Work Text:
"a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily."
- Audre Lorde, "Coping"
🙒
It smelled like wet juniper, Allura decided as she watched the countryside flit past.
Not literally—not in the moment—because right now all she could really smell was the tang of metal rods overhead and alongside her, covered in little smudgy fingerprints. The stench of sweaty polyester seat covers underneath her, discolored from at least eight too many years of service. The cloying sweetness of something sticky that had dried into the corner across from her as the bus rattled unsteadily along on the rough English pavement, each lurching turn revealing hidden treasures of empty water bottles and abandoned chapstick tubes.
So, no. The scent of wet juniper was not a literal one. But as she looked out at the fields of faded grass and the flighty gray clouds above them, as she recalled the touch of frigid earth beneath her fingernails and the wind lifting her black hair around her, the conclusion felt right. There was something natural and fresh and achingly empty about it. Like a toad lily blooming in the last breath of summer, beautiful and quiet in its admission of the end.
🙒
“Friday night and the lights are low
Looking out for a place to go
Where they play the right music!”
Allura groaned as she watched her father swing his hips side to side, his arms reaching out as if to summon her from her seat at the picnic table. She buried her face in her hands and leaned her elbows on the sunbleached wood, but it could not block out the sound of his off-pitch singing. Even the radio crackled, as if in protest.
"Getting in the swing
You come to look for a king…”
When she peaked through her fingertips, he was gesturing to himself, one hand on his hip. She whined into her palms, then dropped them dramatically onto the table.
“If there is any universe in which you are a king,” she said, “this is the furthest one from it.”
He waggled his brows and spun in the windswept grass, letting the rare sunlight catch on his shock of white hair and caress the dark apples of his cheeks. Even the waves seemed to applaud his performance as they crashed against the nearby cliffs. He was ridiculous, but God did he look alive.
“I’m not doing it,” she grumbled, turning her nose up and looking away, but she could feel her resolve crumbling. “You can embarrass yourself just fine on your own, clearly.”
“That I can,” her father replied, “but as the Dancing King, it’s my sworn duty to prepare you for your future duties as my heir.”
Allura glanced back at him once more, narrowing her eyes at the broad grin on his face and stiffness of his posture as he bowed, one hand held behind his back and the other outstretched in her direction.
“May I have this dance, Your Highness?”
Allura sighed and rose, extending her hand out to accept his.
“You are the Dancing Queen
Young and sweet
Only seventeen…”
“I am not seventeen yet, Father,” Allura said as she held her father’s hands and swayed them back and forth in time with his shimmying. “I’m still sixteen.”
He laughed. “You are not a Dancing Queen yet either.”
The radio crackled in the background as her father lifted her arm over her head and twirled her in a circle. Her skirts, pale yellow and dotted in small white flowers, billowed around her, and the breeze continued to play with the fabric even as she completed the turn.
“You are still a princess.”
🙒
The sun had fully risen, though it remained invisible, by the time the bus squeaked to an unceremonious stop in a sandy parking lot that was empty save for a rusted garbage can and an old warped picnic table. The crunch of wheels over dusty gravel grew silent as Allura stared at the sight just outside her grimey window: dirt parking lot, followed by yellowish grass, followed by endless sky where the land cut off abruptly and plunged into the abyss.
The bus doors click-clack-schunk ed their way open, and in flowed the sound of gusting wind and crashing waves. Seagulls crying out in the distance. Blades of grass rustling against one another. But she did not turn from the window until a voice dragged her attention away.
“‘Ey,” the driver said, leaning around from his seat in the front to raise a bushy eyebrow. The puff of his oversized winter coat made him look bloated, cartoonish. “Altea Cliffside. Last stop on this route. It’s right on back after this.” He slipped his cap off and ran a hand through his sweaty brown hair.
Allura held his gaze for a moment, remaining still against the outside noise that forced its way in alongside the crisp air. It tousled the fabric of her skirts, turning silk to liquid, folds to ripples. Goosebumps prickled along the dark brown of her skin, little pinpricks of reality, little needles poking in, draining her—
“You gettin’ off? Don’t got all day.”
Before Allura could process, her body was responding on instinct, giving a stiff shake of her head. The pocket of her dress weighed heavy on her leg, urging her, begging her, but she kept shaking back and forth, no. No.
“Suit yourself,” the driver said, then closed the doors with a hiss-ka-chum and began rolling out of the parking lot.
