Work Text:
The bus grinds to a halt.
The brakes are still squealing, a dry dustcloud from the sudden stop on gravel still hovering around the wheels, when the twins disembark. The girl waves cheerfully to the driver, calling the tail-end of some dubious romantic advice over her shoulder as she jumps down from the last step. The boy looks warily around as he steps off the bus after her, as though he expects the trees to close in on them.
The bus doors shut with a hydraulic hiss behind them, and the engine rattles back into gear as the bus turns and pulls away.
(It had been hours, in the heat of the closed bus, the air whipping through the open windows thick with road dust and barely cooler than the swelter inside. They’d watched other passengers come and go on the long drive up the coast, until finally, they’d been the only ones left.)
The gravel road peters out a few yards from where the twins stand, looking around at the trees as though they’ve never seen pine forest before. The road simply ceases to be a road, widening out into a pebbly, scrubby delta before being swallowed by dry, tawny grass and creeping greenery. Trees surround them on all sides, dark branches knitted close together to muffle the rumble and rattle of the retreating bus and dull the heat of the early-June sunlight.
“It has been a long time,” the girl says, finally, uncertainly. Her hand reaches out, her eyes never turning from the shadows under the trees. The boy’s hand finds hers, clasping it tight.
“Not this long,” he says, a note of certainty in his voice, and starts forward towards the treeline. The girl follows, not letting go of his hand. “Maybe we’re just remembering wrong. It’ll be right on the other side of these trees.”
(Pull back, for a moment, from the girl in her rainbow of apparel, the boy in his hiking boots and flannel, holding hands as though much younger than they are, as they venture into the woods. Pull back and see the forest, not as branches, not as trees, but as a dark spill around the base of a cliff, the world’s bones rising through its skin. See the road as a fine thread of dusty brown woven through deep jade.
See the way the woods dwarf the twins as they disappear beneath the trees.)
There is nothing on the other side of the trees but more trees. There are no tracks, no trails, no sign that anything human has ever passed this way. The boy’s eyes dart suspiciously from shadow to shadow, the girl’s gaze turning ever skywards.
They clamber over logs, crash through brush, follow trails half-remembered, half-imagined. Sunlight filters through the thick canopy in shreds and patches, fawn-dapples the mossy carpet underfoot with gold. Needles rustle as small things dart overhead, squirrel-chatter mingling with raucous magpie laughter and woodpecker drums.
The boy does not draw his notebook from his backpack. The girl leaves her grappling hook in her purse. Somehow they both know that this is neither a mystery nor an adventure.
Neither is it a beginning.
The light has turned thicker, ruddier, by the time the twins step out of the woods. They are both red with exertion, breathing hard, hearts pounding with more than just the long trek. Their legs are battered and scraped from battling through the underbrush, but nevertheless, their eyes are raised in expectation as they step out, into the valley, into the sun.
They both stop.
(Pull back.
Pull back, out over the valley of memory. Pull back over the intervening years, until the streets shimmer in the sinking sun. Pull back until the water tower hovers high above the rooftops, until the statue that was once melted to nothing stands restored to its former glory, straight and tall in the centre of the town square, proudly surveying the town that rises around it. Pull back over the sea of familiar faces, smiles of delight and recognition.
Pull back over the billboard welcoming the twins back.)
The cliffs are dark against the slowly-sinking sun, tall and solid and whole, sturdy twin guardians of the valley before them.
The valley is empty of everything but sunlight and trees and long grass rippling gently in the slight breeze.
The boy reaches out first this time, the girl’s hand finding his. She meets his eyes, just for a moment, before they both turn back to face the valley and its ghosts.
“It was real,” the boy says, at last, and it’s only the way his voice cracks on the last word that betrays him. “Right?”
The girl squeezes his hand.
They stand, together, hand in hand like a couple of children, as they look out over the valley, shining in the summer sun.