Work Text:
In the months following the near-death of Ceres Fauna, Elizabeth was not like herself. Her recovery, up until then, had seemed rapid and steady, under Nerissa’s gentle hand. But something in the shot that drove through the officer’s clavicle, with a piercing finality, the faint wisp of smoke trailing from the muzzle like an afterthought— it brought ash welling up in her throat from where it had settled in her lungs, almost forgotten but not quite, heavy and choking.
In that struggle for the revolver she had felt the blood-heat of another body against her skin, pulsing, wildly and unstoppably alive, and she had stared into the wine of Nerissa’s eyes and felt her mouth burn as though she could taste them. In that fraction of a second where they held each other in clashing gazes, two bodies with beating hearts suspended on either side of that revolver, a cold death sentence in the form of metal and lead and gunpowder waiting to erupt, Elizabeth felt with too much clarity the pumping in her chest throbbing through her body, arteries near bursting with the pressure.
Then, in no time at all, the fighting spilled the both of them into each other, Nerissa’s arms around her like the sinner grips the robes of the holy to beg for salvation. The half-dead body of Ceres Fauna lying forgotten a little ways away, the murderer with raven hair and marred skin cried into the shoulder of her destruction, her savior who had never saved anyone at all, but rather stole warmth from other bodies until she could call it their own.
The more tears that fell and sizzled against the floor, evaporating in their passion and fear and hate all in one ugly mess of wildfire, the heavier the ash that settled in Elizabeth’s chest, suffocating.
Ceres Fauna groaned from where she lay bleeding on the floor, clawing feebly at nothing but some desperate vision of life conjured by the death-addled mind, and Elizabeth saw herself in that body, clinging to light like the moth to the sparking wick as the last wax of the candle melts away—
The sirens came soon enough, and they could not stay any longer. But the slow white-grey-blue of oncoming death creeping onto the edges of the dying officer’s fingers did not escape the corner of Elizabeth’s eye as they stumbled away from the scene, and it took all her willpower to keep from being sick all over the lacquered tile floor.
In the following days, Elizabeth wouldn’t speak. Nerissa wouldn’t force her. They talked through letters, ink on paper that despite its silence rested heavier on their chests than spoken words ever would. Black on white like a reminder that nothing good was forever.
The quiet made them poets, all the words printed neatly into lines of messy things that would never see the world outside their minds otherwise.
Folded neatly on the desk of Nerissa’s study:
Have you ever loved someone so much you felt sick, my raven? Could you begin to understand— the war in my head when I see the red in your eyes.
Imagine me a rose, full with the ripeness of autumn.
Can you?
The months between us— mine spent wilting beneath white sheets and sterile gloves, yours in calculated stillness, waiting.
I ask myself what you were waiting for. For me, but which part— did you want the petals which have blackened and fallen away, did you want the thorns which have been chipped and shriveled by dryness and cold, did you perhaps want the sweet nectar of the center that has since gone, stolen by hungrier things?
Imagine me a rose, now, pink and young and budding.
Can you?
Carefully tucked away in Elizabeth’s coat pocket:
Yes.
A thousand times, and more, yes.
Stuck to the refrigerator, hanging over dinner:
my raven / my rose
would you still love me if i came back wrong / when did we ever live right
Elizabeth had once wanted to die. She recalled to herself, her hand trembling over the next page of a journal full of scribbled nothings, the winter night a lifetime ago that was no time at all, so close to the freezing point of blood that she had fumbled with her numb fingers to spark a lighter— the kind that was rusted over and needed a few clicks to ignite. Holding the flame to her chest like a secret she had staggered out of bed with the blankets wrapped around her, heavy on her shoulders as she settled into the bathtub with a sigh and a prayer to a god she didn’t believe in. She had dropped the lighter into the folds of cotton and wool and watched the heat crackle up in red and orange tongues around her. The small explosions of moisture and thread into vapor and ash-smoke, the sun eating her alive. She recalled hearing nothing from outside until Nerissa had screamed, shrill and fearful, turning on the cold water with quick hands and dragging her by the wrist out of the mess of soot and cloth, fresh-burned skin still raw with sensation.
In the page of that leather-bound journal, with shaking penmanship:
Fire is the language of the forest.
To ravage the soil of dried roots and dying things, cyclical rebirth from summer to summer. To keep the land alive, despite what it kills as it burns.
And, after a skipped line, words scribbled over and blotted out:
How many parts of myself do I need to kill before I can feel alive again?
On a half-torn paper with marks of crumpling, abandoned to the dustbin:
Isn’t it ironic how we look to destruction for salvation? How only the devil sings the hero’s praises when she is about to fall? If you burn yourself to melt the frost, my rose, who do you leave to swallow the ashes?