Allura clutched a strained hand over her pocket and let her gaze drift out to the horizon again. The line of it, hard and fixed as it stared back at her, felt like a frown.
🙒
This was not the first time she did this, nor would it be the last.
🙒
“Do you know your mother lost her favorite necklace here the very first time we visited?” her father asked one day as the two of them lounged, flat on their backs, on a blanket in the grass. The seagulls squealed to each other overhead, desperate to be heard over the roaring ocean.
Allura frowned a moment, watching the smoky clouds swirl above. She hummed a mm-mm but kept her eyes skyward.
“Yep,” he said, a smile in his voice, “a pretty one, with a pearl pendant. I’d gotten it for her as a birthday present the previous year.” He coughed a little into his fist, then rubbed at his sternum. “We’d just moved into the house on Castle Drive, and we had wanted to explore a bit of the surrounding attractions. So we came here, and she stood on the edge of the cliffs and spread her arms to the ocean.” His hands rose up a bit, as if he was grasping at something invisible. “And I stood behind her and held her, just like this, around the waist.”
Allura snorted and rolled her head sideways to look at her father. “What, like in Titanic ?”
“No,” he said quickly, and then, in a sheepish tone, “maybe.” His hands lowered back down again, and he folded them over his chest with a pout. “It had only just come out! It was all the rage at the time.”
Allura smiled wide and looked back up at the clouds again, shaking her head.
“Anyway,” her father continued pointedly, “she was standing there, arms open, wind in her hair, and the clasp just—broke. Just came clean off.” His voice turned softer, more wistful. “And the whole necklace, pearl and all, fell hundreds of feet right down into the water below.”
Allura waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, she glanced his way and said, “And that’s it? She lost it forever, and you two still wanted to come back here?” It seemed silly to her, to keep returning to a place whose very first impression had been such a poor one.
Her father scoffed, but it bordered on a laugh. “Your mother was the strangest sentimentalist.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment Allura thought maybe he was going to sleep. He had been very tired lately.
“I’ll never forget,” he murmured after a minute, and Allura had to strain to hear him over the waves. “She said to me, ‘I didn’t lose it. It left on its own.’” He opened his eyes. The faintest hint of moisture gathered there. “‘It’s a pearl,’ she said. ‘Pearls belong in the ocean.’”
Allura turned her gaze away again when she saw the first tear escape. She stilled, unsure whether she should pretend she had not seen it. Seconds later, she felt a large warm hand slip into hers.
“‘I didn’t lose it. I didn’t lose it. It was just going home.’”
🙒
When fate finally found Allura again, it was in the pink and blue neon lights of the local campus corner store at half twelve, with the buzz of electricity humming a tune in her ear and the weight of a Hula Hoops bag crinkling in her grip. Fate’s hand was pale, lightly freckled, and gentle on her shoulder. Soft but firm as it stopped her in her tracks.
“Allura?” Romelle asked, summoning Allura’s gaze to her face. The fluorescent lights cast deep shadows over her complexion, turning the usual blue of her eyes to a muted purple. She wore a baby blue cropped tank and matching cupcake-printed pajama pants under her oversized pastel pink parka, and Allura might have laughed at the ensemble, if she had the energy.
Instead, she just gawped, unsure what to say—or unable to say it, perhaps. The neon glow from overhead stuttered a moment, a great floundering gasp. When it smoothed out again, Romelle was smiling at her.
“It’s good to see you,” Romelle said, letting her hand drop just a few inches from Allura’s shoulder to the side of her bicep, warmth bleeding through the white wool of her peacoat. “It’s been—” She paused, thumb laying idle at the edge of Allura’s underarm. “It feels like ages. But I suppose it hasn’t been that long.”
“Seven weeks,” Allura supplied without thought. “And two days.”
Romelle’s smile faltered for a moment, and Allura tensed, waiting for it to turn sickly sweet and pitying. It did not. It grew softer, certainly, but there was something respectful in it. Patient.
“Yes,” she said. “Seven weeks. And two days.”
The night air was tight around them, and Allura found herself struggling to muster the spirit to say everything she wanted to. All of the confessions, all of the apologies—they were all lodged somewhere in the scalding heat behind her ribcage. In the end, it was Romelle, once again, who broke the silence.
