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elderkale · 4 years ago

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like a statue, like a wave

Andromaquynh Secret Santa gift for @andy-the-scythian!

ft. sad coffin hours and excessive use of parentheses

AO3

Everything is subjective. The noise that rushes past her ears turns white and meshes with the rumble in her mind; hollow thuds like distant echoes in waterlogged ears.

There’s no time for thoughts when you’re drowning.

She thinks she screams. She thinks she doesn’t. She should be kicking, but maybe she can’t.

She heard, once—in a dream, perhaps—that the mind needs air to function. Maybe that’s why she feels like she’s lost hers.

She sees things, sometimes; blue skies through foggy gazes, black shores painted white with snow, steel that burns and cries and leaves her throbbing when she wakes.

She moves, or the water does, or maybe neither of them do and her rotting mind is just rocking in her skull.

She’d forgotten the word free centuries ago.

The water has been red for years. It’s an excellent spot for sharks.

The air escapes her before she can even manage to savour it and she’s drowning again.

It had not been, by any reasonable metric, the worst battle they’d ever fought in. Far from it, really. It had hardly even been a battle. She hadn’t even died.

Andromache had, though, and that was almost worse.

She’d been shot; she remembered that. Remembered tearing the arrow from her thigh with a scream she didn’t bother to stifle, and standing with a grimace. She’d grimaced as she stood, and bent her knee carefully against the itch of muscles knotting their way across their bones, felt the tingle of new, unmarred skin knitting itself together over fresh pink sinew.

She had, all of a sudden, realized just how very quiet it was.

(She’d marvelled at it, afterwards, in a way she hadn’t since the first time she’d pulled a blade from her throat, drawing her fingers again and again over unbroken skin until Andromache had taken her hand and pressed her lips to her palm, drawing her into her warmth.)

Still, too still, and cold to the touch.

She’d seen warriors, mortal, human ones, pull steel from their wounds only to collapse in seas of viscera and drown in floods of their own lives.

(Before, when it had been but an afterthought to her. Before, when there had always been the guarantee that they would come back.)

The blood beneath her fingers had been warm, still flowing sluggishly over skin that had felt like stone.

And she’d been so still—

(She’d confessed, once, in a whisper lost in the night to the desert winds, that there were times when she almost regretted their gift; times when she wished, somehow, that the healing were not quite so complete. Scars are promises—she is untethered.)

Andromache had spasmed beneath her and she’d jerked back, the arrow coming free in her hand. Andromache had surged up with a ragged gasp that had almost been a scream and she had let out a sob, collapsing into the heat of her embrace. Andromache had caught her, arms firm and strong around her, despite the glaze she had still been blinking from her eyes.

“Quỳnh,” she’d gasped, breath hot in her ear. “Quỳnh.”

Sound, she decides on good authority, doesn’t travel well underwater.

She speaks to the silence, screams for her blood, sobs for herself. What’s a little more salt in an ocean full of it?

Her words do not weave magic through the air, or deliver hell to damned doorsteps. She and Andromache were always joined in that; honesty over mystery, strength in hand with intensity. Her words are not a final blow; they are needles of rain and wayward winds, and grains of sand pressed into little cuts. They are blunt like rounded edges of broken glass and as smooth as the waves above her.

Poetry was for her to hear, not to weave, as music was for her hands, not her throat. Every strike of her knees against the cursed shell rips through the broken melody around her like a drum in a flood.

Her words don’t move anymore.

Her mouth opens, and her wail drags her back down into the darkness.

Andromache had been absolutely giddy with amusement. “Don’t pout, Kleanthe,” she’d chided, a grin tugging at the curve of her mouth.

Kleanthe. She’d been called Kleanthe, then.

“I’m not pouting,” she’d said with a scowl. Andromache had smiled blithely, rolling onto her side and propping her head up on her hand. “I’m not.”

“It’s just a model,” Andromache had said, “and the boy needs practice. It’ll be done in no time at all.”

