For Rosemary
This is how Pelna grieves, on the eve of the treaty signing.
Because of course I had to write something for @glaiveweek. This is for the “Remembrance” prompt for Day 3, and I guess (???) is an intro to the one-sided Pelna/Crowe fic idea I’ve had in the works. We never got to see how he mourned Crowe’s death, and I wanted to explore it!
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Rating: PG-13 for language & implied sex if you squint, but nothing explicit
Tagging: @wolfgoddess77 @vashiane-archive @sailorprompto @sedge-butt @marianne-dash-wood @me-yasato @alecair @toranyx @goodmorningawfulbye@paopusunshine @noxhighwind @sailormars109@bleucommelhiver @elloquench @ultimoogle @kidolegend @rhysspeaces
On Wednesdays, Pelna goes to the herb garden.
It’s a quiet little place he’s called his own, in an isolated corner by the Citadel. Technically it isn’t a corner—it’s part of a plot of public land a couple of blocks away from one of the art museums. And technically it isn’t quiet, either. Can’t be, with the wire fences and wooden stakes, or the roar and honk of shining cars, or infrastructure. (He might be here for strength and strategy, but he learned enough in school to survive off of flashbulb memories, to know what the hell all these government officials are talking about all the time. The word weighs heavy on his tongue because infrastructure was never something his people had to worry about; his people were infrastructure. His people were power.)
But naming it so makes the place a little more peaceful, somehow. Something out of a storybook. Like a place he could write poems. If he could write poems, that is.
The rental fee is a good use of his monthly stipend, at least.
It’s on an afternoon that’s entirely too cheerful and sunny that he pries the gate open and makes his way to his plot, his knees finding a home in the ground and his fingers searching delicately for spindly leaves. He’s started growing little things here, lost track of how long they’ve rooted. Sage, thyme, basil. He knows them like the back of a gloved hand because his grandmother did. Had to. That was her job. Was.
Pelna isn’t here to tend—not to the plants—though he should be. It’s an effort from the Astrals that he’s even tending to himself. It’s just that he knows it’s what Crowe would have wanted from someone she only sort of loved.
He only ever took her here the one time, on an open day like this, when the sun was still lucky enough to be up when their shifts ends. They linked arms, because it was the most she’d allow him out in the city beyond playful shoves, ruffles of the hair, are-you-kidding-me stares, the occasional hug. There was just a tinge of shame—vulnerability, maybe—in the creak of the gate, the give of the ground under knee-high combat boots. He wished he could have held her hand then. Wished he could have kissed the back of it when she grinned at his little patch of peace, crouched among the plants, and said, “So this is where you spend all that extra time.”
Gods, she was so easy to be around. It killed him.
“So why’d you bring me here?” Crowe asked him, brushing stray locks of dark, scraggly hair away from her eyes. “If this is something that’s all yours, I mean.”
“Just wanted you to see it, I guess.”
She gave him a look; if he closes his eyes now, he can see every hint of skepticism in the arch of her brow, every wrinkle in the quirk of her lips. “I know you,” she said, and the words were a fist around his heart then, pulsing with him, wrenching in just the right direction.
He sighed. “I just… wanted to let you in before you had to leave. Okay? Maybe you could help when you come back.” With the flat of his palm, he patted down the earth, a half-affectionate smile on his lips. “Gets lonely here, sometimes. I think they’d like someone else to talk their ears off for once.”
“Pel…”
“I know.” They’d had this conversation a million times, clothed and not, between sheets on lazy Saturdays and on floors in the dark, accompanied by furniture in disrepair and unrequited everything. “I’m not asking you to. I know you can’t.”
She scoffed, halfheartedly, fingertips tracing uncharacteristically delicate patterns in the soil. She wasn’t looking at him. “You make it sound like I’m incapable of this shit.”
Pelna shrugged. “Maybe you are.” He hadn’t meant for his words to sound so selfishly hollow, but it was the real parts of him that she liked, anyway. The kind of like that said, let’s be passionately angry, angrily passionate, both, all the time, everywhere, and never said, I love you, too.
A fucking firecracker, she was.
He’d see plenty of them tonight. Eve of the treaty, and everything.
He doesn’t even know how long it’s been since she came back in a bag. What her last thought was. What her last word was. He couldn’t even bear to see the body. Couldn’t even pay her that single stupid respect. Nyx had to tell him everything. That they found her laying with flies and hauled her to a room that bespoke nothing but cold, clinical isolation. The spidery veins that ran like mascara down the tops of her cheeks, her eyes like smoky glass, every nuance in her expression a scream.
He’d never known her to be so scared.
He’d never known Libertus to be, either. But maybe that wasn’t why they’d woken up to direct-to-voicemail calls his uniform tossed in a haphazard pile by his locker in the barracks.
He has to be careful now. Can’t upset the soil. Can’t throw off the balance of something trying to live. Maybe he should be taking a leaf out of their books—and maybe he shouldn’t be making such stupid puns—if he only knew how to do that in the first place.
Maybe this is the first place. Nyx and Libertus had the training ground; Pelna saw them seated there once, broken men with swinging legs and murmurs about fire and promise. Luche must have grieved somewhere, for all their bickering. Who is he kidding?
On a Wednesday, Pelna took her to the herb garden, and she asked, in a soft tone he could have sworn she saved only for him, “Which one’s your favorite?” Like a friend who had more than a couple of hours left with him.
On instinct, his fingers reached for the basil leaves, and there was a split-second that he stopped himself. Let his fingers curl in, hovering like dowsing rods as they unfurled to brush against a sprig of rosemary. “Tastes like where we come from,” he said. “Sharp. Makes itself known. Sticks with you after you’ve had your fill.” He spared her a glance then, at the hard light in her eyes, the length of dark lashes, every attentive part of her. “Tastes like you.”
He saw more than he heard her sharp breath, and her eyes never left him. (He can still see it now. The invitation. The click in her mind.) “Do you want to come home tonight?” she said.
Pelna pressed his lips together, a hard, firm line, and his voice cracked when he spoke. “I can’t.”
He peels his gloves off now, presses his palms flat into the dirt, and shuts his eyes tight. He could have said he loved her again. Should have. Sure, she might have rolled her eyes, given him that publicly-safe shove. Or maybe she might have lowered her gaze and shaken her head. Anything would have been better than the near-audible crack in her expression, the almost-silent “Oh” that left her lips before she clapped him on the shoulder and said she’d see him at first light.
She’s left him a man of the earth twice now—maybe more. Left him a cluster of those flashbulb memories. People. Power. Fists. Lips. Love. Parsley. Sage. Thyme. Infrastructure. Everything.
His eyes well with tears, and they seep into the ground before he has a chance to catch them, trickle down the back of his hand when he reaches for the rosemary she touched before. (He read somewhere that human skin changes every seven years. How long before she’s never touched rosemary? How long before she’s never touched him?)
Spindles poke at his skin, sharp and wooden and alive, and he buries his face in the crook of his elbow.
Salt is never good for these poor things.
