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///6 + 7///
The first kiss is a sticky, juk-scented smear across Suvi’s cheek. Suvi wipes it off immediately, reflexively, not because she objects to the entire gesture (she’s barely had time to consider the gesture) but because she is a good girl who knows to wipe her face when it’s sticky.
“Stop that,” she says to Ame, who’s giggling and leaning closer to do it again. “You’re all - rice-y.”
They are eating breakfast under the kitchen table, because Grandma Wren is too busy rushing about doing something or other to make them get off the floor and eat on their chairs like civilised children. And under the table has recently become their most favoured base of operations - at least on rainy days like this one - since the cloth means that they cannot immediately be seen by roving adults (or roosters).
“Sorry,” says Ame, though she doesn’t sound sorry at all - Suvi harbours a suspicion that Ame has never been sorry about a single thing in her life. Also there’s rice on her chin.
“Why though?”
“Huh? What?”
“Why’d you kiss me?”
Ame is shoveling juk into her mouth, and she speaks through a mouthful. “You’re so pretty, and stuff. You wanna hunt woodlice later?”
And that’s that.
+++
///8+9///
The second kiss happens because Suvi orders it. You know. Like a normal child.
“You’re the prince, you’re supposed to give me true love’s first kiss!”
Ame finds this idea hilarious. Also, she doesn’t want to be a prince. “How is a kiss supposed to help anything?”
“It’ll wake me up!”
“You’re already awake!”
Suvi looks like she might throw something at Ame. Ame gets ready - Suvi almost always has a book with her and it would not be the first time that she has sent one flying at Ame’s head.
“You’re supposed to wake me up in the story !” She almost stamps her foot - Ame can see her knee flex - but she doesn’t, because she’s practising self-restraint, which Grandma Wren says is one of Suvi’s ‘admirable traits’. Ame doesn’t appreciate these supposed ‘admirable traits’ because mostly they just seem to be complicated ways of being rigid and annoying.
“I don’t like this story,” Ame folds her arms, “There’s no battles and no dragons and not even any songs. Why can’t we go outside?”
“Because it’s my turn to pick something to do, and Grandmother Wren said we could play any game I wanted and I want to play the best story from this book!” Suvi thumps the book she’s been reading for emphasis. Ame makes a mental note to take it and hide it later. Maybe in the chicken coup.
“Fine!” She throws up her hands, “lay down, but I don’t wanna be a prince. Princes are stupid.”
“They are not!”
“They are too!” Ame picks up the little wooden sword she is carrying for the occasion and which is, admittedly, the only redeeming quality of this game, “they can’t even do magic.”
Ame knows that Suvi isn’t actually especially attached to the idea of princes - she only likes this one because he’s in her favourite book - and that they are both united in their low opinions of story book characters who can’t do magic and yet are supposed to be the heroes. (What sort of hero, really, doesn’t have a wand or a staff or a familiar or an enormous spirit bear as a father, or anything? )
Suvi has clambered up onto the little platform she’s spent the last few minutes making out of a couple of big empty crates they found in a corner of the cottage’s vast and cavernous attic, and now she lies down, taking some time to arrange her hair, glasses and skirts into a suitably princess-ly configuration. “You don’t know that. Maybe you’re a magic prince.”
Only Suvi could turn an adventure into somewhere as interestingly forbidden as the attic into something as dull as a game about a book. But Ame has to admit the setting feels fitting. The room is all dark corners and dusty crevasses between stacked boxes and trunks spilling over with lost and broken things. There’s a shaft of light from a pane of coloured glass in the roof falling on Suvi’s makeshift bed, so when she folds her hands over her chest and goes very still she almost does look a little bit like a heroine under a spell. Or at least like something dramatic and fun might be about to happen.
Ame considers, giving the wooden sword an experimental jab in the air. “Maybe I’m… a witch prince?”
“Yes,” Suvi opens one eye to look at her and nods, studiously, as if she is the authority on what princes can and cannot be, “you’re a witch prince, and I’m the wizard princess under a sleeping curse, and when you give me true love’s first kiss, I wake up, and we get married - “
“Yuck! Why would we do that?”
“Because then we live happily ever after!”
“But that’s not how anything works!”
