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“Darling, did you light the oven?”
Imogen looks up from the cutting board, shakes flour out of her hair. The dough is grainy between her fingers and warm with working; it must be a concerning brown color by now. Neither of them are very good at baking. Imogen can make enough to get by, had to in Gelvaan — sometimes she can still taste the stew that tided her over for many late, lonely nights — but baking is delicate. Imogen’s never been very good with delicate things.
Laudna is, but Laudna also hasn’t eaten in a long time. Imogen has already stopped her from putting grasshoppers in the mixing bowl and ground-up flowers in the ginger. Though maybe she shouldn’t. The cookies will taste terrible anyway, and it would make Laudna so happy, seeing the grasshoppers sitting there with their little folded-up legs. Smiling at them. Laudna would smile so widely, her face like the white soft bark of a peeling sycamore tree, exposed to the sun.
“Imogen. Did you light the oven?”
“Oh.” Imogen blinks. “Yeah — I mean, I better have. Used up three of our matches.”
Laudna drifts behind her, laying a hand on the bend of her elbow. Laudna always runs a shade cooler, but the day is mild for fall, and the golden stream of sunlight through the window heats up her skin. She is almost lukewarm. “Hmm. Strange, I think it went out. The oven’s still quite cold.”
“Maybe it’s broken,” Imogen says. It’s probably broken. They’d been lucky there was an oven here in the first place, set back in the mud and straw of the abandoned hut. It’s as much of an oven as Imogen is a baker, really. A creaking, mismatched, intemperate thing. If it burns down their hut one day, she won’t be surprised.
“It’s not broken,” Laudna says, offended. Imogen doesn’t look at her. Doesn’t have to. She knows, like she knows Laudna’s mind and each and every way her bones shift, tectonic: she is going to scoff like Imogen is being ridiculous. She is going to look to Pâté for support. Her mouth is going to twist into that stubborn, hopeful shape it makes when Imogen groans over a broken teacup or curses at a rip in her boot — nonsense! It’s perfectly fine. Just a little mending and it’ll be right as rain. Imogen thinks Laudna would say that about anything broken. That rusty kitchen sink in the Highlands. The fleabitten rug that’d forced them to burn their sheets by the road. Imogen.
Laudna scoffs. “Pâté, you don’t think the oven is broken, do you?”
Pâté yawns out from Laudna’s hair. The skitter-thump of his wings unfurling; he clambers down to sit in the curve of Laudna’s shoulder, bone against bone. “Well, I dunno! Are we gon’ ta pop me in, lemme have a peek? If it is broken, I might die. I think that earns me a right proper goodbye kiss, don’t you think?”
“Pâté!”
“What? I only asked for a kiss, I’m bein’ a gentleman!”
Imogen laughs and slides her hand off the counter, reaches blindly backward for Laudna’s. She misses terribly and knocks Laudna’s hip — “Oomph,” Laudna says, like the hiss of the pickle jar seal when Imogen Mage Hands it open — but Laudna finds her anyway. Twines their fingers together, easy.
Belatedly, Imogen remembers her hands are still covered in an ungodly mixture of butter-sugar-flour. “Sorry, sorry — this fuckin’ dough—”
“Imogen,” Laudna says. There it is again: nonsense, it’s perfectly fine. Imogen smiles helplessly. The dough is not fine, it’s disgusting, very possibly inedible. Like the oven, it is beyond saving.
Imogen squeezes her hand, wonders if Laudna will ever realize that; a part of her larger and more ravenous than she’d like hopes not.
“We’ll fix the oven later,” Laudna says finally, decisively. “You did get it to light, you said. So it’s hardly a lost cause. I’m certain we can scrounge up the parts.” She frowns. “But the dough will go stale — and you worked so hard on it, too—”
“—you mean this dough? The world’s not losin’ much, Laud,” Imogen says, rolls her eyes.
“Maybe we should — hmm. What if we rolled it into balls, like tiny little eyeballs, you know, and ate them raw? Would they really have to be baked, do you think?”
“They’d still have egg in ‘em, so...yeah?” Imogen steps back from the counter. Stretches her neck out — it cracks audibly, and she feels Laudna’s approving hum alight on her shoulderblades, brief and lively as a hummingbird. Something like the soft body of a flower blooms in her stomach, hoping it will come visit again. “Sorry.”
“Drat. Shit. Tits.”
A fond smile tucks itself into the corner of Imogen’s mouth, and she gently bumps her elbow against Laudna’s. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s fine. It’s probably good, actually, the oven not heatin’ up. I’m worried with our skills we’d set the whole place on fire.”
