Chapter Text
The banks of the river are a distant walk from the cottage but, as if it were flowing past the other side of the garden wall, Caroline can hear the water moving out toward the sea from where she sits near the patch of calendulas and lady’s mantle herb. She listens to it with her eyes closed, arms hugging a struck bushel basket that is slowly being filled with lilac clippings and sprigs of baby’s breath. Alexa, who steps around her harvesting aide, carefully maneuvers the blades of the black gardening shears in her hands to fit snugly around the branches of the overgrown bush and clips them one by one, piling the bunches of flowers on top of each other.
“I realize that I shouldn’t be prying into your conversations with Melody,” Alexa says, kneeling down in front of the shrubbery and pats her gloves off on the grass, “but I overheard that you’ll be leaving us soon.”
Caroline clears her throat and nods beneath the wide brim of the gardening hat atop her head. “That is correct,” she admits.
“Are you ready to?” Alexa asks.
Caroline looks down at her own hands, covered in a pair of garden mitts which had been so generously gifted to her by one of the few visitors to the Pendras’ cottage. She’d recovered significantly since the day she arrived with Daniel Powell and the rest of the surviving outpost crew—the stumps where fingers and thumbs belonging to ten of LMG’s middle managers had once been attached were now healed-over with scar tissue and, though she still felt a strange sensational mixture between numbness and soreness, assisting Melody and Alexa with their chores and duties hadn’t been difficult for some time.
“I think so,” Caroline replies, running her palms gently down the sides of the basket full of lilacs.
Alexa retrieves a handkerchief from the front pocket of her apron, unfolding it and pressing it to her face to dab away the sweat beading on her forehead. She takes a deep breath as she stows the cloth back into her apron pocket, smiling softly at Caroline. “Will you be going back home?”
Caroline shakes her head, giving some thought to the loaded concept of ‘home’ with regards to where, in either world, she truly belonged. “Without a proper feeling of attachment to the world… the real world, the world beyond The City, Melody Pendras tells me she cannot be sure that I will make it over to the other side as smoothly as she was able to transport Clara. Even if she could, I am unsure of how I would even begin to support myself. My memories are already quite hazy. I understand that I would only jeopardize the few I have remaining even if my transition from here to there were successful,” she explains.
Like a weather forecast, Melody had told her once before, the ebb and flow of truths circulating on magical currents like the wind through a wildfire and make for marginally more reliable predictions. Though never constant or precise, Melody hoped to give Caroline a decent head-start on her journey; much like the maritime travelers of ages past judging the conditions of their voyages by the color of the clouds at sunrise, her attuned intuition would fortify Caroline’s chances. There was no telling what tides of curiosity or whims of fate would shape her travels but, after having spent so long living with her life in the hands of others, a chance to seize back any shred of autonomy was something Caroline wouldn’t soon neglect to take. The second chance her recovery had thus far provided was all the reason she needed.
“As uncomfortable as I am made by this world, it is also likely that the… ambient ‘weirdness’ which emanates from it is keeping me alive,” Caroline says, frowning. Looking up to meet Alexa’s gaze, however, prompts her to smile in kind.
“She knows well, that wife of mine,” Alexa chuckles, then asks, “You’ll be traversing The City, then?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” Caroline answers, “I am primarily searching for a safer passage back to the real world, though it may prove impossible.”
Alexa hums approvingly. “It sounds like quite a trip,” she remarks, her clippers returning to their place among the lilac branches to trim another few clumps of fragrant blossoms down from the bush. “If, at some point on your journey, you can’t find what you’re looking for, know that you’ll always be welcome to return here. Alright?”
Her open invitation is met with a nod, Caroline grinning. “Of course,” she replies, watching as Alexa returns to her work, the pair of them collecting herbs until lightfall.