To begin is to be given a name. The Scarlet Governor was a beginning and an end with an eternity in between, suspended over a death so far away it didn’t matter. Like cherry blossoms in spring, what did they care that winter would see their petals stripped from their branches, if in the moment they could be beautiful?
In the shower, standing still beneath hot water, Elizabeth waited for the vapour to fog up the reflections on the smooth, shining tiles. Like tender green sprouts in the first storms of the season she bowed beneath the beating of rain against her body, water sliding from her skin in trails pulled down by gravity. Nerissa standing beside her, the two of them vulnerable to only each other, Elizabeth held her lover like roots grip fresh-plowed soil, desperate to be grounded, silently willing the earth to never let go. And as Nerissa worked through the knots and tangles in her rose’s unkempt hair, Elizabeth shook into her shoulder until she couldn’t tell if the wetness on her face was the water or the tears.
At least with blood, the difference was clear.
Written by shaking fingers on the collected mist on the mirror, the clarity of reflection shining through the words, already melting away:
how can i be your rose without the red / a flower’s first bud is green
Turning her eyes away from the revolver from a lifetime ago on the nightstand, Elizabeth climbed beneath the blankets and tried to fall asleep.
In an envelope left carefully blank, save a small red wax seal to hold it shut, lying ignored on the bedside table of a certain Ceres Fauna:
Officer Ceres,
I am writing not out of concern for your health nor out of spite for your weakness, but out of a quiet desire to settle a conflict in myself that I have harboured for quite some time.
I am writing to you as the woman you killed, nothing and no one more. In this paper I enfold the contents of a dead woman’s life, and trust to you its deepest parts.
I read, once, that freedom is nothing but the distance between hunter and prey. Then that freedom can only mean insanity; the hunter will always also be hunted, and only through blindness can you find the courage to stop running. Even the lion of the savanna will live his life surrounded by dying things, and know that his turn will come, brought by some unseeable force that is unstoppable all the same.
When you kill, do you find joy, Officer Ceres? This I have often wondered.
Sometimes I feel there is a bullet, still, buried inside of my head. It would not be so uncommon— the cold of another war settling in beside my corpse. Sometimes it feels as though all my life it was the bullet which made me, that my bone and muscle and skin grew around it knowing it would be my end. I lift my hand to my temple and some days I feel the lead and the metal there, resting.
As I close this envelope I close the dead woman’s coffin. As I seal it I pound in the last nail. I hope you hold her body in this paper and know that you were the one to turn it cold.
Farewell,
The Scarlet Governor
Elizabeth spoke, for the first time in days, over dinner with a voice croaky from disuse. “Can you pass the salt?”
Nerissa, pausing, tried to fish some deeper meaning out of it. With everything she knew about Elizabeth she looked back and forth between her lover and the salt, trying to connect the dots on what this could possibly , possibly mean; in the end she passed it over, quiet, and went back to eating.
And they said nothing more, because there was nothing else to say.
Etched into the revolver that rested in their bedside drawer, collecting dust with chipping paint, red over blue:
E.R. Bloodflame / N. Ravencroft
And into the oak of the wood carving they had done together, of a messy bird with lopsided wings and large eyes:
the raven
Step by step, slowly, they moved from writing to spoken words. There was something between them too heavy to talk about yet, so they left it there, hanging in the air as they made smaller conversations.
On the fridge, hung up over everything else, a shopping list scrawled out in rushed, overlapping handwriting, as though added to over time:
carrots
eggs
non-stick pan
vegetable oil
potatoes
canned beans
tomatoes
fruit (strawberries?)
Amidst the busy murmuring of the farmers market, the brims of hastily bought hats pulled low over their eyes, Nerissa and Elizabeth swept their way through the crowds with reused plastic bags in their hands stuffed with new produce for the season. They murmured to each other between stalls, pointing, what about those mushrooms, or that melon , smiling and gently nudging each other forward to take a closer look. They put on ridiculous voices and accents when they exchange their bills for fresh fruit, a strictly unnecessary part of their goal to stay unrecognized, but it made them laugh all the same. The sun beamed down through the clearing spring rainclouds, the heavy smell of petrichor still in the air after the night’s showers, and the two of them walked home with full bags and fuller hearts.
“I’ve never had cherries before,” Nerissa admitted, examining their load of groceries on the kitchen counter, definitely much more than they had planned on buying. “It’s a bit early for them to start selling those now, but I’d like to try them.”
