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Lizzie is just about eight years old when she first meets the golden-haired girl who will someday be her sister: a fair-skinned, dirty-faced young thing clearly half a child still, with hollow blue eyes, skinny legs and arms, and long hair tied back neatly in a single braid, hair that might have a chance to be golden, if it weren't as poorly fed as the rest of her. The plait is so tightly drawn back that Lizzie thinks the girl's head must hurt from the way that it pulls back the skin of her scalp, but she can't see a sign of it on the little face, disobediently lifted to take in the sight of Lizzie and her remaining blood family - her mother and her two elder brothers - as they're herded through the yard into the main building.
Lizzie looks almost exactly the opposite to this girl, she knows, with her newly cropped dark hair just barely long enough to frame her face, her brown eyes more alive than those of anyone else there, and her sallow skin clearly only recently affected by the threat of starvation. She knows she used to be a little bit plump, but that she isn't any more, except for her belly (and she doesn't understand why she hasn't lost that, too young to really comprehend). The other girl's limbs are so thin they look fragile to Lizzie, as though even she could snap her like a twig if she tried.
Not that she would try. She's not that sort of girl. Lizzie has always been gentle, the kind of child who finds injured birds in the park and takes them home to try to nurse them back to health, and cries if they don't survive. Her brothers used to tell her she was pathetic ... they used to, at any rate. They haven't used the word to her since the moment the three of them were told their father had died in an accident. After all, they can't really tease her for something that upset them just as much, if not more (Lizzie never did see a lot of her father, simply a pleasant booming figure in the background with a dark suit and a long beard who always used to come to take the boys out fishing, hunting or to some other sort of entertainment (toxically inappropriate to their ages, she later learns); he was never very interested in the quiet little girl-child of the family, however protective her mother might sometimes be).
Someone else was, though. Would be. Was.
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She breathes deep, feeling a spiral of air being drawn deep inside her chest as she sucks at the sky. The cold seems threatening in a strange sort of way, but she won't die here. She can't die here. Yet she can't seem to understand where "here" is, just at present. There seems to be something wet and uncertain falling against her face, soft, irregular droplets hitting her hands and running down her wrists to dampen the fabric over her arms... but she bears a fruit in her chilled hand, a soft and beautiful fruit of some unknown kind that feels to her hands as though it has a skin of fur, the softness reminding her of her sister's face, if not her work-roughened hands, so damaged but still so gentle.
She cannot remember her own name, and somehow she no longer cares.
The sky is a strange shade of lavender-white above her, and she leans her head against the tree at her back, tilting, gazing up at it and stroking the fruit along her own cheek as if to compare the two in their silky strange softness of texture, until the skin slips with its ripeness and leaves damp trails against her chin, rapidly turning to sticky, sour-sweet-slippery juice that she tries in a reflex to capture with her tongue. She does not know how long she has been here, her full but ragged skirt a basket for more fruits of more kinds than she ever saw growing up, all found somewhere, somewhere... but where? And when?
The visions swirl in her mind, and she closes her eyes against the chill dripping of the snow from the branches of the tree high above her, preferring to live in that rapture of mystery, sweet fruits, sweet sibling, sweet everything, than to consider returning to a world of which she knew too little and too much, a world that had once too often hurt her.
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Laura always has had the most nerve of the two of them, the wickedest ideas for games and tricks to play. She is the one who drags them both into scrapes, and Lizzie the one who gets them both out; Laura the one who asks Lizzie to get fish-bones from her brother when he has a stint as a fishmonger's apprentice, Lizzie the one who grinds them into powder (at Laura's instruction, though when she's told she remembers what they can be used for) and Laura the one who slips the powder into the workhouse mistress' clothing after two weeks assigned to the laundry to learn the tasks needed to go into service someday. The heavy mangle makes it strangely easy to ingrain the itchy, uncomfortable powder of bone more deeply into the damp fabric of a shift as it's dried.
Corporal punishment is not, according to the outside world, allowed for girls. That doesn't mean they do not suffer.
They always agree - using signs to communicate when they cannot use speech - that it is worth it in the end. Even when Lizzie has her doubts as to their course of action, she never doubts Laura. She couldn't. She can't.
When they curl up to sleep in the midst of a severely hard bunk full of girls, cuddled as near to each other as they can in the very centre of the group, they treasure that tiny comfort, even if they're not sure what it means. Lizzie's brothers sometimes joke about how close the girls are, and Laura smiles secretly to herself as if to say, "If only you knew!"