Laudna hums. The sound feels — well, if a sound could feel like something, Imogen supposes, it would feel like the carefulness of Laudna’s thumb brushing over her knuckles. Imogen’s knuckles are not quite rearranged like Laudna’s are, but the crests of them are still uneven, lumpy with scarring. They’re ugly; Laudna loves them. She traces them with quiet delight, like some curious mapmaker sketching the lines of mountain ranges, filling in her world. “You’re very skilled, Imogen.”
Imogen lets out a puff of laughter. “Not at this, honey.”
“We didn’t even taste it!”
“Well, that’s good, ‘cause if we did, we’d probably die.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“I don’t know.” A sly smile; Imogen feels warm, warm, warm. “Maybe we should let Pâté taste it it first. You'd like that, right, Pâté — tasting somethin' sweet?”
Laudna gasps; Imogen hears something in her unhitch, an organ or a rib bone. “Imogen Temult!” she says. Swats her shoulder; Imogen ducks, the laughter building in her chest like a swift-shudder fall of leaves. Is this what it’s like to be Laudna, she wonders, full of so much joy that it rustles around inside her, loudly, exuberantly, without apology? “You minx, you'll encourage him—”
She doesn’t finish. Imogen’s done so much twisting around that when her foot falls on that one warped floorboard, she topples over. And Laudna hasn’t let go of her hand, so Imogen pulls her down too, a tangled mess of limbs sprawling on a dusty floor. They land in a patch of sun. It looks like a runoff of light-water, where it’s faded the dark wood.
“Imogen,” Laudna says, playfully. She rests on top of Imogen, like a feather, or an acorn settled on the earth; she doesn’t bother to disentangle their digging elbows, the overlap of their legs. Her voice is a breath of laughter. Imogen can feel it in her own chest, as though she’s had Laudna’s breath in her lungs all this time. “Apologize.”
(Imogen looks into Laudna’s still, grey face: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It shouldn’t’ve been you, I’m sorry.)
Imogen looks into Laudna’s flushed, smiling face, hovering above. The sun is pooling in her dark hair, turning the edges of the strands gold; the shock of white branches up. Sometimes the awful part of Imogen, the part that wants so much it has its own teeth, likes to pretend the white is Imogen’s lightning. Threading up through Laudna. Marking her. The silver pockmarks on Laudna’s cheek, where the bullets had caught—
—no, that had been in Bassuras, not—
—in a hut on the road to Jrusar, full of knicknacks that Laudna hangs from the rafters and sticking-up nails that Imogen stubs her toes on and cups that Laudna definitely puts upside-down. When Imogen inhales she can smell Laudna (gentle, like decaying petals bowing off the stem) and whatever the hell those cookies were supposed to be (maple-ginger)—
—but they hadn’t tried those until Eshteross’. Imogen can still remember, over the tin, the way—
—Laudna grins, odd and stretched and lovely, her lips like a bloom of living blood on her face. Her face, white as the kinder moon—
—not that shade of white. Imogen would know, has spent enough time drinking in how Laudna looks in the light. She wasn’t that pale until she was—
(Come back.)
—dreaming.
Imogen is dreaming.
Laudna leans back a little, brow knitting in worry. “I — Imogen,” she says. Stumbles. She sounds so real. “I’m sorry, I thought we were being...I don’t know. You don’t really need to apologize.”
And — oh. Oh, but Imogen does. She needs to so much, suddenly, always, and it punches through the heart of her finds every part that’s hollow chokes them full, and when it’s done with the empty spaces it moves onto everything else, crowding out her bones her mind her worries her want her storm, till there’s nothing left but sorry. Sorry. Sorry, sorry — but it won’t even come out. There’s not enough space for it between her lips.
“Imogen. Dearest.” Laudna reaches down, touches her forehead. Soft as a kiss. “Breathe.”
(It’s safe now. Laudna, honey, breathe. Please, please, just breathe.)
Imogen does — breathes. But then there’s space between her lips, and more important than breathing, more important than anything, she forces her mouth open. Gasps: “I’m sorry. Laudna, I’m so, so sorry.”
Laudna’s hand stills on her forehead. Her eyes — Imogen's rendition of her eyes, the ones she's dreamed — soften, wide and black and gentle. Impossibly gentle. The sun — Imogen’s sun — gleams through her hair.
