auferstanden | deer country; inbox.

[ In a bone-white envelope left, via Alfred, on her bedside table; July 20th or so. ]

Sarah —

I owe you a profound apology, to an extent where I rather suspect I'm far too out of practice to make this easy for me. You may prefer to have it be offered in person, as well, which is a perfectly reasonable choice; if you let me know when and where to meet you, I shall be there.

I will be there.

~~Or if you just want to talk~~ I'm afraid I rather willfully misled you, when I pressed you so intently into forming that bond with me. I was not at my best; I was not, honestly, thinking about the likeliest outcomes to my plans for myself, let alone how such consequences might affect someone else — you, to put it plainly.

I have spent ten thousand years in service to a man who became God and then became a man again, that he might know he had succeeded at bringing humanity back to life — and I don't tell you this to excuse what I've done to you, but simply to show the relative scale; I have been here in Trench for less than half of one year, and only known you for a few weeks.

This is not to say that I chose to sacrifice you, or your relative safety and comfort, however. Rather: I focused so intently on him — and on containing him, in his ~~moment of weakness~~ time of destruction — that I did not stop to consider the ramifications of the price I was willing to pay, in the form of my own pain.

Neither did I have any way of knowing what to expect, only a few days later, when I became certain I had a significant rôle to play in the attempts to appease Mariana, in the wake (as it were) of his offences against her. I am rather less certain, now, that I made that choice out of clear logic; it appears that there have been a great many people drawn to throw themselves back into the ocean, throughout July; I may have merely been in the vanguard. Nevertheless, I did truly believe my time underwater-and-aware would be as brief as anyone might expect — counted in bare minutes, if that. I bear a profound regret that you were forced to experience my swim back to shore, especially as I've already been informed that my conscious transformation presented as an unrelenting ache, and the scales as something of an itch.

I hope, most of all, that you found a way to stay warm. I think you must have; I think it must have been you, and not he, whose warmth reached me even under the freezing pressure. Adaptation may have made the journey possible, but such compassion was what made it bearable; I thank you for it, and if I do credit you with too much — well, I imagine my account is well overdrawn; perhaps such erroneous credits might be left in place anyway, the better to bring balance.

I believe I owe you a very large favour, in the meantime, and possibly quite a few smaller ones as well. If you've made a list of your plans here in Trench already, perhaps I will be able to assist with something or other; if else, I might help you narrow them down, if you should like.

Let me treat you to dinner, perhaps? Until then,

— Augustine

Sarah's Omen is sneaky and utterly silent when he wants to be, which is most of the time, and so it is entirely possible that neither Augustine nor Alfred noticed his return note. A fisher is no predator to a very large snake, after all, and nor is it prey; regardless of the Omen instincts, the animalistic ones did not have cause to notice each other.

Her note was not unkind, but it was not emotional: it was simple and gave directions of where she could be found, a little stall she was working on in Willful Machine or in Trenchwood at her crop or the outpost project. And Willful Machine, notably, was where dinner would be if he wanted to treat her to it (that part was included).

Also, she wrote, you owe me a new sweater.

It only takes a day for her letter to show up; it could just as easily have taken a year or two, or never arrived at all, or at least not before she'd gone back to the sea her own self.

Instead, a response. An acknowledgment that, well, she'd read his message, and yeah, an in-person apology was a better idea — which, rats, writing out his thoughts would have been so much easier — and, apparently, she needs... a sweater?

Willful Machine it is; a chance to find a sweater, or someone selling sweaters at least, a chance to find her and ask what sort of sweater she wants; a chance to buy her the aforementioned dinner.

Not that any of this keeps him from being vaguely nervous about it — indefinably ill-at-ease — and maybe it's mostly that he doesn't really want to get teased by John, or questioned by John, and maybe it's just that he's skinny enough that his bedroom windows provide him a private exit when he wants it, but either way he doesn't use the door when he leaves the house in Gaze, heading over to Willful Machine and his dinner not-a-date With Apology.