Kleanthe had huffed and shifted her foot. Phidias had cleared his throat and tapped the end of his chin. She had rolled her eyes and craned her neck face turned towards the sun. “I never thought I’d tire of holding a bow,” she grumbled, “but it seems that today is the day. I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for throwing rocks from now, Andromache.”

Andromache had hummed. “I’m sure I’ll manage.”

Kleanthe had snorted. “How you talked me into this, I still can’t understand.”

(Andromache had been the face of more goddesses than she could count; she saw a labrys when she closed her eyes, a tablet, a spear, a queen draped in fleece. She moved like a figure carved already of gold, every rise and fall of her chest a surge of fire in a forge. She had never managed to master the same gift of stillness her love had been blessed with.)

“Have you never wondered?” Andromache had asked softly, slipping, perhaps without even noticing, into the private tongue that only they shared; words that flowed like honey down a sweat-slick wrist in the summertime, carried on a voice that bobbed and rippled like a trickle of rain down a stone in drought. “To be immortalized, some way else?”

She’d curled her fingers tighter around the polished grip of her bow. “We will outlive this statue,” she’d said. “It will be dust before we ever grow old.”

“Maybe.” There had been a distance in her voice, the kind that promised bliss and tragedy in the same breath, that offered a smile the way mourners folded themselves onto their knees before shrines.

“What is it?”

(She remembered the smile in her heart’s voice, remembered the twitch of a slender lip beneath her palm, remembered swollen lips and lines of red that vanished before her very eyes.)

“You’re beautiful,” Andromache had said.

Yusuf had believed in truth. Nicolò had believed in destiny. Andromache had believed in the world, and its endless capacity to disappoint.

She believes the universe simply likes its jokes.

She dreams of her homecoming, sometimes; imagines dragging herself across a shore of sand hot enough to sear her skin, sees herself crumple into her family’s arms. Andromache would wash the grit and salt from her hair, she knows, and run her fingers through it until it was as soft as silk, softer than when she’d found her and when she’d lost her. She’d rub her cheeks with the heels of her thumbs and kiss the ragged scabs from her knuckles and her knees.

There are no cuts, no gashes, no ragged fields of skin. There’s nothing for her to fix.

Is she healing? She doesn’t know.

The first time Andromache touched her, her skin had flaked away on her hands.

She doesn’t remember what she’d said, doesn’t remember if she’d said anything at all. It was as if she’d always been beside her, a silhouette formed by communion through sights and stars and sensations walking alongside her shadow. She’d known her name the way Andromache had known it herself, known intimately the lines on her palms and her distrust of shellfish. She’d known her annoyance every time her hair was tangled by the wind, and the way she lost knives the way birds shed feathers but would never fail to polish her strange, rounded axe every knight, starting at the handle and working her way up to the blades. She’d known everything and nothing, and Andromache had known the same.

She remembered the first beat of her heart when Andromache’s shadow had passed her, remembered the way she’d nearly sobbed at the relief from the merciless beating of the sun.

Andromache had crouched, placing her labrys by her head; the blade had flashed in the midday sun, nearly blinding her for the third time that day. She had hesitated, or maybe she hadn’t—she couldn’t recall, or perhaps just hadn’t seen.

She remembered the first touch of fingers to her cheek, remembered feeling muscles flexing and twitching beneath new skin as it bloomed from burning red salt. She’d spoken like a carrion bird learning to sing, cradling her head in her lap like she was something precious, something wonderful.

“What did you say?” she’d asked almost two hundred years later.

“What?”

“The first time we met,” she’d said. “When you held me. What were you saying?”

Andromache had hummed, nose pressed into the side of Quỳnh’s neck. “I asked you if you could see me,” she’d said, “the way I could see you. I thought I was just dreaming; I’d seen you for so long—”

Quỳnh had taken her hands and brought them to her lips. She’d pressed a kiss, feather-light, to the tip of one finger, then the next, and Andromache had flushed. “Me too,” she’d murmured against her skin. “I thought I was dreaming, too.”

