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Here is a beginning: Niki Nihachu lives in the halfway.
She is not lovely enough (not holy enough) for heights, for Mount Olympus. She is not sensual enough (not sinful enough) for depths, for the Underworld. She is stuck in the middle, in perpetual springtime and flowers. She is perpetual springtime and flowers, her mother tells her. This is why she must remain in the halfway, her mother tells her.
Her mother is not controlling—that is something they all get wrong. Her mother is not controlling, her mother is simply protective.
And she wants her daughter to grow fine and well-pruned, thorns removed and shapely. Wants her to know the right people, to marry the right people. Her mother seized Wilbur's presence with magnanimous fervour, with insistent patience, before she found out.
Niki caresses the gentle petal of a white rose. She likes growing flowers, she thinks. Niki has done nothing but grow flowers and talk to people. Sometimes, talking to people is too much. (Sometimes, she can never get enough of talking to people.)
She has always loved roses, every part of them. Red ones and pink ones have always felt so—blasé. Overdone. And while she does love a good yellow bud, Niki has always felt a white one does the job best. Because Niki loves Wilbur, sure, but she only loves him enough to exchange lavenders and smell the earthy rot on him. So she loves white roses, instead.
And of course she loves other things in the context of Wilbur as well—hydrangeas and bachelor's button, dried flowers and yellow acacia.
Wilbur does not grudge her for loving this way, even if Niki knows about the initial slight sting of pain at the corner of his eyes. His heart, Niki finds, can often be a liar to himself. She smiles, not unkindly, and places a softly woven daisy crown onto his hair.
"Come join me next week for a picnic," she says. "I'll bring mushroom risotto. And you?" It is an invitation to wordplay.
Wilbur smiles ruefully, knowing he has been caught out. "Who knows."
Niki laughs, bright colours of flowers unfurling into the spring air. She loves Wilbur, even if it is not in a red rose kind of way, because she doesn't get very many visitors. Doesn't get very many friends, either. You should have higher standards, her mother scolds, hazy and regal. It is precaution, and she is not controlling.
She pulls together a bushel of narcissus. It is a condemnation, as well.
Her friends who smile and play in her daytime steal away when Wilbur comes around. When deep purple comes flowing out of the ground, when ferment and crushed fruit permeates soft-spoken sunshine, Niki's friends gather their skirts, more vibrant petal than fabric, and swish away from the tainted ground. They do not come back until the stench has been purged, wafted out.
She loves them, yes, loves them in yellow-rose ways and in pink-tulip ways, but she cannot help but think of them differently when they wield their sleeves like masks. She finds, instead, that ivy has choked its way through her flowers.
(She wonders what they will think of the spider lilies, of the white roses that have dried up.)
Niki does live in the halfway, she is too holy (too young) and too sinful (too old) to fall on either side of the line. But that does not mean she cannot have friends on either side.
(Her friends of the halfway look on her shamefully. Still, they do not say anything. If they cannot maintain her daughter's sanctity, who is to say they can maintain their own?)
Niki makes friends with Minx, sharp-witted and incisive, grins that slice through gentle-crafted flowers. She basks in Minx's meanness, her wit. Minx is protective in a way Niki is not familiar with, protective in how tightly she squeezes Niki's hand, protective in how she stands her ground as she crackles through arguments. This is a ferocity that Niki (poor, sweet, innocent Niki) does not know well but loves keenly.
You should have higher standards, her mother's green voice rings through her ears when Minx tosses a golden apple, you should hold yourself to dignity, as Minx stirs conflict with a devious finger. Niki does not know what these standards are anymore, what this dignity is anymore. How her mother counts it, Minx fills the board.
Yet every time her mother hears she spent another afternoon with the revenge-ridden purple hair, or worse, sees Minx in her shrewd glory, she locks Niki in a box of flowers once more.
It is on these days Niki feels least like the halfway. She feels like livewire and foxglove, like golden apples tossed to explode. Minx comes to meet her, even as she knows she is the reason Niki is in the box, because it is not her fault.
