When the Sun Comes Back
Dec. 31st, 2015 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinonFandom: Fire Emblem 6-7
Characters: Canas, Niime
Word count: ~4900
Warnings: Horror elements, language, MULTI-GENERATIONAL FAMILY DRAMA. Some kind of experimental stuff going on here with the prose style as well?
Notes: I said I'd finish one more fic this year, and hell if I didn't cut it close, but. Hey. Still got in before the cutoff. DOES ANYONE WANT TO SEE UNDEAD CANAS? AND MY CONTINUED AWKWARD ATTEMPTS AT NIIME?
Set in between games.
He steps out of the blackness and stands blinking. It's some time since he's seen light. It's some time since he's seen anything at all. A breeze ruffles his hair, but he doesn't quite understand. He doesn't remember the concept of wind or of feeling until it's already gone.
He starts noticing sounds a little later on, and that surprises him almost as badly.
He's so cold.
He is hiking up a mountain, though he doesn't know it. He hasn't remembered mountains yet – he's a bit fuzzy on topography in general – and in his head he's just been calling it the up. He's hiking up the up. He has some vague idea of there being something at the peak (though “peak” is another word he hasn't found yet; for now he's going with “uppermost.” He was pleased with himself for recalling that one. It's got more syllables than most of his vocabulary at this time).
He may not know where, who, what, when, or how he is, but he feels cheerful about his prospects. At this rate he'll remember how to be a human being in no time at all. A human being, with arms and legs and a clever brain and all of those things. He's gotten quite interested in how all this is going to turn out.
He is going up, and not tripping on his robes nearly as often as when he started out. So things seem to be working out on the legs side of the equation. Maybe he should try his hands too. He stops and looks down at them. Some of his fingers are black at the tips. He has no idea whether this is worth comment or not, but the rest of his – bone clothes? No, skin, that's the word, skin – the rest of it is fairly pale.
The contrast is striking, that's all.
He bends and unbends his fingers. With practice, he can do that and walk at the same time without falling over. This is good.
At the uppermost he finds a living thing and is so struck by its beauty – and how much he missed living things, though he didn't know it until now – that he nearly weeps. It is a short, bent creature, but he can see the light of vitality that flickers around it.
It's staring at him. He puts his head to one side and squints at it, wondering if it's something he should recognize.
“Canas,” it says.
He mouths the word back to it: Canas? And raises a finger to point at himself, quizzically.
“No mistaking it,” it says. “You still had a complete nose last I saw you” - it sniffs loudly - “for that matter, you still had a pulse. But I know who you are. Better than you do, I'm sure.”
They stare at each other in silence for several seconds.
He blinks. “Mother?” he says.
She relaxes a little. “Good. You know me.”
Giddy with the rediscovery of speech, he says the next thing that comes to mind: “I'm cold.”
“Maybe I can do something about that,” she says. “You can come inside, at least. But either way, young man, you are telling me everything. You've been dead a long time – how did you come back? Why now? How much power does it take to cross?”
He can't keep up with the questions, so he just smiles at her. A person! Speaking to him! He nearly forgot what that felt like.
“Well, clearly you're not all there just yet. If you ever will be.” His mother takes his elbow and starts steering him somewhere, and he doesn't resist. “But I'm getting my answers, son. Count on it.”
As an afterthought, she says, “Welcome back.”
His lips are blue, and there are fine fracture lines in his face where water froze and the ice broke his skin. They don't bleed. He puts the mirror down. “I died?” he says, in an attempt to make conversation.
“Exposure,” she says, “if you hadn't guessed. Damned stupid of you. Trying to fight the weather.”
“Did it work?”
“The storm might have shifted. Half a league or so. I don't know.”
He looks down at the cup of soup in his hands. He hasn't decided yet whether he's going to try to eat it. He's not sure he remembers how it's done. So he just keeps holding it, hoping the heat will soak into his hands. It hasn't yet. “Weather,” he mumbles to himself, trying the word out, searching for an appropriate memory. “Storm.”
“As near as I can figure it, at your last extremity you must have given yourself to the darkness. And now the darkness has spat you back out.”
“The darkness,” he says. The saying of it feels familiar; the word is comfortable in his cold-stiffened mouth. “Yes.”
Mother shifts and looks at him closely across the fire. Her eyes are sharp. “Do you remember, then?”
He frowns, and the expression cracks the skin of his forehead. Snow melt seeps out, running cold over his brow – the feeling is very distracting. He loses the thought.
Mother grabs one of his hands. “Canas. Tell me what you know.”
“Not many,” he says at last. He corrects himself: “Not... much. The cold most of all.”
She lets go of his hand and sits back. Now she's frowning too. It hurts knowing he is the reason; he didn't mean to displease her. “Perhaps it's too early to push you,” she says.
“I'll try hard.”
She smiles with half her mouth. “You always were my success story.”
There are other men in the back room. They turn as one to stare at him when he comes in. They say something without sound. Mother pulls him back; her fingernails catch in the tatters of his robe.
She closes the door. She smooths herself down, and then him, and then leaves. Hours later, he thinks he has pieced together another new concept – but he's not sure. When he steps back and looks at the whole thing, it seems wrong. Mother is not a person who feels fear.
At night he lies down. He remembers this clearly: at night, you lie down.
He isn't sure what comes after that, or if lying down serves a purpose. Maybe people only do it to stay out of trouble in the dark. They can't see as well without the sun. Maybe there is a universal agreement that one stays quiet and waits for it to come back.
He is an agreeable person. He waits for the sun.
Eventually this bores him. He is starting to have questions. He gets up from the bed (how odd that people take lying-down-in-the-dark so seriously, that they have big things made of wood and cloth just for that purpose) and goes to find Mother.
