Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ruth is still in the habit of smelling the flowers. 

It's been seven years and she knows, even before she takes the inhale breath, that they won't smell the same. That although the rose is - undoubtedly - a rose, it does not bear the heavy musk of morning dew, the woody scent of cold nights breaking into the still warm days of early autumn. 

The arrangements are fresh this morning, and she busies herself neatening them just so, and allocating them to tables, alcoves, shelves and social spaces. It is a job beneath her, really, but one she takes on gladly if only to feel the soft leather of the leaves and petals under her fingertips. 

Ruth is still in the habit of smelling the flowers. 

There could be an argument for companion planting, she has spent seven years telling herself. She knows it's not true. Knows that no chives or mint or alliums grow in the same car as the roses. Knows their space is barren save for soil poked with wires to monitor the pH balance, knows the only thing they taste is purified water and mineral solution. Ruth pretends not to smell the starvation. 

She doesn't consider herself much of a florist, though the yellowed book secreted in her room holds memories in it's dog-eared pages. After her grandfather died she kept on the allotment for as long as she could,though it was overgrown with brambles and nettles and errant potatoes before she could blink. But she'd managed to save the roses. Potted them up and set them either side of the bed and breakfast entrance like a welcoming committee. Stopped to breathe their perfume every morning on her way to buy fresh eggs and bread. 

Ruth is still in the habit of smelling the flowers. 

Chapter Text

At first they used to laugh about it. Global warming, they'd say, we'd love a bit of that. 

And when the cost of living started to bite the men down at the pub would laugh and toast the notion of staycation. 

And they were right, at first. Business was booming and the dusty old house, so echoing and empty after they had died, was clean and full of so much life and laughter. And for a while, Ruth was happy. Happier than she had ever expected to be, alone in a town where she knew everyone and no-one. 

Families came and went, and some came again. One year became five, ten, even, and tiny toddlers were suddenly teenagers, poking the dirt with sticks. Ruth never liked to admit to playing favourites.

At first it was the drought. The bookings slowed. The heatwave. Then came the winds. The days and days of gale forces, weather warnings. The bridge shut almost as often as it was open. Ruth cried when she realised even her most faithful family had cancelled. Not that she could blame them - the garden where once they'd kicked footballs was full of leaves and broken branches, and the footpath overgrown. The council didn't bother cutting it back anymore. 

Then the rain came. Great lashings of it, battering on the peeling window frames all day and night. Ruth couldn't sleep. They'd had weather like this before. Hardy people, up there in the Lakes, for sure. But as the endless downpour stretched on, the bridge shut indefinitely, she knew it was the end. The old house had continued to age, repair bills had grown and now the bank wanted money Ruth knew she did not have, but that she would have to find nonetheless, or leave. 

She sat up in her three quarter bed and pulled back the curtains to watch the rivulets of water make their way down the panes, illuminated by the streetlamp. A tear tracked its way down her face. An echo of the storm outside. 

A knock on the door jolted Ruth out of her dark thoughts. 

Chapter Text

Sometimes, Ruth decides it's time for a change. A new nail colour, eyeshadow, hair accessory. At those times, she might find herself scrabbling around at the back of a drawer, pulling out miscellaneous personal care items, cursing the one part of her life she can't seem to keep picture perfect organised. 

Sometimes, her hand brushes against it. Or the light shines down at just the right angle to make it glint, the reflection from the glass making patterns on the wall beside her. 

Sometimes, she wishes she could just chuck it out of a cold lock. Memories of another world. 

She can't remember the last time she plugged it in. It must have been years now, but still her thumb caresses over the touchscreen as if the family photographs were still there in blue light. Sometimes it's a comfort to know that somehow, despite it all, they still exist. 

Today is not one of those times. 

Mobile networks had been sketchy for a while before departure. Infrastructure that couldn't cope after years of poor investment and increasing costs would drop whole swathes of people in and out of service. And then the cold came, and the people behind the infrastructure stopped going to work, and the cables and wires and lines were corroded by salt, or weighed down by snow, or cut by angry mobs. 

There had been a signal blocker at the station itself. Some vague attempt at stopping the riff raff from realising what was there and the all important when. 

But even the rich have regrets. Survivors' guilt. Ruth still associates champagne with a redial tone. 

Melanie had tried to explain, once, how the Internet might survive. Caches of information, servers entombed in caves, back ups of back ups. And it's not that Ruth couldn't understand it, but she didn't want to. What good was a world wide web when the entire world was a train?

Today the world feels smaller than ever. Stifling, suffocating. 

Ruth's thumb catches on the damaged corner of the screen, tiny cracks extending inwards, as she wraps her hand and fishes it out from the detritus of the drawer.