Work Text:
You’re going away soon? She asks as she rolls the apple between her palms. They’re rough from farm work, unlike his, smooth and calloused only on the finger where his pen and quill rub. Her hair is long down her back, untied for what seems the first time in days with harvest season and so much to do. The locks fall in ringlets, wavy from the braids she usually tucks them away into.
He thumbs his cheek. At the end of the week, rybka. Everything will be at market by then. Little fish, he calls her. Sister. The same name she’s had for as long as they’ve known each other, separated as they are by a few years’ difference in birth.
The light from the porch shines warm and pearlescent on the whites of their clothes, soft for housewear, and the thick smock she uses to shield her shirt from dirt and tear during the workday. With the light to the side and the blue-dark bushes behind them, the old wooden table in the yard feels like a secret clearing in the woods, someplace they’d go to whisper when they were young. There isn’t much they have left to say now, between the things they already know and the inevitabilities - they don’t need to read minds.
She continues to move the apple around gently in her hands, brushing its shiny skin with her fingers. He eyes the pale flesh of the one they’d cut open to taste. The apples will taste different in the city, so far from the orchards that they’ll have to be picked early. But then, nothing will ever quite compare to the taste of home from those his family and their neighbors touch every year.
I wish you the best, she says. They deserve to have someone like you to care for them - meets his eyes - all those lost people. The corners of his mouth twitch up, just enough to say it happened. Together, they watch the light apples oxidize into caramel.