She's sitting in a chair by the fire, and doesn't seem to be doing anything. She opens one eye as he approaches. “Can't sleep?” she says.
“Sleep?”
“You close your eyes and your consciousness stops for a while.”
The idea gives him an unpleasant feeling. “I don't want that.” The words seem inadequate, but they are all he has. He knows he was smarter than this once. Before.
“Too much like death for you, hm?” She shifts. Her bones make sounds, creaking and snapping. He realizes she is old. “Never had much use for the practice myself. Oneiromancy's one thing – one mostly rubbish thing -” She stops, and gives him a look. “Do you follow a word I'm saying?”
He is not supposed to lie to her. Ever.
He says, “I'm trying.”
She sighs. “Come and sit with me, then, and let me look at you.”
Of course he'll let her look at him. It never occurred to him there was a way to stop her. He thinks – some weirdly treasonous part of him thinks – he might like it if there were. Her eyes are on him all the time. They have been since he came here. She is watching him fail to be what he once was. But he doesn't say any of this. He sits down opposite her, before the fire, and they stare at each other.
She says, at length, “There are no records of anyone like you before.”
“No?”
She shakes her head slowly. “There are no records, but there are... myths. If you stay here with me, we can sort them out together. Cleave the truth from the superstition. We'll find out what you are, what you can do, and what you can't. I've already been taking notes, in fact.”
This sounds sensible. Mother was always sensible. She always found things out, and he always helped. He can't remember specifics, but he knows that – so it's only natural, now that he has returned, that things will go on the same way.
But she said something strange just now. His brow furrows. He says, “Why 'if?'”
“It's been a long time since you lived here. Things have changed in ways that may not agree with you.” She shrugs. “I think you'll have a harder time elsewhere. With me, you'll be safer, and you'll get answers. But.” Her expression turned cold. Her voice deepened. “Whatever is animating you now, it likely has a purpose. And if that purpose takes you from here, I doubt I have the standing to quarrel.”
“Purpose,” he mutters, testing it out. “Purpose.” Nothing. He doesn't know what his purpose is, or if he has one. He gives Mother an apologetic look.
“Then I'll observe you as long as I'm able. We both stand to learn a great deal.”
Silence.
It will be a long time until the sun returns. There must be something else to do until then. There must be some other way to pass the time. He looks at Mother. She is still conscious; her eyes are still open and still staring at him. He fumbles at an idea more complicated than anything he's yet managed to put into words. At last he says, haltingly, “Is that... all we say?”
“What?”
“Are there... things... for saying. Other things.” He bites his lip. It's too hard. He should never have even tried. But if he gives up now before she's understood him, that look on her face won't change. That look says he's not useful. He waves his hands. “Do we – before, did we – is the darkness everything?”
Her eyes narrow. She says, “You're asking if we ever talk about anything besides magic?”
He nods vigorously. He admires her clarity of thought. Maybe resents it, too. Maybe it's annoying that he doesn't have it anymore. Maybe it's sad. “Until the sun comes back,” he says. “Can we?”
She looks amused. “Fine. You want to chat, do you? What about?”
“I don't know. Anything.” Something in the rhythm of the words strikes him. He tries it again. “I don't know anything.”
“I wonder why not,” she says. “You knew quite a bit in life. I wonder why it would only give you back half a mind.”
The darkness again. The darkness and his death. Very well. If those are the only subjects she wants to speak on, he'll ask her about them until she has nothing left to say. It's better than the silence. It's better than sitting in the night and thinking about how hard it is to think. “Where did I die?”
She eyes him shrewdly. “I think the more useful question is where you came back to. But I don't suppose your sense of direction is up to answering that. Maybe when the snow thaws you can lead me there, but I'm not going tromping aimlessly around after a dead man in this time of year.”
He asks again, “Where did I die?”
“Would it mean anything to you?” she says. “Do you know where you are now?”
“Your house.”
She rolls her eyes. “All right, clever britches. Do you know what country?”
That he doesn't. But it shouldn't matter. There shouldn't be any harm in the question. “You won't tell me.”
“That I won't.”
“Why?”
“Doesn't concern you.”
He is fairly certain it does. He thinks his own death concerns him pretty intimately. He can't articulate that. He thumps a hand against his chest – he doesn't know what the gesture means – and says, indignantly, “Yes.”
“Don't get so upset.”
“Yes,” he says again, the most assertive thing he can manage.
She sighs. “When you learned the storm was coming, you went out a few leagues to try to stop it. It still did considerable damage when it arrived, so your sacrifice did little if anything to blunt its impact. Like I told you before.”
She says nothing more. At length he ventures, “You don’t like how I died. You don’t… approve.”
“It was foolishly done.” And she stops looking at him.
She does not resume, and he thinks, since her desire to look at him was why he sat down here, that means it’s time to go. So he rises, mumbles something, and goes back to the room he first lay down in, so that he will not bother her while he waits for the sun’s return.
Of course, he doesn’t “sleep,” whatever that means. Instead he lies quietly and thinks. He could not see a storm coming for leagues, not here in the mountains. So how did he know it was coming? How did he go out to find it?
He remembers a shadow at his side. A presence out of the corner of his eyes. He is sure now, somehow, that somebody told him it was coming. Maybe somebody who went with him.
It is still some time before true dawn, but the sky is lightening in the east. He goes back to Mother.
“When I died.” He takes a breath. “There was more than one.” He looks at Mother. Her face does not change. “I was not … alone. Was I?”
Mother is silent a while. At last she says, “Your wife died in that storm with you.”
