(I asked my friend @itsalwaysbloodmagic for a character to write about, since I already had the setting / mood / atmosphere in mind. It’s been raining in my city for the past ten days, with little letup.)
(Tag for this is now long rains. The stories aren’t related, they all just happen to have the same mood.)
Quick Fic Pick 65: say do you hear the distant drums?
He has to catch his breath when he finally turns his steps in the direction of the familiar path, the familiar arch of the trees in their overhead whispers and the careful considered gaps in their leaf-green canopies, their laden branches reaching up into a sky full of clouds and seeming to cradle the rain and the sun alike: the rain that falls in wandering wind-wisps, not even a drizzle; and the sunlight in its pallid shafts, that barely warm, that barely illuminate.
The world, the afternoon, stock-still and paralyzed in the unending rain: and this is not the place where he was born, and this is not the place where he first became friends with a boy who smiled too much and laughed like he was slitting throats, who talked and talked and talked and never failed to push everyone else to do better, if only to shut him up. A boy who smiled and laughed and talked and never let on that he’d been weeping, that he’d been mourning, cast adrift into a world rumbling with discontent from the moment he’d left his dying mother’s womb.
This is not the place where he became friends with that boy. That other place is gone, is vividly and viscerally gone, without even the dust left to remember it by, and Libertus is -- must be -- one of the last to still remember it. One of the last, and him only in his thirties, just edging over onto the frontiers of middle age, and he’s the one who remembers and he has to carry those memories all by himself -- as heavy as millstones, he thinks, as heavy as the supplies he’s just taken delivery of a few hours ago. Even people lost in their memories, even people who’ve been mortally displaced, have to eat: and tomorrow, he’ll be back in the kitchens. Tomorrow he’ll be cooking those old well-worn dishes in their vast pots and pans and their unending quantities: people have to eat and people have to remember and he can help. He can do that. He’s dedicated himself to that.
Now, though, in this rain-soaked afternoon, he tends to his other self-appointed tasks: and the bunch of wild roses in his hand drips, and the colors run off onto his skin in their shouting pinks, and the scent of them is spice-faint and drowning in the mists that are now creeping up around the toppled stones, the flat-worn markers that he passes by.
Hood down, and umbrella furled, when he gets to the end of the path: when he gets to the tree and, hidden in the knurled tangle of its old roots, not a stone and not a marker but something living, instead.
The vines that twine carefully around that tree-trunk and give it the illusion that it might still be able to put forth new growths. New leaves.
Carefully, piece by piece, stem by stem, Libertus winds the wild roses into the vines. Decorates the old dead tree with fresh new growth, fresh new color, and when he’s done his nose is running, and his shoulders are shaking with more than just the slicing cruel winds that blow here, because there are no leaves to shelter him, because the branches of this tree that soars still above him are bare and blighted and have been, since the night he’d lost almost everything, and had to start over.
And he tries to stand up straight. Tries to blink away his tears and the spitting rain. Tries to smile.
He doesn’t hold the words back, when they come, after a long breathless pause. “There were these kids on the sidewalk, the other day,” he says, speaking as though the tree can hear him. Speaking as though the roses might turn toward him and drink in his tale. “Kids in -- costumes. Like they were going to some kind of parade. I know there aren’t any holidays. Not important. What’s important is what they were doing -- something I’d never seen before. Something good.”
He smiles, and he tries to remember the light in those youngsters’ eyes: the girl with the braids woven into her halo of blonde hair, in a scarlet dress decorated in gold. The two boys flanking her, who held her hands, one in black and one in white, play-swords and play-guns belted at their waists. The girl whose silver hair contrasted with the stark mourning black of her ragged skirts, and the barefoot girl who’d been wearing a mocked-up gentleman’s coat over knee-length shorts.
Libertus tries to sing, now, tries to sing the words they’d hastily scribbled down for him, on a torn piece of receipt: For the wretched of the earth there is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.
He fails. He knows and he knows there’s no shame in his broken voice. It’s the man buried beneath this tree who’d been able to sing: and it had been his last act, singing, singing and giving up his last breath, so Libertus can be here, so he can sing to the tree and sing to the roses, and the rain falls onto his wavering notes, falls onto the color running from the petals.
