Gweneth Popplestone is a deadly cinnamon roll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gwenniepop) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
gooseberryhigh2018-07-26 09:27 pm
gwenniepop) wrote in gooseberryhigh2018-07-26 09:27 pm
What is dead is never gone
WHO: Gwen (guest appearance briefly by sleeping Wilde)
WHAT: Someone has to go back to face the past
WHEN: The morning after their reunion
WHERE: The Grotto path
WARNING/RATING: This is a big fat E for Emo and there's some self-indulgent writing ahead and also about death and grieving, so read at your own risk
There’s no sunlight that creeps under the flap of the tent, but Gwen wakens anyway, her internal clock knowing it is close to dawn, the same way she woke up everytime they went camping. And in the pre-dawn dark, she sees the slight swaying of the fabric above her head, hears the distant sound of water lapping at the shoreline. If she strains, there’s birdsong, faint like they are testing out before the actual sunrise rouses them. Otherwise, it’s quiet, except for Wilde’s deep breathing, next to her.
Gwen’s eyes widen. Wilde’s breathing, next to her.
The evening before comes back in a rush, and she feels an equal mixture of elation and total horror. He couldn’t have meant all that. He could not. And she is his friend and she let it happen, and oh dear god she is the worst friend ever because she slept with him when he was drunk and….the onslaught in her mind continues on, only halted when he moves slightly. She freezes, but he simply slides his arm around her and pulls her tighter against him, although his breathing doesn’t change, and she makes a little face at herself because she instantly weakens and snuggles up against him. Coward, she berates herself. It does nothing to make her move away. He smells like everything good, like home. Extra coward.
For long minutes, she lies there, cocooned under the covers, listening to him sleep, feeling the warm rise and fall of his chest against her back, and tries to find the tranquility they usually shared, just as they’d shared tents before (just never a bed). And it’s there, she can feel it at the edges now that she’s gotten over the initial surprise. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has, and she softens a little more. If he can forgive her for letting this all happen, maybe, maybe everything will be alright. Carefully, she extracts herself from the loop of his arm, but only so she can sit up and see him, in the dark, an outline against the sheets. His hair is tousled, falling over his eyes, and she hesitates before brushing it back with the lightest touch. He sleeps on, heedless of her worried gaze.
She thinks about going back home, back to the city; what they will do next, say next, what this means for the fall, for Alaska, for everything that comes after. And it feels nebulous, like a cloud she can see, but not see through to know what lies ahead. Just as before they’d come back here, to this old forest, when she tried to picture what she would do after she faced the last of her demons, but couldn’t imagine the shape of that life. And she knows why. Because the last demons just aren’t gone.
She thinks he will wake, certainly, when she crawls off the bed silently, moving around the tent to draw on jeans and a shirt and her shoes, then tucks the new journal and her wand in her pockets. It’s chilly enough even in the height of summer that she snags a hoodie on her way out, and once outside, releases the pent up breath that she’d been holding. The sun hasn’t hit the horizon yet, but it’s still light enough to see the trail among the gloom of high trees. She doesn’t realize her breath is coming hard, as if she’d been running, as she walks past the river, the monoliths of abandoned cabins, the mossy rocks that once lined a fire pit. It all falls away behind her.
It’s only trees and worn forest floor, and she swears its hours that she walks even though it can’t be more than a quarter of that time, long still minutes. Surely she’ll forget the night before, of being wrapped up in a warm embrace, or she’ll forget the years intervening, transported back to a decade earlier. The fear will rise up and choke her, and she’ll face it again, because she hasn’t really done so in all the years since. Come close, when a nightmare felt too real, a ghost a little too bright, but not like this. And yet when she reaches the spot, and she knows it, knows that stretch of trees burnt into her mind so indelibly, there’s no fear. No lingering ghosts. Just a patch of lavender that persistently took root from whatever blossoms that fell, and a bit of moss on a dip of land.
It’s not right. Something is not right, because she has been avoiding this exact place for years, letting it build a home inside of her and filling it with dread that never truly went away. And yet it’s just a place. The sunlight comes drifting through the trees, fully dawn now, and it blinds her for a moment, and she thinks about what Wilde said. Tearing up at the sunrise. It’s just a spot in the forest.
And she looks up, over her head, at the treetops stretched like a canopy over the trail, and she starts to cry.
It’s not fear. It was never fear, but grief, deep and heavy like stone that robbed her of breath so many times, that she mistook for terror. Anguished, she sits down hard on the ground, and then lies back, seeing those limbs crisscrossing a pale sky through blurry moisture. Because the person that was her, the eighteen -year-old her, she’d died here, and Gwen knows that in so many ways, she had not come back. This is still a grave for a scared child, because that Gwen is irretrievably gone. She’d died frightened and in pain, even though she had not been alone, and the woman who had woken up next the Oak wasn’t the same. Hot, steady tears slide down her temples and into her hair, a halo on the ground. Here, now, there is nothing she can do anymore for that Gwen. She’s already been gone from the world for ten years.