“I know!” Suvi snaps, sitting up, “of course that’s not how anything works in the real world, but this is the book, we’re doing the book, and I don’t spend your games asking why we’re running after butterflies again or spying on Grandma Wren’s guests or - or - “
“Alright, alright!” Ame waves her hands, because if Suvi’s voice gets any louder Grandma Wren is definitely going to hear them and come and chase them out of the attic. “At least can my sword be magic?”
“ I suppose ,” Suvi sighs, flopping back down on the boxes sounding extremely put upon, “just hurry up, will you? And you have to do it properly, Ame, you promised!”
Ame groans - but she had promised, some long hours ago when the threat of being made to be a prince from one of Suvi’s stories had seemed blissfully distant, to play whatever game Suvi wanted that day ‘properly’. And she is meant to be kind - in general, and specifically to Suvi because Suvi is so often very sad - so she gives her wooden sword a little swish and pretends very hard that it’s magic and also that she doesn’t mind being a prince, and stomps dramatically up to Suvi’s prone form on the boxes.
“Aha! What is this? A sleeping princess!” She intones, in what she imagines is a witch prince sort of voice, “how - vociferous!”
“That’s not what vociferous means!”
“You can’t talk, you’re asleep!”
Suvi giggles, but keeps her eyes closed. Ame feels her face get hot - she had used that word because it felt big, like the sort of word Suvi would use, and maybe the sort of word that a prince would use, and because Ame wants, more than she really cares to admit, for Suvi to be just a little bit impressed by her for once. But now she feels stupid. Stupider.
She’s been quiet for too long, because Suvi prods at her - still without opening her eyes. “Ame! You promised!”
“I’m trying!” Ame huffs, then plants her hands on the boxes next to Suvi’s head, trying to assume the air of a prince perturbed by the presence of a cursed princess. “Awake! Awake, beautiful princess!” And she gives Suvi’s shoulders a shake.
Suvi giggles again, but doesn’t move.
“How strange! This is no ordinary sleep! She is cursed! Cursed, I say!” Ame waves her sword for emphasis, even though Suvi still has her eyes closed so can’t appreciate this masterful piece of acting. “What shall I do? How can I save her?”
She scratches her chin - yet again a gesture that Suvi will never appreciate - “aha! I know! A kiss - “
“ True love’s first kiss !” Suvi hisses, out of the corner of her mouth.
“True love’s first kiss!” Ame declares, trying not to roll her eyes. “Surely, shall break the spell, even though that’s not how magic works which certain girls definitely know-”
“ Ame !”
Ame sighs. “Still, perhaps because I am a witch prince and my sword is magic, a kiss shall awaken the girl - “
“ Princess ! I’m not a girl, I’m a princess!”
“Princess.” Ame carefully places the wooden sword on the boxes next to Suvi and then leans over her, only a little apprehensive - this seems like the most straightforward part of this game, though for some reason her stomach feels a little funny at the thought. Maybe she ate too fast at breakfast again. “A kiss - for a princess.”
And she leans down and firmly presses her mouth to Suvi’s.
Suvi’s lips are dry, and she smells faintly of the attic and the rosemary they were picking that morning. It doesn’t occur to Ame to close her eyes, so Suvi’s face blurs and for a moment her eyes merge into one, which is funny and Ame has to pull away because she’s laughing.
Still, this seems to satisfy Suvi, who immediately sits up and dramatically stretches and yawns.
“Goodness! Where am I? What has become of my queendom?”
And that’s that.
+++
///10+11///
The third kiss isn’t really a kiss, it’s a medical necessity.
Because Ame falls out of a tree. She falls at least fifteen feet to the ground, cracks off two branches on the way down, lands with a sickening thud on the forest floor and then makes no noise whatsoever, which is terrifying.
For a moment there is only that terrible silence ringing in Suvi’s ears - but then Eursolon is up on his back legs, upright, his nostrils twitching, which she will later (much later) begin to understand is a sign of real fear in her friend.
“Suvi,” his voice is sharp with urgency, “what must we do?”
And it is his not knowing that jars Suvi into action, because one of them must decide what to do and Eursolon, in asking her the question, has nominated her. Knowing things is, after all, her particular area of expertise within their little group - so even if she doesn’t, really, in this moment, have a singular clue, she feels she must at least pretend.
“Grandma Wren - “ she points back toward the cottage, “quick, run, fetch help!”
