flower power

daughter of the soil

[willowxaisley]

ohspecters:

The wormwood and Solomon’s Seal had been lit to agitate a spirit into confession. It made the process of sin-eating that much easier, but alas, he had cancelled his evening’s appointments despite his usually unshakable nature. But the provisions remained, spread around him in a perfect arc, untouched, unchanged. He had never felt so heavy, so anchored, so stuck. He was keenly aware of the ache in his bones, of the dryness in his throat, and the nauseating churn of his empty stomach. He needed to close his eyes and drift. He needed to detach.

Willow stepped around the corner, and he let out a breath as if he needed to prepare to look upon her face. But he didn’t.

Her sister had come to him countless times over the last few days, and it was for that reason alone that he knew why Gaia’s helper had left the comforting green archways of her garden to visit his tomb. Her parents had died in the licking flames that razed their woods.

“Was it?” he asked, unsure what made a dance nice.

He found it strange that she was able to look past her own grief to see that he was suffering. No one was ever able to do that. It was a sign of someone lost, of someone struggling. It was a sign that she was burying her sadness like bulbs in the earth.

His eyebrows dipped into the middle of his forehead, and he finally straightened his spine and stood.

“I know what you’re going to ask me.” He met her eyes and felt the walls around his heart tumbling down.

It was one of the last moments Willow had felt safe, that stupid little handful of minutes the two of them chatted and swayed along the floor of the lodge. Willow swallowed hard and nodded before she realized he wasn’t actually looking at her. “It was,” she murmured, taking small and hesitant steps further into his sanctuary.

She ceased the advance when he stood, all at once adopting that intensity Willow sometimes saw flare to life when that mortal root of him put its foot down. His words were disheartening, but not entirely surprising, and she heaved a sigh, coming the rest of the way forward to meet him at his desk. “I had a feeling you may have known,” she replied, exhaustion and defeat in her flattened tone.

“Do you know why?” she continued, the glaze over her eyes thickening, threatening to spill over as she blinked them away. “Why this happened? Why them? Why I couldn’t…I couldn’t even take their remains, Micah. Why?”

[willowxaisley]

ohspecters:

Wormwood burned with Solomon’s Seal in a rusted, silver bowl upon his altar. The scent of privet rose up, sweet and earthy and familiar. The hour was still early, but he hadn’t taken another patron in hours. The rooms had gone quiet, and cold, without the echo of footsteps, or even the sound of a page turning. Today had been a difficult day. So many had died, and countless spirits had washed up upon the shores of his bleeding mind, knocking on every door, waiting for answers he couldn’t give.

The living showed up, too. Their eyes glassy and distant, their voices far away.

They’d buried a child in the early morning, and while the fires in the mountains still hadn’t gone out, the chill in the air hadn’t disappeared. The girl’s father had come to his shop after the service, his eyes running, and his breath caught in his throat. He’d asked to speak with Maggie, and Micah had foolishly obliged.

By the end of the day, Micah’s soul felt old and ragged, as if it had lived through centuries of grief. He cursed himself, his magick. What relief had he really offered the man? The truth was, Micah had given him nothing, only fully-realized sorrow. And then, helpless, Micah watched as the grey-faced man sobbed into hands, and folded a wallet-sized photo over and over until it began to fall apart. 

How many hours had he sat there in silence, trying to empty his mind of the girl’s voice? Then he heard the unmistakable sound of his front door scraping across the hardwood. Had he forgotten to lock it?

“Back here,” he barked, pressing his thumb against the space between his eyebrows. It was Willow.

Willow heard his voice blare abruptly from a back room of the building, and wasted little time in following it to its source. She smelled the herbs burning before she even gently nudged open the door. Was he praying? Or preparing? Willow could usually got a surprisingly good read on people if she could be bothered to focus on them enough, but with all her efforts, she felt like she wasn’t any closer to fully comprehending Micah’s uniquely tortured perspective.

Stepping into the room, she’d typically allow herself to succumb to her impulse to apologize for her interruption. Her family had instilled a deep sense of humility in her--they were the attendants of the soil, little more than the tools of Mother Earth. They had no business intruding in the matters of those of such higher station.

