that she’s an actual resident, complete with introductions to the townsfolk. He struggles through this only because of her large, imploring brown eyes--as a rule, he does not socialize, his conversation skills awkward and stilted, his mood usually dark and irritated. And they--the villagers--are not overly fond of him, do not go out of their way to make him feel welcome. Never have.
They take to her immediately, of course, with her bright smile and her round, pretty face.
(Takakura does not resent this. He has never been one for large groups of friends, only a few, select, close people that he favors over all others. Archie had been that, if only for a while, and a long time ago. And now, today, his daughter--his daughter looks to be taking his place, if only out of kindness to an aging, bitter, and secretly lonely man.)
She strikes up friendships quickly, yet organically. She has a natural charm that draws the citizens of Forget-Me-Not like moths to the flame. Muffy seems especially fond of her, but then, Muffy has always been more drawn to the city than anyone else in the valley, and Jill is enough representation of that to intrigue her. When Jill is not working in the fields--and she actually works, makes an effort with budding trees and tomato plants and carrot seeds where Takakura never had--he sees the two of them sitting on the riverbank closest to the farm, their heads together, their shoulders pressed close. Speaking softly. Sharing secrets.
He does not know what to make of it. Of any of it.
And, what’s more, Jill seems happy--happy with her new blonde friend, happy with her tiny garden, growing each day. Happy learning how to properly milk Bessie, and how to keep her clean. Happy tasting the milk and crating it up for sale. Happy with achy knees and dirt-smudged faces and even happy with Takakura, awkward as he is with their every interaction. Days pass and weeks pass and even a month passes, and she continues to gift him with her smile.
He thinks he must be doing something right.
And he learns, more and more, that he was right about her. What he said on the beach. She is like both her parents--soft, the way Archie had been, and gentle, but in possession of that same hard edge Takakura had always resented in her mother. For all that she whistles through her work, Jill is not blindly content--her frustrations, when the come, are black. He has seen her kick fence posts, a string of curses slipping from her that would make that little hooligan Rock blush, and slamming doors in rage. The work is worthwhile, but it is not without pitfall, especially with the farm as faded as it is. They are reviving it, slowly, surely, but there will be no simple fix. The barn roof still leaks in the rain, and the soil quality is lacking. The chicken coop is uninhabitable, the walls close to collapse beneath the sagging roof. But they need more money to combat the issues, and need a working farm to make more money. Takakura is not unfamiliar with this cycle--when they had first started, young and naive and ready to take on the world together, he and Archie had been much in the same boat. That he is beginning the process again so many years later, this time with Archie’s daughter at his side, seems absurd, but he has no one to blame for their financial difficulties but himself.
It also seems a dream--this brave new farm in this brave new world--a dangerous dream, a dream he does not dare to hope will last, and complicated and messy and difficult to understand, but--
Jill is happy.
And Takakura is cautiously happy, too.
--
Spring burns into summer, and Jill produces a surprisingly large tomato crop.
She drags him to the tiny plot to admire it. The trees are in full bloom now, and the space between the woods and the fence protecting the grass pasture is cast in shadow. Jill grins, throwing out her arms as she presents to him the fruits of her labors.
“Well?” she asks, nakedly eager. “What do you think?”
Takakura is doing everything he can not to smile an enormous, frightening, goofy smile.
“I think you’ve done very well,” he says. “These look like Vesta’s.”
“Well, I’d hope so,” Jill winks at him. “We wasted enough cash on fertilizer.”
Takakura does smile then, as small as he can. Jill smiles back--wildly, and a little goofy herself. Then she steps forward, into the mass of green stalks, and selects one particularly large and red tomato, breaking it from the plant.
“I think we can spare one,” she says. “Do you have a knife?”
Takakura does. He hands it to her, watching as she cuts a slice for herself. She surprises him by cutting a second immediately after, balancing it on the flat side of the knife and holding it out to him.
“We should test it,” she says, lifting an eyebrow. “Right? Make sure they taste decent before we try to sell them.”
Takakura takes the slice, surprising himself with a lack of hesitation. “I’m sure they’re fine,” he says, and pops the piece into his mouth.
It is fine. It’s more than fine.