"Your mom is such a cunt," Minx rolls her eyes.
And, because Niki feels the least like the halfway on these days, she chuckles at the comment. And here is another thing people get wrong: her mother is not controlling, she is protective, but that does not preclude her possessiveness. Niki is the darling bud, she is the star flower, glorious and splendid to be demurely glanced at in state fairs. "I do think this is a bit much," Niki settles on instead.
Minx only stares at her with light grey eyes, piercing in owl-sight.
Niki reaches through foliage to flick at Minx's forehead. "I hate it when you go silent on me like that."
Minx scowls, gaze still fixed, till she blinks and shrugs. "Sucks to suck, I guess," and she flashes a toothful smile before she swoops off.
And now: Niki is alone, in a flower box. When she draws her arm back from past the foliage, the leaves have deadened, crackled. It does not occur to her to leave.
You can skip to the end, if you want.
This must be a story you are familiar with: the beats of romance have already been played, the drama has already been acted out. The steps have been planned, a lovers' waltz trod so many times the movements have worn themselves into the wood.
But: this story has been told wrong. The beginning is not the only beginning.
There is, you could say, a "proper" beginning. A "first" beginning. Something that starts in something Niki knows well. As her skirts brush by green fields, flowers bloom in her wake, but she does not control what sprouts. Still, she does not remember pulling spider lilies from the ground. They drip down, crimson petals falling along invisible curves. They are nice, though, so Niki leaves them.
Then: her white roses (the ones that remind her of Wilbur when he arrives from wine for the first time) wilt. It is a gentle, harsh wilting. They die too quickly for the petals to fall off the stem, and their sweet scent stays even as spider lilies push through their corpses. Niki brush them away as well. If nothing else, they are pretty.
(They are canaries in a coal mine. Still, at this beginning, Niki wonders why they chirp so quietly.)
Later still, the bird song cuts out entirely: black rams, curly-haired and sly-eyed, start to take Niki's fields for grazing ground. They tramp around, hooves conspicuously missing all the important blooms, and look on with a watchful gaze when she walks by. She pets their smooth and rough fur, takes their nibbles at her skirts in stride. She does not ask why they are here anymore.
And when she looks at her flowers, makes sure none are diseased or wilted strangely, she sees rainbow gleam beneath the green. She pushes leaves aside to see colour refracted through carelessly tossed diamonds. She finds fractured onyx, smoothly chipped obsidian, shining gold underneath the canopy of verdancy.
Niki lives nowhere near a mine.
She takes these little tokens and gathers them into a little box, does not tell her mother. Her mother is not controlling, but she is protective.
(Finally, when Niki sees the bird bones among the gems, when the cool air billows through soft spring like noxious smoke, cigar scent and metal sharp, she knows it is too late. Even as the ground has not split with prophetic certainty, even as she hasn't been whisked away yet: she still welcomes the death-dusted fingers pressed against her own, the never-broken chivalry melted into gentle kisses, her gallant smiles turned into shy promises.)
Niki meets Puffy in the morning.
(This is the other thing everybody gets wrong: Puffy is not a stranger, nor is she invisible.)
She comes a time before Wilbur does, even. She is lain across the lush greenery—rather rudely crushing her hard-earned blooms, Niki notes—a Sleeping Beauty landed in Niki's field. Her dark clothes drape across the ground, rainbow hair spread around her head like a mock halo.
Absurdly, Niki's first thought is how she can get rid of the body.
Of course she wants to get rid of an unresponsive body in her field, but more than that—her mother is snap quick to protection, to judgement. Niki leans over the body, waits for a few seconds. Then, she considers whether she could carry this body to a... nearby river. Or perhaps a denser area of forest.
Maybe she could grow flowers over the body, instead. (Her mother will know it is there, will hear the dry thumps of the heart.)
