Awakenings

[This post is from Hecate’s point of view.]

                Carolyn smiled weakly and squeezed her hand.  “How can you be so sure, though?  What if something happens to all of us?”

                “There is nothing that is going to be able to wipe out all of us all at once,” Hecate said.  “Besides, do you really think that we wouldn’t find some way to make sure that any of our children were protected and cared for, even if something came at us hard?”

                “No.  No, I don’t think that.”  She shook her head.  “No matter how stubborn we all are, someone would make sure they’re with them.  Those kids would never be alone.”  She sighed, then let out a little laugh.  “God.  It’d be me.  I’d be with them.  Even if one of them was mine or not, it’d be me until they’re old enough to take care of themselves if something happened to us.”

                “I’m sure you wouldn’t be the only one,” Hecate said softly, squeezing her hand.  “None of us are ever alone in anything here.”

                Carolyn smiled crookedly.  “Someday, that’s going to be a problem.”

                “Probably,” Hecate agreed, grinning.  “But not just yet.”

                Carolyn nodded, squeezing her hand again before letting go.  “Thank you.”

                “You’re welcome.”  Hecate smiled at her and went back to clearing overgrowth.  Carolyn did the same, and the two worked in companionable silence for a little while.    The sound of birdsong lifted Hecate’s spirits slightly, carrying her to a time long ago and far away, to thick forests and the sound of waves crashing against a shore.  She could smell the woodsmoke in her memory, feel damp earth and grass between her fingers as she knelt near the edge of a forest, smelling the salt of the sea on the wind.

                It was one of those memories that had faded from her thoughts, half-buried because it was wonderful and painful all at once, precious because he had been in it, but painful for the same reason.

[This post is from Hecate’s point of view.]

“Neither do I,” Carolyn said.  Hecate glanced up at her again and the other woman smiled.  “Something tells me that love’s pretty complicated.”

Hecate choked on a laugh, feeling tears start to sting in her eyes.  “You have no idea.”

“Probably not,” Carolyn said, then shrugged.  “I’m not sure I want one, either.”

“Probably not,” Hecate echoed, sitting back against her heels.  She smiled wryly.  “So what was bothering you about having children?”

“Who said it was bothering me?”

“Your tone of voice.  The way you said it.”  Hecate shook her head slightly.  “I may have spent most of very long life more than half out of my mind, but that certainly doesn’t mean I can’t read people.  In some ways, it made it easier.”

Carolyn laughed weakly.  “Well, since you put it that way.”

“Since I put it that way, what’s going on?”  Hecate leaned forward, clearing away a little more overgrowth, freeing the stems of another plant from a tangle of invading greenery.

Carolyn sighed, watching her for a few seconds.  Hecate glanced up, her brow arching slightly.

Finally, Carolyn shifted her position, sitting cross-legged in the grass and fidgeting.  “I guess I’m scared,” she said.  “That’s all.  I’m scared to have kids.”

It was more than just that, though—Hecate could tell from the way Carolyn’s voice hitched slightly.  Carolyn might be afraid of the actual process of carrying a child and giving birth to a child, but whatever fear she carried went beyond that.  “Scared to have kids or scared to have kids with him?”

She looked down.  “It’s not that I don’t want children with him.”

“Then what is it?”

“What if something happens?”

“What do you mean?”

Carolyn swallowed hard.  “What if something happens to us?  To me, to him?  What if—what if our child has the same gifts as one of us—or worse, something entirely different?  Or what if they’re completely normal and everyone around them isn’t?  What then?”

Hecate reached for her hand.  Carolyn let her take it, looking up to meet Hecate’s eyes.

“We never know,” Hecate said softly.  “And none of us really will.  But know this—no matter what, they’ll always be protected and they’ll always be loved.  When you know nothing else, when you can predict nothing else, you know that for certain.  No matter what, they’ll be loved.”

[This post is from Hecate’s point of view.]

