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It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
“No,” Drift drift sobbed, sinking to her knees beside AJ’s too-still body.
“No,” she repeated over and over until the word felt like nothing at all, “no, no, no—”
But no matter how many times Drift argued the scene before her, no matter how much authority she infused in her voice, reality did not bend toward her will.
AJ did not peer up at her with a crooked smile, did not say something like: “Mmm, I love it when you get all bossy,” or, “Are you this nice to all the girls you get in this position?”
For once, AJ didn’t fill the silence. Drift felt sick with a sudden want for it — all the times she’d bristled at AJ’s inability to back down, to keep her comments to herself instead of insisting on having the last word… they were always empty rebuttals, halfhearted deflections.
She would give anything for another argument.
“You weren’t supposed to leave me,” Drift hissed, curling her fingers around the grass beside AJ’s body, needing some sort of anchor, “not now. Not yet. Not like this.”
In truth, Drift couldn’t think of a way she’d rather AJ had left her — each of them would feel like the sudden extraction of a limb, a visceral sort of grief which left her unmoored and off-kilter — but surely anything would have been kinder than death.
Drift dug her hands deeper into the Earth, tears blurring her vision as her body shook, unaware of the way that and Earth shook with her, like it, too, was in mourning.
AJ’s blood seeped into the grass, into the Earth below.
The Earth — grass and root and rock and soil and rot — hummed a discordant kind of music, a dirge of the dirt.
Come back to me, Drift thought, and her thoughts became the Earth’s.
A gasp shook Drift from her trance, eyes snapping open in alarm. A ring of roots and flowers had formed around AJ, who mirrored her shocked expression. As Drift looked closer, she found herself unable to discern where they ended and AJ began — it was as if the Earth had reached out and woven itself within her, stitching her back together.
“Open Book?” AJ croaked, and Drift’s hand flew over her mouth as she lurched forward, throwing her arms around the other girl in a tight embrace.
“Oh my God,” Drift sobbed.
“If I knew I’d get this kind of response every time I died, I’d’ve been doing it more often,” AJ drawled.
Drift laughed wetly, pulling back for a moment to shove at her shoulders. “Don’t joke about that,” she said, and something about her expression gave AJ pause, her face softening in understanding.
“Okay,” AJ agreed, allowing herself to be pulled into another hug with an amused oof, shakily wrapping her own arms around Drift’s shoulders with a small wince.
“Um,” AJ mumbled into Drift’s hair, “why are there, like, plants growin’ out of me?”
Drift stilled. “Um… well…” she laughed, wet and incredulous, “I… don’t entirely know?”
AJ laughed, too.
A blue orchid sprouted on her shoulder. She blinked down at it, mouth slightly agape.
“I, uh,” Drift offered, shrugging, “I guess we’ll find out?”