Niki wrings her skirts, and right as Niki's considering cutting the body's heart out just in case, the eyelashes—pale and carefully light—flutter open to reveal hazel-grey eyes, too sweet to be judgemental. Her lips curl into a cheeky grin, before she sits up.
"Hello!" Her voice is yellow-bright, at odds with the gloomy clothing she's donned. She extends a hand, long and soft, towards Niki. "My name is Puffy. Captain Puffy, to be exact, but we're friends here. I think we can drop the formalities."
(This is the first time somebody has dropped into her field—before Minx, before Wilbur. She does not know yet about perfectly preserved flowers, suspended in time, or about cages grown with flowers.)
Niki returns the smile—to not would simply be rude—and allows her hand to be shaken. "Niki."
Puffy's grin grows even wider and pumps her hand up and down. "Aw man. I knew I was probably going to run into somebody, but I didn't think I'd meet the mysterious daughter herself." She stop shaking her hand for a second to frown. "You're not gonna tell on me, are you?"
Niki drops her hand, considers the possibilities. "Not unless my mother sees you."
Puffy laughs, bright and loud, places a hand under her head. "I like you. I didn't know what you would be like. Some part of me was wondering whether you'd be like your mother—oops, not to say anything bad about your mother."
Niki nods, unsure of how to respond.
"I like the field, too." Puffy turns to admire the yards of flowers spread across. "Very picturesque. I don't get to see very many flowers, you know. At least, not ones that are this colourful. I think I'd want to be reborn here."
"Yeah," Niki says vaguely. "I spend all my time working on them."
Puffy sighs, and lies back down. "I'm sorry for landing in the fruits of your labour."
Niki should be mad—intellectually, she knows she should be angered—but she only smiles.
"I do hope he'll prefer this over the doom and shade of where he usually awakes. Oh, I should probably ask—are you particularly opposed to the scent of wine?"
"I've never had it," Niki confesses.
"You haven't?" A grey eye peers at her face.
Niki shakes her head and twines her hands together.
"No shame in that," Puffy closes her eyes again. "I'll bring some, though, if you'd want me to."
Niki pauses, pulls at a gloxinia, white-tipped edges folding into colour. "I think I'd like that." Niki puts her head to one side, feels the glow of sunshine on her cheek.
Puffy hums and opens her eyes, watches Niki basking in the sunshine. She thinks to herself that she will bring the finest wine she has.
The next time Puffy comes, it is a surprise.
(Niki did not spend days, weeks, months, wondering when Puffy would show up next. She did not wonder whether Puffy had forgotten about her.)
She flutters into the field, black draperies for the gentle warmth of noon, wielding a slender bottle. She grins when she notices Niki, raises the bottle higher. "I kept my promise," she shouts (god, Niki had forgotten how bright her voice was).
Niki pulls out a blanket, one that she did not carry around for months in hopes Puffy would come, spreads it across an area largely devoid of flowers.
Puffy sits as soon as she can, pours the wine into two goblets she produced, the liquid honey-thick and golden-sweet. Takes a cup, raises it to Niki. "To our health?"
Niki takes one as well, raises it. "To our health."
Puffy grins, swirls her glass, the wine amber deep and ethereal, and takes a sip. The slow spread is gentle and nutty, tastes popping and coating her tongue in fresh fruit. "Ah." Her grin mellows out into a smile. "I forgot how good this kind is."
Niki, in her own turn, has her eyes closed. The flavours are a soft hammer, pressed insistently onto her tongue, the colour of sunshine bottled. She has never had wine before, and she thinks she likes it. It reminds her of sweet pea, fragrance and freshness layered, of rainbows just barely there after rain, of yellow-bright voices and amiable grins. She does not hear Puffy's words, exactly, but the euphonious core is the same as the flavours on her mouth.
When she opens her eyes again, Puffy is smiling at her, crinkles in the corners of her eyes fond. Niki smiles back, lifts her glass in another half-cheers. “This is really good.”