“I have a wife,” he says, at first astonished, but then it starts to make sense. “Yes.” He flexes his fingers and stares at them contemplatively. He can remember: there was warmth there once. “Her hand. Her hand was in mine.” He clasps both his hands together to try to recapture the feeling, but his skin is thin and clammy and starting to wear away. His dead flesh is a poor substitute. “We both went. I was with her. I was always...” It isn't true. He wasn't always with her. They were often apart for some time, when he still did whatever he did in life. Why does he want to say it wasn't so? Why does he want to think he was at her side at all times? “I was in a war...” The impressions are crowding in on him now, more memories than he has had since he came out of the dark, and he doesn't know what to do with them, or what they mean. “I came back.”
He came back, on a day not unlike this. It was cold and bright. She was holding something. She ran out to meet him. They both smiled. They both cried. He remembers that, and he remembers her face, and he remembers that he loves her. What he doesn't remember...
He pulls himself out of the memories and back into the present. He looks at Mother. “Tell me her name.”
“You don't remember?”
He wants to point out that he didn't remember his own name until she told him. He wants to say that he knows she has a name that isn't “Mother” but he can't seem to find it now. But these mean nothing. These are excuses. He doesn't remember his wife's name, the name of the woman who died with her hand in his. It is betrayal. He doesn't know whether he or the darkness is to blame, or if there is any distinction. He says, “Please.”
She tells him.
He repeats it. He bows his head. “I'm sorry.” Eventually he looks up again. “Where is she?”
“Canas,” Mother says, and then hesitates. In a tone he has not heard from her before, she finally continues, “She wasn't one of us. The elder magic wasn't in her as it is in you.”
“She hasn't come back yet.”
“No.”
“When?”
Mother looks uneasy. It's an unfamiliar sight. “For her, there is no way back.”
“She... stays?”
“It brings me no joy to tell you this, but yes. She’ll stay dead.”
“Why?”
“I told you why.”
“But she – but I – should be with her. When I... came back, I said I... wouldn't leave again.”
“As far as she knows, you didn't. You died together. That was the end for her. She can't be aware of what's happening now.”
“But!” He can't find the words. He tries to tap his hand against his chest again to indicate himself, and somehow accidentally punches himself in the clavicle. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt, but his hands don't work right, even now. “But I know. I know... that I...”
There isn't much that he knows. Not anymore. He sinks down and lowers his hands, despairing. Why did the darkness let him go? Why is he back here, in this imperfect form, and without her?
The men in the back room. The men Mother didn't want him to speak to. They knew him. They knew what he was for. Their mouths made shapes that spelled out secrets -
The magic that soaks through this tattered body is waking up. It doesn't feel the same way it did when he was alive. It's more immediate now, more visceral. He can feel his blood starting to move, for the first time since he came back, and it is the magic that's pushing it, the magic rising like a tide. He knows what those men said to him. The rough wood of the chair in which he sits begins to warp and swell and dribble toward the floor. He stands up. “I want her here. I will... bring her back.”
He tastes ozone. Holes are opening and closing erratically in the air around him. He knows how to do it. He knows how, if he can only withstand -
Mother's hands are on his arms. Mother's eyes are wide. “Stop. Stop this foolishness at once.”
Why would he stop? “I love...”
“You can't imagine what would happen if -” He closes his eyes. She shakes him. Her voice cracks out: “You have to control it! It will swallow you again, count on it – do you really think you can escape twice? In the shape you're in now?”
“I miss...”
“That doesn't matter now!” She isn't letting go, and it begins to annoy him. “Fine, it does matter – but you can't do anything about it. Son, listen to me. Do you want to share this existence with her? This miserable half a life? Do you want her to see you this way? Do you want to see her become the same?” The magic is still rising, about to break through his skin. She shakes him harder. “Canas! Do you think that would make anyone happy? Do you think that would solve a single damned thing? Does anyone want to see someone they love reduced to this?” He opens his eyes. Her face is strangely contorted. “What you miss about her is her humanity. Herself. You won't be able to give that back. She's too far gone. I'm starting to wonder if you aren't, too.”
He thinks – maybe – she is suffering. He never thought she was someone who suffered. He doesn't want to be the cause. “Mother...”
Then her tone changes again, and once more she's all business. “Still with me? Good. Now, it's like when you were young. You can't let it go of all this power at once, or it'll snap back on you. Remember what I taught you. Control your breath. Concentrate on the proper runes – shit, please tell me you remember the runes -”
“I remember.”
“Gods know I went to enough effort drilling them into you. All right, Canas. Show me what you can do.”
It takes time to subdue the magic, and more time to let the extra finish trickling safely out of his hands. When it's done, he falls on her.
“Amateurish,” she mutters, just managing to hold them both upright. He embraces her. She seems surprised. On reflection, he doesn't remember the last time he's done so – but there's so much he doesn't remember, that may not mean anything. “Canas,” she says, and then a short time later, “Never mind.” He straightens himself out, and in that pause she breathes in and out a few times before she goes on. “Don't do that again.”
He’s so relieved to be in control of himself again that he forgets what it was all for, just for a moment. Now he looks aside and says, reluctantly, “She stays dead?”
“She stays dead. There's nothing to gain by looking for her, and a great deal to lose.”
All at once he is tired. He has known all this time that his body is flimsy and broken and shouldn't be able to work even as poorly as it does, that he's held together only by a thread, but – he feels it now, like he didn't before. This leaden fatigue may be the closest he can come to pain. He sits down. The chair isn't in the same shape it was before his episode, and it splinters, dumping him on the floor. He spares no thought for the indignity and makes no move to get up again. “Then all that's left...” He taps the side of his skull with one finger. “I have to keep her in my head. All that I can.”