“There’s an orchard that lets you pick them and charges you by the pound,” Elizabeth said absently, looking over an apple with a scrutinous eye. “We can go when they open for the year.”
“Oh, can we?”
“Of course.”
Nerissa crashed into a hug around her and she leaned into the embrace, the apple all but forgotten as they lost themselves in the warmth of each other’s bodies.
In the middle of the night, Elizabeth woke up to the sound of quiet crying.
She rolled over, bleary-eyed, reflexively reaching out in an offer of comfort. She saw Nerissa’s back outlined in shadow against the moonlight filtering in from outside, shaking, and instantly felt more awake, concern spiking through the sleepiness in a shot of adrenaline and escalated heartbeat.
“My raven,” she whispered past the muss of sleep in the back of her mouth, “are you alright?”
Her only response was more silent trembling.
“Hey,” she muttered, propping her body up with her arms, crawling over to turn Nerissa to face her. “Look at me. Are you alright?”
Her raven’s bloodshot eyes, illuminated in ghostly twilight, stared back up at her, glassy and uncomprehending. Elizabeth took Nerissa’s hand in hers, scars brushing against scars, and squeezed it as much as she could without fear of hurting.
“I’m right here, love, do you need anything?”
Nerissa hiccuped, her composure shattered. “Liz,” she murmured shakily, squeezing Elizabeth’s hand back. “Liz,” like a prayer.
“I’m here.”
“I dreamed you were— that you didn’t—” she choked, biting her lip to keep more from spilling out. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Rising from a whisper to a scream in rapid crescendo. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—”
Repeating the apology until it wasn’t a word anymore but a drumbeat, crashing against their ears in discordant cacophony. Elizabeth only gathered up Nerissa’s body, tense with screaming at a life that wasn’t theirs, and pressed herself closer. I’m here. I’m here.
Slipped beneath the door the next day, in practiced but shaking cursive:
I needed to take a walk.
I dreamed that you died. You and I both know that it should have killed you but it didn’t. I don’t know what gave you the second chance but I was the one who killed you the first time. I’m sorry.
I know you still love me, or at least I hope you do. I will be back. I just need some time to think.
Elizabeth set the note aside, her brow furrowed.
Added to the shopping list:
reservations for cherry picking
Nerissa came back home when it started to rain, her hair glittering with thousands of tiny raindrops clinging to the strands. She smiled sheepishly as Elizabeth greeted her at the door and yelped in surprise when, without warning, she was nearly tackled to the ground in a hug.
“Of course I still love you,” Elizabeth said, soft but firm, leaving no room for argument. “I always have and I always will.”
Bent over a slab of cedar, Nerissa attempted to carve out the likeness of a flower. The thinness of the petals, the intricacies of its center, the veins of its leaves— she cut them out slowly, with a patient hand. Elizabeth, arms folded beneath her chin, watched the slow creasing of her lover’s brow as she sank deeper into her own world of concentration.
In a mess of sawdust and wood shavings, something like a rose appeared— monochromatic, large and heavy, an imperfect rendition at best, but still a work of art. Nerissa set her whittling knife aside and lifted the piece for Elizabeth to judge, and received a proud nod of affirmation in response.
That night the new piece sat beside the bird like an apology, life carved from wood, immortalized. On the bottom of the flower:
the rose
And the raven and the rose were set next to each other on the nightstand, where the revolver with fading names used to lie instead.
An early morning of May, when the sun had not quite yet breached the barrier of the mountains, Nerissa and Elizabeth with hair tied back and baskets in their hands stepped into the cherry orchard, the rose gold of sunrise scattered across their skin in spotted tapestry. They went when no one else had yet arrived, so among the quiet rows of cherry trees they found one they thought the most fruitful and plucked the low hanging cherries until there were none left. Then they lifted each other to pick the higher ones, taking turns reaching through the branches to grab fistfuls of the ripe red fruit and drop them into bags. When they had exhausted themselves and the shadows of the trees had shortened enough to leave them standing in the full warmth of spring morning, they sat and fed themselves with silent satisfaction, fallen pink blossoms scattered around them.
Nerissa looked at Elizabeth, red running from the corners of her mouth, and Elizabeth froze for a fraction of a second, almost imperceptibly, mistaking it for something else. Then she laughed, and with an affectionate roll of her eyes wiped the cherry juice from her lover’s chin and kissed her, and they leaned into each other, drinking in the warm sun above them and the cool earth beneath, and they were alive.
In the comfort of their own home, cherries left in the fridge, they listened to the rain thudding against their windows.
Tucked into the pocket of Elizabeth’s coat:
I love you
And folded into Nerissa’s purse:
I love you too