“Yeah,” Puffy says distantly. In the mid-day sun, Niki is as ethereal as their drink—her hair is canary light, the corner of her mouth slightly dimpled. She is warmth and holy light, sublime blessing and effortless kindness. Puffy looks away, forgive her, and pulls out a picnic basket. “Well, I figured I may as well bring something to eat, as well.”
On the blanket, Puffy lays out the foods she has brought. Sponge delicacies with pomegranate spliced into the midst, sticks of halloumi that squeak under their teeth, pillowy baked bread made into sandwiches sweet and savoury alike.
Niki takes everything in and tries everything with curious gluttony. The cakes she pulls apart and admires, letting tangy sharpness fall apart on her tongue, tastes the cotton sweetness that follows it and covers the sour.
Puffy looks over at Niki working her way through everything and thinks yes, this is a good day.
There are not many days Puffy thinks she can assuredly say that she has had a good day.
Not to say that she has the worst of things to deal with—she has maybe fifty petitions a day, and forty-nine of fifty she can most likely dismiss without too much thought.
But.
(Puffy thinks on how she never got to spend time in the sunlight, how her birth started and ended in a body, that the tearing of a celestial body was what she needed in order to see the sun.
How she still drew last, and still draws last, how she loves the sun, how her anger boils but she cannot do anything on it.
She had never asked for anything more than a cut of sunshine to slide into her darkness but even that, even then, is too much to ask for.
All she can care for, learn to care for, is for things that already have no future.)
She loves her duckling, her mischevious little imp who grins darker than the night and slices twice as hard, but there is only so much someone can have of someone else. And her duckling, too, does not belong entirely to her.
She would not wish for her duckling to belong entirely to her. She has been that, has felt the cloying grasp of total ownership of her being. She is not that, she will not be that, to her duckling.
Still, she spends her days—when she’s not listening to petitioners who have not thought who they are talking to—wandering the gardens, thumbing the colour-drained pomegranates, yearning for another someone.
For a while, that was Wilbur. Puffy knows resentment when she sees it, knows the bitterness, knows the dazzling smiles draped over the top. And she sees it clear in Wilbur, sees it clearly as a mirror of herself. But even as Wilbur cleaves his way through the world, tries to figure out where he stands between Heracles and full gods, he still has an escape.
He is tethered to the Underworld, but he still feels the cold comfort of awakening in his body again, tears and scars knitted over into never-touched skin, in a river of fermented grapes. Puffy does not envy Wilbur, but he has something between now and the end of the world.
Even so, Puffy does not wish the dreariness upon him. So, she takes it upon herself to find a better place—and, if not a better place, a kinder place—for him to wake up.
She does not usually leave the Underworld, but she thinks it is okay to leave to its own machinations for a day or two. She travels the earth, admires the ways in which it has changed, notes the landscapes that might be best suited before—
There.
In the crest of a lush mountain is a smattering of flowers that cover the ground with determined certainty.
It is gorgeous.
There is no other space in the world that allows itself to be cloaked in vibrancy, in life. So, she descends and falls into the fields, and notices the scrambling of nymphs to leave as her feet touch greenery, turning verdant growth into brown, then grey, then dust. She sighs, then lies down. Allows herself to imagine herself as Wilbur, desecrated and disrespected, waking up in a pool of deep purple.
That is, until the light turns darker behind her eyelids, and she feels a swell of life under her back. Perhaps it is a fluke, a strange phenomenon, but when it does not go away, she opens her eyes.
And she meets Niki.
Puffy is selfish. She is allowed to be selfish, she thinks, if only for a little bit.
She does not change where Wilbur re-awakens for a month, two, perhaps more.
Niki is her own oasis for a little bit.
For the next few months, the world changes furtively and furiously.
Puffy brings other things to show to Niki, different kinds of foods. She listens to Niki, her stories of Wilbur and Minx (her stories of her mother). Niki, when she allows herself to be, is spitfire brilliant and wicked sharp.
And Niki herself finds new ways to be surprising to Puffy: innovative in how she works with her plants, ferociously meticulous about transgressors (and god, nothing has ever been hotter than Niki with poison on her tongue and fire in her tone).