Takakura knows his expression must be surprised, because Jill, running her tongue over her thumb to catch stray tomato juice, smirks a little at him. “Pretty good, huh?” she says, as if she’d never once doubted it, and then reaches for his face. “You’ve got a little--”
Her thumb--the one she’d just licked--brushes the corner of his mouth and up his cheek.
For one wild moment, Takakura isn’t certain if the ground has dropped out from beneath him or gravity has abandoned him entirely. He feels as if he is floating, and also in free fall. He feels as if the world is ending, stopping, fading around him.
Jill drops her hand, still smiling.
Takakura returns to earth in the next moment, utterly bereft in the wake of that little touch. She, thank whatever gods are out there, does not seem to notice.
“I’ll get the shears,” she says, tossing the remains of the tomato to him. That he catches it is only dumb luck. Another absurd gift from some higher power.
Still, Takakura has to take a deep breath before he replies.
“I’ll get the crates,” he says.
--
Summer passes in a flurry of activity.
Jill grows watermelons and more tomatoes. Her trees sprout inches and then feet. Bessie grows fonder of her, and of Takakura as well, as if she’d needed Jill’s brighter influence to fully appreciate his quiet existence.
Jill and Muffy have sleepovers, and spend night upon sticky summer night lying on their backs in the open space between the barn and Takakura’s cabin, staring up at the wide open sky. Takakura does not begrudge them this--the mountain protects the valley from most of the city’s ambient light, and the stars, when he deigns them worth a look, are nothing short of breathtaking, the Milky Way spread wide across the horizon. When it becomes more difficult is when they swim in the goddess pool in the late evenings, returning dripping wet and dressed only in bathing suits. Muffy favors bikinis. Jill prefers one piece suits.
He has to close his curtains on those nights.
Kassey and Patrick light off fireworks on Midsummer’s Night. Jill and Muffy drag him down to the beach to observe--and it is not entirely unpleasant. He sits with Galen and Nina up the beach while Gustafa plays his guitar, Jill and Muffy and Cecilia each dance with Hugh, and Cody, the other surprise guest, draws quick caricatures of each Forget-Me-Not resident. Daryl provides the lanterns--all electric, and all drawing power from his odd little trailer--and Tim and Ruby provide a hearty meal of garden salad and fried fish. There is bonfire, and Vesta nearly loses consciousness due to alcohol consumption and has to be supported home early--Marlin takes the fall, looking surly, and far less comfortable than Takakura himself feels. Part of that may be Rock--the outrageous flirting, not just with Lumina, whose crush on him is obvious even to Takakura, but with Muffy, and with Cecilia. And Marlin is far more obvious than Lumina has ever been with his feelings for Cecilia.
(Rock flirts with Jill, too, and Jill laughs, but does not necessarily rebuff him. Takakura ignores this. Takakura pretends Rock does not exist at all.)
When the fireworks show is over, Muffy trails Griffin and his boxes of alcohol back to the bar and Jill, cheeks flushed with the remaining excitement of the night, takes his arm and leans into him as they walk back to the farm. Takakura forces his eyes straight ahead and wills himself not to sweat or twitch or panic and swallows and swallows and swallows to try to rid himself of the lump in his throat.
“Thank you,” she says as they approach her front door--she has hung a wreath made of wildflowers on it, which is more life than Takakura has ever tried to infuse into his own cabin. “For coming tonight. I know you didn’t want to.”
Takakura does not want to agree--it’s true, after all, and they both know it--and so he doesn’t say anything. Jill extracts her arm from his, and he has a moment to mourn the loss--but then, instead of reaching for the knob and vanishing inside, leaving him alone with his morbid thoughts, she turns to him and braces her back against the door, the top of her head pushing the little wreath up and nearly off of its little hook.
“Can I ask you something?” she asks.
Takakura looks at her face, her bright eyes, and realizes that she’s drunk.
He wants to say no. He should say no, because she’s drunk--too drunk, if the way she’d hung off of him on their walk home is any indication, and really, he should have seen it then--and not in control of her inhibitions. It would be taking advantage, letting her ask a question, because it could reveal something about her, or imply something about her, something that may or may not be there at all. Something dangerous, or messy, or uncomfortable, that could ruin things between them. And things are--
Things are as good as they’re ever going to get.
