Chapter Text
The smell of lilacs in an evening breeze.
It’s the loveliest period of spring, when the winter chill has finally given way to a hint of summer’s warmth, and when the air is tinged with a floral scent.
Trent looks out his bedroom window, up at the falling petals of a cherry blossom, then down at the running forms of Stu and May. She shouts after him; he turns around to stick his tongue out at her; she stomps her foot then runs with renewed vigor. Trent quirks an eyebrow in amusement.
The lower the sun sets, the warmer the streets become. It’s the warmth of the townsfolk, really — with the end of a work day comes an opportunity to exchange amusing tales and enjoy each other’s company, perhaps at the inn or at someone’s house. Perhaps someone is holding a feast, and perhaps everyone heading northwards is invited. It’s difficult to tell. People don’t share their plans with him, though he might hear of it tomorrow from Manna.
He shuts the window.
His work day is also done, but he has no urgent plans to heed or a companion to expect him.
Not before long, there is silence.
Silence is a trustworthy companion. It’s gentle enough to hold the echoes of the written word as he reads a book, and it’s harsh enough to alert him of a patient’s prolonged lapse in consciousness. It breathes life into inanimate forms, and informs of a life’s end.
Mostly it’s cold. It speaks to him of who isn’t there with him and what isn’t his to have.
Still he trusts it. He has dwelled in it long enough to know to expect it — it can’t disappoint or shock him; it has gifted him the virtue of acceptance.
Down at the ground level of the clinic, he sees Elli. She appears to be in a dream of some kind. Her eyes are open but she is far away. When she sees him, she startles and sheepishly stacks the strewn papers in front of her.
“You’ve done a good job today, Elli,” Trent says. “You may rest now.”
“Oh,” she intones, flushing. “Do you think so? That… I did a good job, I mean?”
He nods. “Jeff and Sasha complimented your stellar bedside demeanor. It comforts me to know you have something I lack. This way, the clinic will continue to fulfill everyone’s needs.”
Her reaction is a curious one. She seems flattered but disappointed. Nonetheless her lips strain upwards as she stands. “I'm happy… I can bring something vital to the clinic.” Now she has walked away from her desk. “I suppose I shall go see grandma and Stu now.”
“Give them my regards.”
After a tentative smile, she’s gone.
Trent sits at his desk. He looks at his notes, rearranges them, then folds his hands atop the papers.
The ticking clock loudly proclaims how slowly the time passes.
He checks his notes again. There’s still nothing missing. Nothing that needs revision.
Outside, the sky is without a trace of gold.
It’s a tranquil blue.
It puts an ache in his heart.
He looks at his notes.
A new resident has arrived. A farmer. Her hair is spun gold, her eyes are the color of cornflower, and she smells of sunshine.
She’s new in more ways than one; childlike in her appreciation of the town’s novelty, doubtless to be unspeakably different from the bustling city life that was once her own. There’s an eagerness in her to accept what isn’t familiar, and with it comes an eagerness to be accepted.
Perhaps it is her innocent smile or her honest eyes — whatever it is about her, Trent feels compelled to include her in a novelty of his own. A medicine that he himself has worked on and tried. His personal verification doesn’t lend it scientific merit, but it’s enough to tell him that he wouldn’t be endangering her by offering it.
So he offers it.
And she accepts his offer.
His first instinct is to be pleasantly surprised that she accepted, and his second is to be thrilled to know that his concoction works.
After she leaves, he allows himself to feel something akin to excitement.
This girl's nature is refreshingly unassuming, and her disposition is kind. She reassures without needing to so much as speak a word.
Trent feels perhaps, maybe, he can forge a friendship with Claire.
Except that he almost ruins it before it has even begun.
After their second encounter, and late at night, Trent sits on his bed, back hunched and neck bowed.
He gave her a toxic substance. He put her life at risk.
In his excitement at his first success, he sought to overstep it and outdo himself. He should have known better than to be so hasty.
What would have happened if she took greater damage than she did?
If she fell into an endless coma? An endless… sleep?
His stomach lurches at the thought. He shakes his head vehemently.
And he feels incredibly tired.
He stands, walks to an undecorated wall, and lets his head collide with it, again and again, until the ache ceases to be superficial and develops into a migraine.