In many ways, Puffy thinks her duckling and Niki would get along. They are notoriously stubborn and endlessly charming. The way Niki is keen and observant, the way Dream turns his cheek.
But her duckling is not Niki, because as much as they are similar they are also different. Niki, whip-smart and clever, is also a kind soul. She hugs and smiles openly, mourns her plants seriously, takes in a tricky little fox who snuck into their Eden.
(And because Puffy knows Niki is as watchful as her mother, she knows her little tokens will not go unnoticed. By the time she returns again, they are gone, and if Puffy asks, Niki smiles.
“I miss you too much to leave them languishing in the field,” she answers.
Puffy feels her heart leap at its bounds at those words.)
They are still secretive about their visits. Puffy skips over the question when Dream asks where she has been, hands off a new little trinket for him to mess with. Niki buries her little treasures across a field, underneath prized crops, so they may never be dug up.
(This is something new, though: their little exploratory touches. Puffy does not know if she is interpreting Niki right, and Niki does not know if she is doing it right. Still, when they link pinkies, they both feel a thrill of delight that leaves them fuzzy for the day after.
One day, Puffy asks, point-blank: what are we?
Niki simply takes her calloused hand and holds Puffy’s cold one.)
Then, a little closer. A play-act at medieval chivalry, a press of lips against the back of Niki’s hand, a joking “my queen.”
Your heart does not know the difference between a joke and reality.
There is a breaking point, somewhere, a sonnet’s volta: the perspective shifts, the scene changes. The world comes crashing back into focus, comes crashing out of focus, there is everything and nothing all at once somewhere along the way.
Niki feels it, but Puffy knows it. She knows it when she sees Niki, laughing and dancing in the field, endlessly bright, and she wants to show Niki her domain, even though her own domain is not as pretty as this.
(And besides, she knows of the vines that have tangled through Niki’s sleeves and down to her wrists, and every time she sees them, Puffy wants them to disintegrate into ash, into dust, into nothing. But matter cannot be destroyed.)
It’s one day, one evening: Puffy has brought another bottle of wine, because it has been one year since they have met each other.
(“It’ll be an anniversary of sorts, you know?” Niki smiles guilelessly, and Puffy wants terribly to kiss her.)
She pours a glass for Niki and one for herself, swirls the familiar topaz liquid, takes a long swig. And Niki, still, even after she has had this so many times since that second time, is savouring it, seduced by the gentle sweetness.
They are one, two glasses in, Puffy has always been a lightweight—moreso than Niki—and she has her head lain across Niki.
Niki is caressing her hair, dragging her flower hands through silk white covering rainbow. Puffy stops her on once, takes her hands in her own, shuffles closer.
In this light, Niki is blessed by moonlight, blonde hair polished until it is highlighted by the silver instead. Puffy takes a nearby flower, white and tear drop shaped, leaves it in Niki’s hair.
Her face gets closer to Niki’s, before she drops her forehead into the crook of Niki’s neck. Niki gasps, a breathless sound in this sudden silence and Puffy wants to whine. She whispers secrets into Niki, leaves them there as proof of her existence.
Oh.
Niki, who knows she should not have heard but still heard, drags her hand to the back of Puffy’s head, pulls her up and brings her closer till they hold the same breath.
“Can I?” Niki, who did not know until now, asks.
“Yes.” Puffy’s words are on the air right as Niki’s lips, plush and thin, are against hers. It is frantic and furtive, the moon their only witness.
When they separate, Puffy’s hands travel up to hold Niki’s again.
“Will you run away with me?” Puffy’s hazel-grey eyes, woozy on moonshine and wine, are determined and desperate.
Niki only laughs quietly and leans in for another kiss.
The last thing they get wrong is this: Puffy could not, would not, kidnap Niki.
But this is not something Puffy and Niki blame on them. After all, they left it for them to discover, a map of their love that leads to the wrong destination.