He opens her mouth to tell her to go to bed.
She beats him to it.
“Why’d you never get married?”
Takakura blinks, and thinks for a moment that he has dropped dead. That he’s dead, and that this is hell, this question is his punishment for every thoughtful thing he’s never done; every careless thing he’s ever said, accidentally and intentionally hurting someone with the words; every uncharitable, nasty thought he’s ever had about his neighbors, about Jill’s mother--
And about himself.
She’s looking at him. Staring at him, her eyes so large they seem to have been inflated somehow. Waiting. Patiently.
“I don’t--” he starts to say, halting, his voice barely a croak. She has had too much to drink, and he has had not nearly enough.
“Was there someone?” Jill asks him. She pushes herself away from the door and leans towards him--Takakura retreats, takes an actual step back, before she gets too close. “Before?”
Takakura stares, and thinks, and panics, and takes a deep breath, and--
Admits it.
“Yes.”
Jill gazes at him. As if fascinated. Her lips part a little--he looks at them, and then he has to look away, towards the wreath above her head. He focuses on the pale yellow flowers--Goddess Drops, he thinks the name is. Swallows hard.
“I’m sorry,” the girl says quietly. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
Takakura nods, and clenches his jaw to keep his mouth from falling open and the story flooding out. Keeps his eyes on the Goddess Drop flowers. Wills himself to keep breathing.
Then:
“Is there,” in a tiny, tiny voice, “is there still someone else?”
Takakura looks down at her again. Shocked. He can’t help it. That question--
“I don’t know,” he blurts.
And then swallows, swallows down the rest, because it’s one thing to think of someone physically, and entirely another to--
He had not realized it until right this second.
Her face is almost silver in the moonlight. She falls back against the door again.
“Okay,” she whispers, her eyes dropping to the ground between them. “Okay.”
--
Fall begins with torrential downpours.
Takakura is forced to spend three days on a ladder inside the barn, patching up leaks he should have dealt with months ago. Jill, for her part, wraps herself in a poncho and weeds in the absence of plants to tend to, running various errands when she eventually runs out of things to pull from the dirt.
He finally finishes with the barn, though he doubts the rains will last long enough to make the effort actually worth it. Things rarely do when he actually tries, as if he is the butt of some enormous cosmic joke. Close to fifty years, and he is nearly used to it. But the universe surprises him this time. The monsoon pounds into its fourth day. Takakura, in a fit of uncertainty, turns his attention to the chicken coop. Jill had expressed, as summer drew to a close, a desire to purchase another animal. They had debated a sheep for a while, but the grass pasture is still a sad little thing, and they had decided not to stretch it thin between Bessie and someone else.
(This is something they talk about. They talk about many things as the season changes, of course, because they are running a farm together and they must, but there is one thing--a thing that sits large and dark and damning between them--that they do not acknowledge. There are times he catches Jill watching him these days, times she cannot meet his eye when caught staring, and it nearly kills him. It nearly kills him.)
Jill is growing carrots and potatoes, and they’re coming along nicely, thriving in the rains. Jill herself spends the lingering rainy days fishing in the river and the pond, and with Muffy and Griffin at the bar. They pass each other in the barn and exchange greetings, and they work together in silence in crating milk and vegetables, but. The world outside is darkened beneath the cloudy sky, and inside, in the little world of their farm, things are no better.
(These are the days he cannot avoid the fact that they are avoiding each other. That nearly kills him, too.)
Eventually, a week and a half into the autumn season, the rains slow to a drizzle, and then stop altogether. Jill returns to the fields, and presents him with carrots and potatoes for tasting, and Muffy follows her, sitting on the pasture fence in boots with high heels, her laughter spreading over the farm in fading afternoon light.
Takakura relaxes a fraction, now that she is back on the farm, or back more often. He is more at ease when he can see her, or hear her, he finds, because it means she has not given up on him entirely yet, has not left him to his own devices. Muffy is here, too, and he thinks it may be so she can act as a buffer between them, an influence to lessen the awkwardness, but he finds he does not mind so much. Anything she needs, he’ll deal with it.