But her family was gone, and she simply couldn’t be bothered wasting breath on pointless apologies.

“It was a nice dance, that we had, Micah,” she started, quiet as usual, but decidedly more detached. “Before people started dying, it was a decent night out. I can...only imagine how dreadful this has been to you.”

[willowxaisley]

Willow had tried to push away the thought of seeing Micah Shipley again ever since that night. But nothing got better, it just got…further. The sad thing was still sad, but now if felt more distant, like the person touched by tragedy was left in its wake, and the person waking up in Willow’s bed every morning was a stranger, someone who never had a family, and didn’t have to worry or grieve. Part of her was relieved, and part of her alarmed by this development. When she found out about Amos, she couldn’t rest anymore. His infamous insomnia transferred to her, or perhaps her mind was doomed to run a hamster wheel of mourning.

And so it was that Willow wound up standing in the entryway of Mediumshipleys, looking around with a hint of curiosity and little else. The light that flickered in her eyes was guttering; even the clarity in her hazel hues had clouded over with murk and misery that would never escape her lips. “Micah?” she called out, soft but clear through the dusty old shop. “Are you in?”

[willowxaisley]

“If I can then why shouldn’t I?” Thomas retorted back “An’ stop apologizin all the damned time, if ya got a fuggin’ opinion then say it.” He took a step forward as she backed away, hating that she always wilted. “Conflate? Jesus, Willah…” He heaved an exasperated sigh as he pinched the bridge of his nose once again, taking guess at what conflate meant. “I’m not overworkin myself, I’m not workin at all and it’s just makin it all worse.” Being a mechanic was all he knew, it was all he had done nearly every day for as long as he could remember. He didn’t take sick days, he didn’t take personal days, and the only reason he took one day off a week was because he was forced to.

Being out of commission very well may push him over the edge, he didn’t know how to not be what he’d always been. He didn’t like change. “I’m fine, all I need is to be left alone and not be told what the Hell I can ‘n can not do. I’m grown.” He grumbled, trailing off and turning away from her “I need a cigarette…” He would regret this right about the time he stepped outside, Willow didn’t deserve his anger but he didn’t know how not to displace it.

He advanced at her retreat, and Willow froze as Judas aired his complaints. Sometimes, when he said to leave him alone, he didn’t seem to mean it. Either way, it didn’t matter, because she was going to get him to shut up and listen to her, even if she had to try a different tongue. Maybe she would have shut down before everything that had happened the past week, but she was beginning to understand that this was a test. The smoke was clearing, and she saw the horror that could live inside a person, and she just couldn’t watch hate and anger eat a person alive until they were like those murderers.

She looked stunned as Judas turned to walk away, but really, she was trying to pull herself together and summon the gall to confront him. She couldn’t understand how he could be so brash and direct sometimes; really, it was one of the things she sort of admired him for. In this moment, she wished she could have been more like him. This was what he needed to hear, and he wasn’t in the mood to listen if she said it softly and vaguely.

He was already out front smoking a cigarette when she came out the door, her lips pressed into a thin line, her posture wired. “Judas, now just you listen,” she shook her finger in his face, her eyebrows contracting. “You say you’re grown, but that was about the most childish behavior I’ve ever seen in a grown man. I understand you’re in pain, I know you don’t want my sympathy but I can’t help who I care for,” her voice broke just slightly, and she swallowed hard, then in a bold move that surprised even her, reached up to snatch his cigarette out of his hand and took a long, slow drag.

“Not all of us suffered such physical wounds,” she noted pointedly, handing him back his smoke. “But I think I would rather suffer the blisters, the scars, than the nauseating churn of loss in my stomach. If you think…” she voice trembled again, and she closed her eyes, shook her head, cleared her throat. “If you think I’m going to let you have this temper tantrum while your life is possibly in danger, you can…” she paused, searching. “fuck off, right? That’s what you’d say.”

[emilybrowningfans]

Emily Browning for Objects Without Meaning (x)