«Flowers might be a good idea,» Alfred suggests cheerfully. «She likes flowers.»

"Oh does she, now," Augustine retorts dryly, even as his gaze catches on whatever vegetation around them is listed for sale, immediately following his brother's suggestion. "And you would know this how, precisely?"

«Because I pay attention,» is his prim answer; Alfred says nothing more, just calmly coiling around Augustine's waist and shoulder in his usual perch, along for the ride.

He doesn't have flowers, when he finds her little stall. He does have, to his bafflement, a sapling dwarf apple tree — for sale, cheap, by someone who had apparently Had Enough of the memories that resulted from the orchard's fruit — tucked under one arm, ready to be transplanted, as he knocks against the stall's frame.

"Is this a good time, then?"

The stall doesn't look like much, yet. It's been built: it's clearly A Stall, with a small person-sized counter for a shopkeeper to keep things behind as records, and a couple of tables, and paper-and-wire flowers woven into some of the slats in the walls. It's making some kind of progress. She has been writing notes, working on some kind of thing.

She looks up.

She squints a little, tilting her head, and then slowly offers him a hesitant excuse for a smile. "Do I look particularly overrun with tasks?"

"Well, you might be about to have three elephants and fourteen ostriches descend upon your stall, here, to make inquiries about whether or not you're providing rapid-turnaround costume tailoring for their ballet recital this evening," he points out, calmly and quickly enough to make anyone listening wonder just why it is that he could pull up an example like that so rapidly —

(The answer is: John. It's John's fault that he's so good at terrible examples. This may or may not, in fact, be one he's heard from John before; he really has no idea anymore.)

"On the other hand... you might be bored, and be willing to provide me with something more in the way of information regarding this sweater I'm supposed to replace for you."

Despite herself, because she does not want to be giving him the satisfaction whatsoever, Sarah laughs.

It's a laugh that doesn't last, but apparently she likes John's method of examples.

"If that happened, I would be extremely busy, and it would also be one of the best days of my life," she says, and then: "I am. Bored. And willing. It got wrecked by a smoothie, and that was your fault."

"And how did I manage to smoothe-and-wreck your sweater, whilst away at sea?"

Beneath the waves, of course. If he quips about it, though — leaning in against the tiny little counter, reducing his height a touch — that means it didn't leave scars, right?

"A shiver that made me drop it."

All over herself, but thankfully in front of no one else. Sarah still pulls a face at him, even as she's stepping backward to clear out of nearly sharing personal space—which means Augustine has her back to the wall, now. There's sideways to escape, though, so she's safe from a panic.

"Why do I have a feeling it wasn't the nicest vacation?"

"Because you're a reasonably intelligent young woman, I think," he says dryly —

— because, of course, that way he doesn't have to think about how wet he was, for five days straight. And chilled all the way through, under the crushing depths.

"I would strongly recommend more tropical waters, if you're ever in the mood for endurance swimming. Nice and warm and restful, a crisp clear blue — try to find an atoll, maybe. Keeps the sharks out, makes the water seem nice and shallow, it's a lovely combination."

"Mm. Sounds lovely." This time Augustine really does get a smile out of Sarah King, though she's gazing off to the distance and not at him. She is gazing off in the distance in the direction that she would make her escape were he to try to crowd her any further. This is probably coincidence.

"Endurance swimming is—not my thing, but warm beaches most certainly are."

They're not getting dinner at one, though.

Neither are they at her mostly empty stall, yet.

She's also trying not to remember what she felt; what he made her feel; that this is the man who forced his sensations upon her against her will, kind of. He did ask for her assistance with something important. She gave it willingly. It was her fault she didn't ask the right questions, understand the gravity—

No, that was old Sarah talking. That was pre-Rosen Sarah.

She didn't understand the gravity, but he was also a jerk about it and it was mostly his fault.

"You will have to tell me more about these warm, restful atolls. Remember them vividly enough that you're feeling the sensations." Okay, so that was a little bit playful in tone. A smidge of smile might be for him.

