Chapter Text
In the void, the rush of nothing had become something different.
Anne didn’t know how she knew. She didn’t know if voids could become real or endless or cold to her touch, but she found herself in one regardless. One where the horizon stretched on in what looked to be colors and ribbons of lights. Auroras dancing between her eyelids.
Her neck had craned up well to see them. She was lying down on something solid, flat as a table, and yet when she tried to stretch her eyes to the corner of her vision she could see nothing that could even be marked as a floor. Or anything comfortable, for that matter.
But there above her were a span of stars. And in those span of stars she could count the reds, blues, and greens — the hues she counted as the most alive, the most present in the sky.
Within the void, the ability to breathe coalesced between the space of her ribs to the top of her throat. She didn’t know if her pulse beat on like a drum. The air was too silent to ever give her an answer — or at least an answer that could make sense to her, and to her only.
Heat pressed itself to the sides of her head. It wasn’t an alien feeling; Anne could tell that the pressure was light, a bit cold to the touch, and her thoughts quickly jot it down to be amphibian skin.
The touch of someone else.
Was it Hop Pop that held her like this? Sprig? Polly?
With her neck stuck to where it was, she couldn’t quite tell. She could only gaze up at the space and waited for something to be said. In between the gentle mess of her curls to the shift of unseen clothing, Anne wanted to know if she was dreaming.
And if the galaxies over her were all fake.
A pulse grew steady in her ears now, leaving her to exhale cold gusts from her chapped lips. All as a warm voice entered. Soft and sweet.
“I have seen you struggle many times.”
The mist grew choppier. She hadn’t heard a voice like this since her dreams, her nightmares. And now here she was, rested as an amphibian played with her hair, the beginnings of electric blue coiling into the curled mess.
“I know the journey possessed to you is something you couldn’t have fathomed. It’s a narrative that shouldn’t be given to you or to many others like you, and yet I have no choice in the matter: on what the world dictates.”
The weight on Anne’s chest was like a plate. It budged against her abdomen, left her gritting her teeth as the stars above grew brighter and brighter in turquoise.
Brighter than she’d ever seen it before.
Yet when a hand nudged through the strands, the movement of it fizzled, tamed like a dog. An animal.
“I wish I can. Because within the space of my heart, I had prayed many lifetimes for you to stay safe.”
She hissed at the wet touch to her forehead.
“It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for all my ancestors before me, and I’m sorry it has caught up to you. You. The youngest of them all.
“Judgement is a cruel unnecessary thing. I learned so young that lesson and paid the price for not doing enough. Yet here I sit with you, lucky enough to say these things as if they mean something, and hope for the best that my apology can at least reassure you that you weren’t alone.
“That you tried your best like any other before today.”
So Anne laid there, unyielding. There wouldn’t be a complaint to the sweet voice that filled her ears, nor the tension coiled in every tendon of her body. She would listen, staying put as a corpse in a grave, and wait as the silence became deafening.
And even more deafening.
“There is an evil that no one wants to kill. We both know that we dread the end, the idea that it’s near, and it mayhaps is true.
“But I’m asking you to endure it.”
Despite the words, Anne remained still — the weave of her hair memorizing as the void itself.
“I am aware this request is fundamentally selfish. I can offer no justification for it. It is simply the outcome I wish to see the most.”
And with the stars fading from her eyes, with the drained hues of her hair, Anne wondered if she was going to die in this woman’s arms. All in the middle of nowhere, as the surface below her faded to nothing.
“So I’m asking you...”
And even when the final request never came, Anne smiled to herself as she plummeted to the depths of the sky.
For out of everything she endured, this was the calmest she’d ever been.