Post by luinae on Dec 3, 2011 12:39:36 GMT 10
To: Lisabounce
Message: I was so excited to write for you, especially since we haven't really talked a lot on the boards. It gave me a chance to make some new friends. I was also so happy you had one of my favourite couples on your wishlist- yay! I hope you enjoy
From: Luinae
Title: Rose petals in flame
Words: 2026
Rating: PG-13
Wishlist Item: #3, Lark/Rosethorn
Summary: Rosethorn left Lark behind when she went to Gyongxe, and now she can't come home, and neither of them know how to bring her home.
Notes: Enjoy!
Every day was hard for her, and every day was as painful as the last, but at least they weren’t the night. Rosethorn hated the night, when the burning fields of Gyongxe rose in her mind and choked her until she was scarcely able to breathe. She would wake in a cold sweat, and Lark would start awake with bright eyes and an expression that fairly ached with pity and sorrow.
She couldn’t stand it, in the end, Lark’s bright eyes of unshed tears and her unspoken pity, so she took her things out of Lark’s room and moved back to her own. There was no comforting warmth there, and when she woke in a cold sweat that night, screaming, she could tear soft sobbing coming from Lark’s room.
The only thing that Rosethorn could do was push the pillow over her head, ignore the sobbing, and try to surrender herself to sleep in the choking darkness.
When she started crying, Rosethorn pretended she wasn’t, even to herself.
The days were easier. She lived in constant terror and fear and hatred and pity for everyone and herself, but even all of that was easier than remembering. Memories, broken and fragmented, always haunted her in the night, and they hurt more than Rosethorn had ever though possible.
“Go away!” she shouts, shrieks really, when Lark bolts into her room the following week, after Rosethorn wakes up screaming. Again. “Go away! Get out, get out, leave me ALONE!”
Lark doesn’t say anything. She just looks at Rosethorn, wild and sweat soaked from nightmares and turns, slipping out of the door. Lark still hasn’t said anything, but what she’s left unspoken is, come back to me, Rosie, come back to me.
She hadn’t come home, not really. Lark spoke to her as if to a wounded animal, and the children were gone, and someone had even given Discipline cottage a new coat of paint.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to Lark the next morning, slipping her hand into hers.
Lark takes her hand away and turns. “I know,” she manages to say, in a choked voice. “I know. I’m sorry too.”
They still go to their own rooms that night. Lark, a traitorous voice begins to whisper in Rosethorn’s mind. Lark Lark Lark, you left her behind and now you can’t come home.
Her mouth won’t form the words to speak of Gyongxe, but she can still see it in her mind’s eye. Rosethorn could see it clearly, the blood soaked ground, the burning fields, the battered villages, and the bitter, salty rain.
“What was it like?” Lark summons up the courage to ask after a week of tip toeing around each other and ignoring the screaming that comes from her rooms in the night.
Rosethorn looks up from her mug of tea. “I don’t know.” The words are stone heavy on her tongue.
“I don’t know either,” Lark says, a little sharply, before looking immediately ashamed of herself.
“I’m sorry!” they both blurt out at the same time, because they are, but neither of them knows how to bring Rosethorn home.
Murderer, they whisper to her, children with heads lolling at strange angles. Murderer, they whisper to her, men and women with the slumped bodies of their loved ones in their arms. Every night, Rosethorn would dream, and some would whisper, softly, murderer.
“They’ve caught a murderer in Summersea,” Lark says in a quiet voice, timidly trying to make small talk.
“I’m not!” Rosethorn screams before she realizes that Lark isn’t even speaking of her.
Rosethorn flees to the garden, and lets the plants wrap around her arms and legs, but when she dreams that night Lark joins the faces of the dead. There is crimson blood splashed across her face, and her red lips whisper, murderer, murderer, murderer.
Even with Lark’s feeble attempts at speaking to her and her quiet sobs she thought that Rosethorn couldn’t hear, she loved the day, because it was not the night. The night was still and calm and an oppressing black. Every night, Rosethorn would close her eyes and remember the tramp-tramp of steel boots on fields of grain.
She had been so hopeful then, and then someone had whispered traitor to a terrified emperor and rebellion to his crueller councillors, and the already broken emperor had simply whispered burn them, burn them all.