"I'm certainly willing to experiment with that," he offers gamely — immediately — at least in part because, well, it's a fuck-you to Mariana, with her cold-and-icy ocean depths; in part because it's a pretty girl smiling at him and challenging him to make her Feel Good Things, and his response to that is practically Pavlovian.

"No idea atoll if remembered sensations are going to translate the same way, however — although, come to think of it, I know there was at least one moment I was fervently recollecting being stuck in a quagmire of hot mud. Did any of that come through, before?"

It takes her a second to catch the pun, with his accent, but he gets credit for it with a flash of amusement in her expression. He's pleasant to talk to, in some ways, simply because she cannot feel a thing from him.

An emotional thing, anyway.

And he's not having any specific physical sensations to call attention to now.

"I might have," she admits. "Or I might have been asleep. I had quicksand dreams."

Technically, other than the pressure of his weight on his elbows against the counter, that's true — with one exception: the sort of tickly-prickle of tree branches against his leg, albeit through his trousers.

"I suppose one of the most important questions to ask, before we've built a working hypothesis, then, is — have you ever done that before?"

And then, as he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, one of the branches pokes aggressively into the tendon of his semimembranosus, and he winces just a twinge — and gives her another quick, wry smile, even as he reaches down to soothe the irritated spot. "Another very important question, as it happens, is 'do you like apple trees'?"

"No," Sarah answers, though by the time she says it he's asked two questions; she then reaches to the same irritated spot as a mirror, before quickly realizing that it isn't her discomfort and pushes it away. At least that she has skill at. Sometimes. Kind of.

"I mean, no, I can't remember ever having a quicksand dream before. Quicksand nightmares, yes, but this was not a nightmare, it was a dream, and yes, I like apple trees, as it turns out."

"And what's the difference, then, between nightmare and dream, if you're still in quicksand?"

It's something about the gleam in his eye, maybe, that indicates that he really is quite curious about her answer to his question — even as he bends and twists and lifts and —

— presents her with a dwarf-root-graft apple tree sapling, since he happens to have one with him and all.

"Mind you, I've never heard of this variety of apple before in my exceptionally long life — might be fully local, might just have always been a New England thing — but I can't help but think that you're either going to be delighted to have it, or know someone else who will."

Hopeful smile.

Sarah considers the tree, shoving enough stuff aside on the counter surface that the pot can, at least, temporarily be placed upon it. Now she has nothing but unadulterated smile on her face, a satisfaction with enough to it that despite only being attuned to physical sensation Augustine might be able to sense. (It's in the cheeks, a little, from the smile; there's a bit of a lifting sensation in the chest. Some emotion is physical.)

Reaching out a hand to touch a flower, she says, "I would be pleased beyond measure to provide it a home, though I might need another one to get fruit." There's a twinge of hope in her eyes, like he may know how to make that happen. Magic cloaked emotions man is also now a tree dealer. What a person to have in your debt.

The grin he gives her in reply is an easy one; it's the sort that crinkles up his eyes, stretches out his cheeks, eases tension in the back of his neck and shoulders. (Is he even aware of that tension in the first place? Eh, probably not.)

"You might, although there also might be enough other ones around the neighborhood generally that you'd be fine," he allows, and stops and thinks about it for long enough to realize "— not that I'm actually sure whether or not this one's going to bear fruit ever. They always do in orchards, anyway — I hope you know the trick to that, because in all my experience farming, I never did all that much with orchard management."

And:

"Are you not going to answer the question, though?"

From the beginning of their association--when Augustine sent him to befriend her, in an echo of something the Saint of Patience could not have known to parallel; something that would have made Illarion's heart clench in his chest if it still beat--the shrike's made a habit of bringing food whenever he visits Sarah's plot in Trenchwood.

It's often been fish or salt or fresh mushrooms from around the Salt Lake, but today's--unusual. Today he's accompanied by a very different Omen, and today he's got dried fruit and fresh bread undoubtedly procured from a market rather than harvested fresh from his own territory.

