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yveschanceux · 5 years ago

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Yves takes his time placing his objects into the simple stained box. A harmonica reed, a petrified flower, a small quill with the ink still staining the tip, a long blade of grass that could carry a whistle, a rock, a shell, a small coin, and a few other odds and ends. He tries to work quickly, so as not to dwell, but gently enough to tuck the small objects away where they won’t be rattled around too much. He wants nothing more than this to be over, and the debt to be paid.

Finally, he dives into his life to try and cut out the parts that Dahlia didn’t ask for, anything that doesn't directly provide context for his house and the way he is, he tries to remove.

In the end, he does an okay job, they aren't as cleanly cut as Dahlias, he watches the reel back, trying to force cold indifference. It’s hard, but not nearly as hard as it was the first time. He does trust Dahlia, he supposes, but not enough to give more than asked, not yet, so he slaps the lid closed with a sigh and places the box on the table before her, nervous energy bouncing his leg.

With barely contained eagerness, Dahlia nods and opens the box.

Her vision blacks out, all she has are her other senses and it’s strange not being able to fall back on her mage’s vision. She feels his life thrumming in her veins.

Yves has always made the best of life, she can feel it in his ribs, knows that he’ll always be okay, as long as he has Felix.

It immediately feels like a dream.

-----

Dahlia wakes up on the stairs of the back porch, it's a late spring evening and shes reclined down the steps in an awkward but mostly comfortable daze watching the dust pick up and settle in the warm breeze. Even laying down, Yves body feels too long and wide on her consciousness. She can feel the high of fatigue holding down his limbs and the sun lulling him to sleep. Soft footfalls thump slowly in the house and then out onto the porch. Ilya drops down next to Yves, slightly higher up on the steps and takes his head into her lap to play with his hair and rubs a hand down his bare chest.

“Hey, babe.” “How are you feeling?” Ilya asks, looking out at the pollen swirling in the road. “Your fevers gone.”

“Mmhmm.” Yves lets her eyes flutter shut and grasps for Ilyas hand on his chest, the additional warmth of his wife lulling him further into a doze. “I’ll be back to work soon…”

“Let me know when you’re ready to finish the eel,” she traces the black and green lines across his shoulder.

He makes another content noise. “How’s Felix been?”

“Hmm. Felix is doing well in the city. He’s taken on an apprentice it seems, has high hopes for her. He’s glad to hear we’ve settled in and keeps threatening to visit.” She grins and plants a kiss at his damp temple. “We should clean up your old room for guests-”

Her voice cuts off as Yves falls into a soft sleep.

-----

They wake on the beach in the late afternoon, Dahlia is overcome with a moment of Deja Vu, but Yves seems content with the routine. Ilya rouses beside them, much less burnt and they sleepily gather their belongings and make the familiar journey up the bluff-side to watch the sunset.

They can see just the top of the farmhouse roof behind them. In the distance, the outlying docks of the town a mile away can be made out against the blue water, and facing directly into the ocean is the sun, seconds from setting. A small strip of exposed sandbar is the only obstruction breaking up the endless expanse in this direction, and the water surrounding the sliver of sand is aglow with glowing green algae and ocher and purple bioluminescent animals.

Ilya’s hand worms into theirs and Dahlia points out at the dim glow as the bright flashes of golden sun begin to cut across the water in a swath of dancing light. The few clouds above turn purple, pink, then red as the sun dips halfway below the horizon line. The purples and greens seem to intensify in its wake, and all along the darkening coast, the last flecks of orange light give way to purples and greens and intense sparkling gold all the way out to sea.

All Dahlia can see is Ilya’s face as she watches the lights replace each other, her dark skin catching each colour of the sea. She turns to make eye contact and all Dahlia can see are her green-grey eyes flecked with nearly imperceptible spots of gold, like sunbeams in a storm. Ilya cups her face and taps their foreheads together. “I love you.” She kisses Dahlia in the violet burn of the false sky with all of its glowing specks. Aside from a few grey clouds far off in the distance, the night sky and ocean seem to become one vast void of lights with no horizon to separate them.