Later, when Rosethorn had lost most of her hope, she would learn that the Emperor, in his fear and madness, had drowned all of Gyongxe in a red river of blood, but in that moment there had only been her and Briar and Evvy and the soft spoken temple dedicates and the cheerful merchants and the quiet, fearful children. They had stared down at the column of soldiers and listened to the sound of steel boots on dry earth, and irrationally, Rosethorn remembered Lark.
But then the screaming had started, and she had forgotten everything. By the time Rosethorn came back, she couldn’t even remember what Lark looked like.
When she woke that night, sweat soaked from another, never changing nightmare, she can't remember what Lark looked like again.
Rosethorn could hear her sobbing in the next room, like she did every night, when Discipline was silent and she thought no one could hear her, and Rosethorn couldn’t even remember her face.
She traipses quietly into Lark’s room, because even with the pity and the sorrow and the tears, Rosethorn desperately needs to remember.
“What do you want, Rosie?” Lark says quietly, her voice dull and defeated.
The words tumble out of her mouth before she can stop them. “I couldn’t remember what you looked like.”
Lark looks immeasurably hurt for a moment, and then looks at her lap. “I didn’t remember what you looked either.”
“Oh,” Rosethorn whispers, and the tears running down her face taste like blood and smell like rain.
Rosethorn dreamed of it, over and over and over again. The way they had hit her head so hard that warm, sticky blood trickled over the left side of her face, and herded her against the wall, hands tied behind her back. She had no choice but to listen to their screams as her own blood dripped into her mouth.
Evvy’s had been high, shrill, and panicked; Briar’s had been angry and full of pain. Rosethorn hadn’t screamed at all. She pressed her lips together and bit her tongue so hard it bled. She’d fought and fought and kept on fighting, at the Emperor’s men who burned and raped and beat people bloody, at the rope on her wrists, at the soldiers who took a stick to Evvy’s feet. They’d still won.
Rosethorn supposed that they always did.
And then she closed her eyes, but she still couldn’t remember Lark, and someone was screaming, and her lover’s face was fuzzy and distorted in her mind. Rosethorn was holding the image of Lark until someone hit her on the head and she slumped to the ground, bound hands lolling in a gutter of blood.
Lark, she thought. Lark, Lark, you left her behind, and now you can’t go home.
Lark brought her tea the next morning, and instead of asking for permission with a sly smile and sparkling eyes, she placed the mint tea on the wooden crate and crawled into bed beside Rosethorn.
Part of Rosethorn wants to push her away, and growl, and scream, “don’t touch me, don’t hurt me,” but that’s a very tiny part of her. Lark curls around her, warm and soft and the sun streams in through the window.
A few tears fall on Lark’s black hair and then Rosethorn can’t stop crying. She half expects Lark to start or sob or speak comforting words, but all Rosethorn can hear is the steady thump thump thump of Lark’s heart beating against her chest.
When she wakes screaming that night, she can still hear Lark’s sobbing in the next room, but at least Rosethorn can remember her face, a flashing smile and pair of bright eyes among the wall of blood and siren song of steel.
I’m next, Rosethorn had thought, and it was relief, because she had been dead, really, ever since the screaming had finally stopped and echoed through the ruined shell of Gyongxe.
Beat her, a soldier had cried. Beat her bloody! It hadn’t mattered, not really. Evvy and Briar were being herded into the magistrate’s building, to jail or torture or worse, and there was no more screaming. The only sounds were soft sobbing, and occasionally, a heart broken wail, or the dull thunk of a sword slicing through human flesh.
It had been a time of horrors, but when it was over Briar had squeezed her hand and said, “Let’s go home.”
Rosethorn had stumbled off the boat and into Lark’s arms, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d been dead ever since the screaming stopped.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Lark asks the next day, softly. Her hair is matted from another sleepless night, and Rosethorn just stares at her with red rimmed, tired eyes.
“I’m a survivor,” she says, just as quiet as Lark had been. “I’m one of the strong ones.”
Lark almost laughs. “Is there nothing else you can say?”
“I’m a survivor,” Rosethorn repeats, turning away. But she’s only saying she’s a survivor because she’s terrified that she isn’t, not really.
It’s the first night in months that Rosethorn has slept in Lark’s room, in the tiny room with the soft rugs on the floor and the comforting click clack of the loom every morning. It’s the first night, really, that she manages to speak of Gyongxe, in something more than broken sobs, stuttering sentences, and nightmarish screams.
