Illia had her hand raised to knock when the door opened. She stopped. Hand still up. Looking at Astra, who was standing in the doorway in the early morning light, and who looked like someone who had not slept properly in weeks, which was accurate, and who had clearly not planned what to do after opening the door, which was also evident. They looked at each other.
ILA: Huh.
Astra said nothing. She was holding the doorframe with one hand, not leaning on it exactly, more anchoring herself to it, the way you held something solid when the ground felt uncertain.
Illia lowered her hand. She tilted her head, looking at Astra the way someone looked at a thing they were genuinely pleased about but were trying not to make a big deal of, because making a big deal of it would ruin it.
ILA: You look terrible.
AST: I know.
ILA: Good. Honesty. We're starting well.
She looked at Astra for another moment. Then, without announcement, without asking, she stepped forward and put her arms around her.
It was not a tentative hug. It was not the careful, checking kind, the are-you-okay kind that held itself slightly back in case the answer was no. It was complete and immediate, the kind that assumed the answer and answered it at the same time, and Astra, who had not been touched by another person in weeks, who had not realized until this exact moment how much that had cost her, stood very still inside it for a second before something in her chest gave way and she held on. They stood in the doorway for a while.
Then Illia pulled back, looked at her once, made a small decisive sound, and before Astra had processed what was happening she was being lifted, both arms, carried in the way that brooked no argument, her feet leaving the ground entirely.
AST: What are you-
ILA: We're going out.
AST: Put me down.
ILA: No. You've been inside for weeks. You've forfeited the right to walk out under your own power, that's just consequence.
AST: That's not how consequences work.
ILA: Stop squirming.
Astra stopped squirming, less because she agreed and more because Illia was apparently very strong for someone who spent most of her time painting, and the morning air was cold and clean against her face in a way that was, against her will, not terrible.
ILA: There we go.
She carried her down the path away from the cottage with the ease of someone who had decided this was simply what was happening now, and Astra, suspended in the air like something between a person and a protest, looked up at the sky. It was the color of the drawing. The fourteenth one. Open and pale and enormous. After a moment she stopped arguing. Illia painted them there.
It was, Astra had to admit, extraordinary to watch even through the fog of everything. The brush came out from somewhere, longer than it had any right to be, and Illia drew in the air with it in long certain strokes and the world rearranged itself around the strokes, the path dissolving and the cliff arriving, the morning light shifting slightly warmer, a pond below them catching the sky in its surface and holding it still.
Two canvases stood waiting on the cliff's edge. Already set up. Easels and everything, the paint already laid out in careful rows, every color. Astra looked at it all.
AST: You planned this.
ILA: Obviously.
AST: You were very confident I'd open the door today.
Illia set her down. Dusted nothing off her hands. Looked at the two canvases with the satisfaction of someone admiring their own logistics.
ILA: I was confident you'd open the door eventually. I just had this ready every day for two weeks.
Astra looked at her.
AST: Every day.
ILA: Every day. I'm thorough.
The pond below them caught a cloud passing overhead and held it for a moment and let it go. The cliff was warm where the sun had already reached the stone. Somewhere in the distance something moved through the long grass at the water's edge, small and unhurried, unbothered by the two of them standing up above it with their easels and their paint and the particular complicated silence of a conversation that was just beginning. Illia picked up her brush. Looked at her canvas. Looked at Astra.
ILA: You don't have to paint anything good.
AST: I know.
ILA: You don't have to paint anything at all, technically. You can just stand there and breathe if that's what today is.
Astra looked at the canvas in front of her. White and waiting. The paint laid out in its careful rows. Every color including the deep almost-black green she had never quite been able to name. She picked up a brush. It felt strange in her hand. Familiar and strange at once, the way things felt when you had been away from them long enough that coming back required relearning. She turned it over. Looked at the bristles.
Her hands were still cold.
But she held the brush anyway, and the cliff held them both, and the pond below caught the sky and held it, and Illia began to paint beside her with the focused ease of someone who had been doing this since before most things existed, and the morning opened around them, unhurried and enormous and entirely indifferent to whether they were ready for it. They were there anyway. That was enough to start.