Daryl starts appearing at odd times, too, a seemingly random development. Apparently--and he learns this because he happened to be in the vicinity the second or third time the scientist stopped by, not because he’d been listening in intentionally--they had bonded during the rains, over fish and over animals. They sit on the fence, too, and Daryl talks rapidly about his experiments with electricity and hunting the white creature in the north woods. Jill watches him with wide eyes at these times, and nods along with his stories. She expresses interest in helping him stake the Goddess Tree out when winter comes.
(Takakura has seen the creature Daryl speaks of. Many times. In the woods, and also farther down, wandering beside the river that borders the farm. Jill’s enthusiasm for the stories often has him on the verge of speaking up, but then Daryl will say something apparently amusing, and Jill will laugh with a hand on his shoulder, and the scientist will look dumbfounded, but pleased. Takakura keeps silent, then.)
(He is a bitter old man. He’s never denied that.)
It is despite their best efforts that between Daryl, Muffy, and the things that go unspoken, the distance between them grows. The gulf between them grows. He is trying, and most days he thinks she is trying, too, but the damage seems to have been done, and there is no easy solution, especially not with him. Especially because he knows it’s his fault.
He just doesn’t know how to fix it.
--
Held as autumn fades, the Harvest Festival is yet another excuse to drink and eat, much like the fireworks of summer. Takakura has always avoided it before, citing the excess of socialization, and, given the deteriorating state of his relationship with his farming partner, does not expect to be invited this time around. He readies himself for yet another night locked in his cabin, the sounds of the party in the heart of the valley drifting in through the windows and mocking him.
But then Jill surprises him.
She knocks on his front door at six o’clock in the morning.
“Hey,” she says, a little breathless. Her knees are already muddy, and there are a bunch of carrots in her left hand. “You’re coming to the Harvest Festival, right?”
Takakura blinks, once. Starts, “I--”
“Because,” Jill speaks over him, her voice a little strained, a little too loud, especially in the early morning. “Look, I told Ruby that--that you’ll be there. To help move stuff. Tim hurt his back.”
Takakura stares.
(She has, once again, rendered him utterly lost for words.)
“I’m sorry,” she continues, a cascade of words she seems unable to stop. Her eyes are very large, and, he realizes, she isn’t looking directly at him, but over his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I just assumed. I just assumed you’d be going. I should have asked. I’m sorry. I can tell her you won’t be able to make it, if you want. I’ll explain. I promise. Takakura, I’m so sorry.”
She’s working herself into a frenzy. He has never seen her so far out of her element before.
It frightens him, a little.
“I’m going,” he says. His own voice is also too loud, but only to stop her before she stops breathing, or worse. Her face is red in the early morning light, and the carrots, thrashing in her twitching hands, have sprayed excess dirt all over his welcome mat.
“Oh,” Jill says.
“You can tell her I’ll get there early,” he adds. “To help.”
She smiles at him. He realizes it has been a while he has seen it, at least directed in his direction.
He thinks he should apologize--though what for, he’s not entirely sure. Not stopping her from talking that night, probably. Not being quick enough to save them from the awkward mess their relationship has descended into. Takakura opens his mouth, unsure of what he’s going to say, but intent on starting with some variation of I’m sorry. Jill, perhaps sensing what he is about to say, cuts him off.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’ll do that. I’ve got to run across the river to Vesta’s anyway, so I’ll do it on the way.” She lifts the bunch of carrots to show him--there are, he now notices, tiny bite marks running up and down the orange stalks. “I think we’ve got moles or something,” she says, a hint of irritation leaking into her voice.
“Okay.” He stares at the tiny grooves in the bodies of the carrots.
“Okay.” Jill bends to retrieve a burlap sack sitting at her feet and shoves the carrots into it. She tosses it over her shoulder and smiles at him once more. “I’ll see you later, then?”
Takakura should apologize. He needs to apologize.
“Okay,” he says again.
And there is no other way to describe it.
She flees.
--
The morning of the Harvest Festival dawns brisk and sunny.
Takakura milks Bessie, and spends an extra amount of time brushing and washing her. Bessie honks her appreciation, lingering beneath the one tree in the tiny pasture, the falling leaves crunching beneath their six combined feet.