Eursolon immediately falls back onto all fours and takes off through the undergrowth, faster than Suvi has ever seen him move before (and she’s seen him move). He’s the fastest of them by far, and they need help immediately, so sending him off is absolutely the right thing to do, but that doesn’t stop Suvi’s immediate urge to call him back. She doesn’t want him to leave her here alone to face what has become of Ame without him.
But her feet are carrying her forward anyway, toward where Ame has disappeared under a dense layer of ferns and tall grasses wet with dew, because the canopy of the trees here grows too dense to let much sunlight through to dry undergrowth beneath. There is still no noise - and Ame is never without a near constant aura of noise, even when she’s not talking she’s working on something, playing with something, rustling, humming, tapping - something . Never silent, not like this.
Ame is a heap on the forest floor, face down, ragged hair and torn clothes in such disarray that at first Suvi can’t see what’s wrong - though it doesn’t take a great deal of observation to conclude that Ame’s legs should definitely not be bent at those particular angles.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” she falls to her knees by her friend, though she’s otherwise at a loss and starts repeating herself in a helpless, ridiculous babble, her fingers beginning a frantic tapping against her thumbs, “oh dear, oh dear, oh dear - “
Recriminations and ‘I told you sos’ bloom and die in her mouth - even though she’d told Ame, she told her , not to climb so high in those stupid galoshes of hers and especially not to climb that tree, which was struck by lightning a few weeks ago so is burnt up and fragile all along its topmost branches -
And it occurs to her that she cannot tell if Ame is breathing, and that she ought to find out.
It takes some effort to manoeuvre Ame’s inert form enough that Suvi can get a look at her chest and face - and she sort of wishes she hadn’t, because Ame’s face is a snotty, bloody mess. Her nose is busted, her lip is split, her eyes are rolling in her head -
Suvi sets her jaw, suppressing the sick feeling of panic as it begins to rise from her stomach like bile. Because Suvi lives in a world in which the closest and most invincible people in her life can die - she knows this, as a concrete and terrible reality as heavy as the weight of her mother’s pendant around her neck. Ame could die. Could already be dead. Such things happen every day.
But Eursolon will be back, Grandma Wren will be with him, they will fix this, they will -
“Ame -” her voice comes out shaky and small. And she sort of can’t get her fingers to work properly. They shake as she fumbles around Ame’s throat, brushing her hair out of the way where it’s finally growing out of the bowl cut she’s had for years, trying to feel for breath, for a pulse - “Ame, c’mon - “
It must only be seconds but it feels much longer before she remembers to hold her trembling hand under Ame’s nose to feel for breath and even then she can’t tell - is finally reduced to pressing her ear to Ame’s chest -
And realises that though she can hear something unsteady and faint that is probably a worryingly erratic heart beat, Ame doesn’t appear to be breathing at all.
And if Ame ever gives her crap for reading so much ever again Suvi is going to have some choice words for her, because suddenly she really does know what to do. Tucked up in the back of her mind there are scraps on human anatomy, on the cardio-vascular system, and on non-magical methods of revival in an emergency.
She adjusts Ame’s head, aligns, as best she can, nose with throat, throat with chest - she tips Ame’s chin back so that her mouth falls open, ignores the worryingly slack quality of her jaw, concentrates on getting two fingers between Ame’s teeth - but finds nothing in her airway. Yes. Good. Nothing is the correct number of things to be in an airway.
The next thing is to pinch Ame’s nose shut and cover her mouth with her own. The words ‘form a tight ceil’ spring to mind in the same crisp type that she saw them on the page. And breathe.
Breathe into her friend. Push air into her lungs. Slow, steady, for one heartbeat, two, then stop. Ame’s mouth tastes bloody. From this angle, Suvi can see her chest rise fractionally, and then drop when she pulls away.
She does it again. And again.
Her mind, so often constantly a flutter of pages, images, words, shrinks down to this point - to this moment with Ame - to breath, to pressure, to -
Ame jerks, gasps, and throws up. Suvi avoids getting vomit in her mouth by, like, half an inch, and definitely gets vomit in her hair.
But if Ame can puke, she’s alive, and for the moment that fact alone is worth how incredibly gross this is.
Suvi pushes Ame onto her side (yet more extremely sound book-based advice) and gathers her hair out of her face. Ame begins, immediately, to make a lot of noise again, which is such a relief that it’s almost not even disturbing that all of the noises being made are those of someone in a lot of pain.