Dahlia tries to think of something romantic to say to that but her eyes flutter shut and she focuses on the points of contact between them, on the heat of Ilya’s fingers running across her cheek and neck, still warm from the sun. She’s so happy she could cry.

“I love you too, smudge.” Dahlia grins as the kiss breaks and nuzzles into the crook of Ilyas neck, taking in the smell of sand and sun, of ink and paper. It smells like home.

They sit there forever as the lights sparkle and fade….

“I just think it’s dangerous what you’re doing.” Dahlia spits a little too harshly. She’s sitting up on the counter between the sink and the icebox while Ilya works furiously over the kitchen table. Paper and ink are spread everywhere in a map of words and glyphs, coded beyond anyone's comprehension. Ilya stops suddenly and looks up to her slowly, placing the quill down gently. “Yves, baby,” Ilya stands and walks over to Dahlia, forcing eye contact. “I understand, But you’ve known for a long time that this is a huge part of me. Helping these people is a calling - especially-”

“-Because we’re in a position too, I know, I know, but still-” Dahlia interrupts the familiar...discussion, a swirl of bitter embarrassment wells up in her gut. “I just…there’s talk of a witch hunt in town this week. It’s got me on edge is all...I’m sorry smudge.”

“You are forgiven,” Ilya grins and runs her nimble stained fingers through Dahlia’s hair and cups her face. “I would never put either of us in danger, neither will Felix. I need you to trust me, and trust that I know what I’m doing.” She plants a kiss on her forehead and steps away back to her papers.

“I do.” Dahlia lies with a small smile. The guilt is thumping in time with her heartbeat, outmatched only by the dread building up in her chest, pooling hot and sickly just beneath her war wound - now scarred over. “I do.”

Outside the fall wind howls through the trees and splatters wet leaves against the shutters.

Dahlia knows in her soul, with unheard of clarity that she’ll always be okay, as long as she has Ilya.

------

Dahlia isn’t present for most of the winter. They don’t get snow as far south as they are but the freezing rains and grey skies take the warmth away. It's far too cold to swim and even the green grove at the beach is devoid of colour. Ilya is patient with her, used to the routine after three odd years of being together.

They work as a team maintaining the animals, even though there’s less to do on the farm it still takes much of the late morning before Ilya returns to her limited invoices and Dahlia can return to the comfort of the warm bedroom. She nestles into the covers and sleeps until she's woken by Ilya retiring to bed. This pattern continues for the whole season, broken only by the occasional illness, mostly on her part. But as the weeks proceed Ilya gets to bed later and later.

“Is everything alright?” Dahlia asks on one of her better days when her fever has gone down. “You seem so stressed, I’m sorry I haven't been he-” the apology is cut off by an abrupt kiss. Ilya holds her fast and close, a little tighter than necessary. She buries her head in the crook of Dahlia's neck in the centre of her chest and clings for a very long time.

“Hey, Ilya what’s wrong?” Guilt and fear swell up in her gut, she had been barely cohesive the past few months, and the idea that Ilya needed help while she was off living life underwater was wretched.

She clings a bit tighter, her voice muffled in Dahlia's chest. “...You know that I love you right? I love you and I would never do anything to hurt you?” She's shaking as she threads her hands under Dahlia's shirt for warmth, for proof of life. Dahlia is overcome with a deep sadness compounded by her recent emotional instability, a sob overcomes her and like a switch is flipped they are both sinking to the floor in a weepy embrace.

“Of course I know, and I love you too, of course I know.” Dahlia assures her as best as she can, “please Ilya, I love you so much but you’re kind of scaring me right now.” She holds Ilya out by her shoulders so they can look at each other. She looks exhausted, worn thin.

“Nothing’s wrong, baby, I’m just tired is all.” She seems to avoid eye contact but a smile comes to her lips trying to reassure. “I think we both need this winter to end.” Dahlia doesn’t know how to interpret this encounter and is really in no condition to, post-illness. At a loss, she also smiles and hugs her wife close. “Yeah.” They sit there for a while longer before the frigid air gets to be too much, “common, let's go to bed, Smudge.” As Ilya proceeds, upstairs Dahlia takes a minute to lock up the house and close the curtains for the night. She glances at the documents on the table with little interest but can make nothing of the correspondence between Ilya and her customers. She slides away to lock the back porch, with one last look outside to make sure the barn door is closed.