Jill is on the other side of the fence, frowning and fretting over her carrots. She has a large bowl and seems to be sprinkling some kind of liquid, perhaps repellent, around the plants.
Takakura longs to close the distance between them, to ask if there is anything he can do to help. There is nothing else for him to work on before midday, when he will go down to the inn to help Ruby--the barn roof is in good shape, and he has made remarkable progress on the chicken coop. Jill is watering the plants and Bessie has been well cared for already. The tools have been well-maintained all along, for all that their shed had decayed around them. But he had propped that roof up in the summer, before the fireworks.
He catches himself wringing his hands as he stares across the pasture at Jill, and stops immediately. Shoves them into his pockets. Looks away from her.
In the end, he settles on taking a longer shower than usual, and picking out some of his cleaner clothes for the festival. It is the coward’s choice, but he has never claimed to be brave.
When he leaves for the inn hours later, Jill is gone from the carrots, nowhere to be seen.
--
He does not see her for the first hour of the festival.
Cody helps him move the boxes for Ruby. They are numerous, and the villagers had apparently elected to hold the festival on the beach rather than on the main stretch of road, increasing necessary distance traveled for, in his opinion, no real reason. The artist grunts at him in greeting--Takakura has always been fond of him, if only for the similarities in their dispositions--they are both distant, though Takakura is more standoffish, while Cody is merely distracted, his thoughts wrapped up in this project or that. He is very famous in the city, Takakura knows, and has sold a great many pieces for a great deal of money. And that is another reason he has always been fond of him: he could live in an expensive house in a bustling city, and chooses to live in a trailer in Forget-Me-Not instead.
A man after Takakura’s own heart.
They work in silence, transferring boxes of vegetables, fruits, flour, sugar, juice, alcohol. It is a smooth process, mostly--Takakura’s foot slips once, but Cody, his arms full of relatively light wheat rolls, reaches out and catches his elbow, prevents him from collapsing beneath a box of oranges. Takakura merely nods his thanks, though his heart is pounding in his chest. Cody only mumbles in reply, though, and if Takakura hears correctly, his words have nothing to do with saving him from a orange-y death.
And then there are the tables, and the chairs--donated by Ruby and Tim, and Griffin, and Romana. Maneuvering the legs down the slope to the beach is a little more difficult, but the two of them manage well enough. They shake hands at the end, as Ruby and Hugh and Gustafa decorate the makeshift dining area with splashes of yellow, red, and orange. And then Takakura, stiff and uncertain, stands beside the pond as Cody wanders back to his trailer, muttering to himself about “adding a metal arm.”
The rest of the party begins to filter in about an hour later--the sun is low in the sky, casting the world in golden light, as Wally and Chris drift down the hill from the main road, and Carter and Flora come wandering in from the other side of the river. Vesta, Marlin, and Cecilia come next--Marlin is scowling again, and Takakura notices that Cecilia is carrying a blue flower--when he sees Rock, the next to arrive, throw the brunette an absurd wink, he understands completely. Jill and Muffy appear arm in arm--Jill is wearing a dress he’s never seen before, blue and loose on her body.
(He experiences a moment of horror at himself--that he has grown to recognize her various articles of clothing. It reeks of creepy and pathetic. He relishes, not for the first time, the privacy of his own mind.)
Eventually, Sebastian and Lumina escort Romana down the hill, and Daryl and Griffin follow close behind, a large and dusty and bluish bottle clutched in the latter’s hand. Nina and Galen are the last to arrive--Nina has developed a nasty cough of late, he has noticed, and so they are moving slower than usual. He does not blame them in the slightest, and nor does anyone else--he’d caught her just last week on the bridge, laboring a bit to catch her breath. He’d escorted her home, and she had smiled so sweetly at him, patted him on the arm, but he has lingered on how pale she had appeared that day, and how frail her fingers had been on the inside of his arm, in the days since.
He rushes forward to help pull chairs out for both of them--Nina, with her wobbling, grateful smile, and Galen, worried lines cut deeply around his eyes. He catches Jill’s watchful eyes as he does so--she smiles at him, yet another different smile--softer, somehow, and sweeter than ever before. She looks infinitely pleased by his behavior.
He forces himself to look away.
