She had not thought about the fight in weeks. She had thought around it, the way you thought around something that was too bright to look at directly, catching it at the edges, feeling its shape without meeting it head on. The funeral. The graves. The silence of the cottage. The drawings on the doorstep. The cliff. All of it orbiting the thing she had not looked at. Tom's drawing made her look.
The figure with the hands raised and the light coming out of them in long radiating lines. Her. Fighting. Rendered in careful pencil by someone who had only heard and had made it real anyway, had made it something carried and kept and eventually offered with shaking hands on a cliff. She looked at the drawing and the drawing looked back and the thing she had been orbiting for weeks pulled her in, and she was there again before she had decided to be.
The light from her hands had gone blue at the edges when she was afraid. She had not known that before. She knew it then. He had looked at her with eyes that were not his. She had known they were not his. She had known it completely and certainly and it had not made any difference because his face was still his face and his voice, when it came, still carried the shape of him underneath everything that had been layered over it. She had raised her hands anyway. She had done what needed doing anyway. The light had gone blue at the edges and she had done it anyway and she would do it again, she would do it a thousand times again if she had to, and that knowledge lived in her chest like a stone she had swallowed and never been able to dislodge. He had looked at her, at the end of it, with eyes that were his again. Just briefly. Just enough. She did not know if it had mattered. She did not know if not knowing would ever stop.
She came back to the cliff. Tom was looking at her. He had been watching her face change and had gone very still the way children went still when they understood that something was happening that was larger than them and required stillness rather than words. Her hands were shaking. She was crying properly now, not the trying-not-to of before, but fully, the way she had cried on the studio floor, with her whole chest, with the kind of grief that did not ask permission. The drawing was still in her hands and she was holding it carefully despite everything, the way you held something carefully when you were falling apart, because some habits were deeper than the falling.
Tom looked at her for a moment.
Then he stepped forward and put his arms around her, as far as they would go, which was not very far because he was ten and she was not, but the intention was complete and the weight of it was real, and Astra stood on the cliff with a child's arms around her and the drawing pressed between them and cried until the crying had an end to it. When she pulled back Tom looked up at her with the serious evaluating expression of someone assessing structural damage.
He nodded, apparently satisfied.
Behind him, Illia stood with her arms crossed and her brush in one hand and her expression doing something complicated and quiet that she would, if asked, absolutely deny. Astra wiped her face with the back of her hand. She looked at Tom. She looked at Illia. She looked at the drawing one more time.
Then she ran.
Not away. Not blindly. She ran the way you ran when you finally knew where you were going and your body had decided to get there before your mind changed its opinion, down the path from the cliff, through the long grass at the water's edge, onto the road, the air cold against her wet face, her feet finding the ground with the certainty of someone who had spent enough time not moving and was done with that now.
The graveyard was quiet in the afternoon.
It was always quiet. That was the nature of graveyards, the whole point of them, that the quiet was kept deliberately, maintained against the noise of the world outside the low stone wall. She came through the gate and across the grass and stopped in front of the stone that still had fresh earth at its base, that still had the shape of new in it, that had his name on it in letters she had not yet let herself read straight through without looking away.
She looked at them straight through now.
Then she sat down beside the stone, in the grass, close enough to lean against it if she wanted to. She did not lean against it. She sat beside it the way you sat beside someone. She put the drawing in her lap.
AST: I don't know how to start. I've been thinking about what I'd say for weeks and now I'm here and I don't know how to start.
The graveyard held its quiet. A bird somewhere. The distant sound of the road.
AST: I fought you. You know that. Obviously you know that, you were there, or part of you was there, I don't know how much of you was there and that's the part I keep- that's the part I can't-
She stopped. Let out a breath.
AST: I need you to know that I knew. The whole time. I knew it was you underneath it. I knew what I was doing and I knew why and I would do it again. I need you to know that it wasn't- I need you to know that my hands knew whose face they were looking at and they did it anyway because that's what you would have wanted and I knew that too.
The stone said nothing. The afternoon light moved slowly across the grass.
AST: I'm angry at you. I'm allowed to be angry at you. You don't get to do what you did and have me not be angry about it. You were supposed to-
She stopped again.
AST: You were supposed to be here. You were supposed to be the one who smiled too much and was loud when you were happy and quiet when you were thinking. You were supposed to be so many things that you didn't get to be.
She looked at the drawing in her lap. The figure with the raised hands and the light coming out of them.
AST: A kid drew this. He wasn't even there. He just heard about it and he drew it and he kept it and he gave it to me today with shaking hands on a cliff and I-
Her voice broke. She waited for it to come back.
AST: People are going to keep doing that. They're going to keep carrying you. And I think- I think I have to keep carrying you too. Not the way I have been. Not like a wound. Like something I'm- like something I get to keep.
She pressed her palm flat against the grass beside the stone.
AST: I don't know how to do that yet. But I'm going to figure it out.
Her hands were warm. She noticed it the way you noticed things that arrived quietly, without announcement, the warmth that started at the center of her palms and spread into her fingers. Not the blue-edged fear-light of the fight. The real warmth. The one that had always been there, the property of the thing rather than an effort of it. She looked at her hands.
She raised one slowly toward the stone. The light came out of her fingertips the way it always had, steady and certain and entirely itself, and she began to draw. She drew him the way she remembered him. Not the way he looked at the end. Not the possessed eyes and the wrong expression. The way he looked when he was being loud because he was happy. The way his face arranged itself when he was thinking and didn't know anyone was watching. The way he smiled, too much, in the way that had always been both difficult and the best thing.
She drew him as he was.
The light settled into the stone slowly, the way paint settled into canvas, building in layers, gaining depth. She worked without planning it, the way she always worked best, letting her hands lead, letting the right side of the piece arrive the way it always arrived, unannounced and exactly right. When she was done she sat back and looked at it.
A boy with a smile as bright as the sun. The kindest soul cursed by the deepest tragedy. Rendered in light on stone, on a quiet afternoon, by someone who had loved him and lost him and was learning, slowly and imperfectly and without any guarantee, to carry both. She sat with it for a long time. Then she smiled. Small. Real. The first one in a long time that reached all the way.
AST: I'll come back.
She stood. Brushed the grass from her clothes. Looked at the portrait one last time. Her hands were warm, and the light was hers, and the afternoon was long, and she walked back through the gate the way you walked out of places you intended to return to.