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Hidden in their corner of the braid, they still write letters.
In this quiet, deep-tucked place, this bubble, this knot, this fragile togetherness, they share breath for the first time. Share space, share touch. The strands of hair Red longed to touch in Samarkand are soft now, beneath her fingers. She presses her limbs to Blue's and understands hunger anew.
Yet she can't forget what she first hungered for, Blue's words breaking open on her tongue, unfurling through her bones. Can't forget the years they glutted themselves on thorns and beestings, sentences woven through water, through dust, through animal flesh.
It becomes a habit, then, their own small secret. It bleeds domesticity in a way that fits foreign round her skin. Blue's Garden were the ones for the slow-plant, the years of partnership. Blue has known domesticity more intimately than Red has, known decades, known wives and husbands, known the smell of bread in the morning and the curling fur of a dog.
Red, quick vicious shadow that she was, knows far more of blood than she does of loving. Blue shaped time with her arms around necks. Red shaped time with her knife to them.
It's an oversimplification, of course. Blue has been as dangerous as Red has; and one does not live as long as Red and not once play at love. But still, it is alien to her, the quiet affection of it.
They still hunger, like this. Still claw. They were weaned on war, know not much of gentleness. What tenderness they share is the tenderness of a thumb dug into a bruise, the tenderness of the flesh beneath a fingernail. It suits them, to be small and quiet and yet still fierce, to whet their endless hunger on the sharp blades of each other.
And yet there is still a domesticity to it, hiding the letters for each other, in each other, not because their secret lowers over their heads, not because of the axe-blade poised always to fall, but only because they can.
It is through this that Red writes, one day, of reminiscence. Crafts the letter in growing form, turns berry-words to blood-dark wine, kisses Blue with its sharpness on her tongue, gifts clauses to her through the press of lips, the play of teeth.
My Cerulean– and Blue laughs at this, delighting in it. So many blues in all the strands, and Red has not exhausted them yet. Revels in the simplicity of Blue shaped on her tongue, but finds joy still in the exercise of synonyms. Still pours her into things.
My Cerulean,
I thought, today, of your first letter. My blood-wet hands, that single sheet of paper, words flickering and gone in a shower of ash and instants. Your signature burning the surface I call skin, as if your mark were not already indelible, as if it hadn't been you and me before we knew it, you and me from the beginning of it all.
I thought, as well, of the war that was once ours, fought up and down through time and strands. Thought of small changes wrought to beget large ones.
In many strands, they had some early theory of this phenomenon. I found it in the books I loved from childhood, their strange order, their sequentiality.
This place of the small upon the large, the littlest shift to shape our Shifts– they called it the butterfly effect. Whether or not a tiny creature flaps its wings could shape, some thought, a whole world. We know this, you and I, so intimately. Every strand distinguished by difference, some infinitesimally wrought.
I spoke to you, in my first reply, of whispers to a snowbank. Their overlooked value when planets crushed between my palms. Of these small infinite choices, these forks in the road of our reality.
I thought, today, how your letter was one such.
It is a simplification, perhaps, to call your letter the butterfly's wings, when we were already each other's. It is wrong, surely, to call it a fork in the road, when I made you and you made me. Impossible, maybe, for us to take another path.
And yet. When I trace the tapestry of time that led us here, I come back again and again to that thread. My blood-wet hands, your paper challenge.
I wonder, sometimes: if we were not who we were, unbound by the thousand variances of Time; if we were like those whose lives we shape, endless variations of them fractured by their every small decision; if we were that, would there be a strand out there where I did not take it?
A strand where I set my foot upon the path's opposing fork, and left your words to lie there in the death and blood.
A strand where I took it up and brought it to Commandant, unburned, unread.
A strand where I destroyed it without watching the words that took shape.
I wonder this, sometimes, and feel – perhaps you'll laugh– (And she does, exhales delighted into the dig of Red's teeth, shapes her fingers to the curve of Red's skull, affection spilling)–but I wonder it and feel afraid. It curls claws into my limbs, this imagined reality, my feet on a fork in the road that did not take me to you. That did not lead us here.
That a world could ever have conceivably existed where a thrill misplaced, that chase in Samarkand, was the closest I would ever get to touching the strands of your hair, the skin and bones and fact of you.
That a world could have existed where the war raged eternal with us as its agents, seeing each other's outline only on the battlefield, only in the footprints we scattered throughout time.
I dance again, I think, skirt the edges of the point I should be making. I am still fallible, my azure, my robin's egg. To unmake myself still frightens me. To be ungloved before you, separated from the skin my extraneous words craft for me... forgive me, it's still terrifying, even with all of our truths.
But to the point. This is the truth I skirt the edges of, half-ashamed to give words to its simplicity: I am glad every day of that letter. I am glad you wrote it. I am glad I set my foot upon the fork that led me to you.
Gladness, gratitude, ecstasy, veneration– all words are too small for what I mean, the sheer overwhelming largeness of the feeling. I could fill all the strands with thankfulness and still have it spill over, begging to be spoken.
I will say it, then, in simpler ways.
Thank you. I love you. I am glad of what I chose.
Allow me now to say it without words.
Yours (and really I need not sign further, for yours is who I am),
Red
Blue smiles under her mouth, and kisses her, and there, hidden in their corner of Time, they say it without words.