Lizzie is not sure she understands, at least not just yet - but somewhere deep inside she wishes she did.
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She's so unsure, now, how she feels about Laura, or how she should feel... well, she knows how she's been taught she should feel, but she's so uncertain of this, the beautiful agonising vivid flare of emotion and reaction in her body when she looks at her sister, her sister, in an unguarded moment, or when she tilts her head a certain way or purses her full, rose-red lips to whistle... she's not sure she should be feeling this. She doesn't even know where it came from, except that she thinks, maybe, it has always been there, under the surface, this current of something sparking along every nerve in her overwrought body and stealing her breath with the worst possible timing - or maybe she simply grew into it. Maybe this is a sign that she's finally really a woman at last, no longer a little girl.
Perhaps she should not have let Laura's mouth anywhere near her skin, even her forehead or her cheek, but she could not stand to see her sister starving and hungry for the beauty of the fruits they'd seen in the gardens they passed by, and even slightly overripe fruit could still seem nourishing to the emaciated girl who had tasted little but hard bread and souring ale in days, who could barely keep down what little she had eaten, and seemed on most occasions halfway to the bottom of the barrel as the ale kept her alive and she sucked on crusts of bread moistened with more of it to soften them up. She could not have eaten it any other way, for her teeth ached, and her head ached ... All Lizzie wanted to do was to help Laura, to give her anything she wanted, anything she could handle, anything she could have ... everything her "sister" had to give. And she would do it, whether need begged it or not.
They cannot be less than sisters, now, but can they be more? She isn't sure. She remembers with a flare in her gut the feeling of Laura's tongue against the slope of her own jaw, and she presses her thighs together as tightly as she can beneath her skirts. She shouldn't be thinking about this. She shouldn't. But the action only makes her feel more, and with greater intensity.
Is she going insane? Did some of the fruit juice get into her mouth, somehow, or soak into her through her skin? She wishes she could be sure one way or the other.
It's so much. It's almost too much. And oh, she wants...
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Laura smiles to herself, hands wrapped around her knees and knees drawn up against her chest in a defiantly unfeminine posture as she sits with her back against a dry-stone wall. She's never known more definitely what she wants. Lizzie has always called her "sister", and she happily accepted that for years. But no sisterly relationship should feel like this.
She welcomes it, though; welcomes the emotions that worry Lizzie, breathes them in deep and feels the energy all through her body, fingers tingling and toes curling at just the thought of Lizzie's skin against her tongue, at the memory of sucking goblin-fruit juices off the peach-soft fuzz of her cheek, sating a kind of hunger she never knew was part of her until she tried the fruit itself... but the kind she's been holding back for years? It only made that worse. She leans forward, chin atop her knees, hands sliding down to rest at her ankles, and thinks of how warm she feels inside when Lizzie reaches out to her.
It might be cold, sleeping out among the trees instead of in a lumpy workhouse bed that was at least beneath a roof - but that doesn't mean she's lost everything else that she wanted. The goblin fruit left her craving, starving for a while, but it seems she's transferred that desire to something else - something she might only ever be able to have in little gestures and looks, but something that is a great deal more attainable than growing eatables from goblinfruit pips on the village green. Even if right now, it might not seem so easy to get.
She knows Lizzie loves her from the depths of her soul. She would give her anything, do anything for her. Laura feels much the same way about Lizzie, when it comes right down to it. She really would do anything to keep her by her side. Anything but give this up, that is. She can't do that. Not now she's tasted it. Not now she's seen that matching shiver run through Lizzie's body just the way it's been running through her for years. She wasn't wrong to use her teeth. Oh, she wasn't wrong at all.
The only thing she fears now is to lose her. Would it be worth that, to have her in yet another way? To love her truly, not just with her heart but also with her body?
She's sure it would be worth almost anything. She'd go to prison if they were caught - they have little enough privacy, and what she's contemplating is a crime if done in sight of other people - but she'd accept that, in exchange. The only thing she cannot accept is the risk of losing her self-proclaimed "sister".
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The fruit makes the world twist in the most peculiar ways, but neither of them care. After all, the world they knew so certainly was never kind to them.
So long as they have each other, whether they live or die will not matter. It no longer matters to them.
Of course it's worth it. How could it have ever been anything else?