“Gyongxe was burning,” she whispers. Still, she can only speak of it in the darkness, because the pity on Lark’s face is still too much to bear. Lark’s arms clench tighter around her waist. “It burned like rose petals in flame, and I stood with my hands bound behind my back, while Gyongxe burned.”
“You did what you could.”
“Burning,” Rosethorn whispers, because the memories are too strong to stop now. “It was burning like a field grain, and the ashes rose to the sky like smoke.”
Lark doesn’t say anything until Rosethorn grabs her shoulders so hard that she fears she might leave a bruise. “Lark, I can’t forget! I can’t forget, I can see it all the time, and the memories never leave, not even for a moment!” She stops speaking for a moment, choking on her own grief and hysteria. “Am I going mad? What’s happened to me? Why aren’t I home? I want to go home, Lark, I want to go home.”
And then she screams. Lark holds her until she stops shaking and screaming, but after a while Rosethorn realizes that all she is screaming is, I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home.
I want to go home, and I’m trapped in the cage my mind has become. .
Lark brings her tea in the morning and Rosethorn washes the crumbling tear tracks from her face.
“There were roses in Gyongxe,” Rosethorn says, wistfully. “Bright red roses, and then the soldiers burned them. There were bright red rose petals lying in pools of blood.”
“Were they beautiful?” Lark asks.
“Yes,” Rosethorn says. She wraps her hands around the yellow mug and Lark curls up beside her, smelling like almond and vanilla and home.
“I will plant you a rose bush,” Lark says. Her hair is coarse against Rosethorn’s skin and her hands are cold. “I’ll plant you a rose bush, you’ll see.”
“Even after all this?” whispers Rosethorn, with Lark’s breath hot on her neck and cold hands clenched tightly in her own.
“I promise,” Lark says, voice tight, and when Rosethorn squeezes her eyes shut she remembers Lark’s face clear as day. “I’m going to plant you a rose bush, I promise, Rosie-girl. I promise.”
Lark, she thinks, in the nights that follow. Lark Lark Lark, you left her behind and forgot her face and now you’ve come home.
Hope you enjoyed!
Message: I was so excited to write for you, especially since we haven't really talked a lot on the boards. It gave me a chance to make some new friends. I was also so happy you had one of my favourite couples on your wishlist- yay! I hope you enjoy
From: Luinae
Title: Rose petals in flame
Words: 2026
Rating: PG-13
Wishlist Item: #3, Lark/Rosethorn
Summary: Rosethorn left Lark behind when she went to Gyongxe, and now she can't come home, and neither of them know how to bring her home.
Notes: Enjoy!
Every day was hard for her, and every day was as painful as the last, but at least they weren’t the night. Rosethorn hated the night, when the burning fields of Gyongxe rose in her mind and choked her until she was scarcely able to breathe. She would wake in a cold sweat, and Lark would start awake with bright eyes and an expression that fairly ached with pity and sorrow.
She couldn’t stand it, in the end, Lark’s bright eyes of unshed tears and her unspoken pity, so she took her things out of Lark’s room and moved back to her own. There was no comforting warmth there, and when she woke in a cold sweat that night, screaming, she could tear soft sobbing coming from Lark’s room.
The only thing that Rosethorn could do was push the pillow over her head, ignore the sobbing, and try to surrender herself to sleep in the choking darkness.
When she started crying, Rosethorn pretended she wasn’t, even to herself.
The days were easier. She lived in constant terror and fear and hatred and pity for everyone and herself, but even all of that was easier than remembering. Memories, broken and fragmented, always haunted her in the night, and they hurt more than Rosethorn had ever though possible.
“Go away!” she shouts, shrieks really, when Lark bolts into her room the following week, after Rosethorn wakes up screaming. Again. “Go away! Get out, get out, leave me ALONE!”
Lark doesn’t say anything. She just looks at Rosethorn, wild and sweat soaked from nightmares and turns, slipping out of the door. Lark still hasn’t said anything, but what she’s left unspoken is, come back to me, Rosie, come back to me.
She hadn’t come home, not really. Lark spoke to her as if to a wounded animal, and the children were gone, and someone had even given Discipline cottage a new coat of paint.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to Lark the next morning, slipping her hand into hers.