“You’re okay,” Suvi says, holding tightly to Ame’s shoulder in the hope that she can make it true through sheer force of will, “you’re okay, you’re okay - “
And she leans down and rubs Ame’s back and kisses her cheek, because this is what her father used to do when she skinned her knee or stubbed her toe, and even though this is undeniably far worse than a stubbed toe, it does seem to comfort Ame a little. Enough to get some coherent words out, at any rate.
“M’legs hurt!”
“I know,” Suvi agrees, patting Ame helplessly, “it’s okay, though. I promise. Eursolon’s gone to get Grandmother Wren and then they’re going to come as fast as they can, and you’ll be okay again.”
“Okay,” Ame mumbles, her breathing ragged and raw, her fingers curling and uncurling into tight little fists. “S-sorry about - um - th’princes -”
“The what?”
The smaller girl is beginning to shiver violently, her teeth chattering in her skull - another distant bit of learning flits through Suvi’s mind, a chapter from some book somewhere about shock. “W-wont b’able to p-play - your princes ‘an’more with n-no legs…”
“You’ve still got legs” Suvi assures her, though Ame looks rather doubtful, “and you can still play a prince even without legs but - but you can stop being a prince in our games if you don’t want to, I’ll stop making you. As long as you promise to stop climbing trees.”
Ame snorts. “Only - only trees hit by lightening.”
“All trees, Ame!”
“M-maybe Grandmother Wren w-will t-teach me f-f-feather fall now.”
“Well, when I go back to the Citadel I’m going to learn whatever spell keeps your feet stuck to the ground the next time you get some stupid idea in your head!”
“Aw, Suvi, y-you wouldn’t,” Ame groans, peering up at her, “t-think of all the adventures y-you’d m-miss if I c-couldn’t drag you up a t-tree every n-now and…” her eyes flutter and then her face goes a sickly grey and she passes out.
Grandmother Wren and Eursolon find them like this perhaps five minutes later, Suvi still shaking Ame and yelling at her to wake up immediately or she’ll have to kiss her again.
“Is that a threat that ordinarily works?” Grandmother Wren asks, mildly, as she and Eursolon gather Ame up and load her into the little cart they’ve brought with them.
“You never know,” Suvi replies, pensively, watching Ame’s deathly still face. “Will she be alright, Grandmother?”
“Oh, yes, not to worry,” Grandma Wren pats her shoulder soothingly.
And Ame is perfectly alright, in the end. And that’s that.
+++
///16+17///
The fourth kiss is stupid. And a mistake. And neither of them remember it properly because they are both quite drunk when it happens, and then they never talk about it again.
A boy at the midsummer fair calls Suvi ‘scrungly’, whatever that means. But it’s patently not a compliment - so Ame threatens to hex him until his penis turns green and he can only spunk out spiders and worms, and then Suvi steals a bottle of blueberry wine from scungley boy’s father’s stall and together they run off, swigging and giggling, even as the boy and his friends give chase.
It might be the first time that Suvi has ever done anything remotely wrong in her life - Ame hopes she’s finally becoming the bad influence she aspires to be - and she’s jittery with pride. They aren’t scared, because no one’s stupid enough to actually try to chase them all the way back to Grandmother Wren’s home, and sure enough the boys give up as they round the bend in the road that leads up the hill to the cottage, reduced to yelling dirty words at their departing backs. Suvi and Ame return such dirty words, adding several of their own, accompanying them with suitably rude gestures and finally a bawdy song about a butcher’s boy and a bull.
Ame slings an arm around Suvi’s waist as they skip on up the road, leaning against the taller girl, feeling the lean length of her body and the unfamiliar warmth of the wine in her belly and the evening sun on her face. Somewhere in there, it occurs to her, that she feels Suvi’s weight at her side not as an anchor but as a kind of balloon, baring her aloft so that they might float away together forever and ever into a future of whatever they want. Forever sunshine and forever wine and forever rude jokes and forever Suvi at her side. They’ll be powerful witches together in Grandmother Wren’s cottage - the smartest, trixiest, most beautiful witches in a hundred years - and do just whatever they want, because what could be better?
Then they go and lie down in the good, cool dirt under the black currant bushes behind the cottage, near the beehives, where they can eat the currants and finish off the wine while they wait for Grandma Wren and Eursolon to get home, and Ame rests her temple on Suvi’s shoulder as they share the bottle.