Out on the lawn is a spot of red on the pale frosty grass. She steps outside to investigate in the as the sun dips below the trees. The shadows of the orchard reach out like long fingers towards the house. A line of ocher feathers connects the spattering of red to the treeline behind the fence. Beyond the thick oaks surrounding the property, something moves in the brush.

This isn’t the first time they’ve lost a chicken to wild animals, but the trail of gold feels so much like a bad omen that she can't help but shudder in the cold wind.

Dahlia inhales deeply, the sharp air cuts into her weakened lungs like glass. She diligently gathers water from the creek and washes most of the blood into the ground, then flicks the feathers off into the forest before turning in for the night. She double checks the locks on the door and doesn't tell Ilya about the chicken, she’s under enough stress already…

----

Spring rain comes, and with it a high the Dahlia still hadn’t gotten used too. She’s over-productive in many ways and a tad destructive in others but Ilya seems grateful to have her husband back in full health though she seems older despite high spirits.

“Let's plan a trip.” She suggests over lunch after the chores are done. “Oh yeah? Business or pleasure?” Dahlia looks away from the treeline, interested.

“Hmm…” Ilya leans over to rest her head on Dahlia’s shoulder, looking up into her dark eyes. “Most definitely pleasure.” She smiles and Dahlia couldn’t say no if she’d wanted too. “I think we should see the far west… just for a couple of weeks? Sebastien can watch the farm can’t he?”

“Why the sudden wanderlust, babe?”

Ilya inhales deeply, a weariness settling in her features, “I think we just need...a change of scenery is all…” they’d talked before, about going the way of Irene and Louann, shuttering the house and retiring to travel the countryside in their old age. Dahlia didn’t think would happen so soon, couldn’t fathom a nicer place to be, but something about this last winter had added years to Ilya’s face.

“If we butter him up first.” She kisses her wife on the head, noticing a grey hair here and there. “I think Sebas would be happy to get out of that dirt shack for a bit.”

“Oh yes, I think so too.” Ilya agrees matter of factly, but Dahlia can hear the relief in her voice as they begin planning their trip...

----

Two months before they leave something goes horribly wrong.

Dahlia wakes up alone for the first time in years. It's early spring, frost still threatens the grove, but the rains have started. It seems like a dream at first, she dresses like normal, an uncomfortable itch in the back of her throat. With sleep still clouding her vision, she makes it down the stairs to the first landing before she notices something is wrong. There’s mud tracked all over the stairs, looking up, she can see prints in the hallway as well. Not panicking she hurries downstairs.

“Smudge, is everything alright?” She yells as she descends, mind scrambling to come up with an explanation for the mess, perhaps they’d forgotten to take off their boots before tracking mud into the house last night? The papers on the tables are missing. “Ilya!”

Outside in the fresh spring mud are streaks of red and a trail of golden feathers.

The next few months are like one long nightmare, Dahlia can feel the life draining from her body every day.

She starts out fine. Terribly worried and angrier than she’s ever been in her life, but not panicked. Not for the first few hours.

It’s easy to piece together what happened. The boot tracks throughout the house, the missing cypher, the dead fowl. She begins the search on the grounds of the farm, fanning out from the house to circle the grove, then the property, then the beach. It's long after dark when she returns home shaking and wired and itching for violence. It’s not even a thought to grab at the bottles of wine on her way into the kitchen and spend the rest of the night awake, alternating between restless sleep and paranoid bargaining.

The rest of the week is a blur. She spends a great deal of time switching between overwhelming panic, unparalleled rage, and unwavering determination to find Ilya. She writes in a shaky hand to Felix and Sebastien, her words are basic and sharp and spelt wrong and barely legible, even to herself. Its nothing like Ilya’s deft grace and control. Dahlias used to not having the vocabulary to get her emotions across but the fact that she’s writing at all - she hopes - conveys the urgency that her words can’t.