Then he slides to the ground and rests the back of his head against that very wall.
“I'm a terrible doctor…” he whispers to himself. “A terrible person…”
He forgets the possibility of a friendship with Claire.
The death of a hope is the cruel price of having hope to begin with.
The first couple of days after meeting Claire have been remarkably saccharine. He felt a lightness to his steps. Like the air he inhaled touched every crevice in his lungs and tickled them with life instead of stopping at the base of his throat.
Now he is leaden.
Beyond the regret that consumes him, he’s sad that he destroyed a chance of having a companion. Even though Carter makes a good confidant, Trent still feels an obscure cavity in his chest.
How dreadful it is to know that something is missing but to not be able to give it a name or even identify it.
“Doctor?”
Elli.
He raises his head to look at her. She’s standing a few feet away from his desk.
“Are you alight?” she asks, concern lacing her voice. “You seem completely elsewhere.”
Some seconds pass in silence. Then he makes his decision to confide in her.
“I suppose I feel guilty…” he all but whispers. “I took advantage of Claire’s kindness and endangered her life…”
“Yes, what you did was horrid,” she says. She’s cross with him and it shows in her reproachful frown. But then her features ease. “But you can always say you’re sorry.”
He looks at her. His face is soft with sadness.
He concedes.
For his apology, he gives her a negative ionizer. It’s his most prized invention — the one model that he has, with no replica or replacement. He gives it to her and wonders if she realizes the significance of such a gift.
He himself hardly does. He can’t tell why he gave a stranger something that he has toiled over for many sleepless nights before he has even had the chance to make more of its kind. But he gives it to her.
And when she smiles, the overcast skies that loiter over him alone begin to clear. Sunshine can reach him again. He smiles too. A slow, underused smile. Those facial muscles are gravely atrophied, having abandoned his face to be sculpted by vacancy. He hopes she can’t see the effort it takes to strain his lips.
But his greatest joy comes when she says, “I accept your apology.”
He sees her one Wednesday when he is out foraging for herbs. She’s foraging, too, it turns out. Inexperienced, sore, and more than a little bit lost. He decides to help her.
And it’s fascinating how fast the sun changes position in the sky.
“What's this?” she asks, crouching down, her voice a mere whisper. He thinks to ask why she’s whispering, but he finds his own voice lowering an octave or two. And he realizes the answer to his unspoken question. There’s something sacred about the serenity of nature. Something that shouldn’t be disturbed.
“This lovely evergreen shrub is called Camellia sinensis,” he says. “Its leaves are used to make tea.”
The air is heavy with dew, and the soil smells of petrichor. It rained heavily last night and stopped only at dawn. Until now, leaves glisten with a wet sheen and some branches drip with water.
Just when Trent thinks that it’s rather cold this golden hour, Claire smiles. She looks up at him.
“Maybe we should have tea.”
Trent blinks, eyebrows raised. “Tea? Together?”
This makes her hesitate. She misunderstood his surprise.
“You don’t have to join, of course, I just thought —”
“No, no,” he intervenes, feeling her turmoil reflect on him. He calms, and his smile comes more easily than last time. “I'd love to join for tea.”
And she beams.
Her farm house is quaint and cozy. It feels much more like home than the upper apartment of the clinic ever did.
Claire moves lightly in her space, taking out some flowers she picked earlier that day and putting them in the vase. She moves the vase so that the flowers can catch the last rays of sunlight, which reflect off the pastel of the petals gently.
Trent shuffles his feet at the door and resists the urge to clear his throat. He feels awkward against his best efforts to behave normally. He doesn’t remember the last time he was invited to someone’s house.
Looking up from the vase, Claire takes him in with a slightly raised brow before her face softens. She extends a hand to the table and says, “You can sit if you’d like.”
“Oh, I’d…” he begins. “I'd like to help you in the kitchen, actually.”
She seems to appreciate that suggestion. She makes space for him beside her, and he settles in, stiff and gangling. But she doesn’t mind it. She only smiles at him, offering her silent reassurance for which he’s endlessly grateful.
“I’ve learned to cook only recently,” Claire says, somewhat embarrassed. “I can’t do much, but if you have a recipe in mind, we can bake some sweets…?”
