Work Text:
The Little House is one and a half stories tall. Inside, it’s all one room with a puddle of blankets and pillows for groups of lovers to slumber and make love in. Accessible by ladder, there is one little loft with even softer blankets and pillows. Grass smoke and laughter puff out of the door frame at all hours. She had been inside the Little House plenty, but this is her first time on top of it.
From the loft, she’d opened the skylight and scrambled onto the flat roof while nausea rolled around her belly, bubbling up her esophagus. On her hands and knees, she crawls over to the edge and peers down. It’s just him looking up at her. Everyone else had been sent to the Big House to make use of the summer’s zucchini harvest. Alone, together, she would be tested yet again.
Floating candles in still rooms had become easy. She could make bones dance for hours. Ritual summons had become regular excursions into the astral plane. This would be new.
Standing in his Y-pose, he begins to repeat the recent chanting of the new spell. Hovered over the fire, she’d memorized it, too, and joins his intonations as her heart imitates horses trampling. He motions for her to stand, and she reaches her full height while staring past him at the empty grass below.
She’d asked for something soft to land on, just in case, but he’d admonished her for doubting herself.
The spell increases volume and sincerity between them. She watches his eyes narrow as the chanting begins its second round. Closing her eyes quickly, she searches for the bubbly sensation of suspension to wrap around her wrists and ankles as the magic invades her muscles. Instead, she only feels the quickened pulse coursing blood. His voice taunts her, and she feels a prickling form around her thighs. Thankfully, enchantment.
She jumps off the roof.
She hits the ground, and the ground breaks her bones. Crumpled on the ground, wind knocked out of her, horrible white pain shoots through her shins and thighs. When she opens her eyes, she sees a sickening jagged edge of bone protruding from her left shin and a horrible lump on the right. Whatever magic might have touched her had already disappeared. Juddering breaths turn to fat-teared sobs as he bends over her and frowns.
He touches what was once inside her, and she screams. He covers her mouth quickly with his palm and then uses his other hand to push the bone back inside. Her muscles squirm to re-accommodate her bones, and she pulls his fingers into her mouth to bite them to keep her quiet.
His look is stony by the time all her wounds are closed and her body parts are arranged correctly. Pain only echoes in her imagination rather than her material self, but she’s still reduced to hiccups of breath.
“We’ll try again tomorrow.”