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Grief had made its home inside Eternal Sugar in the wake of her other half’s departure. Tendrils had slithered up to encase her beating heart, woven around the staves of her ribs, canopying so thick over her lungs that too frequently she would gasp for breath and nothing would come.
Futilely, she had decided to busy herself with the ever-crucial task of adorning her garden with luster. Yet that wretched sensation only prevailed, its weight growing heavier and heavier upon her as each day crawled by.
Fear, cold and petrifying, had begun to set in. She truly could not survive this torment; to languish alone under another act of cruelty cast down from the witches. Spine stiffened, Eternal Sugar always swallowed it down, settling it thickly into the recesses of her stomach as she continued her work. She must carry on for her dearest…she simply must.
One afternoon, she had found herself by a riverbed, bare feet lost in the pearled sediments of the shore. The tide ebbed and flowed to kiss her ankles, its touch playful, leaving rings of foam behind. Lidded eyes drifted towards the distant bank across the way. There were still imprints of footsteps, made by hurried stomps of metal into the mud. Her chest seized tight.
Doubling over, Eternal Sugar coughed, the wet and violent sound discordant against the burbles of the creek. It was as if she was hacking up every last vestige of that terrible grief into her palm, wracking her body with endless, harrowing shudders. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, stinging.
At last, that awful fit began to subside, skeletal rattles for air plaguing her still. As if in a trance, she brought her hand away, her dough left sticky and warm and so oddly full.
A rose greeted her- blooming strange and sweet upon her palm. Reddening petals glistened with jam, thorns bristling out from underneath their splayed edges. Fervent and bright, the hue of it utterly passionate splashed against the lilted pastels of her garden. She would have considered it garish eons ago, but now she recognizes it for what it was—a gift from her dearest, proof of her everlasting love.
Her mouth welled with moisture, and pinpricks of pain pierced into her gums from the thorns. She ran her tongue along them, savoring the taste.
“Eternal Sugar Cookie!” A clarion voice rang out. A hand fell upon her shoulder, butterfly-light.
Numbly, she gazed back at Pavlova, his grip gone bone-white on his bow. Youth was captured still in his features, softening the bridge of his aquiline nose along with the junction of that tensed jaw. The forked tongues of his ribbons had caught along the water, the fabric budding with deepening crimson.
“Is…is everything alright?”
She curled her fingers inwards, crumpling the rose away into slivers of petals.
“Of course it is, little one,” Eternal Sugar crouched down. She placed her hand into the water, allowing it to run red away with the current. Bringing her cleansed fist to her heart, she smiled. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
She had seen this curiosity before.
It was born of a basic root cause. Seeds of unreciprocated love planted deep into cookies’ lungs, nourished by the longing pumping through their jam. Cursed to be consumed by the endless blossoms bubbling up from their throat unless their love returned their affection. Countless times before, she had cookies come to her garden, pleading on their hands and knees for a simple remedy. Yet she had not one to offer besides her cherub’s heart-tipped arrows. Alas, even that was not enough to save them from their crumbling fate.
Internally, Eternal Sugar turned up her nose at the mere suggestion that her flowers shared the same seed as those past damned. No, her situation was entirely special- a blessing sown upon her beloved’s departure.
Even in her absence, she is kept company by her love. She found solace in the tickling leaves against her throat and the roots ramifying in the veins of her lungs; devotion devouring her utterly whole in its greedy maw.
Torn from her throat, the flowers came. She recognized them all: bleeding hearts and spider lilies and the persistent roses, burning ablaze as they fell free into her splayed fingers. In their cupped petals, she sees her, that familiar fervor alight in the glow of ardent red. Eternal Sugar cherished them all the same, whispering soft nothings into their folds before allowing them to flutter free into the breezes. Her dearest may be gone, but she shall stay, waiting ever so patiently for her return. And thus, she must be satisfied by these blistering petals of memory for now.
She coughed; mealycup sage dripping from her lips, their billowing blue stained by strawberry.
Eternal Sugar stood stock-still in the heart of her paradise, the plainest mouthfuls of petals thickly coating her tongue. Her breaths ran haggard as she plucked them away from her mouth, hands shaking.
The garden is awash with blossoms, sugar-sapped insects fluttering from floret to floret, the air thick with their honeyed scent. Her love colors her paradise: misty pink, ablaze cerulean, waned periwinkle, found in all the lovely shades of petals that leave her mouth. And never before had she witnessed such Happiness from her cookies, all left wonderfully speechless by its splendor.
Another cascade of blooms spilled free from her chapped lips, lilies of the valley abscising into her splayed hands.
Eternal Sugar gathered them into a messy bouquet. She tilted her head, appraising them, thumbing over the drooping bells weeping with jam. With a smile, she tucked them away into the brush, roots springing forth into the ground to join the others.
When her beloved arrived home at long last, she would be waiting for her, flowers kept in hand.