“Allura, I’m—I miss you.” Her voice was soft but hoarse, a whisper that had not quite decided to come out before it was thrust into the open. “I was talking with Lance and Hunk, and they said—they never see you either.” Her hand was still there. A tender non-pressure against Allura’s arm. “Except when you’re at the coach station. At odd hours, too,” she added, and Allura felt her abdomen tingle with the urge to curl in on herself. She resisted. Romelle’s eyes held hers, searching, wondering. “Why?”
The bell of the corner store door jingled behind Allura as a customer entered. She broke Romelle’s linked gaze under the guise of watching through the wide, poster-littered windows as a man in a maroon windbreaker shuffled through the aisles, grabbing a tube of Pringles and then putting it back, grabbing a carton of two percent milk and then trading it for skim. His fingers tapped a rhythm on the fridge doors as he passed toward the register. He placed his carton on the counter and perused the candy selection while the cashier rang him up. His hands hovered over an Aero bar for a moment before he stood and pulled out his wallet to pay.
“Nevermind,” Romelle’s voice cut through, and Allura felt a sudden chill on her bicep as the gentle weight there disappeared. She looked back at Romelle and found her wringing her pale hands under the too-long sleeves of her parka. “You don’t have to answer that.” That smile was guilty now. “You’re allowed to grieve how you want. You don’t owe us an explanation.”
The bell tinkled behind Allura again and, for the umpteenth time that night, she could not speak.
“I’m just glad you’re safe.”
And then suddenly, she could.
“I can’t do it,” Allura said, and it sounded unsteady even to her own ears, but she ignored it. “I promised I would but I can’t.” At Romelle’s confused but encouraging expression, Allura dug a hand into her pocket and fumbled around for the item that she carried with her everywhere she went. Her fist closed over it, and she pulled it out, shoving it in Romelle’s direction clumsily as if she was handing over a spare coin or passing salt. She could not look at it; she would not. The sensation alone of carved wood beneath her fingertips was already enough to have her breath catching in her throat.
Romelle reached both hands out, far more slow and tender, and held it like it was made of glass.
“I can’t,” Allura repeated.
Romelle was quiet for a minute as she eyed it, then looked back up again. “My grandmother used to say,” she began, her tone measured but light, “‘If you hold on too tight after they go, it weighs them down when they’re trying to get to Heaven.’” Her fingers, long and lithe in Allura’s peripheral, cradled the item in their grasp with careful attention, even as she kept her gaze focused on Allura. “I used to think it just meant they couldn’t get into Heaven. Scared the shit out of me, if I’m being honest.”
That startled a wavering laugh out of Allura. It earned her a slightly cheeky grin in response. That grin subsided after an instant.
“And then, you know, Bandor died,” Romelle continued, and Allura winced, feeling suddenly very selfish and weak. Romelle had lost her own family, her own brother, and here Allura was feeling sorry for herself, as if she was the only one to know this kind of loss. “And I felt like allowing myself to be happy would be dishonoring his memory.” Romelle frowned. “Like it would mean I didn't love him anymore, or I was letting go of something precious. The idea of healing felt more painful than the wound itself.” Her hands were fidgeting again—still careful, but tracing the edges of the object almost absently.
She let out a puff of breath. “So really, I think it’s not so much about them reaching Heaven,” she said, her lips thinning in a wan smile, “so much as it is about you dragging yourself into Hell.” The more Allura looked, the more the pink and blue lights seemed to frame her like an art piece. “And them too, because so long as you don’t know peace, neither do they.”
She was beautiful like this. Half of Allura wished she could isolate her beauty and extract it from the terrible solemnity of this moment. The other half knew that it was that very solemnity which was, in part, responsible for that beauty.
The hems of Romelle’s pajama pants had started to grow damp from the moisture that lingered on the cement after the day’s light rain. She did not seem to notice, or perhaps did not care.
“When they go,” she said, “they don’t take us with them. They don’t want to take us with them.” She stepped closer, just a hair, but enough that the neon lights shifted along the planes of her face and flashed in the depths of her eyes. “But that’s a two-person job, Allura, and we have to put in the effort to make sure we don’t go with them too.”
Allura swallowed around a strangled noise in her throat.
“In order to do that, we have to stop holding on so tight. Otherwise, they’re dragging us with them—and that’s the last thing they want.”
The words burned in Allura’s lungs, behind her eyes, beneath her fingertips. She felt herself clawing against them, a cornered animal in a losing fight.
