Awakenings

[This post is from J.T.’s point of view.]

Leinth watched his face for a few seconds, then spoke, her voice still quiet. “Something happened there.”

J.T. startled slightly, glancing toward her. “What?”

She motioned toward the garden, with its once-manicured hedges, broken benches and its fountain with Robin Goodfellow perched in the center. J.T. took a slow breath and nodded.

“Yeah. It—it’s a long story.” That was a lie—the story wasn’t that long, but he wasn’t sure he had the energy to tell it. He stared at the remains of the garden and sighed quietly. Had Carolyn’s faery friends returned there at all? He wasn’t sure he wanted to ask, wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Leinth squeezed his shoulder again.

“Are you all right?”

He smiled crookedly, nodding. “Yeah. Just morbid thoughts, that’s all. I’m fine.”

“Are you?” she asked, her voice gently probing. J.T. shook his head, still managing to smile.

“As most of us ever get, anyway,” he said, then turned, heading down the hill toward the barrow. “Just thinking, that’s all. Dangerous proposition around here.”

“True,” she admitted, then smiled herself, falling back into step with him. “Very, very true. This conversation is a prime example of that, I think.”

J.T. nodded in agreement. “Twisting paths and all that. It’s a tangle.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

A pale blue haze hung over the barrow, though J.T. was certain no one else would have seen it beyond a handful of their friends. He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. Something had stirred, though what it was, he didn’t know, couldn’t know—not yet.

“Do you see it?” he asked her softly, lips barely moving.

Leinth nodded. “Aye. I do.” She touched his arm gently. “I can go down alone.”

“No,” he said. “No, together. We go together.”

With a resolute stride, he walked down the hill, Leinth trailing half a step behind.

[This post is from J.T.’s point of view.]

“I often think the same thing of Seamus,” Leinth continued, crossing her arms. She was in jeans today, jeans and a tank top, revealing pale arms with blue-gray tattoos spiraling across her collarbones and shoulders and down her arms. Her hair was gathered into a thick rope down her back, steps echoing along with his as they walked across the concrete that had already begun to crack with the shifting of the ground beneath it, with the change to the world they lived in.

How many years would it survive?

J.T.’s brows rose. “You do?”

“I think everyone does, sometimes,” she admitted, then smiled faintly. “One thing I knew when I met him, though—he was too good for any of us. For any of my ilk down in the south. For all that my father cajoled and demanded and negotiated—Seamus was beyond our depth. I wonder, sometimes, if Teague might have been but in my heart of hearts I know that whole clan was well beyond anything we deserved or ever should have desired.” Leinth shook her head slightly, her gaze far away. “And yet, somehow, my father managed to demand just such a thing and get it.”

A shiver crept down J.T.’s spine. “I—I don’t remember it,” he admitted quietly. “The feeling I get is that my soul was spun into someone close to Teague’s wife back then. I remember—” he broke off, took a deep breath, then started again. “—I remember seeing her choose her death.”

Leinth squeezed his shoulder. “Memories of a distant long-ago must be strange for all of you.”

“Not all of us have them,” J.T. said. “Just some of us—and not all of us talk about them, either.”

“Probably a wise decision.”

He nodded. They were coming up on the Shakespeare garden. Roses and other flowers grew in a wild profusion there, tangling over each other, hiding the ruins left behind by the destruction of last autumn. His heart gave a painful squeeze. Perhaps it would heal.

Perhaps it wouldn’t.

[This post is from J.T.’s point of view.]

“I’ve been having dreams again,” J.T. murmured to Leinth as they reached the far end of the bridge. Until that point, the pair had moved in companionable silence after leaving Rory by the fire. Each of them carried a mug of something steaming—the last of an early batch of coffee for J.T., a mug of tea for Leinth—along as they made what at least appeared to be a leisurely stroll south toward the barrow.

“What sort of dreams?” She asked quietly. “The kind you told me about before? Those ones?”

He grunted softly and nodded. “The ones I don’t like talking about.”

“Have you seen her again?”

J.T.’s lips thinned and he stayed silent for a few minutes as they walked along the plaza, past the blue arch that swayed silently in the summer wind. “Yes,” he finally said as they were halfway to their destination, outside of the ruins of the library at the center of campus. “That’s why I needed to talk to you this morning.”

“So that’s why we’re taking this walk,” Leinth said, her voice slow and soft. “I wondered.”

“Well, now you know,” J.T. muttered, then scrubbed a hand over his face. He took a long, slow sip of coffee. “I have to figure out a way to tell Carolyn if she hasn’t already figured out what I’m dreaming about. She already knows I’m dreaming. She’s woken me a couple of times and thank god that she did because I don’t know what the hell I’d have done if she hadn’t.”

“She’s good for you,” Leinth said softly, crossing her arms against her chest even as she sipped at her tea. Her gaze focused distantly, tracking something that J.T. couldn’t quite see, wasn’t sure he wanted to see. She was older than he was, in years and in the world they’d settled into. She’d always been able to see the strangeness.

This was all still at least a little new to him.

“Too good, I sometimes think,” J.T. murmured. Leinth grinned.

“Perhaps, but you’ve chosen each other and that’s what matters.”

That, at least, was heartening.