She sees Andréa scrubbing blood from torn blue silk on the banks of a silver river, and feels her fist break her nose from a thousand miles away. Andrew tosses a star-striped flag into a flame, and twitches beneath a cloud of poison in a furrow carved through the earth. Andy shoots her in the back of the head, and bleeds on a carpet in front of a wall of triumph.

Victory is a pyrrhic thing.

Everything blurs. She is Quỳnh, and Kleanthe, and Quintina, and Anya. She is Sebastien, and Booker, and Nile, and Quỳnh. She is Andromache, and Yusuf, and Nicolò, and she is Quỳnh.

There’s so much she doesn’t remember.

She wants to remember.

She opens her mouth, and her next breath comes out as a cough.

“Have you seen this, love?”

“Hm?” Quỳnh cracked one eye open to peer up at the tablet Andy was brandishing at her. “I’m afraid not,” she said, closing her eyes again. “You’ll have to read it to me, my heart; you know how those screens make my head hurt.”

Andy scoffed. “Please. I know Nile helped you download Candy Crush.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Why would I crush candy? And the ads are infuriating.” She nudged Andy’s hip with her cheek and idly stroked her fingers along the other side of her wife’s stomach. “What is it?”

“Someone broke into the Met,” Andy told her.

“Ah,” said Quỳnh, wrapping a hand around Andy’s wrist. “The Met. Of course. Which one is that?”

“Oh, you know,” said Andy, grinning openly as Quỳnh tugged at her to lie down. “Big one. Kind of ugly.” Quỳnh chuckled as she slid a leg over Andy’s and sat up, straddling her hips. “Joe took you last week.”

“Did he?” Quỳnh asked, pressing a kiss to Andy’s clavicle. Andy hummed, arching her neck. “I can’t recall. My memory must be going in my old age.”

“Huh.” Quỳnh smiled into Andy’s neck, nipping lightly at the skin over her pulse. “Thing is,” she said, voice faltering only slightly when Quỳnh’s lips brushed the sensitive spot beneath her ear, “the thief only took one thing.”

“Sounds sensible,” murmured Quỳnh, dragging her lips down Andy’s shoulder. “It must be difficult to carry many things through a window.”

Andy made a small, pleased noise in the back of her throat. “You don’t want to know what they took?”

“Hm.” Quỳnh leaned back on her heels, putting a finger to her chin. Andy growled, and she grinned. “A vending machine?”

“Funnily enough,” said Andy drily, lip curling as Quỳnh leaned down, hands lightly circling her wrists. “Those were emptied, too.”

“Have you ever had a Cheeto, Andromache?” asked Quỳnh, stroking the insides of Andy’s arms. Andy groaned, wriggling beneath her. “They’re remarkable.”

“We can buy snacks, Quỳnh.”

Quỳnh pouted. “Where’s the fun in that?”

(She hadn’t hidden it in the apartment—she’s not an idiot. She’d rented a storage unit.)

Andy snickered, then turned her head and bit playfully at Quỳnh’s hand. Quỳnh yelped, drawing it back on instinct, and Andy lunged, sending both of them tumbling across the bed. Quỳnh let her head hit the pillow with a laugh, and Andy collapsed on top of her, snickering uncontrollably.

“I thought you didn’t like it,” she said when she’d finally calmed down. Quỳnh hummed, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

(There was a bruise on her shin from where she’d banged her leg on the door last week, and smaller, private ones littered down her chest. The cut on her cheek was still fresh enough to be tender, though it had already closed, and, beneath her fingers, Quỳnh could feel the raised edge of a scar she knew to be thin and white.)

She shrugged lightly, and Andy moved with her. “You did,” she said simply, brushing a strand of hair from Andy’s eyes. The black was beginning to recede, and she could see the tips of time-bronzed gold at her roots.

(They hadn’t stayed in Athens long enough to see the sculpture finished; it’s still just a model. The tip of the bow had broken off, as had all but the bridge of the nose. More scratches had Quỳnh found in the plaster than she had ever counted in her own skin at once, and there was a crack snaking its way down the spine like a viper through the sand.)

Andy smiled and pressed their lips together.

(And carved carefully into a weather-worn heel:

I was here.)

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