Work Text:
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given.
-Mary Oliver
- - -
Penance sat alone in her workshop. Its machines and normal vibrations were silent, the whole of it as paralyzed and as numb as she was, her body feeling like a hollow atom: the outside world still buzzing, but her inner state completely empty. Each time she blinked, she saw the jerk of Mary's body, as if she'd been jolted by an electric charge, then saw the blood on her dress, none of it making sense, none of it piecing itself together.
Penance shook the image away, picking up a small, round alkaline battery, the size of a studded earring, and placed it gently in the small chamber of a sparrow she'd fashioned out of thin plated chrome and metal. Blinking again, she saw the confusion in Mary's eyes, then the second bloom of red on her dress, then felt Amalia's hand pushing her down, Amalia running toward the horror of it, and the realization that they were under attack.
Penance shuddered, a low moan coming from her own throat, and she forced her attention back to the battery. She placed it gently in the bird's heart, a chamber that Penance created, and clicked it into place, watching as the sparrow came to life, its metallic wings fluttering.
Blinking again, Penance saw Amalia leaning over Mary, whose eyes stared lifelessly at the sky as if looking for stars that weren't there, that would never be there. The bird continued to flap its wings, something inanimate that she had managed to give life to, and yet Mary was gone. Another shuddering moan came from her, echoing in her empty workshop as she hovered a finger over the fragile flapping wing, knowing that all it took was the briefest of toughest to make it stop.
- - -
Amalia leaned against her bedroom door, fleeing the upstairs hallway, which buzzed with movement, if not life. She had spent most of the night in her office, she and Harriet attempting to welcome the newcomers with inanimate, frozen expressions, grief still etched on their faces. Until after some time, Amalia eyed Harriet and took in the whole of her: the distraught shoulders, the shocked, wide eyes, the stupefaction that would keep her going for as long as she had to, so long as she didn't have to stop and absorb what had happened in the park. Fortunately, Lucy was there, always there, and quietly guided Harriet upstairs, where hopefully she could help Harriet forge her way into this new, abrupt reality. Because Amalia couldn't; she wasn't suited for it, this lifelessness that came from grief. It took up time, which is something none of them had.
This was why she stayed in her office, speaking with girl after girl, writing down where they were from, their turns, their fears, what had brought to seek refuge from the orphanage. And then, as if lightning had struck her from the ground up, Amalia faltered slightly on her feet, exhaustion catching up with her. She may or may not have killed a man in a lake; she had seen Mary die, and finally, she slowly climbed the stairs, weaving her way around girls who were still being assigned a bed, welcomed inside, in so much as the rest of them were able to offer more than a shocked and silent looks.
Although her clothes had dried, her hair was still damp and she was cold to the bone; and yet she felt nothing. Amalia shed her clothes because she should, but instead of reaching for her nightgown, she pulled on a set of trousers and a shirt so that she could post herself in the yard for the night, alert, watchful, waiting. She'd watched as Mary's life had ended, and yet the day was not done. There would be no rest.
A knock hammered its way into her head, and she spoke automatically. "Yes."
Lucy appeared, her blue eyes now caverns in her head, pools of loss. "The girls are set. We're all out of sheets, but Primrose gave up a couple of her nightgowns, so we should be fine for a few nights." Lucy stared ahead, as if she had seen something that once she'd known but could no longer remember. "To think, that would have made me chuckle this morning."
Amalia and Lucy stared at one another, mirthlessly, like two soldiers who knew that humor was only a tool to remind them of who they once were: people who used to laugh.
"I'll check on the girls," Amalia offered, bending to straighten her trouser leg, but Lucy gave her a pitying, knowing look. "We've got it covered," she said. "That's not your strong suit. You and Bonfire Annie can just focus on keeping them safe for the night." She stared just past Amalia, not meeting her eyes, but looking at nothing. "I don't see the point in this world anymore." And with that she left, leaving Amalia alone again.
Amalia paced in her room, as if the very act of movement could get her mind to focus, rather than reeling back to the panic, the realization, the horror, the guilt; all of it tumbling on a loop in her brain and preventing her from focusing on the problems she could actually solve. She would find Mary's murderer and she would end their life; not for any larger purpose, not because it would make any of them safer, only because it was the only way to even out the loss. It was all she knew how to do here.
Amalia rammed her fist into her wardrobe door, the thin wood bowing. She rammed it again, feeling her knuckles split and crack. She rammed it again, the wood splitting. She rammed it again, pain radiating from her hand, splinters digging into her skin as her hand broke through it. Amalia looked at the blood on her fingers. It wasn't nearly enough to redeem her.
