Work Text:
There's a chilled malaise in the air (or is it just her?) as Coco wakes up alone, in a dark room that is for her but not hers. Where she lives but does not belong. Her not-home.
Dim moonlight reveals the edges of the bed and shelving. Her eyes trace the familiar contours of the keepsakes she's acquired in her time here. The hanging crystal from Richeh, an enthusiastically embroidered handkerchief from Tetia, a stack of corrected spells from Agott, and in the corner, like a phantom, the dark hanging shadow of her apprentice cloak. She quickly averts her eyes and focuses instead on slipping out of bed and into the cool air.
As she tucks in the corners and fluffs the pillow there's a space where a snug stone should be. No wonder the air bites so hard. It's penance for taking kindness given and transforming it into golden slag forever congealed in the darkness of the earth. She has a Midas touch for that - for taking the vivid life of the world and making it eternally cold, hard and dark. Forever silenced. Forever trapped.
No more of that. It's not helping.
Coco instead focuses on getting ready in the still darkness until finally, she's drawn to the hanging cloak like a moth to flame. For so long it was all she ever wanted.
Like a cuckoo she has stolen into this atelier-home and been given love and gifts she does not deserve. She has taken the place of another would-be apprentice.
Do they know what they've been robbed of, that ghost apprentice? In some other place do they put on their uniform and feel that the weight and cut doesn't sit quite right? That there's five gaping holes in their heart they can never articulate?
Undeserving as she is, it's been entrusted to her, this precious cloak. So she does up the fastenings with care and neatens out any wrinkles with reverence.
The room is quiet.
She summons up her old enthusiasm and wonder and shrugs it on like a snakeskin she shed on the night she killed Mum her mother petrified. It's getting harder and harder to wear, this ill fitting skin. She's outgrowing it too fast - her grief and self-loathing and despair and bitter, bitter hope larger than her body.
But she forces it on regardless. If the gnawing void inside her ever stole the smiles from Tetia and the others she couldn't bear it. She has taken too much already.
So she wears her younger self's love for magic and life like armour. Armour that will protect not her, but the ones she loves.
Maybe today I'll learn something crucial, she thinks. She bounces on her feet a few times, getting her blood pumping, settling into the shape and feel of who she needs to be to keep moving forward.
Up above she can hear the sounds of Agott lighting the glow-lanterns and the scrabbling claws of Brushbuddy running around with pre-dawn excitement.
She breathes deeply, and pumps her fist. When her eyes snap back open there's a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye.
Let's do our best today!
When she opens the door a cone of warm light spills across the floor. Coco skips up the stairs to the shared workspace.
"G'morning Agott! Morning Brushbuddy!"
The door behind her swings shut, and the room plunges back into darkness.