“I think he meant that you’re tall, but like, in a bad way?” Ame suggests, taking another long pull from the wine - she didn’t like it much at first but it’s getting better the more she drinks. “dumbass. Like there’s a bad way to be tall. Being tall is great. It’s useful, is what it is.”
The sky above is a perfect azure blue and the air is still sweet with the sunshine - the quiet is punctuated only by the sigh of the breeze through the grass and the occasional humming bee, drifting by on its way back to the hives.
Suvi’s laughter turns into hiccups; her breath on Ame’s cheek smells like black currants. “Maybe he was jealous ‘cuz I can reach higher shelves than him.”
“That has to be it.” Ame flashes Suvi a contended grin and reaches to pick one of her braids out of the dirt and deposit it back onto her shoulder. The braids are a new thing Suvi is trying out - Ame likes them. They’re lovely and long and dramatic. Alongside the extra five inches Suvi has on Ame these days, the braids make her seem very sophisticated all of a sudden. Kind of grown up.
Ame goes to drink again, but Suvi reaches for the wine bottle. “Don’t finish it!”
“I’m not gonna.”
“You will if I let you,” Suvi prizes it out of Ame’s hands and plants it in the dirt beside them. “Ame?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I pretty?”
Ame has to roll onto her belly so she can stare into Suvi’s face in a way that conveys, as clearly as possible, how entirely ridiculous a question this is. “Suvi. You are so pretty.”
“Am I, though?”
“Yes! You’re like - the most beautiful girl I know!”
“You barely know any girls! You barely know anyone!”
“So?! You think I don’t know what a pretty girl looks like?”
Suvi doesn’t seem especially comforted, scrunching up the hemline of her blouse with her long, anxious fingers.
“Why do you care what that boy thinks?” Ame asks, in a tone she hopes suggests that this is only a casual question and doesn’t matter to her very much at all, “he’s stupid anyway.”
“I don’t,” Suvi mutters, “I know it’s shallow -”
“It’s not shallow, it’s - ” Ame grasps vaguely at what she’s trying to say - something, something, Suvi is allowed to feel all the ways she wants to feel because Suvi is great - but her head feels fuzzy with the wine and words feel hard and also inadequate. “You’re magnificent, Suvi. Almost as magnificent as me.”
And Suvi smiles, finally, in that small, affectionate way that means that Ame has said something right.
“And he’s not worth anything. And if he ever says anything mean to you ever again I’ll make him barf frogs.”
“You don’t know how to do that.”
“So I’ll learn!” Ame leans closer, meaning to nuzzle her nose against Suvi’s cheek for emphasis if for nothing else - though it also seems like a pleasant thing to do, all things considered, because Suvi smells lovely and her skin is warm and her face is good. But Suvi turns her head at an awkward moment and suddenly Ame’s mouth has brushed her lips which Ame almost certainly didn’t mean to do -
It’s just this very soft, breathless moment - quiet and secret under the black currant bushes - Ame is aware of her fingers curling at Suvi’s wrist, and of Suvi’s hand on her back, and of their mouths suddenly, clumsily together in a kiss that somehow isn’t ending, and feels like the most ridiculous thing either of them have done that day but also, perhaps, the best -
Just one soft, breathless moment, inching irrevocably into another, and another, as they linger - and their legs are tangled and Suvi’s hand is on Ame’s jaw and there is nothing, nothing but this, but them -
Until there’s the sound of the garden gate clattering and Grandma Wren’s voice calling their names and Suvi startles up and away from Ame.
Ame remembers lying there a minute or so longer, stunned to stillness, staring at the azure sky through the black currant bush leaves, feeling the warmth of the earth where Suvi was a moment ago.
And that’s that.
+++
///17+18///
The fifth is an apology. A promise. Both.
Suvi slips into Ame’s bedroom late that night - her last in Grandmother Wren’s cottage while Grandmother Wren yet lives.
Over years of annual summers here, Suvi has graduated to her own space - a small room across the hall where Ame will not drive her to distraction with her clutter and noise and Suvi will not keep Ame up with her reading light into the small hours of the morning. But it hasn’t been unusual for Suvi to spend nights in the little bunk she once occupied as a very small child anyway. Or even, once in a while, in Ame’s nest on the floor. Most often, over this summer, they’ve fallen asleep with Eursolon in one of the shrines outside, or in front of the hearth downstairs. They share sleeping space all the time.