- - -
Penance had slumped onto the floor behind her work table, the sparrow in her hand, watching its wings. Of all her discoveries, her insights, there were some mysteries still so out of reach, obfuscated by shadows she would never be able to penetrate. Moments like this tried her faith, and it was only the image of the sparrow and the memory of Mary's melody that kept her from following the shadows into the darkness. She didn't hear the door open, nor Amalia's footsteps across the floor, and so was surprised to see her inexplicably standing before her like a petrified shell of herself.
"Did your amplifier manage to get anything from the song?" Amalia asked, her voice dull, as if she were simply going through motions she thought might help her. "Does it capture any frequencies, anything that she might have left of it?" She was grasping for threads she could pull, as if one of them would lead to a reason why Mary was no longer here.
Penance looked up at her, but it hurt to lift her eyes, to feign interest, even though she knew Amalia needed it. "Amalia, don't. I don't want to talk about this."
Amalia bent to her knees, her scraped hands resting uselessly on top of them, and contemplated placing a hand on Penance's arm, but the effort seemed too much for something that would do so little to take away the grief she saw in her light eyes. Instead, she sat, both of them staring down at the sparrow's wings, the measured, tiny beat of them.
"I had to come out here," Penance started, not looking at Amalia, but simply saying words. "I got Myrtle and Primrose into bed, but they won't sleep. I want to be with the girls, but I felt every time one of them looked at me I couldn't breathe."
"You've been with them all evening, Penance, you must give yourself some time."
She finally looked up at Amalia, tears running over her eyes. She was too exhausted for sobbing, the tears just seemed to fall of their own accord, too many built up inside her. "I've been lying to them," she faltered, her voice weak. "Letting them think they're safe here, with us, that we won't let anything bad happen."
"We've never been able to promise that," Amalia reminded her.
It was as if Penance didn't hear her. "I took them to the park and promised them something good would happen to them. I promised them the song would change them and they watched it happen." She swallowed, shaking her head. "I thought they would see a glimmer of God in her, such hope. They won't ever find that hope again, it's gone from them, Amalia."
"Time changes us, Penance, it always does. They won't ever be the same, but they will find a new space, one that has room for inexplicable tragedy. We can't let grief derail us from what we know we have to do."
"Amalia, your mission can't fix this," Penance said, too weak for anger, only despair. "This is hate so blinding that it thinks nothing of extinguishing a light just as it's at its brightest." Her voice broke, but she pummeled through, her words catching. "There's no mission that can reverse that, other than death and the salvation that comes with it."
Amalia had never heard Penance speak with such darkness, and she knew she had nothing to offer that would effectively counter it, for that is exactly the type of lightness for which she usually relied solely on Penance. Amalia felt a ball in her throat, one she couldn't swallow down, no matter how much she tried to force it into the bottomless pit deep inside, a place where she alone could fall, knowing that she was the reason for Mary's murder, Penance's pain, the girls' anguish. But she could indulge that guilt on her own, feed it with her own blood and pain at a later time. Now, she needed to harness all of her attention on repairing the broken woman in front of her, although she had no idea how to do it. She scooted closer to Penance and enveloped her in a cocoon of warmth to keep any more of her hope and spirit from seeping from out of her. It was a hug meant to catch her, support her, keep her upright. It was all she knew how to do.
"When I'm from, they say that the present moment is the only thing we have. And that nothing matters, neither pain nor joy, because in the moment everything exists at once. It just is."
Penance let her head drop onto Amalia's shoulder, knowing what an effort it took for Amalia to simply sit with someone else's sadness, especially when she could do nothing, punch nothing, that would remedy it. "You believe that?" Penance asked, her voice muffled at Amalia's neck, barely there.
"Whether I believe it or not doesn't matter."
"The way I feel right now, I don't understand how we can still be here," Penance said. "All this hurt, this sadness, and still be sitting here? Surely that means there is something out there besides this awfulness. The fact that we are here, these girls are here, despite our pain, there is God in that, there has to be." Amalia felt her shudder, as if her certainty was testing itself. "Otherwise, what else is there?"
Amalia tightened her grip around Penance, pressed a kiss to her curls, their buoyancy gone, and rested her head against them, if only searching for the remnants of joy that she'd felt before the park and Mary's senseless murder. And there it was, the slightest twinge of anger, which was a feeling she knew well and one that she welcomed. "Why don't you lay down?" she asked Penance. "In your own room, close your eyes and just let the dark come instead of your thoughts."
Penance shook her head. "I'll sleep here tonight," she said, pointing to a small chaise and blanket. A place where she had fallen asleep many a time before, peering at the night above her through the sloped window. She would lay and watch the stars, occasionally seeing one flicker out, a dying sun that had left the universe light years before; she wondered if Mary's fate was designed like that, if she had come into her life with a distinct path and purpose. Penance wiped a hand over her eyes, finding no comfort in it.