Romelle was even closer now, close enough that Allura felt if one of them breathed too hard it might knock them both over. The air was heavy between them. Romelle looked as though she expected Allura to flee at any moment.
Part of Allura expected the same.
“Allura,” Romelle said, voice barely higher than a murmur, “you have so many people in your life who lo—” She swallowed. “—who love you,” she finished, voice cracking just a bit at the end. “And all they want is to be there for you. To help ground you, to keep you from following your ghosts and losing yourself in the process. Won’t you let them?” She tilted her head, and a strand of blonde hair shifted against her jaw. “Won’t you let me?”
And it hurt, because Allura knew she wanted to. The pain of missing her friends, of missing her life—it was crushing at times, and right now was no different. It was just easier to shut it all out and focus on death.
Only it wasn’t, really. It wasn’t easier. It was just less daunting. It involved less vulnerability, and it involved less confrontation of her own emotions, and it involved less attachment, which was the terrible thing that had put her in this wretched state to begin with. And allowing that debilitating fear to overtake her wasn’t fair to any of her friends, but it also wasn’t fair to Allura.
She was protecting no one, least of all herself, by shutting everyone out. By trying to forget them, and to be forgotten by them.
That would be asking far too much, of herself and of them. How could she expect them to leave behind every late night study session and every skipped class? Every drunken journey home and every hungover brunch the next morning? Every scream and every laugh?
How could she expect Romelle to abandon every hand held, or every smile shared, or every almost-secret whispered beneath the cover of darkness?
“You’re right,” she breathed finally, unable to stop the tension from bleeding into her voice. “I know you’re right. I just—I just…” She sniffed once and rubbed an index under her nose, hunching her shoulders.
Romelle looked down at her hands, then glanced up again. “I can come with you.” She reached out, offering the item back. “If you’re comfortable with that.”
Allura exhaled, long and trembling. She finally let her gaze lower, and her tongue grew heavy and painful in the back of her throat. A small wooden box sat there, perched so innocently in the dip of Romelle’s fingers, each surface riddled with engravings. Little branches and berries and pine needles.
It was so tiny. How peculiar, for such a tiny thing to have such a firm grasp around one’s heart.
Allura looked back up again, tracing the worried lines of Romelle’s expression until she felt, all at once, that she knew each edge and divot just as well as she ever had—that she had never stopped, and that she was a fool to think she ever should. Some things, some people, stay with you forever, and that doesn’t have to hurt, not really. Not if you don’t let it.
The neon sign overheard flickered one more time, and Allura extended a hand to clasp around Romelle’s. She felt rough wood beneath her fingers, but mostly she felt soft skin, warm and smooth under her touch.
“Alright,” Allura said, and she meant it, or she would soon. All right.
🙒
“Do you remember Altea Cliffside, Allura?”
“Yes, Father.”
“The way it used to get so windy that your skirts would blow everywhere, and you’d struggle to tame them?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And you’d fight for a minute before giving up and dancing with the breeze instead?”
“Yes, Father.”
“And we’d eat those little sandwiches with the cucumbers, and you made me cut all of your crusts off because you wanted to feed the gulls? That’s what you claimed, at least. I knew it was an excuse, but I did it anyway.”
“… Yes.”
Her father was difficult to watch like this, all needles and tubes and starched blue cotton. He had once had such a rich, dark complexion. Now it was as though his vibrancy had been drained out of all of the holes they had poked in his wilted veins. His head, once covered in that magnificent snow white mane, was bare now, bare enough to reflect the harsh hospital lighting back at her when she looked at it. She tried not to.
“I am leaving, Allura,” he told her, as if she did not know, as if she did not spend every waking hour knowing, as if she would not give anything to stop knowing if only for a moment. He turned his hand in an invitation for her to give her own. She accepted. “I am leaving very soon.” His eyes, sunken and bloodshot, crinkled around the edges as he smiled.
“You’re leaving,” she echoed. An attempt ground herself in the truth. Instead, the truth only rattled around in her brain, eluding her at every turn.
“I want to go back.” Her father’s fingers squeezed, weakly but desperately, around hers. “Take me back, Allura. Promise me.”
Allura stroked a thumb along the back of his hand, careful to avoid the needle taped there. When she broke his gaze, it was to look down at the fold of their hands together, to memorize the curve of his fingers around hers and the cradle of his palm below.
