Chapter Text
She'd traveled to Europe to see her friend, to do research for her stupid vampire sequel. She had expected getting to see her old friend would make things better, but… It only made her feel worse. She'd been here some months and was making no progress, and her publishers were hounding her. At least the wine was cheap. It had been an awful few years, with her publishers demanding she write sequels to the bestsellers despite how she didn't want to. She'd put in some listless hours into the sequel for Victorian Roses, found no comfort in the svelte promises of vampiric salaciousness. She'd tried her hand at the sequel for the rough-and-tumble cubs of Fenrir, found nothing worthwhile in boozy debauchery, either.
Half a bottle wasn't bringing the gears of writing to any decent lubrication, so she reached for absinthe instead. She quirked a sardonic smile, wondering if the Green Faerie had any magic for her, and turned to the thing she had been working on for a few years now— Honestly, since about the time she'd started feeling down.
She was a historian, dammit, but all they wanted was smut. It sold— Oh, there were plenty of lonely folks out there who wanted solace in the arms of a sex-charged idealistic man, but… But there had to be more to these stories than that.
She knew it wouldn't sell well. It couldn't. It was tragic and chaste, and nobody wanted to lose themselves in that. Sugar-clouded verdant green was set to the side, and she looked at the blinking cursor, then to the window to the outside. There was a balcony there, broad and beautiful, and oh-so-high.
The other historians hated her, called her a sellout for her breakout success with the saucy dime-store books. She wanted to make things that mattered, had thought that her success would afford her freedom, but rather it had just gilded the cage she'd gotten shoved in.
Had she gotten a room with a view of London for the inspiration? Nobody really cared about the tragedies of the rich and famous, after all, not until…
She shoved those thoughts away. How could it be that here, with all the success she could want, she was more morose and miserable than when she was hospitalized, when the doctors told her she'd lost an eye in the accident, when she was told she might never walk without a cane again? How could that have not crushed her so as the very thing she said she'd have liked?
People only wanted tragedies when they were beautiful, and sweet.
She sipped more at the absinthe, turned her face to the glowing laptop before her.
She was writing a romance between a nun and a knight-Templar in the Third Crusade. It would be tragic, of course, and never would become physical. She knew it wasn't what the publisher wanted, but…
But here she was, nearing the end. She laughed at that. Only thirty-three, nearing the end. Was she one and done? A hack, a fraud? Hadn't it been lovely to have been a history teacher, poor but loving what she did, before—
Before the school found out and politely found a reason to let her go—
But here she was, she had an end to write. Oh, screw it. Just— Just go for it.
The cursor blinked, and began to run.
"But Marguerite," her companion murmured, unwinding the bandages from the feverish Templar they tended to. "Isn't hope supposed to be something sweet? Why are you so bitter about it?"
"No," the other nun sighed, tears welling from the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip for a moment, as if trying to force its quivering to still, before the curl of sorrow overwhelmed her and forced her into a snarl.
"No, hope isn't sweet . I know— I know the clergy loves to give us hope as doves, but it just isn't . Don't you know the story of Pandora?"
"Oh, the Greek story? Yes, she finds hope in the bottom of the box, right?" Cateline's eyes shone bright, though hers weren't gleaming with tears. "The Greek gods put that there to console Pandora."
"The gods didn't— It was a box of sorrows , Cateline. All of man's sorrows were in that box. And hope was in there, too." She clenched her fists, bundling up the sticky, pus-stinking rags and dunking them in herb-steeped water to clean them.
"Hope was in that box because it hurts to hope. Because hope won't let you give up. It beats you and drags you behind it. It grabs you by the throat and chokes out your words. It will slaughter sense, and numbers, wisdom and training— Because it must . Because it can't not . Hope will drive you to the ends of the earth for just the faintest glimmer, even when it's easier to give up, even when it's more sensible or better for you to let it go. Hope isn't— Hope isn't some cooing, fragile, white dove, it's—"
Tears poured from her face, ragwater coating her sleeves. The water bloomed with fresh red, and she pulled her hands from the bucket and board to see her fingertips rubbed bloody by the force of her scrubbing. She hung her head low, finally giving in to the sobs that had been building ever since her beloved Guiscard had been transferred to the nuns' care, fighting his swordless battle against the demons that brought fevers and infection.
"— Hope is a knight , Cateline. Hope is strong and noble and holy and loving. Hope is vicious and frightening and bloody and cruel and— And it shall protect you so long as you protect it."
Marguerite rested her forehead on her knight's bandage-bundled chest, hot tears yet cooler than his feverish skin as they pattered down, rolled away to soak into bandages or cot-straw. His breaths were shallow and rapid, and all she wanted was to feel him tucking her hair beneath her habit once more, see his eyes crinkle in a smile behind the holes in his helm.
"This must be our punishment. I— I loved him, maybe more than the good Lord, and in doing so… "
She could barely get the words out, and when she did, they were but a thin wail.
"I failed them both."
She found herself crying, and needed to close her eyes and put her head down on her desk to recollect herself— And when she opened them, she was not where she had been. Her clothes were strange, and the air was hot and dry, and her fingertips were bleeding as the scent of infection hit her. She lifted her head and saw a knight below her, heard muttering in old languages distantly, and saw the face of her story-character Cateline looking at her with kindness and sympathy.
And then the knight moved.
He raised a hand and tucked a stray lock of hair beneath her habit, and his eyes were soft and brown as he smiled, and whispered.