Sweets aren’t an indulgence that he favors. Perhaps because he became so used to viewing them as the precursor to disease in some patients or on the pages of a medical book that described diabetes or certain cancers. They hold no nostalgic value for him; no heart-rending memories to fall back on and reminisce over. The son of a workaholic physician and an ever-occupied nurse, he rarely, if ever, was given something to snack on; much less sweets.
But now, Trent can’t think of anything he’d like to try more.
In this warmly lit house with its flowers of daffodils and tulips, tea and sweets are perfect.
“I have no such recipe,” he says apologetically. “But those books over there — there must be a cookbook, no?”
“Oh, maybe…” she trails off. “I haven’t had the time to read much since I came here… I didn’t even look through these shelves.”
“Well. That can be remedied. Once you’ve settled in and your work has taken off, I mean.”
He hates the dryness of his tone. He hardly ever spared it much thought, but then again, he hardly ever wanted to make a friend as he does now.
Before he has the chance berate himself, she says, “You have no clue how much I look forward to that. Nights spent on the window sill, with hot chocolate and a good book.”
“I can make a suggestion for your first book here, if you’d like,” he offers. “In fact… I can lend it to you.”
Her response is a beam. Trent wonders how smiling comes so naturally to her.
They do find a cookbook, and they learn how to make chocolate cookies. Their joint endeavors are interspersed by mirthful groans and frustrated laughter, but eventually, the sweet smell that rises from the oven tells of their success.
A kettle boils on the stove, and the tea leaves color the water green. Trent adds some other herbs he has gathered on the way, and the water turns blue.
Claire’s mouth resembles an ‘o’. She looks so mesmerized that Trent can’t help his amusement.
“Blue butterfly pea flowers,” he murmurs, and she nods. Somehow he knows that she's repeating the name in her head so that she can remember it.
“You can change its color to purple, even,” he says.
She turns to him with wide eyes and says, “Really?”
“Yes.” His face is soft. It occurs to him that he’s enjoying himself. “With some lemon or lime.”
“Oh!” she says. “I have lemons!”
And she rushes to the fridge and brandishes a lemon for him to see. His eyes glitter, and he grins.
They have cookies and tea, and they talk of their life up to that point. Or more accurately, she talks about her life and he encourages her to follow up on some details with questions and genuine interest.
When the time comes for him to reciprocate with anecdotes of his own, he finds his tongue tied. No recollections come to the forefront of his mind. They’re there — he knows it — but they’re inaccessible. Hidden behind a wall whose foundation is self-sacrifice and loneliness.
It’s only now that he can admit to it. He is lonely. Profoundly, achingly lonely.
He knows it because he has a basis for comparison now. He compares the lightness in his chest to the leadenness of last night and every night that came before.
In the joy of Claire’s company, Trent discovered how much he has been yearning for it his entire life.
She doesn’t press him to disclose details about himself. She only smiles, as smiling is a gift that she gives freely and in plentitude, and sips her tea.
“I also enjoy the silence,” she says quietly. And he notices that he has been silent for a while, lost in thought.
“There are many kinds of silence,” he whispers, eyes faraway. “Not all of them I enjoy.”
For long seconds, she looks at him.
Then, like him, she looks out the window.
And they’re at peace.
The misfortune of finding something that brings peace to one's heart is the pain of being without it.
Days pass without an event worthy of being told, with Trent treating his patients throughout the day, gazing restlessly through the window at dusk, and lying in bed at night as he thinks. He wonders if she will come. She never does.
How can he blame her? Her job is taxing and strenuous. It must occupy her from sunrise to sunset and perhaps even beyond.
He imagines her, waking to solitude, then stumbling over recipes in the kitchen, then toiling away with tools meant for people of much greater muscle mass and core strength, then when all is done, back to the solitude of her bed. She must fall asleep faster than she can recognize that she, too, is lonely.
And if… when… she recognizes how lonely she is… would she think of him? Would she imagine him a companion to her loneliness, much like he does her?
When no amount of thick covers can dispel the cold of her bed, would she fantasize that he is there to hold her?
Would it be him? Or someone else?
These thoughts can be spelled in the heavy letters of solemnness. He feels their weight on his shoulders and in the bags beneath his eyes.
Trent sighs and leans back against his chair, and thinks.
Who is he to her?