#ok i had a very hectic stressful day lmao but at like 11pm pdt i finally started reading lazarus

[thesunshinecourts]

countdown to tsc: apr 7., 2024, 23:58 pdt

2. digging your fingers into fresh dirt // renee walker, after lazarus

When Renee gets to the garden, her fingers are still stained with blood.

It had taken Abby’s most soothing tone and Wymack doing a passable imitation of Aaron’s impatient candour—the same language as Wymack’s, but less heart-filled bluster, more blunt force trauma—to get Renee to leave the room. She’s still not sure she should have, but Abby’s voice had been gentle when she’d said, this isn’t like Matt. Giving him something to believe in will come later.

Renee doesn’t know if she’s ever seen Abby so angry and horrified. It’s worse than how she looked at Kevin’s injuries, that very first night. It’s worse than how she looked at Neil, both times, after the Nest and after his father. It’s almost as devastated, Renee thinks, as the way she looked when she held Allison tight to her chest that first night after Seth.

Wymack is better at holding his expressions in check, but Renee knows him. There had been a tremor in his knuckles when he opened the passenger car door. He’d gotten it under control fairly quickly, to his credit, but Renee had noticed.

Renee had thought, I am not the only one who must draw on all my reserves to keep steady.

She breathes out, then in, as if the smell of growth in the world around her can flush through her body. When she was a second year, Seth had taken a biology class with Dwayne. It had nothing to do with either of their majors—she remembers Juan making some sort of joke about growing pot, and Seth elbowing him with a sidelong glance at Allison, who had rolled her eyes and told them both that she thought they’d be lucky to keep a fake plant alive in the shithole they called a dorm—but Seth had liked it better than anyone had expected, occasionally offering up things he found interesting from the units on horticulture.

There had been a joke about photosynthesis once, something that had been mostly earnest information, but he hadn’t been able to resist throwing in some teasing at the end, always trying to make Allison laugh. Renee feels a sudden wave of indescribable, quiet grief when she realises she can’t remember how his joke had gone.

There are four plants to her left, still in the plastic pottles you buy them in at the store. Renee remembers Abby talking about a sale a few weeks ago, and wonders if these are those same plants. It’s been a demanding few weeks, she thinks. Life is often unkind to those that cannot move of their own accord.

She’s not really thinking about it when she walks over and picks them up. She puts them together, two by two, and squeezes her fingers around two pottles per hand. There are probably gloves somewhere; a trowel too, maybe.

Renee does not care.

Kneeling down at the edge of the garden, there’s a patch with looser soil than the rest. It is poor behaviour, she thinks, to start messing around with Abby’s things without asking permission first, but Renee does not have the space in her yet to hold back. Abby will forgive her, which is not an acceptable reason to do something, but Renee is so angry. She spent her whole night transforming terrified grief into determination and a plan, and then the six-hours-and-then-some drive from Castle Evermore back home with nothing in her mind but Jean. The impossibiity of him.

The impossibility of him still being alive. The impossibility of her getting there in time, and even that’s still to be determined. The impossibility of how much she aches, looking at him and thinking about him and praying for him. Four hundred miles on the I-77, and all she could do was pray.

It was a very human thing, Renee thinks, to walk into Evermore to get him out. Stephanie had been proud of her, and Abby had called her brave, and Andrew had looked at her with that innate knowledge of someone who understood what it meant to take someone under their wing, and absolutely none of their thoughts and love and understanding change the fact that Renee walked into Castle Evermore with more fear than faith.

She digs. One hand into the soil, then the next. There is blood on her fingers still, beneath the nails. Part of Renee has the uncharitable thought that she hopes it’s Zane’s, stray flecks from when she punched him. More of her accepts that it’s Jean’s. She does not know when it is from: when she first knelt at his side on Riko’s bedroom floor, when he was carefully settled into her car, when she and Wymack lifted him into Abby’s house, when she sat beside him and held his hand as those broken, wounded sounds ripped their way from his throat and drove right into her heart, piercing it through, over and over, just as the way the ugliest part of her, buried beneath therapy and anger management and the most wilful calm she has ever had to cloak her body in, wishes it could do to Riko.

Jean’s blood beneath her fingernails, spattered across her hands, buried into the soil. She’s planting a flower she does not know the name of, and all she hopes for is that Jean will bloom.

Please, she prays, tugging the roots apart with a care and precision she did not feel capable of two hours ago, listening to Jean’s screams. Please, she prays, pressing the plant into the soil, cupping her hands together to scoop the dirt, helping it settle into its new home. Please, she prays, patting down the soil, warm earth meeting her palms like a balm.

Please, she prays. Stephanie says you are not done with him yet. She was right about me. Thank you for getting us this far. Please. Please. Please.

“Renee?”

It’s Abby’s voice, exhausted and haunted and utterly wrecked. She still manages a wan smile when Renee looks up at her. Abby doesn’t seem to notice that Renee has been co-opting her garden, or maybe she’s too raw to care.

“You can come back in now,” she says, like she knows it’s both a gift and punishment at once.

Renee nods, then stands, brushing the dirt off her trousers. She looks at Abby as she approaches, trying to choose her words. To ask how he is would only invite more sadness; to ask if he’ll live betrays how deep her fear has run.

“I’m sorry,” she says in the end, quiet but sincere. “That must have been… very difficult.”

The look Abby gives her is brief, but pained. “He breaks my heart as much as any of you,” she says, quickly, fervently, “but that is never a thing to apologise for.” Abby looks so sad. It makes Renee ache, but this is not the type of thing she can wipe away. “Thank you for bringing him here,” Abby says, and Renee feels rocked with it.

“Thank you for letting me,” she says in return, and neither of those are entirely what they mean, but it is enough. Renee will always walk into Castle Evermore to save Jean, and Wymack and Abby will always open the door when she arrives in South Carolina. There is no version of this story, Renee thinks, where they follow any other script.

This is what it is to be Foxes, after all.

“He’s still not quite himself,” Abby says. There is a part of Renee that finds this sentence amusing; Abby has never met Jean, not truly, only from Kevin’s stories. More of her is somber. She knows what Abby means. “But I think he’ll feel — perhaps only marginally, but I think he’ll feel more at ease having you beside him. I’ve done what I can, for now, and there will be more medication and treatment and dressing of his wounds, much more before the night is through, let alone before he is recovered, but —” She exhales, long and low. “He is alone, and in pain. We can’t do much more about the second one. But he can have you back.”

Renee nods, setting her jaw as Abby steps back to allow her through.

“Then he shall have me until I am no longer needed,” Renee says, and thinks, and perhaps some time longer after that.

Abby gives her a careful look. “That could be a very long while,” she says, but she does not offer any sort of objection.

“That’s okay,” Renee says. “I don’t mind waiting.”