That's one sign something's a little off-kilter, and another is the doleful look on his face--real, matching the exact emotion roiling in him beneath it--as he presents himself at her door.

"What ques—"

But then it dawns on her, of course, much as he has forgotten to even bring up the dinner he'd implied they were going to have together to make up for the Drowning Incident, Sarah has forgotten to finish the point about the quicksand.

"— oh. It's not a nightmare because it isn't frightening. It's just a dream about quicksand. And yes, apple trees where I come from cannot self-fertilize, so it will need a mate. If it's like the ones I'm used to it's hermaphroditic, thus any tree of the same species will do. Hopefully won't be too difficult to find."

It's probably a good thing that Sarah doesn't look out the window before she opens the door, because if she had she might've startled a bit more than anticipated. Because, whoa, there is a dinosaur outside and while she's seen Petrie, he is younger and smaller.

Instead she does her startled mouth-in-an-O once she's opened the door, as her greeting for Illarion gets swallowed up by the surprise in his Omen's changed look, and turns into: "She looks different today!" And then, after a second, "Sorry, that was awkward—hi, lovely to—"

Wait a minute. It's not just the Omen that isn't quite right: "—it's still lovely to see you, of course, but it seems like you're not having the best time. Tea?" She's stepping out of the door to let him in even while asking the question, trying not to be the pinnacle of rude and say what happened to your amygdala, that's different.

"Hermaphrodites unwilling to perform parthenogenesis, though?" He scoffs, but his eyes are full of laughter. "Someone is feeling entirely too picky — I promise you another apple tree, then. Does it need to be the same sub-species, or is that only if you don't want it to keep hybridizing...?"

He ... well, okay, he sort of knows what he's talking about, with trees; he's just rusty.

"Also, I hope it's all right if I don't provide it tonight — the seller was about to go home, when I picked this one up."

"Every apple tree I've ever met has insisted on having a mate," Sarah confirms, with a solemn nod. "I wouldn't want to produce offspring on my own either, both because that would be weird and because clones aren't any good for genetic variations."

Her people had enough problems with consanguinity occasionally producing an unanticipated genetic quirk generations later as it was.

"Of course it's all right, I thought you were feeding me?" Mark this as the return of the grin; it's impossible to say if he's actually growing on her or if it's just that when he smiles she does.

He had known, of course, that his Omen's new appearance could be startling--and if he were in a better frame of mind, he might've called ahead to warn her about it. As it is, though, Sarah's state of obvious surprise actually brings a wan smile to his face. That's--something, in his current state of mind and heart.

"We are sorry to startle you. She has been through some changes," Illarion explains, or doesn't, as the case may be. "We both have. Tea would be welcome; we might speak over it."

About the changes, and otherwise. He takes the implicit invitation and steps into the house with her, holding the food out in offering in return.

"Oh, I don't mind a good-or-neutral startle every now and then. Shape changes usually aren't an outright negative kind of startle, unless you hate it," Sarah accepts the Appropriate Social Handoff of Food with the kind of polite smile that is at least genuine. It's not a putting on appearances smile. It's not the sort of politeness that is only a social grace—she means it.

"This smells lovely, too. Feel free to have a seat, I'll get plates and jam and get the tea going."

If there is one thing Sarah is good at, it's hosting people who are expecting a comfortable secondhand couch and a hot cup of tea and not much else. But she's also got jam, and now she's got bread to put it on (as well as the delicacy of dried fruit to share or sample later, or both).

Tiny social rituals of this sort, enacted with someone to whom they come naturally as breathing, are their own kind of soothing. Whether or not Illarion should be included in them, as one of the dead, he still has not decided--but if someone who knows what he is and understands the line between life and death should still invite him in, and offer him tea, he at least feels he is not receiving that attention through deception.

"Thank you," he says, gravely, and takes a seat human-wise on the couch. His Omen paces back and forth beside the furniture, huffing softly to herself, as she tries to determine where and how she fits with this too-large body. At last she settles at Illarion's side, propping her chin on the arm of the couch to await the promise of jam.

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