So Suvi is surprised by how much of an intruder she feels like, as she quietly closes the door to the room behind her and pads across the floorboards to the lump of Ame, curled tight into herself amongst the blankets and pillows. How unfamiliar the room feels in the dark, how many of Ame’s many trinkets and treasures are ones she hasn’t seen before - how many of the ones she remembers from years gone by seem to have been tidied away or disposed of. But of course, Ame has gone from accumulating the ‘treasures’ of a small child fascinated by most anything that caught her interest, to gathering the useful detritus of an apprentice witch, in the same way that Suvi has gone from carrying toys about with her to carrying amulets and spell scrolls.
Suvi isn’t sure if she’s more or less discomforted by the fact that she can tell that Ame is awake.
She hasn’t moved, and she’s trying to keep her breaths slow and even, but the very effort she’s extending to do so is giving her away. Her body is too stiff for one who is actually unconscious, and every now and again her shoulders hitch and shudder, as she suppresses what might be sobs.
Suvi slides gingerly to her knees on the edge of Ame’s nest, and then gives up any pretence that there will be an elegant way of doing this, and clambers in amongst the bedclothes. She makes her ungainly way on all fours over lumpen cushions and the soft toys that do, at least, remain unchanged, to find where Ame is a little knot under more blankets than she really needs at this time of year.
And then she wraps her arms around Ame - as best as she can over the covers - flattens her body against the curve of her spine, rests her chin in the dip that suggests the place where Ame’s shoulder meets her neck. There’s only a very little of the young witch actually visible outside of the blankets - the tip of one toe at one point, and a sprouting of dark hair from the top of her head at another - but Suvi does her best to envelop her anyway. And given that, by Grandmother Wren’s estimation, Suvi has shot up another inch in the three months she’s been here, this is even easier now than it was at the start of the summer.
“Don’t be mad at me,” Suvi whispers, into the blankets. “Please, Ame.”
For a while, it seems as if Ame is not going to speak at all - the tight bundle of her tenses up as a hiccuping sob fights its way out of Ame’s chest, and Suvi keeps respectfully quiet as Ame muffles it into the pillows.
Then -
“I’m not mad.” The words are barely audible.
Suvi takes a breath. “Okay.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just - sad.”
“Okay, but that’s way worse, you get that right?”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologise!” Suvi pokes at her through the covers, “I just don’t want to leave stuff like - this - with you upset and us not - talking about it. Ame. Please. Can you just - “
She begins digging in the blankets, trying to uncover her friend enough so that she feels less ridiculous. Though of course, Ame immediately begins to hang on to the blankets like Suvi is trying to pull her literal skin off, grunting in protest.
“Stop it!”
“Ame, I just wanna - “
“You do whatever you want! Just leave me alone!”
Suvi sighs, sitting up, grimacing. “Yeah, well, I’m trying! And if you want me to just go I will - I just - thought maybe you’d want a better good bye.”
Under the covers, Ame doesn’t move, or make any noise at all.
Okay, fine.
Suvi clambers back toward the edge of the mattress, swallowing a noxious kind of frustration, a bitter edge to the emotion that denotes a much greater level of upset than she truly wants to unpack in this moment.
She’s stood up and half way back to the bedroom door when there is a sudden flurry of blankets behind her.
“No - wait - “ Ame is sat up, her upper body emerging from the nest like something out of a cocoon, fighting off the blankets still tangled around her legs. “Suvi - I didn’t mean it - “
She throws off the blankets in time for Suvi to trip straight back to her, into her arms, pulling her close. Ame’s skin through her thin linen nightshirt is feverishly hot from being so bundled up, and she presses her sweaty forehead to Suvi’s neck, her arms clutching at Suvi’s shoulders, and Suvi buries her nose in Ame’s hair and inhales deeply, instinctively, wanting to drink her up, breathe her in.
“I love you,” she says, around the sudden swell of emotion in the back of her throat, “I’ll miss you so much. I’m sorry I’m - “
“You don’t have to apologise either. It’s not about - “
“But I am sorry it’s like this, I just - and that I didn’t tell you - “
“It’s okay -” even though it so obviously isn’t. Ame is swallowing her, blinking - Suvi can feel that her eyelashes are wet. “I just wish - “
“I know - “
“I always thought maybe - I know it’s stupid -”
“It’s not stupid!” Suvi holds Ame away from her abruptly, looking into her face with as much Steel-like authority as she can muster. “You’re not stupid, and you’re never allowed to call yourself that, okay? If I’m going away, you have to remember that for yourself.”