Lark takes her hand away and turns. “I know,” she manages to say, in a choked voice. “I know. I’m sorry too.”
They still go to their own rooms that night. Lark, a traitorous voice begins to whisper in Rosethorn’s mind. Lark Lark Lark, you left her behind and now you can’t come home.
Her mouth won’t form the words to speak of Gyongxe, but she can still see it in her mind’s eye. Rosethorn could see it clearly, the blood soaked ground, the burning fields, the battered villages, and the bitter, salty rain.
“What was it like?” Lark summons up the courage to ask after a week of tip toeing around each other and ignoring the screaming that comes from her rooms in the night.
Rosethorn looks up from her mug of tea. “I don’t know.” The words are stone heavy on her tongue.
“I don’t know either,” Lark says, a little sharply, before looking immediately ashamed of herself.
“I’m sorry!” they both blurt out at the same time, because they are, but neither of them knows how to bring Rosethorn home.
Murderer, they whisper to her, children with heads lolling at strange angles. Murderer, they whisper to her, men and women with the slumped bodies of their loved ones in their arms. Every night, Rosethorn would dream, and some would whisper, softly, murderer.
“They’ve caught a murderer in Summersea,” Lark says in a quiet voice, timidly trying to make small talk.
“I’m not!” Rosethorn screams before she realizes that Lark isn’t even speaking of her.
Rosethorn flees to the garden, and lets the plants wrap around her arms and legs, but when she dreams that night Lark joins the faces of the dead. There is crimson blood splashed across her face, and her red lips whisper, murderer, murderer, murderer.
Even with Lark’s feeble attempts at speaking to her and her quiet sobs she thought that Rosethorn couldn’t hear, she loved the day, because it was not the night. The night was still and calm and an oppressing black. Every night, Rosethorn would close her eyes and remember the tramp-tramp of steel boots on fields of grain.
She had been so hopeful then, and then someone had whispered traitor to a terrified emperor and rebellion to his crueller councillors, and the already broken emperor had simply whispered burn them, burn them all.
Later, when Rosethorn had lost most of her hope, she would learn that the Emperor, in his fear and madness, had drowned all of Gyongxe in a red river of blood, but in that moment there had only been her and Briar and Evvy and the soft spoken temple dedicates and the cheerful merchants and the quiet, fearful children. They had stared down at the column of soldiers and listened to the sound of steel boots on dry earth, and irrationally, Rosethorn remembered Lark.
But then the screaming had started, and she had forgotten everything. By the time Rosethorn came back, she couldn’t even remember what Lark looked like.
When she woke that night, sweat soaked from another, never changing nightmare, she can't remember what Lark looked like again.
Rosethorn could hear her sobbing in the next room, like she did every night, when Discipline was silent and she thought no one could hear her, and Rosethorn couldn’t even remember her face.
She traipses quietly into Lark’s room, because even with the pity and the sorrow and the tears, Rosethorn desperately needs to remember.
“What do you want, Rosie?” Lark says quietly, her voice dull and defeated.
The words tumble out of her mouth before she can stop them. “I couldn’t remember what you looked like.”
Lark looks immeasurably hurt for a moment, and then looks at her lap. “I didn’t remember what you looked either.”
“Oh,” Rosethorn whispers, and the tears running down her face taste like blood and smell like rain.
Rosethorn dreamed of it, over and over and over again. The way they had hit her head so hard that warm, sticky blood trickled over the left side of her face, and herded her against the wall, hands tied behind her back. She had no choice but to listen to their screams as her own blood dripped into her mouth.
Evvy’s had been high, shrill, and panicked; Briar’s had been angry and full of pain. Rosethorn hadn’t screamed at all. She pressed her lips together and bit her tongue so hard it bled. She’d fought and fought and kept on fighting, at the Emperor’s men who burned and raped and beat people bloody, at the rope on her wrists, at the soldiers who took a stick to Evvy’s feet. They’d still won.
Rosethorn supposed that they always did.
And then she closed her eyes, but she still couldn’t remember Lark, and someone was screaming, and her lover’s face was fuzzy and distorted in her mind. Rosethorn was holding the image of Lark until someone hit her on the head and she slumped to the ground, bound hands lolling in a gutter of blood.
Lark, she thought. Lark, Lark, you left her behind, and now you can’t go home.