“That's right. Do your best to hold onto the memories that you have.” She shifts and looks out the window. “You may want me to say something sentimental and reassuring, but I won't.”
“Do you want to?”
“What a stupid question.” She keeps looking out at the mountain. Her tone is casual. “Did you recognize your brothers? I've tried to remember them, too. I suppose it's normal human weakness, wanting that to count for anything.” Now she does look at him. “You were the only one of my children I didn't destroy.”
He knows she's saying something important, but he can't follow it. He can't figure out what's hiding in the shadows of her words, and eventually he gives up. What he has to do is remember. So he calls the image back into his mind, that of his wife coming to meet him at the door. This is what remains of her. If he can keep hold of this image, she'll always be there. Coming to meet him. Holding something -
Holding something.
Something she is handing to him. Something wrapped up in cloth, something
Someone
“Hugh.”
“Hugh,” Mother echoes, softly, looking resigned.
Canas gets up again, a quick and clumsy scramble, and braces himself on the fireplace. “Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Take me to him. Please. I have to.” He forgot his wife. He forgot their child. All this after he promised he wouldn't leave again. So he has to – he doesn't know what. But he has to. “Take me to my son.”
“He isn't here now.”
“Take me where he is.” He clasps his hands together before him in entreaty. “Please.”
She shakes her head. “I'm not taking you anywhere as you are. You'd attract attention I don't think you're prepared to deal with.” Canas tries to protest, but can't think of words, so all that happens is his mouth falls open and he sits and stares at her. “He'll be coming back here, though. Tomorrow, if he hasn't been lollygagging. I sent him on some errands -”
Canas is aghast. “No! He can't... he's too small.”
“He's sixteen come spring.”
He sinks back. “No.” That isn’t possible. Hugh is very young, he’s sure of it.
“I told you. You've been dead for some time.”
“No...” It seems to be all he can say. So much passed by him in the time he was gone. Maybe the cruelty was not in leaving, but in coming back afterward.
“So. We have a little time to decide whether you should meet him, and if so, how.”
“I want to.” Cold water is gathering in his eyelids, but it is not tears. All the fragile ductwork around his eyes was destroyed by the thawing and freezing and thawing of water in the membranes of his face, so that isn't possible.
“But will he want the same?”
He wants to say yes at once. Something stops him. He fumbles across her table, picks up the hand mirror she gave him on arrival. He looks at his face. He looks at her face. He thinks of the faces of the other men - his brothers. People who are still alive. He doesn’t look like them. There’s no disguising it.
He’ll explain himself, he thinks. He’ll simply talk to his son, and then everything will be all right. Then he reflects on how well he’s been communicating since he returned, and has to concede that no, this isn’t likely.
Well, Mother wasn’t afraid of him. Mother wasn’t revolted. Maybe Hugh will -
He remembers sitting in the study, showing Hugh the diagrams in a Flux tome, hoping to share the wonder and the mystery that had consumed his life and eliciting only terrified screams. He remembers that for a week the child did not sleep. He remembers realizing that Hugh was afraid of books now - of all books - and feeling this as a sudden and heartbreaking rift between them, and wondering if they would ever truly understand each other. Hugh’s mother had eventually coaxed him to regard books as friends again, but still the boy wanted nothing to do with anything from Papa’s shelf.
Canas closes his eyes. He will fear me, he thinks. He will hate me if he didn’t already. “No. You’re right. But… I wish him good things.” And he does, sincerely. No matter how completely he forgot his existence. No matter how totally he forgot everything that mattered.
He opens his eyes and looks at Mother again. He knows now that he won’t stay here. Something in her face tells him that she knows it too. “You didn’t tell me,” he says. “About my family. I forgot, but… You never said I had one.”
“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“You waited. For me to learn it.”
“I half-hoped you wouldn’t. I knew where it would lead. You’re a good scholar, but you always were too sentimental.”
“This is not” - he takes great care to shape the word - “sen-ti-ment. This is… I deserve...”
“Perhaps so. But I’m an old woman, you know. I’ve made my mistakes, and I’ve committed to them many times over. Grown attached to them, you might say. I won’t change now.”
He bows his head. “If I stayed. When Hugh came back. What then?”
“I’d find some way to hide you from him.” She smiles bitterly. “I’ve no shortage of other secrets from the boy.”
“I’m… secret.”
“You agree, then. He isn’t to be told you came here. It would distress him.” It isn’t phrased as a question, but she cocks her head and waits for him to speak, as if his opinion holds some weight. Suddenly he’s not sure it ever did when he was alive. He never found that out. He never contradicted her.
And he can’t now. “He would be afraid.” He always was. “He wouldn’t... like me like this.” If the boy remembers his parents, let him keep that. Let him never learn that one of them is a monster.
He looks out the window. “Was she buried?” He will not leave again.
She disclaims everything she calls sentiment, but Mother still understands at once. “There’s a stone in her memory a little east of here. That’s all. The signs were clear enough you two were gone; there wasn’t time to dig through that snowdrift to find all the remains.” She pauses. “Hugh will be coming back from the west. You won’t run into each other there.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“Well, it was nice of you to stop by,” she says wryly. Pretending this is all in a day’s work. Pretending she didn’t mean to keep him here and study him, too. “Though it’s a shame you had to come back to this.”
He crosses the floor to the entrance. Then something strikes him. “Mother,” he says, standing on the threshold. “Did the dark... let me go, or did you call for me?”
She turns her back on him. “I know I talked to you about stupid questions.”
The sun comes back, clawing its way over the cold and mountainous horizon line, tinging the sky pink and scattering across the snow. And Canas goes away, back to ice and dark.