Ame continues to blink, wetly, but she nods.
“I just always thought you’d - stay with us, eventually. Like, become a witch. Or - do wizard-y things here somehow.”
Suvi nods. It’s not as if she hasn’t always sort of hoped for that too, in spite of knowing far better than Ame how impossible such a thing would be. She’s just always held off the hard reality of the situation against the softness of the story she’d told herself about somehow always being able to visit, if not stay. And that had worked well enough, until this spring, when Steel had sat her down to gently ask her if she had thought about what would happen next summer, once she had begun her university studies, and would be seeking apprenticeship.
Because a wizard studying at the Citadel will not be able to take three months off a year to go running around the woods on the edge of the Empire with an ageing witch, her apprentice and any number of troublesome farm animals. She will be hard pressed to take so much as three days off, let alone an entire season, and she certainly won’t be allowed access to the official teleportation chambers she’ll need in order to make the journey even remotely feasible.
She’s had special dispensation to travel unofficially for so many years because she’s the child of a pair of extremely noble and extremely dead heroes, and because Steel is her guardian and Steel is the sword of the city, and because Grandmother Wren’s name is still a respected one in certain circles, if not one that is well liked.
But as she approaches her eighteenth birthday, and, more importantly, the start of her higher education, the Citadel sees her as a resource that can no longer be spared to such trivialities as childhood friends.
(It will not occur to her until some time later that the Citadel might well also not want such a promising young wizard exposed to the ideas and influences of people and places outside of the glass tower, during such a sensitive period of her education).
All of this, Ame has, on some level, understood for years. And she has known for certain that this will be her last summer here since that conversation with Steel. And this is a terribly sad thing, though one she feels quite deeply is unavoidable (what is she going to do? Not study at the university? Not pursue apprenticeship and rise to become the greatest wizard the Citadel has ever seen? Please.) But what she does rather regret is that she hasn’t told Ame until this evening - the night before she leaves - that she will not be coming back for a long, long time. Quite potentially forever.
She hadn’t told Grandmother Wren either, but Grandmother Wren knows much more of the ways of wizards than Ame does and Suvi suspects she has known for some time - has perhaps been surprised that Suvi has been allowed to return for so many summers already.
It’s been cowardly of her, Suvi knows. And it’s meant that she’s had to ruin their last evening together. But better to ruin the last evening than the whole summer. She hadn’t wanted to spend all those weeks feeling Ame’s sad eyes on her the way she feels them now. It’s unbearable. She can’t stand it.
So she pulls Ame closer, intending to hold her tightly again, so that she can stop looking at her face, at that awful expression creased between her eyebrows and dripping from her lashes and trembling around her mouth. But Ame catches Suvi’s face in her hands, presses herself up on her knees, and kisses her.
And Suvi knows herself to be a very, very intelligent person, but she thinks that perhaps if Ame had sprouted a goat’s head and eight tentacles, she’d feel less insane than she does right now.
Because yes, okay, yes, once or twice she’d thought - maybe - and there was kind of a drunken fumble under a black currant bush last year and - but - but -
Her heart is thundering in her ears. Ame’s mouth is very soft. Her skin feels very warm. She smells like sweat and soap and rosemary and the wine they had at dinner. Suvi can’t think through the sensation of it all. Suvi can’t remember the last time she fully couldn’t think.
And it stops, and everything gets real quiet for a moment. Suvi’s fingers tap against Ame’s back, reflexive, trembling but sure. Ame’s hands are still at her throat, under her chin.
No thoughts. Only - this -
Suvi kisses her back. Kisses her again. And Ame’s falling back and pulling her with her, into the bed, on top of her, and Suvi lets her because it doesn’t occur to her not to - why - why wouldn’t she do whatever Ame wants in this situation? Whatever will keep them here in this moment together? Whatever will make more of this feeling, feed it, grow it, keep it -
She is all want, all of a sudden. Nothing but a treacherous, animal desire - the raging hunger of an orphan for love, approval, encouragement - for the sense that she is wanted in a place as desperately as she wants to belong to one. The roar of something that knows no pragmatism, no future or past legacy or plans or tact - it only wants more. Suvi only wants more. Wants this, without even being able to name it (naming would, after all, require thought and Suvi’s head is entirely devoid of such trivial things at this urgent moment).