She goes to town first, gives them the news, asks for help looking, for information, for sightings, for any kind of lead. Everyone offers their sympathies but remain ignorant of her whereabouts and no one seems to meet Dahlia's panic. She has no new information and her sense of urgency only increases. Aside from the occasional comments about how she hasn’t quite been the same since ‘the accident’ Dahlia can’t find any trace outside of the farm that Ilya had ever existed at all.

Ilya is still in the house. Dahlia can see her sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, in the folds of the bedspread in the early morning, or in wafts of fresh ink that still circulate around the bannister. Like if she runs back upstairs, Ilya might be there, sitting at her desk by the window, crunching numbers and doodling in the margins of her notebook. She's not there though, not in any way that matters.

She tries to gather the remaining papers in Ilya’s study and the rest of the house. Whoever took her and her code didn’t seem to know it was there. It occurs to Dahlia that she likely can’t trust anyone, given the illegal nature of Ilya’s hobbies.

She trusts Felix with her life but stops herself from sending him the papers for fear that the information they hold will make him disappear into the night. She hides them instead when she’s sure no one is looking.

----

It’s been almost two weeks since Ilya’s been abducted and no one in town will mention her name. She hears people whispering behind their hands about how tragic it is that she’d been seduced by a witch and how tragic it is that she’s probably cursed, but mostly no one says anything at all and that feels worse. She knows she’s being watched, can see shapes in her peripheral but they always move before she can look at them.

Many of the memories are jumbled here, some of them could be dreams, many of them feel like hallucinations. There is one moment that stands out among the rest. Dahlia is sitting on the floor of her bedroom, unable to move. It feels like she's been through a meat grinder and one eye is swollen shut. She can feel a hot dripping down her face and neck. Above her stands a figure so still, it could be a shadow.

The figure snarls through an old gnarled scar across its nose. “Stop making trouble.” It warns as Dahlia’s vision fades out, then in again. It’s morning now, aside from her black eye there is no evidence that anyone else was in the house last night.

The dead animals keep piling up-it feels like one every day, one morning she wakes up to find the roof of the bard smouldering, the spring downpour likely smothered it in the night. She’s too stupid to stop asking questions, or care, or whatever.

They sneak into the house while she’s away or at night. They move things, take things, stand over her while she sleeps, weird shit like that. Sometimes she wakes up with bruises or cuts or really bad headaches, stuff that doesn’t just happen. Sebastien would probably say its stress, some kind of fucked up grieving process, but Dahlia knows better, she doesn’t give away where Ilya’s work is hidden.

Finally, they get sick of playing games and one night while she’s drunk off her ass because she can’t sleep anymore and her goddamn wife is missing, they break in and drag her out back behind the barn. They dig a hole and bury Dahlia in the mud. It’s not a whole six feet, but she sobers up pretty quick underground.

Dahlia hyperventilates for a long time. She watches her body struggle through someplace just above her, lodged in the fresh packed dirt above. The rain seeps down into the heavy soil and turns her grave into slick mud and the distant thunder rumbles the earth. She doesn’t know how to get out, doesn’t know how close the surface is or even if she’s digging in the right direction. An unknowable amount of time passes but she can hear morning birds chirping through the roaring in her ears. Finally she breaks the surface, freezing and wet and delirious.

The morning mist collects and swirls at her feet. Her thin, quick breaths steam in the cool air as she vomits mud. Something is moving upstairs in the window of Ilya’s study. Trembling, she sloughs her mud-caked clothes off into a pile on the porch. She moves in slow motion through the house and stops at the bottom of the stairs. Shadows coalesce around an eerie red light striking the landing wall. Outside the sun is rising, there are no birds left to greet it.

It feels like it takes all morning to climb the stairs, she jumps and freezes at every noise. At the top, each step feels like walking through mud as she approaches the open study. Small tendrils of smoke curl upwards from burned spots in the floorboard. Nothing is on fire but the room smells of ash and ink. Her books are scattered around and torn up, her chair is knocked over and her utensils spilt. The smoke drifts from gouged lettering on the floor, and Dahlia has bad eyes but the words reach across the floor in terrible black letters.

S T O P

L O O K I N G

She can’t even clean it up, Dahlia just stomps out the wisps of smoke and shutters the window. She locks the door and hides the key away. It's impossible to be upstairs without seeing something out of the corner of her eye.