Do they look like they did in Imahara Joe’s that night, Imogen wonders, reversed: Laudna kneeling, breathing, pressing a benediction onto Imogen’s cold form? She hopes they do. It would be right.
The oven rumbles, low as a murmur, or her weary heartbeat.
“I’m sorry,” Imogen whispers again, closing her eyes.
What does she want to hear? Is it fair of her to ask — here, in this dream, where she controls everything? No, of course it isn’t fair — it’s horrible. It’s what Delilah would do, crafting a mockery of Laudna just to puppet words out of her mouth. Imogen could do that, twist the dream around and make Laudna say — whatever. It’s your fault I died. I’m so angry at you. I love you very deeply. Whatever Imogen wants.
But mockery? a little voice murmurs in her head. Images bloom behind her eyelids: Laudna’s jutting edges, her odd angles and crooks, her hair, her cheeks, her face, all etched carefully into the warmth of Imogen’s dream. The spring-stutter of Laudna’s movements. The feeling of her skin in the sun. The sound of her voice. Mockery? Or memory?
After all, she had learned what her mother looked like from her father’s memory. Had plucked it greedily from his mind like the best hidden fruit, or a four-leaf clover, and the image had been both vivid and rubbed smooth: her mother standing in a field, smiling sun-dimpled, cornsilk in her hair and a hand on the swell of her belly. Imogen had thought she looked beautiful. Her father had remembered her beautiful.
Imogen had thought, then: of course he had. Wasn’t memory was a kind of love? Wasn’t memory the only place that could hold so much of it?
“Imogen,” Laudna says. The sound of her name in Laudna’s mouth, from memory.
Laudna takes Imogen’s hand again, winds her other into Imogen’s hair, so it’s buried there. “Imogen, you don't have to be sorry. But if it’s what you need — I forgive you.”
Is that what Laudna would say? Is she twisting her into something else; is she remembering right?
Imogen has spent the best two years of her life — sometimes it feels like the only years of her life, and most of the time the only years that matter — memorizing Laudna. And she knows Laudna’s mind, knows each and every way Laudna’s bones shift, but this? Imogen doesn’t know. That’s the answer: she doesn’t know.
She sighs, letting air fill her chest, expanding her lungs till they ache. One, two — the oven sputters — three, four. Then she exhales, and a breath heavier than a breath flows out, like the stream of sunlight that has receded from the floor.
But it’s still warm. The grain of the wood is scraping her arms; Laudna’s hair is brushing her shoulders like strands of black thread, tethering. It’s still warm. Laudna still feels real. Imogen thinks Laudna will always feel real to her, even if she has just made her up in her head.
Keeping her eyes closed, Imogen licks her lips. “I need—” she says roughly, her voice fracturing like spider-cracks in something delicate. She pieces it back together, extends it to Laudna anyway: “Could you — hold me? Just for a little while?”
“Of course, darling,” Laudna says. Yes, Imogen knows, that’s what she would say.
Laudna lets go of her hand, and Imogen only has a moment to mourn the loss before Laudna’s curling her whole self around Imogen, like a tender spider, or a loving boa constrictor. She dislocates one arm trying to get it between Imogen’s back and the floor before Imogen laughs, wet and ugly, and sits up a little. She feels Laudna smile against her shoulder. Her other hand is still wound in Imogen’s hair.
Imogen reaches up along the misshapen bumps of Laudna’s spine and tangles her own hand in Laudna’s hair, careful not to pull anything out. Laudna doesn't seem to mind the wasted butter slicked there, the ruined flour printed on her vertebrae. Instead she hums, rustling and happy. Imogen thinks she could be happy like this, too, if it lasted.
They hold each other. It lasts, and lasts, and lasts.
And then, after a moment, or hours, or forever, the room grows dark. Moonlight slants in red and angry. Imogen tenses, presses her fingers into Laudna’s back as though she could wrap her hands around her spinal cord and disappear into Laudna’s quiet, hiding body. Laudna breathes out against her neck. Slow.
“Imogen,” she says. There is something pleading, urgent in her voice — different. At least, that's what Imogen imagines it to be. If she lets herself, she’ll imagine Laudna’s next words, too: I think we should get you to bed. Or, I’ll bring you a glass of water. Or even (selfishly, impossibly): I promise this is real, darling. I’m here with you. When you wake up, you can ask me — will you please just ask me?
Laudna whispers, “Imogen, I—”
—and the oven lights, in a roar of glass and thunder. When Imogen looks over, it is choked with heat, red as Ruidus, red as her moonlit heart. Burning.