Characters: Canas, Niime
Word count: ~4900
Warnings: Horror elements, language, MULTI-GENERATIONAL FAMILY DRAMA. Some kind of experimental stuff going on here with the prose style as well?
Notes: I said I'd finish one more fic this year, and hell if I didn't cut it close, but. Hey. Still got in before the cutoff. DOES ANYONE WANT TO SEE UNDEAD CANAS? AND MY CONTINUED AWKWARD ATTEMPTS AT NIIME?
Set in between games.
He steps out of the blackness and stands blinking. It's some time since he's seen light. It's some time since he's seen anything at all. A breeze ruffles his hair, but he doesn't quite understand. He doesn't remember the concept of wind or of feeling until it's already gone.
He starts noticing sounds a little later on, and that surprises him almost as badly.
He's so cold.
He is hiking up a mountain, though he doesn't know it. He hasn't remembered mountains yet – he's a bit fuzzy on topography in general – and in his head he's just been calling it the up. He's hiking up the up. He has some vague idea of there being something at the peak (though “peak” is another word he hasn't found yet; for now he's going with “uppermost.” He was pleased with himself for recalling that one. It's got more syllables than most of his vocabulary at this time).
He may not know where, who, what, when, or how he is, but he feels cheerful about his prospects. At this rate he'll remember how to be a human being in no time at all. A human being, with arms and legs and a clever brain and all of those things. He's gotten quite interested in how all this is going to turn out.
He is going up, and not tripping on his robes nearly as often as when he started out. So things seem to be working out on the legs side of the equation. Maybe he should try his hands too. He stops and looks down at them. Some of his fingers are black at the tips. He has no idea whether this is worth comment or not, but the rest of his – bone clothes? No, skin, that's the word, skin – the rest of it is fairly pale.
The contrast is striking, that's all.
He bends and unbends his fingers. With practice, he can do that and walk at the same time without falling over. This is good.
At the uppermost he finds a living thing and is so struck by its beauty – and how much he missed living things, though he didn't know it until now – that he nearly weeps. It is a short, bent creature, but he can see the light of vitality that flickers around it.
It's staring at him. He puts his head to one side and squints at it, wondering if it's something he should recognize.
“Canas,” it says.
He mouths the word back to it: Canas? And raises a finger to point at himself, quizzically.
“No mistaking it,” it says. “You still had a complete nose last I saw you” - it sniffs loudly - “for that matter, you still had a pulse. But I know who you are. Better than you do, I'm sure.”
They stare at each other in silence for several seconds.
He blinks. “Mother?” he says.
She relaxes a little. “Good. You know me.”
Giddy with the rediscovery of speech, he says the next thing that comes to mind: “I'm cold.”
“Maybe I can do something about that,” she says. “You can come inside, at least. But either way, young man, you are telling me everything. You've been dead a long time – how did you come back? Why now? How much power does it take to cross?”
He can't keep up with the questions, so he just smiles at her. A person! Speaking to him! He nearly forgot what that felt like.
“Well, clearly you're not all there just yet. If you ever will be.” His mother takes his elbow and starts steering him somewhere, and he doesn't resist. “But I'm getting my answers, son. Count on it.”
As an afterthought, she says, “Welcome back.”
His lips are blue, and there are fine fracture lines in his face where water froze and the ice broke his skin. They don't bleed. He puts the mirror down. “I died?” he says, in an attempt to make conversation.
“Exposure,” she says, “if you hadn't guessed. Damned stupid of you. Trying to fight the weather.”
“Did it work?”
“The storm might have shifted. Half a league or so. I don't know.”
He looks down at the cup of soup in his hands. He hasn't decided yet whether he's going to try to eat it. He's not sure he remembers how it's done. So he just keeps holding it, hoping the heat will soak into his hands. It hasn't yet. “Weather,” he mumbles to himself, trying the word out, searching for an appropriate memory. “Storm.”
“As near as I can figure it, at your last extremity you must have given yourself to the darkness. And now the darkness has spat you back out.”
“The darkness,” he says. The saying of it feels familiar; the word is comfortable in his cold-stiffened mouth. “Yes.”
Mother shifts and looks at him closely across the fire. Her eyes are sharp. “Do you remember, then?”
He frowns, and the expression cracks the skin of his forehead. Snow melt seeps out, running cold over his brow – the feeling is very distracting. He loses the thought.
Mother grabs one of his hands. “Canas. Tell me what you know.”
“Not many,” he says at last. He corrects himself: “Not... much. The cold most of all.”
She lets go of his hand and sits back. Now she's frowning too. It hurts knowing he is the reason; he didn't mean to displease her. “Perhaps it's too early to push you,” she says.
“I'll try hard.”
She smiles with half her mouth. “You always were my success story.”
There are other men in the back room. They turn as one to stare at him when he comes in. They say something without sound. Mother pulls him back; her fingernails catch in the tatters of his robe.
She closes the door. She smooths herself down, and then him, and then leaves. Hours later, he thinks he has pieced together another new concept – but he's not sure. When he steps back and looks at the whole thing, it seems wrong. Mother is not a person who feels fear.
At night he lies down. He remembers this clearly: at night, you lie down.
He isn't sure what comes after that, or if lying down serves a purpose. Maybe people only do it to stay out of trouble in the dark. They can't see as well without the sun. Maybe there is a universal agreement that one stays quiet and waits for it to come back.
He is an agreeable person. He waits for the sun.
Eventually this bores him. He is starting to have questions. He gets up from the bed (how odd that people take lying-down-in-the-dark so seriously, that they have big things made of wood and cloth just for that purpose) and goes to find Mother.