After Galen and Nina are seated, the rest of them chose their own positions around the table. Takakura lands himself squeezed between Hugh and Marlin, with Jill directly across from him, Muffy on one side, Rock on the other.
The meal is almost ridiculous in its quality--Ruby and Tim have outdone themselves, and, Ruby announces, Wally had also played a large part in the preparations. They lift their glasses to him, and he flushes furiously as Chris smirks and pats him on the shoulder.
After dinner, he and Cody and Wally and Tim push the tables aside, crowd them beneath the grove of trees that surrounds the pond. Daryl has provided lights again, and Romana has apparently brought music, and with the wide open stretch of grass that separates the beach from the base of the hill, there is plenty of space. Dancing is apparently the order of the day, a new and, in his opinion, rather unpleasant development.
He retreats to the edge of the festivities as Ruby and Tim take to the makeshift dance floor, followed closely by Wally and Chris, and then Rock and Cecilia. Marlin, standing not far from him, continues to scowl--his arms are crossed, his shoulders tight. Takakura feels for him.
The night becomes something of a whirlwind after that. The sun dips below the horizon, casting the beach and field into relative shadow, and Takakura retreats to the edge of the lantern light, watching the festivities with his hands shoved into his pockets. Ruby dances with Wally, Rock dances with Lumina, with Muffy, with Cecilia again, with Flora, with Jill, with Chris. Muffy dances again, this time with Griffin--and all the while, Takakura notices, Jill stands on the other edge of the dance floor beneath a tree, pulling very obvious, deeply obnoxious faces at her friend.
He smiles a little, and as if drawn by it, her eyes drift from Muffy to his own. Takakura freezes for a moment under that stare, but all Jill does is wink, much as she had done once upon a time, in the spring, in the beginning. She lifts her glass to him, a silent, friendly toast.
Takakura keeps smiling at her, even after she looks away again. But just a little.
--
After ten o’clock, he has had enough. The party had begun to disperse hours ago--first Nina and Galen, escorted by Tim and Cody back up the hill. Wally and Chris had followed close behind them, supporting a yawning Hugh between them. Takakura is exhausted himself, and leaves soon after they do--he picks his way up the river towards the entrance to the farm, the lamps that line it glowing soft in the fall night. Even at this short distance, the sounds of the celebration seem muted, lessened by the fall air. He slows his pace a bit. Enjoys it for a moment.
It is as he reaches the bridge that he encounters Flora and Carter--he can barely see them, as he is standing in the light and they are cast in shadow on the other side of the bridge, but Flora is audibly distraught and Carter is slumping towards the ground.
Takakura crosses the bridge at a jog, concerned.
“But,” Carter is quite literally whining--and Takakura scowls. He is plainly drunk and behaving like a child. Flora, who seems near tears she is so frustrated, seems to be pleading with him, trying to coax him into following her up the river to their settlement at the base of the waterfall.
“Carter, please,” she says, strained. She is wringing her hands. “Please. You can’t sleep out here.”
“How many times,” Carter replies, his voice loud and grating in the silence of the autumn darkness, “how many times, Flora, have I said I want to sleep beneath the stars?” He throws his arms wide, his head rolling backwards on his neck, turning his face to the sky. His eyes are closed, his expression one of ecstacy, and Takakura momentarily envies his thoughtless bliss.
“You’ll freeze if you sleep out here tonight,” Flora protests. She sounds utterly exhausted. “And it’s starting to get cloudy.”
One quick glance upwards is all it takes to know that she’s right, but Carter only moans at her. Takakura, rolling his eyes, steps forward and hooks his hands beneath the other man’s arms.
“Come on,” he says flatly. “We’re walking. Now.”
Flora shoots his a grateful look over the top of Carter’s head. They maneuver so Takakura is on one side and she is on the other, each supporting him with an arm beneath his shoulder. The path up the other side of the river does not have the steps dug out from the earth that the path that runs up the border of the farm does, but it is smoother, and does not require them. Takakura helps Flora guide Carter up to the tent, and then inside--it is larger than he’d expected, cluttered with a squat bookshelf, a card table piled high with bones and what appear to be strange, almost phallic wooden statues. There are two cots, one eached pushed into the longer walls of the small space.
