They had been on the cliff for three days running.
The canvases had multiplied. Illia had painted new ones into existence each morning without ceremony, setting them up alongside the previous days' work so that the cliff's edge had begun to look like a small open gallery, the pieces lined up against the rock face, drying in the morning air. Astra's work sat amongst Illia's without apology. They were different in every way - scale, intention, method - and they belonged together anyway, the way things belonged together when they had been made in the same place by people paying attention to the same light.
Astra was in the middle of something when she heard the footsteps.
Small ones. Quick, then slowing, the way footsteps slowed when their owner had spotted something unexpected and was recalibrating.
She did not look up immediately. She was in the particular state of concentration where looking up cost something, where the eye and the hand were in conversation and interrupting them meant starting the conversation over. She finished the stroke. Set the brush down. Looked.
A boy stood at the cliff's edge, a safe distance back from it, staring at her with his mouth slightly open. He was perhaps ten, perhaps eleven, with the look of someone who had been going somewhere specific and had entirely forgotten where that was. His coat was too big for him. He had a satchel over one shoulder that listed to the left under some weight inside it.
He stared. Astra looked at him.
AST: Hello.
The boy did not immediately respond. He was doing the thing people sometimes did when they recognized someone, that rapid internal reconciliation between the person they knew from a distance and the person standing in front of them, real and present and smaller than expected or larger than expected or simply different in the way that real things were always different from their representations.
BOY: You're Astra.
It was not a question. It had the quality of a fact being confirmed after long suspicion.
AST: I am.
BOY: The Astra. From the- you fought the- you were there, at the-
He stopped himself. Reorganized. Tried again with more dignity than his coat size suggested he possessed.
BOY: I know who you are.
AST: Alright.
He stared for another moment. Then, with the sudden decisive energy of someone who had made a choice and was committing to it before their nerve gave out, he dropped to one knee and pulled open his satchel and produced, from somewhere in its depths, a piece of paper. He held it out. His hand was shaking slightly.
Astra crossed the cliff to him and took it.
It was a drawing. Done in pencil, careful and earnest and technically imperfect in the way that drawings were when they were made by someone who did not yet know how to be casual about it, who was still at the stage of trying very hard. It showed a figure she recognized as herself - the hair, the hands raised, the light coming from the palms in long radiating lines - facing something large and dark that loomed at the paper's edge. Her. Fighting. She looked at it for a long time. The boy was watching her with the intensity of someone awaiting a verdict that mattered enormously. His satchel hung open at his side, forgotten.
BOY: I drew it from- I mean, I wasn't there, obviously, I'm not- but people talked about it and I tried to-
He stopped. Swallowed.
BOY: You can keep it. If you want. I have others.
Astra looked at the drawing.
She looked at the figure in it, the one that was her, the hands raised and the light coming out of them in long radiating lines, rendered in careful pencil by someone who had not been there but had listened to the people who had, who had carried the image around long enough to put it on paper, who had pulled it out of a satchel on a cliff and held it out with shaking hands.
Something moved through her chest that she did not have a name for. Something that pressed outward against the inside of her and made her eyes hot and her throat close in a way that was not grief exactly, or not only grief, but something adjacent to it, something that lived in the same neighborhood.
She was trying very hard not to cry.
She was not entirely succeeding.
Behind her, Illia had been characteristically quiet for the past two minutes, which was notable. Now Astra heard her set her brush down and cross the cliff, and a moment later the boy made a small surprised sound as Illia ruffled his hair with the casual authority of someone who had known him for longer than she had.
ILA: How did you find us up here, Tom.
TOM: I followed the path from the bottom. It wasn't hard, there's paint on some of the rocks.
ILA: There is not paint on the rocks.
TOM: There's a little bit of paint on the rocks.
ILA: That's from last Tuesday and it was an accident and I painted over it.
TOM: You painted over it with more paint.
ILA: Different paint. Better paint. Intentional paint.
Tom looked like he had more to say about the paint situation but was choosing his battles. He glanced past Illia to Astra, who was still looking at the drawing, and his expression shifted into something softer and more uncertain. He took a small step toward her.
TOM: Miss Astra?
Astra looked up. His face, up close, was very earnest. The coat was definitely too big. He had ink on his left hand from something unrelated to the drawing, old and faded, the kind that had survived several washes without quite disappearing.
TOM: Why are you crying?
Astra looked at him. She looked at the drawing in her hands. She looked at the figure in it with its hands raised and the light coming out of them, drawn by someone who had not been there, who had only heard, who had carried the image and made it real on paper because that was what you did with things you wanted to hold onto. She opened her mouth. Closed it. She looked at the drawing for a moment longer.
AST: Because someone remembered.
Tom considered this with the seriousness of someone who was still young enough to take answers literally and old enough to understand that this one meant something beyond its words. He nodded, slowly, like he understood. Behind him, Illia watched them both. Her expression, for once, was not performing anything at all.