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When she was a girl, she longed for the wider world in a way that her sisters could not understand. "Why?" they asked when she climbed to the tops of the highest trees to catch the sky, the stars, the sunset; and, "Why?" when she roamed to the edges of the Wood to catch glimpses of strangers from faraway places and hear their tales. She did not have a why, just a knowledge: the Wood was not enough.
"Leaving means never coming back," Jote told her on the last day, a final attempt to sway her from the course.
"I will miss you," she replied, and turned into the wind and away from the Wood.
She thought, at first, that the noise of the city would drive her mad. To say that it was different from the Whispering was akin to claiming that the Wood had a few trees, and there was nothing she found, at first, to reassure her that the path she had chosen was the right one. In the world at last, and the longing still had not disappeared.
Worse than the noise were the stares. Her people did not often leave the Wood, and thus to many folk, the Viera were stuff of legends. Eyes and whispers trailed her about. Occasionally someone - often a child - would scrape enough courage up to ask her a question. The asker and the manner of the question determined her response, whether honesty or offense, and she earned some little reputation that way. Enough to gain her a position with a guard escorting travelers through the wilderness. Freedom was what she wanted, and travel seemed the way best suited for her. The pay was enough, the adventure was enough, and her companions were friendly without being overly so. Courteous. The one among them who wouldn't take no for an answer, she stopped short of crippling only because she did not want to harm the caravan's prospects for safe travel, and she told him so. He did not approach her again.
It was a lonely path, and sometimes a sad one, but a few years spent in the world, seeing places no others had seen, convinced her that the choice was the right one after all. Standing on a cliff with the ocean booming below, she could scarcely remember the stillness and the smallness of her village. She told herself that she did not even miss it.
Sometimes she believed it.
Her people had a belief that, for each child born in the Wood, there was another who sang the same song, and true growth would guide them together until they found harmony. And once met, a Viera's life was not solely her own, but part belonged to the other. Fran had not believed this. She wandered the wood and never found anyone with whom she had more than a passing refrain, a harmony in verse that passed once the phrase ended, sisters and friends and nothing more. It was why she could leave the Wood at all, she supposed, glad of it in her own way.
She wandered the world, drank deeply of her freedom and tried to ignore the loneliness that came with it for five decades and more, the longing that never fully disappeared, and then she was in the sky city, in a bar, looking for another caravan, and a swaggering hume came up to her and made a comment of a particularly offensive sort. She turned to make a scathing reply, and lost track of her words. Somewhere between laughter and anguish, she wondered, not for the first time, why she could not be content in the Wood like everyone else. A path in the world, that was hard enough, but to find her song in the heart of a man, this man, this hume who did not deserve to stroke her ears, that was beyond countenance.
She traveled with him without telling him why; without so much as hinting at the real reason why she hadn't killed him where he stood.
She made him woo her, although not in a fashion that a hume might recognize as such. He had to earn her trust. Trust was what she missed the most, outside the Wood Herself, and if this arrogant hume would fancy himself part of her clan, her song, it would be a place he earned.
Challenge unspoken but present, he wove his way past her defenses sooner than she would have ever guessed possible. In his own way, she discovered, he was every bit as much of an orphan as she was, and for the same reason - because he had chosen to be. He had brothers he might never again see. He missed them, but, "The freedom is worth the loss," she whispered into his silence. He looked up at her, nodding in genuine surprise. "You are not the only one who has chosen the world over safety," she observed. She let him take her to bed that night, trust earned, fate acknowledged and accepted. For this, in part, she had left the Wood, and it was a benefit she would no longer reject.
He told her, in bits and pieces over the space of seasons, where he had come from and who he had been, before. She told him of the Wood, without ever quite admitting how long she had been gone from it or what her true age was. Laughter and anguish again, thinking of the short run of hume life next to the length of a viera's, and she decided on a rainy afternoon in his bed that she would perhaps follow him into death rather than live without him, and then determined not much later that it was doubtful that either of them would live to be old, so it wouldn't matter anyway.
There were words they did not use together. Relationship was one; she thought it a painfully hume concept, although she liked partners because it spoke of mutual respect and need, and it was ambiguous enough that others might guess but would never know for certain. She never said I love you, not in words, and he never said, I need you, not out loud, but in his arms the longing was finally stilled, and his constant flow of amused words trailed into stillness, and it was enough.