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Coriolanus wakes not with a headache pulsing at his temples, but a soft breeze at his cheeks. It's the first sign that something is wrong - the gentle silence, the chattering of birds, the whistling of grass against the wind.
He had collapsed into bed the night before, run ragged from test runs with Gaul's latest creations. Mutts the size of cars and teeth the size of kitchen knives, things out of his nightmares that he'd been tasked to record in every step of their evolution.
There is a part of him that resents himself for it. An even greater part that stomps those embers out with a thick boot before they can light into a flame, before they can envelop him whole and ruin him from the inside out.
Coriolanus had forgotten what day it was. The seventeenth of August, come the next morning. Come now, in this bed that does not smell like home and instead smells like a memory lost to time.
He opens his eyes slowly, wishing that the sunlight that greets him through cracked window panes is part of a dream. He drags his fingers through the silken sheets and -
Coriolanus' nail catches on a loose thread.
When he glances down, they are long and red and belong to a hand that is not his. A hand that is decorated in gold rings, attached to a wrist that shines with bangles.
Pancakes and blueberries, and the taste of stale alcohol on her tongue. A hue to the sunlight through her eyelids that seems anything but natural, and a ringing in her ears that sees her furrowing her brows before she even opens her eyes.
There is a singing coming from somewhere, an awful crooning that sounds reminiscent of a sick jackal she had taken care of the summer past last. Every part of her body aches, from the base of her neck down to her calves, but she is so incredibly comfortable wrapped in blankets that feel like heaven. That smell like a dream.
She doesn't want to wake up, not yet.
Lucy Gray rolls over, presses her face to softness, and falls back asleep.
Coriolanus knows it's Lucy Gray. It's always been her, really.
It's a small balm to his soul that he wakes alone in her little cabin, with not a soul in sight. No traces of anyone but her, either - only dresses in her closet, only a single mug in the cabinet.
He's not sure what he would have done, had he woken to someone beside him. To someone beside her.
A part of him that she took with him - scared, angry, eighteen - wants nothing more than to smash her dishes to pieces, to cut her wrists with the shattered pieces as to say There. We're equals.
But Coriolanus is not eighteen, and hasn't been in a while. He may not have grown out of aching for her - he still sees her in his dreams, in his reflection - but he has grown out yelling, out of breaking.
Saints, save him. She's turned him gentle.
Coriolanus dreams of her, curls loose around her shoulders. She turns, lips parting around a laugh that he would know even if he was blind and deaf. Lucy Gray is gentle, soft hands uncalloused in a way they only ever are in memory, nails painted a pretty red that never chips or wears. Takes his hand in hers and tugs him along towards - something, something better than his life, something only a dream can give him now.
He finds himself cracking an egg, scrambling it, and cooking it on her little white gas stove. Hunger claws at his soulmates stomach, and it a sensation that sends Coriolanus reeling back to the past. Back to bloody snow and lima beans, to maid's socks and saws in the night. It's a feeling he's done well to escape from recently, but his Soulmate is afforded no such luxury.
Coriolanus forgoes a companion drink to his little plate of eggs entirely and passes right by the garden table in the foyer, instead perching himself on the steps of the cabin.
He remembers the warm summer rain like it was yesterday, and a quick glance at the sky reveals that he won't be getting a repeat of that day just yet.
Lucy Gray's hand is so small , birdlike even, and it takes a moment to adjust to her size as his grip. His fork falters and hits the ceramic of the dish; it echoes in the forest, loud as a gunshot in the silence. The jays hush, noticeable now that they've stopped chirping.
Coriolanus sits in the quiet of the morning as he eats, mind alight with a thousand things he wants to say to her, a thousand more he wants to scream - and only one thing he wants to do, really.
It's two, actually - but seeing her again beyond his reflection today is anything but possible. Instead, he settles for composing the letter he's going to leave her, drifting off in thought as he watches the sun rise over the lake.
His lips taste like the back of his mouth, when Lucy Gray wakes again. Tigris is humming something loudly in the kitchen, stereo cranked up to its highest - no doubt to drown out what is quickly going to devolve into a tumble in the sheets.
She can almost convince herself that it's a dream - she's certainly no stranger to dreams that begin like this, that end like this - but Lucy Gray knows better. The edges around her consciousness are too sharp, the hands on her hips too warm.
"Wait," She gasps, pushing away his shoulders, " Wait. "
Lucy Gray opens her eyes, and finds herself staring back at her.
Her stomach sinks, and she thinks she'd rather like to wake up now.
Lucy Gray,
Happy Birthday.
Cornflowers from down by the lake, katniss stems, and bluebelles that shouldn't be in season yet.
He ties them together with a yellow ribbon he finds at the bottom of her dresser drawer, looping a bow and resting it on the windowsill - the first place he had seen when he had woke up, the first place Lucy Gray will see when she opens her pretty eyes the next morning.
Coriolanus ties off the end of the braid he's woven in her hair with a similarly colored ribbon, and prays to every deity he knows that she wont figure out a way to strike him down all the way from Twelve when she returns.
Making out with herself tastes better the second time she does it. And the third, and then the fourth.
Lucy Gray stops counting after that. She has more important things to focus on - like the strange sensation of being on the receiving end of things she never thought she would be.