Lark brought her tea the next morning, and instead of asking for permission with a sly smile and sparkling eyes, she placed the mint tea on the wooden crate and crawled into bed beside Rosethorn.
Part of Rosethorn wants to push her away, and growl, and scream, “don’t touch me, don’t hurt me,” but that’s a very tiny part of her. Lark curls around her, warm and soft and the sun streams in through the window.
A few tears fall on Lark’s black hair and then Rosethorn can’t stop crying. She half expects Lark to start or sob or speak comforting words, but all Rosethorn can hear is the steady thump thump thump of Lark’s heart beating against her chest.
When she wakes screaming that night, she can still hear Lark’s sobbing in the next room, but at least Rosethorn can remember her face, a flashing smile and pair of bright eyes among the wall of blood and siren song of steel.
I’m next, Rosethorn had thought, and it was relief, because she had been dead, really, ever since the screaming had finally stopped and echoed through the ruined shell of Gyongxe.
Beat her, a soldier had cried. Beat her bloody! It hadn’t mattered, not really. Evvy and Briar were being herded into the magistrate’s building, to jail or torture or worse, and there was no more screaming. The only sounds were soft sobbing, and occasionally, a heart broken wail, or the dull thunk of a sword slicing through human flesh.
It had been a time of horrors, but when it was over Briar had squeezed her hand and said, “Let’s go home.”
Rosethorn had stumbled off the boat and into Lark’s arms, but it hadn’t mattered. She’d been dead ever since the screaming stopped.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Lark asks the next day, softly. Her hair is matted from another sleepless night, and Rosethorn just stares at her with red rimmed, tired eyes.
“I’m a survivor,” she says, just as quiet as Lark had been. “I’m one of the strong ones.”
Lark almost laughs. “Is there nothing else you can say?”
“I’m a survivor,” Rosethorn repeats, turning away. But she’s only saying she’s a survivor because she’s terrified that she isn’t, not really.
It’s the first night in months that Rosethorn has slept in Lark’s room, in the tiny room with the soft rugs on the floor and the comforting click clack of the loom every morning. It’s the first night, really, that she manages to speak of Gyongxe, in something more than broken sobs, stuttering sentences, and nightmarish screams.
“Gyongxe was burning,” she whispers. Still, she can only speak of it in the darkness, because the pity on Lark’s face is still too much to bear. Lark’s arms clench tighter around her waist. “It burned like rose petals in flame, and I stood with my hands bound behind my back, while Gyongxe burned.”
“You did what you could.”
“Burning,” Rosethorn whispers, because the memories are too strong to stop now. “It was burning like a field grain, and the ashes rose to the sky like smoke.”
Lark doesn’t say anything until Rosethorn grabs her shoulders so hard that she fears she might leave a bruise. “Lark, I can’t forget! I can’t forget, I can see it all the time, and the memories never leave, not even for a moment!” She stops speaking for a moment, choking on her own grief and hysteria. “Am I going mad? What’s happened to me? Why aren’t I home? I want to go home, Lark, I want to go home.”
And then she screams. Lark holds her until she stops shaking and screaming, but after a while Rosethorn realizes that all she is screaming is, I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home.
I want to go home, and I’m trapped in the cage my mind has become. .
Lark brings her tea in the morning and Rosethorn washes the crumbling tear tracks from her face.
“There were roses in Gyongxe,” Rosethorn says, wistfully. “Bright red roses, and then the soldiers burned them. There were bright red rose petals lying in pools of blood.”
“Were they beautiful?” Lark asks.
“Yes,” Rosethorn says. She wraps her hands around the yellow mug and Lark curls up beside her, smelling like almond and vanilla and home.
“I will plant you a rose bush,” Lark says. Her hair is coarse against Rosethorn’s skin and her hands are cold. “I’ll plant you a rose bush, you’ll see.”
“Even after all this?” whispers Rosethorn, with Lark’s breath hot on her neck and cold hands clenched tightly in her own.
“I promise,” Lark says, voice tight, and when Rosethorn squeezes her eyes shut she remembers Lark’s face clear as day. “I’m going to plant you a rose bush, I promise, Rosie-girl. I promise.”
Lark, she thinks, in the nights that follow. Lark Lark Lark, you left her behind and forgot her face and now you’ve come home.
Hope you enjoyed!