Work Text:
The ‘Flightful Fancy’ is no longer open.
Raine stares at the house their feet subconsciously led them to, tries to will the rips in the facade closed, the windows unboarded, and the neat letters back onto the front of the building. It’s decrepit, abandoned, and clearly been closed for years. It’s not that they miss it… it just doesn’t fit the version inside their head at all. In their memory, it’s still whole – gaudy, not too clean, and very much not classy.
Waitressing here was Eda’s first job, the one she was able to hold the longest, and they remember all the times they got here to take her home; groggy from waking up in the middle of the night, but unwilling to let her get out by herself. It’s not so much that one scrawny teenager would have fared better against a mugger than another – Eda shoving wallets into any pockets she could find on them while giggling manically was both the only thing they could do for her and an intoxicating thrill.
She was always bold, but she got tough here: an iron forged by harassment and cruelty, hammered on an anvil of apathy. Nobody cared about the Owl Girl, unless it was to take out the day’s frustration on someone who couldn’t talk back without fear of losing her livelihood.
But her working here fed them for six years, and she learned how to sharpen her tongue and talk back in ways a drunkard wouldn’t understand, and how to twist a wrist before it could touch a soft body part.
The step up to its door is much more worn-out than they remember. A testament to how much longer it held out after Raine wasn’t here to scowl at it, or to how much younger they were back then?
“Come,” Eda nudges, pulling them out of their reverie. “I’ve seen enough of this building for a lifetime.”
Raine slips their arm into hers, the way her posture invites them to. They always went like this back then – Raine holding her close, and Eda trying to hide her swagger after emptying a few drunkards’ pockets.
They found it fun, then. Called it proper retribution for all the negativity she had to endure. Looking back, it’s incredible they were never caught.
The buildings around them are all closed now, but most of them will open up again in the morning. There is an antique shop, and a carpenter willing to make furniture for all kinds of demon body types. They’ve never been in either, and they can’t remember whether or not these two were here, all those years ago. What they do know is that the buildings have been repaired and repainted, looking familiar and still almost new in the aftermath of Belos’s rampage.
The building at the end of the street has changed completely, though.
Gone are the arches, the wood twisted into a curtain inviting the customer in; they probably got destroyed in the wrath of a former Emperor. The house has been modernised or maybe built back from scratch, and the high, modern glass panels show all kinds of fashion they don’t care for.
There used to be paper here, and quills, pens, pencils. So many exquisite notebooks they’d surely never be able to afford. Raine remembers standing in front of the glass, nose so close to it that the fog obscured part of their view, and craving the beautiful stationary within. To write their songs and lyrics on something that looked like it was precious, worthwhile, like it meant something. People were wary of commissioning something from the child prodigy who was too scared to perform and ran away to become a wild witch, and yet, everyone was enchanted with their work. They were a dirty secret to be shared – and they would have loved to at least deal their beautiful magic on beautiful paper.
Instead, they remember walking inside and counting out all their money to buy the cheapest sheet music and ink the shop offered.
They could buy it all today, and then some, if they hadn’t outlived the store by years.
Eda laughs at their gaze. “It’s been almost ten years since they closed up. Come on.”
They leave the memory of the Broken Prodigy behind. Their way leads them past the jeweller, and Raine’s steps first get slower, and then faster when they realise that it’s still the same shop, name and all. Watches still take up the same space in the window, as does children’s jewellery, and then, there are the two windows they used to stare at the most.
The rings, affordable now, had an irresistible pull back then. Raine stares at the rows and rows of neat little silver and golden bands, remembers how the only thing keeping them from saving up for one was that it meant buying a matching one, too.
But the rings weren’t the only thing they kept coming back to stare at, back then. The bracelets, earrings, lockets. Pretty things, beautiful even, that Raine loved to imagine on her. They kept dreaming about how beautiful Eda would feel with either of these, how adored and desired. She loved to borrow anything of theirs, and for a time, they openly traded clothes and jewellery. In the end, the only thing they really felt strongly about was that one earring, though, so they gifted everything else to Eda.
Once, they managed to buy her a ring – not one of the special ones, just a ‘normal’ gold ring. Way too big and flashy, in retrospect, but she’d loved it, and worn it up to the day they went separate ways.
Raine doesn’t have the strength tonight to ask where it went.
“What are you making that face for?” Eda finally asks them. She opens her mouth again, gives a side eye to the uniform bands. Closes it. Finally, she puts her fingers into their strangely uncooperative fingers, and firmly says: “Stop looking at ghosts.”
Raine laughs at that, unexpected even to themself.
When they reach the edges of the business district, they are the one pulling her forward, towards a sight they almost forgot about. They step onto the stone bridge expecting the stone to feel smaller somehow. But there’s barely any change – it’s still dark gray and sturdy. Only now, there are flowerpots fastened to the walls where there used to be propaganda posters back then. A few people still linger, yet nobody recognises the famous couple stumbling about like teenagers from place to memory-laden place in the fading light.
They lean back between two of the flower pots, their lower back against the railing, and pull her close, hip to hip. Eda’s lips find theirs the way they always did, every part of her body slotting against theirs as if they were created a matching set.
“Do you remember?” they whisper against her mouth, and can feel the smile more than see it in the way her eyes crinkle up.
“How we fed the fish?”
Raine turns around, feels her arms encircling them as she leans partly onto their back, partly on the railing. They look down into the dark water and nuzzle against her head when she lays it on their shoulder. “We used whatever bread we had left over, until we heard it was bad for them– and then the bugs, you caught everything that dared enter the house–”
“And we’d feed the fish, one bug after the other, the Owl Girl and the Broken Prodigy.”
They both smile in spite of, or maybe even because of, the cruel nicknames. Raine softly presses back against the warm body holding them. “We earned those names back, made them our own.”
“I bet there’s still fish down there,” Eda muses quietly, and they don’t question the change in topic that really isn’t one.