She's sitting in a chair by the fire, and doesn't seem to be doing anything. She opens one eye as he approaches. “Can't sleep?” she says.
“Sleep?”
“You close your eyes and your consciousness stops for a while.”
The idea gives him an unpleasant feeling. “I don't want that.” The words seem inadequate, but they are all he has. He knows he was smarter than this once. Before.
“Too much like death for you, hm?” She shifts. Her bones make sounds, creaking and snapping. He realizes she is old. “Never had much use for the practice myself. Oneiromancy's one thing – one mostly rubbish thing -” She stops, and gives him a look. “Do you follow a word I'm saying?”
He is not supposed to lie to her. Ever.
He says, “I'm trying.”
She sighs. “Come and sit with me, then, and let me look at you.”
Of course he'll let her look at him. It never occurred to him there was a way to stop her. He thinks – some weirdly treasonous part of him thinks – he might like it if there were. Her eyes are on him all the time. They have been since he came here. She is watching him fail to be what he once was. But he doesn't say any of this. He sits down opposite her, before the fire, and they stare at each other.
She says, at length, “There are no records of anyone like you before.”
“No?”
She shakes her head slowly. “There are no records, but there are... myths. If you stay here with me, we can sort them out together. Cleave the truth from the superstition. We'll find out what you are, what you can do, and what you can't. I've already been taking notes, in fact.”
This sounds sensible. Mother was always sensible. She always found things out, and he always helped. He can't remember specifics, but he knows that – so it's only natural, now that he has returned, that things will go on the same way.
But she said something strange just now. His brow furrows. He says, “Why 'if?'”
“It's been a long time since you lived here. Things have changed in ways that may not agree with you.” She shrugs. “I think you'll have a harder time elsewhere. With me, you'll be safer, and you'll get answers. But.” Her expression turned cold. Her voice deepened. “Whatever is animating you now, it likely has a purpose. And if that purpose takes you from here, I doubt I have the standing to quarrel.”
“Purpose,” he mutters, testing it out. “Purpose.” Nothing. He doesn't know what his purpose is, or if he has one. He gives Mother an apologetic look.
“Then I'll observe you as long as I'm able. We both stand to learn a great deal.”
Silence.
It will be a long time until the sun returns. There must be something else to do until then. There must be some other way to pass the time. He looks at Mother. She is still conscious; her eyes are still open and still staring at him. He fumbles at an idea more complicated than anything he's yet managed to put into words. At last he says, haltingly, “Is that... all we say?”
“What?”
“Are there... things... for saying. Other things.” He bites his lip. It's too hard. He should never have even tried. But if he gives up now before she's understood him, that look on her face won't change. That look says he's not useful. He waves his hands. “Do we – before, did we – is the darkness everything?”
Her eyes narrow. She says, “You're asking if we ever talk about anything besides magic?”
He nods vigorously. He admires her clarity of thought. Maybe resents it, too. Maybe it's annoying that he doesn't have it anymore. Maybe it's sad. “Until the sun comes back,” he says. “Can we?”
She looks amused. “Fine. You want to chat, do you? What about?”
“I don't know. Anything.” Something in the rhythm of the words strikes him. He tries it again. “I don't know anything.”
“I wonder why not,” she says. “You knew quite a bit in life. I wonder why it would only give you back half a mind.”
The darkness again. The darkness and his death. Very well. If those are the only subjects she wants to speak on, he'll ask her about them until she has nothing left to say. It's better than the silence. It's better than sitting in the night and thinking about how hard it is to think. “Where did I die?”
She eyes him shrewdly. “I think the more useful question is where you came back to. But I don't suppose your sense of direction is up to answering that. Maybe when the snow thaws you can lead me there, but I'm not going tromping aimlessly around after a dead man in this time of year.”
He asks again, “Where did I die?”
“Would it mean anything to you?” she says. “Do you know where you are now?”
“Your house.”
She rolls her eyes. “All right, clever britches. Do you know what country?”
That he doesn't. But it shouldn't matter. There shouldn't be any harm in the question. “You won't tell me.”
“That I won't.”
“Why?”
“Doesn't concern you.”
He is fairly certain it does. He thinks his own death concerns him pretty intimately. He can't articulate that. He thumps a hand against his chest – he doesn't know what the gesture means – and says, indignantly, “Yes.”
“Don't get so upset.”
“Yes,” he says again, the most assertive thing he can manage.
She sighs. “When you learned the storm was coming, you went out a few leagues to try to stop it. It still did considerable damage when it arrived, so your sacrifice did little if anything to blunt its impact. Like I told you before.”
She says nothing more. At length he ventures, “You don’t like how I died. You don’t… approve.”
“It was foolishly done.” And she stops looking at him.
She does not resume, and he thinks, since her desire to look at him was why he sat down here, that means it’s time to go. So he rises, mumbles something, and goes back to the room he first lay down in, so that he will not bother her while he waits for the sun’s return.
Of course, he doesn’t “sleep,” whatever that means. Instead he lies quietly and thinks. He could not see a storm coming for leagues, not here in the mountains. So how did he know it was coming? How did he go out to find it?
He remembers a shadow at his side. A presence out of the corner of his eyes. He is sure now, somehow, that somebody told him it was coming. Maybe somebody who went with him.
It is still some time before true dawn, but the sky is lightening in the east. He goes back to Mother.
“When I died.” He takes a breath. “There was more than one.” He looks at Mother. Her face does not change. “I was not … alone. Was I?”
Mother is silent a while. At last she says, “Your wife died in that storm with you.”
