Work Text:
Rose Stratford knows loneliness well. After the lives she and her brother have lived, how could she not? It’s been the two of them against the world for years, pitted against it not by any choice of their own but by a mould they’ve never fit, a person-shaped box into which they’ve never fully been able to contain themselves, and there’s a loneliness that comes along with that. She knows it well by now --- can describe in detail how the cold ache of isolation can seep through skin, penetrate bone, nest in marrow --- and she’d greet the sensation like an old friend if she actually had any of those. (What does it say about her that she’s defined as much by an absence as she is by anything else?)
At least she’s had Samuel the whole time. They’ve always been together, through thick and thin and all the unexpected in-betweens; they became each other's shadows --- family and companions and friends, because these are roles that no one else cares to fill --- constants in an inconstant world. They know each other, listen to each other talk when their silence is too loud and words alone will calm it, until it was… not easy, per se, but easier to pretend that the loneliness wasn’t real at all. Samuel had verbalised it, once. He was fresh off a conversation with Margaret then, with that far-off look in his eye that he always gets when he’s pursuing the echo of a thought as it races away from him. I’m glad we had each other, Rose. Through it all. We’ll never truly be alone. Not everyone’s that lucky.
Things have… changed, now.
That’s been happening a lot lately, though, enough that the idea of the world’s foundations being rocked once more comes with no flare of surprise: that’s just how things work these days. The laws of the universe are no longer immutable and undeniable because they’ve been rendered mere suggestions through their own self-contradiction. Time is not a one-way street because it has flowed past itself instead, a looping Möbius strip composed of ticking clocks and bright blue manipulations. And, with a past written in all the varied fonts of New York and the township and their adventures at sea, her most unshakable truth has been contradicted all the same, for Samuel is no longer at her side. She shouldn’t be surprised. (So why does it hurt so keenly?)
She stands, at present, on a cliff. Or, at least, what feels like a cliff, even if she’s not entirely sure it actually is one; with an island coastline composed so entirely of crags and rock faces, the precise definition of each individual land formation becomes harder to delineate. John might know. John probably would know. (John isn’t there to know.) The waves rush beneath her, crashing against the island’s rocky approach in sprays of salted foam and sluicing water, and it’s calming despite how frequently the sound of water has borne bad things in its wake in recent days. Perhaps the sound bears too many good memories as well --- standing with Samuel at a ships’ bow, or stargazing with John, or any of the countless other quiet, stolen moments she’s stored away for herself --- to allow the allure of the ocean to be tainted by something so trivial as the danger it possesses. (Few would be so foolish as to regard tempest-tossed tides and think them gentle, after all.)
Whatever the cause, she grips the memories tighter, pulls them towards herself until she might as well be hunched around something tangible. They’re precious and fluttering little things, standing all too real a chance of being swept entirely away, and so she clasps her hands even tighter, presses them and their imagined cargo against her chest until the warmth can spread. It helps to stave off that omnipresent, worsening chill --- sourced not from this desolate cliff and the sea-sent breeze tangling about her ankles but from the fact that she greets both alone, with no family of blood or spirit at her side --- even as it doesn’t work entirely.
How long she has taken Samuel’s presence for granted! It honestly hadn’t occurred to her that they might one day be parted, that she might find herself navigating uncharted territory without the familiar warmth of Samuel being at her side as she is now. They’ve spent so long with only each other that the boundaries between them have blurred --- streaks of oil paint with ill-defined borders, puzzle pieces so long mated that the edges no longer separate easily --- and his absence now feels like a part of herself is missing too. It feels almost too much --- another presence defined solely by the absence underlying it --- and she feels as though she might shake apart under the destabilisation of their self-forged orbits.
Instead, she stands on a cliff and waits for the waves to carry her family back to her.
She’s never been good at waiting. Even at the paper stand, with days spent in waiting for customers around the nearest street corner and adventure around the furthest cloud, her own impatience had burned beneath her skin. She buried it in her reading, sure --- poring over the newspapers, the journals, the publications, until her fingers stung with paper cuts and her eyes blurred with exhaustion in slow-dying candlelight --- and in the journal entries: valves to relieve the pressure. It had still never been enough, and the agitation at her own boredom had always built anew. She always thought it intolerable, felt that she could handle only a few more days (or minutes or seconds) before she’d just combust; now, standing on the rocks, she knows how much worse mere waiting can be.
Time is a fickle thing, here. She can feel it passing, at times, or at least knows that it must be, and yet she invests it in waiting instead of living and so perhaps it doesn’t really pass at all. Perhaps she merely survives, liminal for her abridged wholeness as time progresses around her and past her but never through her. Perhaps there are only the waves, bashing themselves against the rocks with unfaltering resilience, and the rocks, stoically receiving the torrent’s fervour, and her, frozen at the top of a lonesome cliff waiting, waiting, waiting…
She hopes that time is as stagnant as it feels, for if it isn’t --- if time indeed passes despite her refusal to acknowledge its flow --- then what does that mean for her? She’s been a twin for her entire life, implicitly building herself around that core fact. Even her jokes about being Samuel’s elder have been nothing more than absurd attempts to convince him to listen to her; she’s always held too tightly onto the fact that they’ve been there for each other from before the beginning for the joke to ever ring quite true. She’s never wanted it to ring true in the first place. They’ve always been a united front, a set not to be separated for long, and that was never supposed to change. Her joke was never supposed to be anything other than an absurd reason for Samuel to listen to her; it was never supposed to come true. Indeed, she’d give anything for it to remain absurd, for this to have been nothing but a bad dream or a hoax as cruel as the one they themselves perpetuated, because if it’s not…
What then?
How can she go about living in a world where she’s experienced two weeks more than her brother ever will? How would she even approach an existence of being two weeks her brother’s elder? Fourteen days can change a lot, she knows this --- thinks about it every time she remembers John’s furious expression as he stormed into the Sun and half-complimented-half-raged-against their article --- but surely this is too far? Surely not even their journey and its slow-but-sure dismantling of the laws of science would dare transgress this entirely against scientific inevitabilities. Surely the Stratford twins are macroscopic enough to qualify as a scientific fact: inevitable and unchangeable.
Surely.
There is no surety here. Nothing to be taken for granted. No certainty to be had. Instead, on a cliff above a raging, tumultuous sea, a Stratford waits.