Thieve. Abductors. Undertakers. Ilya.

She stops going upstairs all-together, can’t even get near the bannister without dozens of eyes on her, peering out of the woodwork. Time bleeds together, she can’t sleep for the paranoia, for the bedsheets dragging her back underground, for Ilya watching her from the between the rails upstairs. she jumps at every sound regardless of the source. Her brain feels sick.

She keeps drinking and gets it into her head that maybe - well maybe if they had buried her, that they might have buried Ilya somewhere on the property. That maybe she was still alive underground this whole time, waiting for someone to find her. Dahlia begins to dig holes in the yard because if they wouldn’t let her ask questions the least they could do was let her burn out trying to turn over the orchard looking for some kind of closure.

She knows it’s irrational but she feels hopeless and possessed, looking over the property they had built a life on and only seeing a ten-acre grave.

She digs during the day, at night she listens for intruders, a part of her knows they will leave her alone now, knows that they’ve done all they need to do to keep her from asking questions, but the damage is done. In every shadow is a thief, every creaking floorboard warns him not to cause trouble.

----

Before Ilya became a cartographer she was raised on the bow. She’d been a decent shot but had ultimately preferred to explore over hunt, so she came to him with a lovely heirloom of a crossbow to be used as a party trick to win bets or scare off coyotes. Dahlia’s hands shake as she loads the bow, as she’d seen Ilya do a million times. She levels it at the door and waits through the night.

Sometimes when she’d drift off she would have dreams where it had all been a nightmare. Ilya would be next to her and she would just stay in bed and watch her sleep, watch her chest move when she breathed and the sun would cross the bedroom and then Ilya would wake with a mumble and Dahlia could think for just a minute that everything was alright.

They felt like a curse in her waking hours.

----

Days later Felix finds her, he’d been across the country working and dropped everything as soon as he’d gotten the letter, it still took weeks of travel to arrive. Dahlia has been beside herself for nearly a month and she almost puts a hole in her brother with her wife’s crossbow. She’s a terrible shot, but it gives Felix enough time to yank the bow from her hands and embrace her. She panics at first, then realizes who it is. She cries for the first time in years.

Eventually, Sebastian arrives at Felix’s call. The two pack up everything up while she mopes around and jumps at shadows. They try to get her to sober up too, but it doesn't take.

She never sees the crossbow again.

It takes weeks to clean the mess, weeks to get Dahlia back into her right mind, Sebastien grounds her immensely with old stories while Felix makes arrangements. They are moving her off the farm, to the city with Felix. Dahlia watches numbly as they pack up everything into neat little boxes and scrape the dried mud from the floor. They leave the study alone.

-----

For the next few months, she lives with Felix in the city, recovering mostly, getting back into a normal sleep schedule. The noise helps, being around other people helps, Felix helps when he’s not at work. Slowly, she comes to accept that Ilya is gone, in order to live with that Dahlia also comes to accept that Ilya is dead, and takes the time to mourn properly.

Most of her time alone was something of a blur. She tries to explain to Felix what happened but so much of it was spent in the throes of a drunken paranoia that she isn’t really sure what was real and what was just a bad dream. Felix doesn’t force her to make the distinction even though that leaves a lot of gaps in the story.

In the end, Felix believes that there is some foul play at hand, but has no leads to pursue. Many words are explained, Dahlia has never yelled at her brother in genuine anger before but she's been so frustrated and scared and angry and drunk for weeks now and no one knows how to help. Felix takes it all with grace and pity on his face. He holds her close and she apologises.

They have a proper funeral at some point. Dahlia can’t remember it but she’s sure it was nice.

-----

Months pass and she slowly moves closer to herself. She doesn’t quite fit back into her body but the perspective is nearly the same, she thinks. Drinking helps somewhat.

Felix is very proud of her for finding her body again, though he doesn’t quite word it like that. He says things like “I am glad we are eating breakfast together,�� or “It looks like you got some sun today!” In his cheery, relieved voice. Dahlia feels like a child, or a spooked animal being pitied, but something about Felix’s gentle way of handling her is comforting.

