Chapter Text
“Kip?” Vinyë peeked around the door of his study.
Cliopher laid down his pen gratefully. He had been staring at the same half-empty page of notes for the book he was still not entirely sure he wanted to write for long enough that his coffee had gone cold. A visit from his sister was an excellent reason to take a break. He smiled warmly. “Vinyë! What a nice surprise!”
“I had to get out of the house,” she confessed, sounding a bit chagrined. “Mama and Conju have gotten bored with going through her boxes of old clothing and are threatening to have a go at mine. They’re both very dear, Kip, but they may actually drive me mad.”
“Ah,” he hummed his commiseration, “understandable.” It was lovely, truly, that his Mama and Conju were so close. It could also sometimes be a bit exhausting.
“I used the excuse that I was bringing over a box of your old school papers. I hope that’s all right,” she explained.
“It’s fine. I’ve been intending to get to those, but something always seems to come up. Thank you.” He looked forlornly at the neat pile of blank sheets he had intended to fill with anecdotes and pithy observations. “I’m glad you came by, actually. I’m getting nowhere with this today. At the moment, I don’t even recall why I ever thought it seemed like a good idea. Who would want to read it?”
“I would! I know more about your work than I used to, but that doesn’t mean I know everything. Even now, I’m convinced there are things you’ve forgotten to mention.” She looked at him suspiciously.
“Vinyë…”
“Kip…“ His sister leaned against the doorway with her arms crossed, stubbornly refusing to let him squirm out from under her skeptical gaze. There were times, he thought ruefully, when she reminded him very much of their mother.
“All right, all right—for you, I will continue to slog through my life story.” He stood and stretched. “But later. For now, why don’t you show me what you’ve brought?”
~~~
Dearest Papa,
It seems like a year should be a long enough time for grieving to be finished, but I still miss you every single day. Everything changed without you, then Kip was sent away and I lost my baby brother, too. At least, that’s how it feels.
I miss our family the way it was before. The Lays say we will all be together again when we sail with the ancestors. I’m not sure I believe that anymore, but I want it to be true.
~~~
The notebook had fallen from a handful of identical composition books, remnants of Cliopher’s school days that had been languishing in his mama’s attic for decades. Why he or anyone else had been interested in preserving for posterity his teenage musings on late-Astandalan history or his calculus equations was beyond him; they could be put to far better use as kindling. He flipped the book open and scanned it, ready to add it to the stack he’d already begun. The hand was not his. He nearly closed it, abashed at this inadvertent invasion of someone’s privacy; then the words registered with him and he snatched it up and riffled hungrily through the pages. Miraculously, each was filled with writing in that same hand—one he had thought he would never see again.
“What’s that, Kip?” Vinyë asked, peering curiously at the book. Cliopher couldn’t quite bring himself to relinquish it—not before he had committed to memory every word and thought, every line and curve. Instead, he held it up so she could more easily read and she slid close, reaching to steady the page. Her breath hitched; almost soundlessly, she breathed, “Oh, Kip… Navalia.”
“Did Mama send this over with you?”
“No. Mama never goes into the attic anymore; the stairs are too steep. I don’t know how this could have made its way into your boxes—I packed them myself. It was just your schoolwork, Kip… I’m sure of it. I’ve never seen this before.”
“It must be a gift from the Son of Laughter,” he laughed weakly.
“You would know, I suppose,” Vinyë quipped, “Vou’a never pops round our house as he does yours. Or maybe we have your fanoa’s magic to thank for this unexpected treasure.” As fond as she was of Fitzroy, Cliopher suspected that his sister found serendipity just a bit too convenient an excuse at times.
“However it made its way to me—to both of us—it’s… oh, I can hardly fathom it, Vinyë. Hundreds of letters I have from home—I kept every one of them. They made me feel that I was still connected to all of you, though you were so far away. But I had nothing from Navalia—not even a note. Now I read this and I can hear her voice for the first time in…”
“…in centuries, as you count time,” Vinyë said gently. “Oh Kip, I can’t imagine what that must have been like.” She leaned towards him, her arm against his, and pressed her cheek to his hair.
“Not so different from what you experienced, I expect,” he said honestly. It had been an unfathomably long time, but he wasn’t so sure that it was any worse for him, with centuries to grieve, than it had been for the rest of his family. The enormity of the loss was the same, as was the way memory blurred over time, even when one tried very hard to hold on. It happened incrementally: first, during those terrible final days, and then a little more each year. Cliopher knew the shape of his sister’s smile, the color of her eyes, but he couldn’t quite bring all the little details together as a whole, much as he tried. On occasion, something would catch his eye—the movement of a hand, the tilt of a head, a glimpse of long black curls down a stranger’s back—and she would come nearly into focus for the barest moment, but never fully. That was, sadly, not at all an unusual experience.
“Maybe not,” Vinyë admitted. “I just miss her.”
“So do I.”