Work Text:
For twenty-six months she refuses to swim.
It’s not that Jason ever pushes her–– would ever push her––to do something against her will. Only that she loved swimming. This had been something Jason knew about Marie, something based on memory and experience, something she could tell him about the past and show him in the present. They have always held to these things like threads in a delicate weave of knowledge and telling and the things we decide are true about ourselves.
Marie has told him so many things. The fact of this has always weighed on him, how paltry little he has to offer up in return, unknown seeds thrown to an already blooming garden. They have had this conversation many times.
She has remembered to him her teenage visits to Tegeler See and Schlachtensee, floating out into the very centre of the lake and lying on her back until her fingers puckered and wrinkled; bathing there with Martin in their youth, cans of beer and light bickering; riding a friend’s shoulders around in the shallows and startling the ducks with their delighted shrieks. One day , she promised him, we will go to Obersee. We will stay in a boathouse. The water there, it’s like… She did not finish, only shook her head in the seconds before Jason kissed that wondering smile off her face.
In Goa, she swam every morning. Sometimes Jason would wake alone, her pillow cold, and rise to look out the window knowing exactly what he would see. Her hair was not the beacon it had once been, harsh and winter-sharp. He had loved her red and glowing but he loved her here too, could pick her out instantly regardless. There would be reasons for that other than love, he’s sure, and he can’t mind that too much––his training is being put to good use at last.
He would watch her, moving gentle through the water, until the sun got too high in the sky.
-
In the time it takes for Jason to haul her out and staunch the blood flow to her shoulder she loses all but the faintest colour in her face, like the water itself has leached the warmth and laid claim in mottling blue. He too feels like he’s drowning. When she chokes and dribbles the river down her chin and neck he still can’t breathe himself.
Sitting vigil that night he can barely look at her face, eyes trained only to the tightly bandaged mess of her shoulder and brain undeviating from the fact that were this guy a better shot the water would have had her entirely. He cannot feel relief, lifting a cup to her cracked lips in her moments of wakefulness and dreading infection, hospitals, names. No, what he feels is nothing like relief.
She takes baths, afterwards. It is a matter of practicality.
But she will not swim.
-
After twenty-six months, Jason takes two risks. The first is going anywhere at all, anywhere that isn’t ‘the place they currently are’, the name of which he barely lets himself think lest it lead them here. They don’t discuss it, he and Marie, they never think about the closest city or the local delicacies or any identifying features. They survive.
It’s Marie, in the end, who suggests a trip. An end to the monotony. ‘They found us in Goa, didn’t they? They could find us here.’ Her shoulders shrug but she’s anything but nonchalant. There is a bitterness there. Jason understands.
The second risk is the greater and more terrifying of the two. He does not push, as a rule. This feels like pushing. But when he rolls over in their bed one morning and finds Marie there, no cold gone-swimming pillow, only a cold woman in a dark room, he breathes in. ‘Do you think Lake Khovsgol has boathouses?’
She breathes deep, then hums. Two fingers come to rest on Jason’s lips and he kisses them.
Her arm is weaker now. She compensates, because of course she does, determined and dismissive and taking it in her stride when the muscles on her right grow larger than the left. She jokes, and Jason cannot laugh, that she may have to swim in circles; and when she asks him to help her with her rucksack he doesn’t smile.
-
The only boathouses they see are owned by tourist companies. There are yurts dotted along the edge of the water and Jason watches the ant-sized families like a hawk. Just in case. Always just in case.
They slip along the lake, hiking up into the dense woods when the shoreline thins to nothing.
He goes to pitch the tent right away––they’re losing daylight and she must be exhausted––but Marie shakes her head and points to a rock set a little way back from the water’s edge. He sits.
When she settles next to him he doesn’t move a muscle and still he does not dare when she runs a hand down his cheek to cup and settles her thumb against his neck. The press to his pulse is grounding and he swallows against it. ‘Is this––’ he swallows again and makes a sharp gesture out towards the lake. It seems too big.
Saying nothing, Marie stands and stretches. She windmills her arms, which move at different angles now but they work. Both of them work. Jason watches her use both hands to unbutton and slide off and slip down and finally move to clasp across her chest not from modesty but from the chill. The starburst on her left is larger than her hand can cover. He shivers too.
There is no fanfare, no great gulping intake of breath, for which Jason is grateful. Only one moment she is stood staring out at the wide, still expanse, dark hair stark against the light on the water; the next she is walking away from him and he tenses, wills her on.
She looks back over her shoulder once and nods, the slightest smile quickening across her pale, indoor face. Then she turns and runs and splashes and dips and this is a reconciliation, life and death, a private moment beneath the open sky. He is transfixed.
Marie swims away.