Amalia put a hand on her cheek, let it wrap around her neck and pull her in for another embrace, feeling Penance's shudders beneath her fingers. "Annie lit a fire in the yard---"
Penance stiffly looked up at her, alarm in her eyes, as if her body couldn't help but respond to the adrenaline that ran through it at the thought that some other emergency might require her attention.
"---one I asked her to light for me," Amalia clarified. "I'm going to keep watch tonight, just to make sure things are settled. It's something to do." She pressed a kiss against Penance's forehead, a tacit apology for what she thought was her own fault.
And with that Penance felt her pull away, the space next to her like a vacuum now, heard her footsteps cross the floor of the workshop, fading as the door opened and closed, and Penance returned her gaze back to the sparrow, gently stilling its wings with her fingertips.
- - -
Annie sat on the bench of the picnic table, holding her hands out to warm them over the fire flickering in the barrel in front of her. She didn't glance at Amalia as she came to stand beside it, staring into the flames. Annie wasn't one for superfluous words, but she knew the face of someone struck by the shock of yet another death and wondering why she hadn't grown used to it yet.
"It's been quiet," Annie offered, standing.
"Good," Amalia replied, eyes still on the fire, its feverish flames lighting her eyes, making it appear as if her thoughts were physically moving inside her. She raised her head to Annie, her gaze deadened. "Do you fancy a fight?"
"I should have known you don't go in for bedtime stories," Annie replied, glancing back at her. "But, no. You look to me like a woman who wants the shit beat out of her. Which I could do, of course, easily, but I prefer a fair fight."
Amalia didn't reply, simply inhaled, slightly grateful for a woman that could understand her in that moment. Another reminder that respect didn't always come with affection.
"I can stay longer here," Annie offered. "If you'd like to jaunt off to a pub and find a fight or two."
"No," Amalia countered. "You go inside, we've prepared a bed for you." She looked up at her, meeting her eyes. "I'll need you rested. And ready."
Annie nodded slowly and turned to walk away, giving a wave of her hand as she continued toward a place she might come to call home.
Amalia sat on the top of the picnic table, feeling the chill of the night replace the warmth of the fire, but uncaring, craving the coldness. She lay down, the coolness of the table seeping through her thin blouse and flooding her back with a chilling, comfortable numbness. Staring at the stars, she held back the longing and despair that went hand in hand whenever she looked at the night sky, a feeling of wanting to be home, surrounded by only the darkness and the palpable sense of time. So different from this world, with its pull against the present, its need to carve itself out of the whole and into something separate, and as a result, meaningless. Its habit of summoning meaning in senseless tragedy, trying pull some sort of lesson from grief, all of it pointless and leaving people suffering with their inability to change things. Leaving Penance to suffer. Leaving the girls to suffer. Leaving Mary to suffer.
And then she put a hand against her eyes because the pain she was feeling could only mean that this world had wedged into her: the girls she had come to grudgingly adore, so much so that it pained her to see them struggle through such tragedy; Penance in despair, her light waning and struggling to keep it alive. This bloody world and its imperfection, so much a mirror of her own failings, making her wonder if she would ever have the courage to return home. And Mary, who she had failed, who she had sacrificed all too willingly, by acting so rashly, which was the exact reason why she had been left here in the first place. It was all too much chance and failure and she let her shoulders shake with a silent, shuddered sob as she wished for the dark again, turning to her side and pressing her cheek and hands against the surface of the table until the coldness numbed her back to herself.
She lay silently and watched the fire burn. She heard the telltale creak of Penance's workshop door, the softness of her footsteps across the yard, and took some pleasure in knowing that she was headed back to the house, at the very least acknowledging the need for sleep in the place she called home. The footsteps stopped beside the picnic table, and Amalia felt a blanket settle gently on top of her. Turning, she saw Penance with the fire at her back, her light eyes dark now against the glow of it, and Amalia reached for her hand. Penance stepped onto the bench and then the table, lowering herself next to Amalia, turning on her side to watch the flames flicker in the darkness of the yard. Amalia slid her arm underneath Penance's shoulders and wrapped a hand around her middle, pulling the blanket over both of them and burying her head in her curls, her neck, which smelled like grass and flowers, the remnants of the park before its tragic end.
Penance said nothing, but wedged into her, enveloping herself in Amalia's arms. There were no words, nothing to say, but the hardness of the table felt right, and they had each other to hold, if only to bridge them through a hopeless, sleepless night and into the light of a morning that would inevitably come.