Flora leads them to the one on the right, and Takakura drops Carter onto it. Carter moans again, this time pressing his face into his pillow as Flora stoops to pull off his shiny black shoes.
When he’s finally settled, the beginnings of snores drifting from his mouth, Flora follows Takakura as he retreats outside, her hands clasped in front of her.
“Thank you,” she says firmly. “Thank you so much, Mr. Takakura. He normally doesn’t drink like this--I don’t know what came over him.”
“It was a party,” Takakura suggests. A bit awkwardly. He is not used to being one to offer comfort. Flora nods, and turns her head to the waterfall--a mass that stands out especially white against the black stone of the valley wall. The sound of it seems strangely muted in the night.
“I hope the rest of your evening is less irritating,” she says finally. A clear dismissal, and one that Takakura accepts gladly. He grunts at her, and then turns and leaves her, picking his way back down the smooth path towards Vesta’s farm and the bridge.
It is as he is drawing level with the first of the greenhouses--grey in the sparse moonlight--that he hears the shouting.
He rolls his eyes again--this is why he hates festivals--the excessive drinking--the stupidity--
(When Archie had first left, he had toed the line of alcoholism for nearly a year.)
The screaming belongs to two people standing on the path between the bridge and the entrance to Vesta’s farm. They are outside the circle of light cast by the lanterns, and they’re shouting in unison, their voices mingling and echoing off of the valley walls, making it difficult to understand who they are and what they’re saying. Takakura does not slow his steps--intervening with Flora and Carter had been one thing, born of casual disgust of Carter’s behavior more than anything else. This argument seems far less harmless and far more personal, and getting between it seems not only pointless, but monumentally foolish.
Their shapes come more into focus as he descends the hill, but he aims his steps at the bridge. He is going to cross it, wander back up into the farm, and go to bed. Even if Jill is there, he is going to go to bed. Especially if Jill is--
Takakura glances at the figures, sees the blue dress, and stops dead.
The voices of the two women, so distant and meaningless only moments before, lurch into sudden, terrible focus. Takakura stops dead a few feet from the bridge, his eyes glued to the two of them, just as Marian says, “I thought you’d grow out of this nonsense in a month, Jilly. I never once thought you’d--”
His feet are fused to the ground. He can’t move, can’t think, can’t breathe. He has entirely shut down. He’s not even certain that he exists anymore.
Marian’s words cut off, and silence falls between them. Jill--her hair fallen out of its ponytail, what appear to be shoes hanging from her hands--stands still and stiff, and he watches her inhale, exhale, forceful movements of her chest.
“This is what I want,” she says finally. “This is where I want to be, Mom.” Her voice is cold, as cold as the air around them, late fall fading into winter. “This is what I’ve chosen for myself, and I’m happy, and I’m asking you to accept it. That’s all I’m asking. You’re my mother.”
Marian shakes her head--Takakura cannot see her face, but he can picture her expression. The shock. The confusion. The anger.
He’d seen it once before, many years ago.
“You can’t be happy here,” she says. “I’ve seen that farm--it was pathetic then, and you can’t tell me that that man--”
“Don’t,” Jill snaps, harsh. “You don’t get to talk about him--”
“I know things about him that would disgust you,” Marian snarls back--and Takakura--it is a morbid thought, a frightening thought, a devastating thought, but it does not take him much effort to imagine--Marian spilling his secrets to her daughter, and her daughter--the look that would appear on her face when she learns that--that the someone--
“About him and Dad?”
Marian is so shocked that she actually falls back a step. And her gasp is a living thing, something that carries to Takakura, paralyzed on the hill, and beyond, back towards the party, to the stragglers and their nonsense on the beach. It fills the air, and it destroys it, leaving Takakura nothing--nothing to breathe, and nothing to hold him together, to hold him in place.
His heart has actually stopped beating in his chest.
“He,” Marian says hoarsely. “He had no right to tell you that.”
“He didn’t have to tell me, Mom,” Jill replies. Her voice is softer now, but no less hard, no less angry. She crosses her arms over her chest, her shoes dangling from her left armpit. “And I’m not even sure why it’s any of your business, anyway, if it happened before you and Dad got together. Is that why I never met him while I was young? Because you were jealous?”
