Work Text:
She has not always been a child.
She knows that and still that same certainty does not stick.
Every day, they tell her. She is blessed. She is divine. She is holy. She is unholy. They are never quite able to agree on that part. She is the Living Flame made Flesh, she is living proof of the End that is to come, she is the answer and she is the scorched throat that shaped the question, she is flesh in flame so long as it never learns to protect itself as a human hand would, to withdraw, to heal. She is not a child. Or she is, but not forever. No, not for very long at all.
Agnes Montague kneels in the dirt.
There is a tree, and she can neither shake nor shape the suspicion that it is hers, somehow. No, not somehow. Some when. Someday.
If she were a child, she might be afraid of it.
Every night I close my eyes
Another day away
You know I love you, I can't explain
Crying over the candle flame
She wonders what fear tastes like. If it is peppery as the singed parchment of prayer sheets. If it is the Blitz she was born into, that is still glassy orange and stained yellow in her memory, trussed up in a paper package bundle of boiled sweets. If it is like the bleating of the men and women and children Genie brings her. The sound is often sweet enough on the air that she opens her mouth. It is like expecting a sugar lump and getting a moth ball instead. Except flames singe moth wings. She has watched enough of them land on her skin to know that.
She wishes they would not. She has always had a soft spot for things that like the light, that live for it. And die. Her body does not seem to know that about her.
There is a great deal her body does not know: she is twelve; she is afraid of the dark, but only on nights that start off purple; she dances, sometimes, because she feels something beating beneath her skin and she does not know how else to let it out; she is a child, sometimes. She would like to be.
Most of all, moths.
She likes them. She wishes they did not like her.
Then again. Something tells Agnes Montague – little messiah, Arthur calls her; little madam, Genie says when he brings her something – something tells Agnes Montague that loving her will mean a great deal of singed skin. In this lifetime, at least.
I feel God here and there
People tell me it's everywhere
You know I know you can't explain
Crying over the candle flame
Agnes Montague has not always been a child.
She is learning curiosity all the same. Or perhaps curiosity is learning her instead. Taking a careful catalogue of the form in which it finds itself.
Curiosity is whispering questions in her ear. Its voice is honey and lemon: one cloys in her throat, threatening to crystallise and stop her from ever speaking again; the other is bitter and tears at the cut she has called a mouth before but cannot any longer. Curiosity is opening her up. If she were a child, she might think this was growing up. But she is not a child, she cannot be. This must be a holy test. Or an unholy pilgrimage. It depends upon what she is. She wishes her devotees had decided upon what she is. It is the uncertainty that hurts her most of all. It is the skelf in her skin that lets curiosity in. It is nestled in her chest, it is the beat beneath her bones, and it is telling her that though she may not always have been a child, she is one now, and that tree is not too tall for climbing, and perhaps it would not kill her, even if she falls from the tallest branch.
It might kill her, she thinks.
She tries to remember an old adage about curiosity and cats and killing.
How 'bout that moon looking back
Saying, "Glad you're here"
When we're together only one thing moves
Everything else stays the same
Others had been curious, before she was.
Genie has not always been her protector, after all. Arthur had tried first. She hadn’t cared for Arthur’s way of caring for her. So there had been foster homes, then blackened remnants of homes, then orphanages. They hadn’t lasted.
She had liked them.
She wonders if that was why they hadn’t lasted.
But for a while, they had been there. The orphanages. Their doddering stairways and their open-throated door frames. Before she had been brought here, to this place of cool silk and hollow words and clean bones. There was a cold here and it had its hooks in her. This place was nothing like the orphanages she had known, if only for a few months. There had been other children there, not these husks. They had been curious. Their eyes were always wide, their hands were always open. She had learned curiosity from those fingertips; she had shut more than her share of those eyes.
Every eye, in fact.
Except…
Agnes screws up her face, summoning a memory. She pretends to divine it from the dirt. It is clear and cool, not as water, but flame.
I see you pray, I want to too
I one, two, one, two, four
Four, two, five, six bedrooms
So everyone can close a door
She gasps with the effort. This place dulls everything, makes it echo, but she is determined now. She is flesh in fire, she has a sugarcube between her teeth, she can still imagine what it might feel like for a moth’s wings to touch her skin.
It comes, like curiosity, when called.
A memory.
Not a memory.
A girl.
An eye.
A pair of eyes. Grey. Young as her eyes are, and as old as she is. They blink, once. Even in Agnes’ mind, they are already impatient.
There is a strange keenness in them, one that Agnes thinks would appear to best advantage behind glasses. Something to protect the world, rather than their wearer. Agnes would like that, she thinks. It makes her feel like a moth, alighting on the gloved hand of a girl who has never been touched.
“Who are you?”
The eyes are asking her something.
Agnes wants to answer. Answer. The word turns over and over in her mind, unbidden. It tumbles through her, tearing itself open and in two and inside out until it does not sound like answer anymore, not quite.
Agnes opens her mouth and her palm.
She has a fistful of dirt.
She is not holding any answers.
The eyes are still open, still waiting. She wants to tell them that she does not know. She wants to tell them that the tree is too tall to climb because this body is still a child even if she is not. She wants to ask why moths follow fires when they must know what it will do to them and she once read that moth are looking for the moon anyway so why don’t they fly to it when it’s right there and she cannot hold them for more than a second before they are set alight and she does not know if she is a child but she cries like one sometimes because their wings are most beautiful when they burn and she cannot be much of a moon, anyway. She wants to know why Genie’s palm is never open and her hands are caked in mud. She wants to know why those eyes look so familiar when she has only seen them once. She wants.
The eyes do not answer.