“I have a wife,” he says, at first astonished, but then it starts to make sense. “Yes.” He flexes his fingers and stares at them contemplatively. He can remember: there was warmth there once. “Her hand. Her hand was in mine.” He clasps both his hands together to try to recapture the feeling, but his skin is thin and clammy and starting to wear away. His dead flesh is a poor substitute. “We both went. I was with her. I was always...” It isn't true. He wasn't always with her. They were often apart for some time, when he still did whatever he did in life. Why does he want to say it wasn't so? Why does he want to think he was at her side at all times? “I was in a war...” The impressions are crowding in on him now, more memories than he has had since he came out of the dark, and he doesn't know what to do with them, or what they mean. “I came back.”
He came back, on a day not unlike this. It was cold and bright. She was holding something. She ran out to meet him. They both smiled. They both cried. He remembers that, and he remembers her face, and he remembers that he loves her. What he doesn't remember...
He pulls himself out of the memories and back into the present. He looks at Mother. “Tell me her name.”
“You don't remember?”
He wants to point out that he didn't remember his own name until she told him. He wants to say that he knows she has a name that isn't “Mother” but he can't seem to find it now. But these mean nothing. These are excuses. He doesn't remember his wife's name, the name of the woman who died with her hand in his. It is betrayal. He doesn't know whether he or the darkness is to blame, or if there is any distinction. He says, “Please.”
She tells him.
He repeats it. He bows his head. “I'm sorry.” Eventually he looks up again. “Where is she?”
“Canas,” Mother says, and then hesitates. In a tone he has not heard from her before, she finally continues, “She wasn't one of us. The elder magic wasn't in her as it is in you.”
“She hasn't come back yet.”
“No.”
“When?”
Mother looks uneasy. It's an unfamiliar sight. “For her, there is no way back.”
“She... stays?”
“It brings me no joy to tell you this, but yes. She’ll stay dead.”
“Why?”
“I told you why.”
“But she – but I – should be with her. When I... came back, I said I... wouldn't leave again.”
“As far as she knows, you didn't. You died together. That was the end for her. She can't be aware of what's happening now.”
“But!” He can't find the words. He tries to tap his hand against his chest again to indicate himself, and somehow accidentally punches himself in the clavicle. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt, but his hands don't work right, even now. “But I know. I know... that I...”
There isn't much that he knows. Not anymore. He sinks down and lowers his hands, despairing. Why did the darkness let him go? Why is he back here, in this imperfect form, and without her?
The men in the back room. The men Mother didn't want him to speak to. They knew him. They knew what he was for. Their mouths made shapes that spelled out secrets -
The magic that soaks through this tattered body is waking up. It doesn't feel the same way it did when he was alive. It's more immediate now, more visceral. He can feel his blood starting to move, for the first time since he came back, and it is the magic that's pushing it, the magic rising like a tide. He knows what those men said to him. The rough wood of the chair in which he sits begins to warp and swell and dribble toward the floor. He stands up. “I want her here. I will... bring her back.”
He tastes ozone. Holes are opening and closing erratically in the air around him. He knows how to do it. He knows how, if he can only withstand -
Mother's hands are on his arms. Mother's eyes are wide. “Stop. Stop this foolishness at once.”
Why would he stop? “I love...”
“You can't imagine what would happen if -” He closes his eyes. She shakes him. Her voice cracks out: “You have to control it! It will swallow you again, count on it – do you really think you can escape twice? In the shape you're in now?”
“I miss...”
“That doesn't matter now!” She isn't letting go, and it begins to annoy him. “Fine, it does matter – but you can't do anything about it. Son, listen to me. Do you want to share this existence with her? This miserable half a life? Do you want her to see you this way? Do you want to see her become the same?” The magic is still rising, about to break through his skin. She shakes him harder. “Canas! Do you think that would make anyone happy? Do you think that would solve a single damned thing? Does anyone want to see someone they love reduced to this?” He opens his eyes. Her face is strangely contorted. “What you miss about her is her humanity. Herself. You won't be able to give that back. She's too far gone. I'm starting to wonder if you aren't, too.”
He thinks – maybe – she is suffering. He never thought she was someone who suffered. He doesn't want to be the cause. “Mother...”
Then her tone changes again, and once more she's all business. “Still with me? Good. Now, it's like when you were young. You can't let it go of all this power at once, or it'll snap back on you. Remember what I taught you. Control your breath. Concentrate on the proper runes – shit, please tell me you remember the runes -”
“I remember.”
“Gods know I went to enough effort drilling them into you. All right, Canas. Show me what you can do.”
It takes time to subdue the magic, and more time to let the extra finish trickling safely out of his hands. When it's done, he falls on her.
“Amateurish,” she mutters, just managing to hold them both upright. He embraces her. She seems surprised. On reflection, he doesn't remember the last time he's done so – but there's so much he doesn't remember, that may not mean anything. “Canas,” she says, and then a short time later, “Never mind.” He straightens himself out, and in that pause she breathes in and out a few times before she goes on. “Don't do that again.”
He’s so relieved to be in control of himself again that he forgets what it was all for, just for a moment. Now he looks aside and says, reluctantly, “She stays dead?”
“She stays dead. There's nothing to gain by looking for her, and a great deal to lose.”
All at once he is tired. He has known all this time that his body is flimsy and broken and shouldn't be able to work even as poorly as it does, that he's held together only by a thread, but – he feels it now, like he didn't before. This leaden fatigue may be the closest he can come to pain. He sits down. The chair isn't in the same shape it was before his episode, and it splinters, dumping him on the floor. He spares no thought for the indignity and makes no move to get up again. “Then all that's left...” He taps the side of his skull with one finger. “I have to keep her in my head. All that I can.”