He wants her to stay as long as she needs too but Dahlia’s skin begins to crawl with wanderlust. She’s grateful for everything Felix has done for her but she feels like the world is stagnant now, with an absence of colour or sound. She bids Felix goodbye with solemn determination. Her brother is nervous and reluctant to let her go, but all the same optimistic that travel could be a good thing.

She knows that she’ll be okay, she always has Felix, after all.

----

She stops by the farmhouse before truly leaving, needs to say goodbye to it now that she’s said goodbye to Ilya. She goes in the middle of the day, alone. It stands solitary and warm in the summer sun, she can hear the creek babbling through the orchard and smell citrus on the breeze. Dahlia takes in the view, closes her eyes and inhales the smells of the property. She can still hear the wind-chime on the porch, made from small rocks and shells, there is laughter in the wind.

The holes she’d spent days digging up are still present, like scars on the property, though they have filled in somewhat from the rain and are grown over with grass now. In a few years, she knows, it will be like they were never there at all.

It feels like she’s just come home from the market as she slips in the backdoor easily, for just a moment, Ilya is sitting at the kitchen table, pouring over her work. She looks up with a smile on her face, they’re going on a trip soon.

Dahlia shudders and moves through the space, careful not to touch anything. It feels wrong how barren the rooms are, never in her years of living here has the place felt so empty, not even when the old birds had moved out. She avoids the stairs entirely to find some of Ilya’s papers in the spare room. Waves of melancholy wash over her, looking at their life together packed up in neat little boxes and stored away, it all feels so wrong. She pulls a bundle of paper from a box, gently leafing through the parchment. It smells like home.

Dahlia spreads the papers over the kitchen table. She finds a vial of ink and a half dozen quills to place delicately between the pages of almanacs, half made maps, and first pass translations of various texts. She steps back with a nod, it isn’t quite the same as Ilyas organized chaos, but looking back at the kitchen as she locks the door, it feels like she’s still home, it feels less like bidding adieu and more like she’s just... going on a trip.

----

The memory fades out and back in, she doesn’t experience first hand but knows that she spends the next few years wandering from city to city, revisiting old friends and customers from before the farm and the injury and the conscription. It’s easy to fall back into what she used to be, even if it doesn’t feel real. She stays out of the way of the law as best she can, avoids all talk of mages and witch hunts and crowns guards for fear of having to do it all over again. To repeat the last year of her life, she knows, will probably kill her.

She comes back into herself in a familiar apartment, a terrible melancholy interrupts her, a longing for this place that was her home inside a body that feels too tall, too wide, too different from hers. There is a resounding whiplash that stuns her as she sees her body, her real body leaning over her with a potion, pouring it into her leg wound that feels both numb and like white-hot pain at the same time.

She’s talking in a playful tone, telling him - telling Yves that she doesn’t need payment for the priceless potion in her hand.

“Just take me to that summer festival we talked about last night. Win me something nice, buy me snacks, whatever you can manage.”

Dahlia can tell Yves can’t remember what ‘last night’ means, but he doesn’t miss a beat in agreeing, Dahlia can feel in his gut that Yves will probably do whatever she asks of him (within reason) for the potion. But that's truly all she’d wanted at the time, and the world seems brighter for it, at least from his perspective.

The memory starts to fade there as if Yves had let it run too long on accident and hadn’t wanted her to see this far in. She fades out of his memory one last time and comes back into her real body, back in the kitchen. It feels like the breath has been knocked out of her for a long moment. Yves slaps the box shut the second she pulls away. He looks absolutely perplexed - on his end the whole thing took less than a minute, not the months that Dahlia had experienced.

“Is it really supposed to be that fast?” Yves mumbles to Namir, who is nearly in Dahlia's lap in worry, he paws her potion closer to her hands. “It feels so much longer from the other side.”

“Hey fireball, you doing alright?” He leans back a bit to give her some breathing room, remembering how claustrophobic he’d been coming out of her memory box.

#backstory #keep it secret keep it safe #oc rp #original character roleplay #rp stuff #rpnow #saving itathia #sia #saving itathia again part 3 #part 3

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