“Something bothering you?” Carolyn asked after a few minutes. Hecate glanced up to see the other woman watching her, her brow furrowed slightly.

“That’s a complicated question,” Hecate said softly, then smiled crookedly. “Maybe a little bit.”

Carolyn nodded. “It usually is. Nothing’s ever really that simple, is it?”

Hecate choked on a laugh and shook her head, looking back down to her work. She cleared a few weeds away from the base of a stand of flowers. “No. No, it really isn’t. Only a few things are.” She paused, glancing up again. “You came out here to think, too?”

“Well, I did say I was.” Carolyn grinned, then shrugged. “Nothing really that important at the end of the day. Some of it’s silly things. A little bit of daydreaming.”

“You and J.T. are going to get married,” Hecate said. “Was that what it was?”

Carolyn nodded. “Part of it. Part of it’s a little more than that—questions about whether or not we should have children, that kind of thing. I just don’t know. There’s a lot of things to consider and things are kind of happening a little fast.”

Hecate smiled weakly. “That can be a thing,” she said, tossing a handful of weeds into the pile on the other side of the bed, near where Carolyn knelt.

“So I’m told.” She shrugged again. “I think it was a little different for you and Matt, though. You guys knew each other in another life, right?”

Hecate nodded, lips thinning. “We did. We loved each other in another life. It didn’t feel like it was long enough, though.”

“Would anything ever feel long enough?” Carolyn asked. “Be honest. When you really love someone, I don’t think you really hit a point where enough time together has ever been enough.”

“No,” Hecate admitted in a whisper. “No, I don’t think so.”

[This post is from Hecate’s point of view.]

She walked across the cracked concrete beyond the bridge, past the archway sculpture that somehow still stood, if a little off-kilter, in the center of what used to be a plaza at the heart of the old campus. The manicured lawns and carefully tended trees had gone to wild in the last year since the end of everything, since the day exactly one year ago when everything had changed. Hecate hugged her sweatshirt a little closer and sighed.

Everything changed. It was a mark of the passage of time, and time was something she’d seen—and forgotten—in abundance.

There were still a few buildings there that she remembered from the couple of classes she’d picked up there decades ago, long before her husband or his sister had come to this place to pursue their own studies—studies that for them would have had far more significance going forward than anything she’d ever done here.

Sometimes she wondered how much the interiors had changed, but even now—especially now—it didn’t matter. All that mattered was what they built going forward—and how they would defend it.

Her hand strayed to her belly again. She wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, but eventually they’d figure it out—likely not until the child was born, if even then—but even that didn’t matter.

Nothing will ever harm you, little one, she thought, her lips thinning. I swear on my life.

She could hear the sound of humming as she came closer to the top of the small hill where several half-standing buildings clustered. The sound came from the tatters of a garden bounded by hedgerows outside of one of them, standing above the hill down to the barrow where they’d buried their dead. Hecate’s brows knit.

Who…?

Her steps carried her toward the archway into the garden, marking a gap in half-wild hedgerows. Hecate blinked when she saw Carolyn kneeling amidst tangles of rosebushes and a dozen other flowers, her hands full of dirt, humming as she slowly brought some order to the chaos. Her breath caught.

“Oh,” Hecate sighed. Carolyn turned, looking up at her. She smiled.

“Do you want to help?”

Hecate nodded slowly, moving deeper into the garden. A faint shimmer of power washed over her and then faded. She paused, looking around. Carolyn watched her, sitting back against her heels.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Hecate said, moving to join her. “What are you doing out here?”

“Gardening,” Carolyn said with a crooked smile. “Thinking. What about you?”

“I was—I going to go to the barrow to think.”

Carolyn nodded. “It seems like that kind of day.”

“Yeah,” Hecate said softly. “It does.” She knelt down in the damp grass across the flowerbed from Carolyn. “What do you need me to do?”

“Well, you can start by clearing back some of the grass from the plants over there.”

Hecate nodded, rolling up her sleeves and setting to work.