“That's right. Do your best to hold onto the memories that you have.” She shifts and looks out the window. “You may want me to say something sentimental and reassuring, but I won't.”
“Do you want to?”
“What a stupid question.” She keeps looking out at the mountain. Her tone is casual. “Did you recognize your brothers? I've tried to remember them, too. I suppose it's normal human weakness, wanting that to count for anything.” Now she does look at him. “You were the only one of my children I didn't destroy.”
He knows she's saying something important, but he can't follow it. He can't figure out what's hiding in the shadows of her words, and eventually he gives up. What he has to do is remember. So he calls the image back into his mind, that of his wife coming to meet him at the door. This is what remains of her. If he can keep hold of this image, she'll always be there. Coming to meet him. Holding something -
Holding something.
Something she is handing to him. Something wrapped up in cloth, something
Someone
“Hugh.”
“Hugh,” Mother echoes, softly, looking resigned.
Canas gets up again, a quick and clumsy scramble, and braces himself on the fireplace. “Alive?”
“Yes.”
“Take me to him. Please. I have to.” He forgot his wife. He forgot their child. All this after he promised he wouldn't leave again. So he has to – he doesn't know what. But he has to. “Take me to my son.”
“He isn't here now.”
“Take me where he is.” He clasps his hands together before him in entreaty. “Please.”
She shakes her head. “I'm not taking you anywhere as you are. You'd attract attention I don't think you're prepared to deal with.” Canas tries to protest, but can't think of words, so all that happens is his mouth falls open and he sits and stares at her. “He'll be coming back here, though. Tomorrow, if he hasn't been lollygagging. I sent him on some errands -”
Canas is aghast. “No! He can't... he's too small.”
“He's sixteen come spring.”
He sinks back. “No.” That isn’t possible. Hugh is very young, he’s sure of it.
“I told you. You've been dead for some time.”
“No...” It seems to be all he can say. So much passed by him in the time he was gone. Maybe the cruelty was not in leaving, but in coming back afterward.
“So. We have a little time to decide whether you should meet him, and if so, how.”
“I want to.” Cold water is gathering in his eyelids, but it is not tears. All the fragile ductwork around his eyes was destroyed by the thawing and freezing and thawing of water in the membranes of his face, so that isn't possible.
“But will he want the same?”
He wants to say yes at once. Something stops him. He fumbles across her table, picks up the hand mirror she gave him on arrival. He looks at his face. He looks at her face. He thinks of the faces of the other men - his brothers. People who are still alive. He doesn’t look like them. There’s no disguising it.
He’ll explain himself, he thinks. He’ll simply talk to his son, and then everything will be all right. Then he reflects on how well he’s been communicating since he returned, and has to concede that no, this isn’t likely.
Well, Mother wasn’t afraid of him. Mother wasn’t revolted. Maybe Hugh will -
He remembers sitting in the study, showing Hugh the diagrams in a Flux tome, hoping to share the wonder and the mystery that had consumed his life and eliciting only terrified screams. He remembers that for a week the child did not sleep. He remembers realizing that Hugh was afraid of books now - of all books - and feeling this as a sudden and heartbreaking rift between them, and wondering if they would ever truly understand each other. Hugh’s mother had eventually coaxed him to regard books as friends again, but still the boy wanted nothing to do with anything from Papa’s shelf.
Canas closes his eyes. He will fear me, he thinks. He will hate me if he didn’t already. “No. You’re right. But… I wish him good things.” And he does, sincerely. No matter how completely he forgot his existence. No matter how totally he forgot everything that mattered.
He opens his eyes and looks at Mother again. He knows now that he won’t stay here. Something in her face tells him that she knows it too. “You didn’t tell me,” he says. “About my family. I forgot, but… You never said I had one.”
“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
“You waited. For me to learn it.”
“I half-hoped you wouldn’t. I knew where it would lead. You’re a good scholar, but you always were too sentimental.”
“This is not” - he takes great care to shape the word - “sen-ti-ment. This is… I deserve...”
“Perhaps so. But I’m an old woman, you know. I’ve made my mistakes, and I’ve committed to them many times over. Grown attached to them, you might say. I won’t change now.”
He bows his head. “If I stayed. When Hugh came back. What then?”
“I’d find some way to hide you from him.” She smiles bitterly. “I’ve no shortage of other secrets from the boy.”
“I’m… secret.”
“You agree, then. He isn’t to be told you came here. It would distress him.” It isn’t phrased as a question, but she cocks her head and waits for him to speak, as if his opinion holds some weight. Suddenly he’s not sure it ever did when he was alive. He never found that out. He never contradicted her.
And he can’t now. “He would be afraid.” He always was. “He wouldn’t... like me like this.” If the boy remembers his parents, let him keep that. Let him never learn that one of them is a monster.
He looks out the window. “Was she buried?” He will not leave again.
She disclaims everything she calls sentiment, but Mother still understands at once. “There’s a stone in her memory a little east of here. That’s all. The signs were clear enough you two were gone; there wasn’t time to dig through that snowdrift to find all the remains.” She pauses. “Hugh will be coming back from the west. You won’t run into each other there.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“Well, it was nice of you to stop by,” she says wryly. Pretending this is all in a day’s work. Pretending she didn’t mean to keep him here and study him, too. “Though it’s a shame you had to come back to this.”
He crosses the floor to the entrance. Then something strikes him. “Mother,” he says, standing on the threshold. “Did the dark... let me go, or did you call for me?”
She turns her back on him. “I know I talked to you about stupid questions.”
The sun comes back, clawing its way over the cold and mountainous horizon line, tinging the sky pink and scattering across the snow. And Canas goes away, back to ice and dark.