Takakura’s foot slips. A cascade of pebbles is sent careening down the remainder of the hill.
Jill spins. He still can’t see her face, nor Marian’s, but he sees enough of her body language to see her momentary fear. She drops one of her shoes.
“Who--?” Jill starts to ask, her voice too loud in the darkness. “Is that Carter?”
Takakura opens his mouth. No sound comes out.
“It’s him,” Marian says coolly before he can regather his wits. “Been following us, old man?”
And--
And.
The thing is, Takakura has loathed Marian for years. For years. Marian had taken everything from him--everything that had mattered--and she had cut him from Archie’s life as if excising a tumor, and she had done it all with a nasty smile. He’d thought of her as a rival, once, but the truth, the truth it took him a small eternity to accept, is that they’d never been rivals. Archie had been Takakura’s, and then he hadn’t been Takakura’s. He hadn’t been Marian’s, and then he had been Marian’s. There had been no overlap, no push and pull, no war. He had constructed a contest between the two of them in the space of his own mind, and Marian, gleeful, vicious Marian, had let him think it, had let him try and try and try and try, all the while knowing that it had been over before it had even begun.
(He knows it’s wrong, blaming her, just her, and not Archie. He knows, but he just can’t stop himself.)
And then it had been over, and Archie had married Marian, with apologies to Takakura--he hadn’t been invited to the wedding. And then Archie’s visits to Forget-Me-Not had begun to dwindle, his office job sucking up his time and leaving him with little for himself, little that was mostly devoted to Marian. And then Marian had gotten pregnant and the infrequent reunions had stopped all together and Takakura had been left to stew in his rage for years on top of years on top of years and now--
And now, here they are. Takakura. Marian. And the child that had spelled the true end of his first life.
And he is angrier about all of it than he has been in a very, very long time.
When he jerks back to reality, it is as if someone had poured acid into his stomach during his momentary absence.
“Of course not,” he hisses--and takes a step forward, and then two, just close enough to get a decent view of the hard look on Marian’s face. “Of course not, you--you harpy. You witch.”
Marian lifts both of her eyebrows. “Witch? That’s the best you can come up with? Spare me--like you haven’t been thinking a thousand other nastier words for all these years.”
“Mom,” Jill says. “Takakura.”
The distress in her voice is obvious, the sound of it enough to reach down his throat and twist up his insides, but Takakura can’t let himself look at her. Can’t let himself see the disappointment on her face. He swallows, and takes a breath, and says, “What the hell are you doing in my valley?”
“Your valley?” Marian scoffs.
Jill’s eyes are drilling into the side of his head.
“I don’t remember inviting you,” he says.
“Perhaps my daughter did.”
Jill jerks at the corner of his vision. Takakura cannot help the wide smile that spreads across his face. He does not doubt that it is an ugly thing.
“I know she didn’t,” he tells her.
Marian stares for a long moment. Her eyes flick between Takakura and her daughter and Takakura and her daughter. The anger is fading from her face, leaving something vaguely ill in its place.
“You two,” she says finally. Her words are directed at Jill--Jill who seems to have frozen solid, her eyes still fixed on Takakura’s left ear. “You two, up on that hill.”
She jabs a finger in the direction of the farm, dropping the words there as if they make even the slightest bit of sense.
Jill makes a strange sound. A tiny sound. A frightened sound.
“We work together,” Takakura snarls. His protective instincts--largely unused since Archie left--boil to the surface now, shake his hands furiously at his sides. He glares at Marian as she stares at Jill. Wills her to turn her eyes away from the girl.
He does not want to hear that noise again.
“Yes,” Marian says. And she does--she does look away from Jill. Toward him. And he has seen that look of disgust before. “Yes, you work together. Much the way you did with my husband. Right, old man? That’s what this is about? You couldn’t have him, so you--”
There is a sharp scrape. Little stones clatter, skid against each other. Takakura blinks, and so does Marian, and they both look down at the disturbance at their feet. Jill’s shoe, the one she’d dropped, sits on the ground between them, abandoned in the night.
--
It is not until she is on the other side of the bridge and well out of their reach that either of them realize that she has walked away.