“I promise,” she said. “I promise.”
🙒
The skies were yet again gray—they almost always were—as Allura stood at the edge of the cliffs and peered out over the churning ocean below and beyond. Her black hair was left loose to fly about her form like the gulls that circled above. She had worn her silk dress again, and she could feel the press of crinoline gliding along her nylon stockings each time the breeze shifted her skirts. Romelle stood just behind, out of sight but within reach.
The scent of sea salt and the crash of waves were a siren’s call, and Allura slipped a slow hand into the folds of her dress.
When she pulled the box out, she felt a warmth pressed close to her side, fighting back the cold of the early spring wind. Romelle did not speak, but she was there, a welcome presence and a pillar of stability. As Allura stared at the little wooden container, she could just barely feel the press of a hand on the middle of her spine, a small point of contact that offset the heavy touch of the burden she bore in her hands.
Allura breathed in and out, then carefully pried open the lid to reveal the ashes within.
“Welcome home,” she said to him. “I am sorry I made you wait so long.”
🙒
“How come we have so many juniper trees in the backyard, Father?—Ow!”
Her father patted her head apologetically as he tugged her hair into a braid. “They were your mother’s favorite.” He pinched a fuzz between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it out of the way before resuming. “And now they are mine.”
Allura’s legs dangled from where she sat on the back porch, overlooking their yard and the line of conifers that bordered it. From this distance, she thought they looked like a giant fuzzy green scarf wrapped around the entirety of their home. She had pointed it out to her father once, and he had laughed aloud. Mother would have liked that, he had said. She always used to fuss over bundling him up and keeping him warm.
Allura wished she could have known her mother. But the big fluffy juniper scarf was very pretty, and it helped keep their nosey neighbors out, and Allura supposed that would have to do.
“Do you still love her?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“How?”
Her father paused his ministrations. “There is no ‘how.’ I simply cannot stop.”
“Why?”
“Because I love her.”
Allura scrunched her nose. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Her father laughed and pressed a kiss into the dark coils at the crown of her head, and she craned her neck back fast enough to see him pull away. His smile widened as he was caught in the act.
“It doesn’t have to,” he said.
🙒
Allura brushed her fingers along the juniper engravings on the wooden surface of her box. When at last she upended it, the ashes met with the wind and danced there, suspended, for just a moment, until gravity swept them down and away, until the waters found them and kissed them hello; an old lover welcoming a wayward companion home.
The hand against her back slid away, but she chased it, reaching behind herself and snaring it in a firm grasp. She heard a hitched inhale from her side, but she only squeezed tighter and fixed her gaze on the milky brow of the horizon.
This time, she was sure it smiled, so she smiled back.
🙒
Allura frowned at her pudgy hands as her father popped open the red lid of their cool box. “Tommy J. says his mum married somebody else,” she said, clenching her fingers together until they turned clammy and gross. “That he has a new dad now.”
There was a soft hum from beside her, and her father began to pull out a couple of water bottles to set on the picnic table. He was quiet for a few seconds.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Allura,” he said. His movements were slower now as he unpacked a Ziploc bag of sandwiches.
“I just don’t get it.” Allura slid off the wooden bench with a huff and turned around to face the sea. “He says she loved his old dad. And now she loves his new dad.” It was abnormally windy today, and the bluish-gray of the water seemed particularly cold as she watched it churn in the distance. “So she had to stop loving the first one, at some point.”
She heard her father close the cool box behind her. A moment later, he was at her side, hands stuffed in the pockets of his navy bomber jacket, shoulders hunched against the chilly breeze. He let the silence hang for a little while longer.
“I love your mother,” he said finally, his voice quiet as he tilted his head up toward the marbled sky. “And I love your grandmother, and I love your uncle, and I love the ocean and the sunrise and the face kittens make when they sneeze.” He mimed sneezing in Allura’s direction, and she could not help but giggle even as she batted him away. He laughed and caught one of her hands in his.
“And I love you.” He leaned his side into hers a bit, just enough to jostle her before he stood up straight again. “The heart is big enough for all of it.”
“That love is different,” Allura protested, though she was smiling now and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“I don’t think so,” her father said, “not really.” He watched the tumbling waves and squeezed Allura’s hand. The water didn’t look so cold anymore. “Not when you get to the core of it.”
🙒