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The Rivendell festival lasts long into the night. Shrub finds herself at the steps, beyond the entrance archway. Wordlessly she slides down to a sitting position beside Katherine, who’s staring off into the distance, her face poised and expressionless.
She’s always a curious case, Katherine. They’ve always been good (or so Shrub thinks at least), cordial enough as trade partners. But with House Blossom’s ruler came this regal stature, this quiet assuredness. Quite different from the loud chaos of Count Fwhip, or Scott’s cunning. Shrub’s always found her quite hard to decipher.
“Not enjoying the party?” Katherine offers.
Shrub purses her lip. “I did. But it gets loud, doesn’t it?” she shrugs.
“That, you’re right about.” she nods.
They sit in silence for a while more, and it’s the most harmonic Shrub has felt since—
She doesn’t know when.
Eventually Katherine offers to take her through the garden and they end up laying there on the wet grass, the noise of the other sovereigns dancing their hearts out a mere hum in the background. No, all Shrub can feel is fascination, and maybe a little bit more.
Katherine intertwines their pinkies between them, and it’s like the stars suddenly seem to shine brighter in the night sky.
Shrub's fingers tapping on the table rang a bell in Katherine's mind, and soon enough, she found herself humming along to the beat, a quiet distraction from the cauldron softly bubbling with newly brewed potion in front of her.
"Hm?" Shrub was staring at her intently, eyebrows slightly raised.
Katherine paused, taking her time to collect her thoughts. "That rhythm... it reminds me of a song I was taught as a young child. A classical piece, written here in House Blossom over three hundred years ago.”
The faintest hint of a curious smile plays at the edges of Shrub’s lips. “Really?”
“It does, really.” she said, and after another pause, “You know what? Follow me.”
Shrub stood up from the wooden chair in which she had been sitting idly in, and followed Katherine to the open balcony of the castle. Retrieving an acoustic guitar from a secret compartment hidden behind one of the giant flower vases, she then sat down at the top of the steps and motioned for Shrub to sit beside her.
Resting the guitar above her knee, she pointed her gaze to the clear night sky above them, and then closing her eyes, she whispered, “Listen.”
Individually plucking the strings once, twice, Katherine started playing the composition, her fingers moving with their own mind, finding their way around the strings she hadn’t touched in years, matching the melody to the chilly evening air around them. It was just as she remembered it as a kid— slow, melodious, calming, played high on the strings.
She paused and opened her eyes to see Shrub staring into the distance, the moonlight reflecting off the tears tracks running down her cheeks. Upon noticing Katherine looking at her, she let out a soft chuckle. “Nothing— your playing is beautiful.”
“You think so?”
One day, Shrub comes bursting into House Blossom, all pent up nervous energy and thrusts the crown and all the power that comes with it into Katherine’s hands.
Shrub leaves, and with her absence the weight of the world became heavier by the second.
“I don’t understand why the gave it to me,” is what she tells Scott later on. Katherine doesn’t mention the nightly encounters, the weighted glances — none of it.
It doesn’t matter, she tells herself.
When the world bursts into flames, Katherine looks her in the eyes from across a campfire, voices arguing and embers crackling around them.
It feels like magnetism, like anger and everything else all at once. Shrub averts her eyes to the ground, the feeling of cowardice like pressure between her shoulder blades.
She knows Katherine wants an explanation, and maybe in another life she could give it, could rationalize the world and the mistakes, but here’s the caveat, the banker.
Shrub Berry has been running for all her life.
I’m sorry.
The figure halts its movement suddenly, a dark shadow against the thick gray fog that wraps around the forest. Still, the shadow shifts, seemingly having turned around to regard their pursuer. Katherine stops dead in her tracks, unmoving under the concealed gaze of someone she could almost see. Her breath hitches, the cold morning air daring not to leave the confines of her chest— a thousand words and questions begging to be said, but nonetheless crashing inside mental walls with no release.
It could have been twenty seconds or twenty years, but the quick turn of a blurry shoulder and the start of footsteps moving away from her breaks a pause formed by a the silent, chilly tension between two souls in a forest enveloped in the noise of the trees and its native creatures. Katherine exhales, all the words she wanted to say dissolving into a soundless whisper carried away into the wind. Entranced, she runs after the fading silhouette deeper into the woodland.