"It's never a failure to love."
An intense sensation of vertigo overtook her. She knew she had become unmoored in something, but couldn't pick out what—
She was in a long fur dress, carrying a man in leathers off a bloody field—
She was in a palla and stola, reading a letter that informed her that her husband was dead—
She was in a Renaissance noble's gown, weeping over a full-armoured form, a friend by her side—
She was in an abaya, with gloves and niqab, weeping softly as she bid goodbye to her desert-fatigued soldier—
She was in thick wools and furs, gathering up a lightly-mailled man to her chest—
She was in some sort of enhanced ceramic-armour, watching the flames creep up over a man with his cybernetics removed—
She was in the clothes of a squire, fingers pressed against a bleeding wound in the soft maille where plates didn't cover—
She was in a sarang, waving goodbye to a man she feared she'd never see again—
She was in huipilli-cueitl, watching her warrior in his death-shroud and tlahuiztli be sealed away from the sun—
She was in a peasant's wear, bundling up a cloak around the limp form of a knight whose helm had fallen as she lifted him—
She was in a black dress and coat, holding an umbrella, placing a flower on a headstone—
She was in a white dress and shawl, looking through the dead on a field for her own—
She was bare, screaming and bawling as she touched the mangled body of a cat-mauled man—
The vertigo grew stronger.
The story was the same, over and over. Love and loss. Hoping someone would come home, stay safe out there. No matter who you were, where you were, when you were—
Iterations. All iterations. The universe repeating it, trying to get it right, hoping this time— THIS time!—
It didn't matter. Time itself didn't matter. History was alive, the children becoming their parents, having children that would one day become them. An unbroken line stretching back to the very beginning of things—
An unbroken line stretching to the very end of things—
The knight wound his fingers with hers—
Distances were irrelevant. The heart, the soul, screamed just the same as the reaving loss remained bloody-mawed and slash-bellied, devouring, devouring, everything in creation—
Where was she? Here? There? When was she? Now? Soon? Then? There wasn't a difference. Free-floating in possibility, free-floating amongst the threads of stories and hearts that knotted back, Mobiuslike, into themselves. Those were concrete. Those were known. Those were the ties that bound.
She grabbed for them. The dragon was devouring, and she was despairing. The threads slipped wan and limp from her hands. With only a thread to hold onto she would be lost.
The knight held her fast. His blood spattered her face.
The threads were being woven.
Threads of thought and idea and iteration, of repetition, moorings in a now and a here wrapped up beneath her as black teeth gnashed. The fluttering of wings, the singing of birds in harmony.
Hold fast, the knight ordered, as a rope spooled down from behind where he was, and the whickering of a great horse could be heard.
Both hands of his held one wrist. With the other, she reached, grabbed, clung to the rope.
Let go of me, now, he told her, his own grip loosening. She paused, she wound her leg with the rope and quickly transfered her weight over to it, gasping as she dangled into nothingness.
The knight stepped to the edge, an edge made of paper and cloth, an edge she could see now, somehow. It flickered and hummed with energy. He raised his spear, pointed it down towards the gaping abyss.
Climb, he ordered, and she shook her head. She couldn't move. She didn't know where she was. She didn't know when she was, and it was all far too frightening—
CLIMB! He howled, and blood slicked the rope where he held tight.
The dragon snapped at her heels.
She climbed.
The knight plunged his spear down.
And before she knew it, she was back on her floor, in her time, in her place.
A man, battered and bruised, bleeding from his hands and somewhere beneath the hauberk that hung, dresslike, from him, stood before her. A horse whickered from the balcony. He smiled. His spear dripped with black blood.
Hold on. It was a thought, an order, a reassurance.
And before her eyes, he disappeared.
Around her wrist was a braided twist of horsehair and red silk, but no knot secured it. Rather, it had been woven small enough, with long enough fibers that it looped over itself multiple times, twisting in the middle, over the veins on her wrist, to be a single-sided plane.
Iterations rung in her head.
She rose, stumbled to her computer.
A little bird peeked its head in from the tent-flap, looked down at the two nuns who knelt over the dying knight-crusader.
Cateline gasped, and Marguerite looked up from her tears to see her darling Guiscard's eyes flickering open, hazy, but there. He was no less feverish— And oh, how painfully his breaths were slowing— But he was awake, and he was there.
"I fought for love, and I do not think the Lord will find fault with that," he breathed, the edge of a wheeze on each laboured word.
"Our Father did not let his one true Son die for anything less than love of us. So please, do not think you failed me," he murmured, and pressed his bruised hand to her cheek, wiping away the tears with a rough thumb. She held his hand tight to her face, nuzzled into the calloused palm.
"It is never a failure to love," he breathed. Then, the strength in his hand faded, and the struggling breaths stilled.
Marguerite could barely breathe as she pressed her forehead to his, clung to his hand, and wept. Cateline held her friend tenderly around the shoulders, and hushed her, and rubbed her hand in little circles on her back until the other nun could breathe without shuddering again.
"Come, now, my dear. He's in the arms of our Father," she murmured, and, as the grieving nun began to collect herself, she smiled.
"I'm sure you'll see him again someday."
So did the two walk from the tent, and find a priest to perform last rites for the fallen Templar.
Then, and only then, did the little bird flit away.
She stared at it, and wiped her watering eyes. It'd need some edits, surely, but…
Well. It's better than the ending had been.
She walked to the balcony, absinthe left on the desk behind her, and enjoyed the warm summer breeze.