Ame’s hands are pulling at her shirt - pulling it up - and Suvi’s fingers fumble in her hair, down her sides, find the bare skin of Ame’s thighs under her palms and - oh god - oh god - Ame’s breath hitches and Suvi stops immediately - she feels insane. She feels drunk.
“S-sorry - “
“No - “ Ame’s swallowing, gasping, her eyes wide in the dark, “I didn’t mean - you don’t - have to stop - “
So Suvi doesn’t.
It is, in hindsight, a ridiculous thing to do. Have awkward, sweaty, tearful sex on their last night together when there will be absolutely no time to talk about it in the morning and barely any ways to communicate at all for a long time after. It is especially ridiculous because neither of them have any fucking (hah) clue what they’re doing - like, at all.
Like, Suvi knows about sex things from books, and from a handful of hideously embarrassing conversations with Steel, and from the whispers and gossip of other young wizards in the Citadel and the lewd songs and words of the rude village boys in Toma. And even some funny, surprisingly easy conversations with Ame. She’s not been without some regular solo explorations on the subject since she hit puberty, after all - she has even become adept at hiding some especially dirty books - with favourite passages carefully highlighted - in her room where Steel and Steel’s younger kids will never find them.
She’d thought, for sure, that she knew what this was all about. Turns out she was fully incorrect and she is terrible at this, which means she should hate it (gods damned but she hates being bad at things, she’s so rarely bad at anything that it feels incredibly rude when it happens).
But also this can be terrible and still good, actually? Still - nice and - stuff -
Her hands shake and she knows she wants to do stuff with them, with Ame, but she is way, way too terrified to attempt any of the stuff her vast collection of dirty books have suggested is possible. Her mouth dries up. She can’t get her socks off. She feels ridiculous. If she could just think for a minute - but her head is too full for thoughts. Too full of sensations and wanting stuff and wanting Ame - Ame who is naked now, which is A Lot, because even in the darkened room there’s enough moonlight through the window and lamp light coming in under the door that Suvi can still definitely see everything -
Ame who seems a lot better at this - perhaps because ‘this’ all seems to be about feeling a bunch of stuff and then knowing what to do about the feeling of things and that has very much always been Ame’s area of expertise. She pushes Suvi’s fumbling hands to where, apparently, they should be, and moves her body in a way that should be awkward as hell but is somehow incredible? It feels incredible. And Ame is close and kissing her and touching her all over and letting Suvi explore and catalogue and memorise every inch of her and that’s good, for sure, for definite. Letting Suvi study, because Suvi is determined to study and get better at this. Because at some point she has to do this again, with Ame, and be better at it. Someday, she will be as outstanding at this as she is in all things. Because Ame deserves that much (and let’s be real, Suvi does too).
They exhaust themselves, eventually.
In the morning, Suvi finds she might feel poetic - if still, y’know, deeply embarrassed at how not good she was - enough to describe what they did as - as - something like waves, breaking on each other, collapsing into one body of water.
Less poetically she thinks they spent a lot of time grinding on each other’s bare thighs and only kinda getting their hands involved until they were both exhausted and fell asleep wrapped up in each other.
She gathers her clothes in the grey pre-dawn - while Ame pretends to stay asleep - and slips out to her own room to hastily gather her belongings and make sure she’s ready to go, and then, stealing herself, she slips back into Ame’s room and kneels by her head and strokes her hair out of her face.
“I’ll be back,” she promises, fervently, “I’ll find a way. It might not be soon, but it’ll happen, okay?”
And she leans down to kiss her, and Ame decides to stop faking sleep to kiss her back, to hold her close one more time. A promise. An apology.
Then Suvi forces herself to get up and leave, to make breakfast with Grandma Wren one last time downstairs and to step out to meet Steel when she arrives to collect her. She doesn’t let herself look back at the cottage as she walks away from it - afraid to check whether Ame is looking out at her from one of the top floor windows. Afraid to find that she may not be.
She leaves for the Citadel, for her studies, for her future.
And that is that. For now.
For years.
But not forever.