Bare months later, in that following fall, Webster had told her every word of his eulogy, about the girl he’d idolized and mourned, and Gwen knows now that he’d been right, the girl he had loved died on that path. Everything she is came from those ashes, not from the lifetime before, and Gwen weeps for that, for what part of her that she’ll never get back. It’s a sharp ache that she’d never acknowledged, that she struggled to understand, and with the brightening sky above her, she wishes that she could go back and comfort that girl, hold her, anything. Tell her that she had been loved, even when she doubted it, that her short life had still been wonderful and filled with so much. That in dying, she gave a different kind of freedom to the person who came after, a thirst to know the entirety of the world and to see it and not fear death. But now, all she can do is cry until her eyes are hot and dry, her skin damp, until the sun is so high it cannot be ignored.
She won’t be alone here too long. The ghost of that girl would stay there forever, but the forest moves on all the same, and new feet walk the paths, new voices travel through the underbrush. This isn’t her place anymore. That, too, has its own ache, but it’s less bitter, less fatal to her heart. She does have other places that are hers, and she knows each of them are a gift from this quiet teenager who had done her best to be a good person, a kind person. She wouldn’t be there today, if it hadn’t been for a young girl's somber death that came before. So she would take it, remember this present for what it is.
For now, something else beckons. Someone else. And while it won’t be the last time she grieves for that lost girl, it will be enough for today.
WHAT: Someone has to go back to face the past
WHEN: The morning after their reunion
WHERE: The Grotto path
WARNING/RATING: This is a big fat E for Emo and there's some self-indulgent writing ahead and also about death and grieving, so read at your own risk
There’s no sunlight that creeps under the flap of the tent, but Gwen wakens anyway, her internal clock knowing it is close to dawn, the same way she woke up everytime they went camping. And in the pre-dawn dark, she sees the slight swaying of the fabric above her head, hears the distant sound of water lapping at the shoreline. If she strains, there’s birdsong, faint like they are testing out before the actual sunrise rouses them. Otherwise, it’s quiet, except for Wilde’s deep breathing, next to her.
Gwen’s eyes widen. Wilde’s breathing, next to her.
The evening before comes back in a rush, and she feels an equal mixture of elation and total horror. He couldn’t have meant all that. He could not. And she is his friend and she let it happen, and oh dear god she is the worst friend ever because she slept with him when he was drunk and….the onslaught in her mind continues on, only halted when he moves slightly. She freezes, but he simply slides his arm around her and pulls her tighter against him, although his breathing doesn’t change, and she makes a little face at herself because she instantly weakens and snuggles up against him. Coward, she berates herself. It does nothing to make her move away. He smells like everything good, like home. Extra coward.
For long minutes, she lies there, cocooned under the covers, listening to him sleep, feeling the warm rise and fall of his chest against her back, and tries to find the tranquility they usually shared, just as they’d shared tents before (just never a bed). And it’s there, she can feel it at the edges now that she’s gotten over the initial surprise. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has, and she softens a little more. If he can forgive her for letting this all happen, maybe, maybe everything will be alright. Carefully, she extracts herself from the loop of his arm, but only so she can sit up and see him, in the dark, an outline against the sheets. His hair is tousled, falling over his eyes, and she hesitates before brushing it back with the lightest touch. He sleeps on, heedless of her worried gaze.
She thinks about going back home, back to the city; what they will do next, say next, what this means for the fall, for Alaska, for everything that comes after. And it feels nebulous, like a cloud she can see, but not see through to know what lies ahead. Just as before they’d come back here, to this old forest, when she tried to picture what she would do after she faced the last of her demons, but couldn’t imagine the shape of that life. And she knows why. Because the last demons just aren’t gone.
She thinks he will wake, certainly, when she crawls off the bed silently, moving around the tent to draw on jeans and a shirt and her shoes, then tucks the new journal and her wand in her pockets. It’s chilly enough even in the height of summer that she snags a hoodie on her way out, and once outside, releases the pent up breath that she’d been holding. The sun hasn’t hit the horizon yet, but it’s still light enough to see the trail among the gloom of high trees. She doesn’t realize her breath is coming hard, as if she’d been running, as she walks past the river, the monoliths of abandoned cabins, the mossy rocks that once lined a fire pit. It all falls away behind her.
It’s only trees and worn forest floor, and she swears its hours that she walks even though it can’t be more than a quarter of that time, long still minutes. Surely she’ll forget the night before, of being wrapped up in a warm embrace, or she’ll forget the years intervening, transported back to a decade earlier. The fear will rise up and choke her, and she’ll face it again, because she hasn’t really done so in all the years since. Come close, when a nightmare felt too real, a ghost a little too bright, but not like this. And yet when she reaches the spot, and she knows it, knows that stretch of trees burnt into her mind so indelibly, there’s no fear. No lingering ghosts. Just a patch of lavender that persistently took root from whatever blossoms that fell, and a bit of moss on a dip of land.
It’s not right. Something is not right, because she has been avoiding this exact place for years, letting it build a home inside of her and filling it with dread that never truly went away. And yet it’s just a place. The sunlight comes drifting through the trees, fully dawn now, and it blinds her for a moment, and she thinks about what Wilde said. Tearing up at the sunrise. It’s just a spot in the forest.
And she looks up, over her head, at the treetops stretched like a canopy over the trail, and she starts to cry.
It’s not fear. It was never fear, but grief, deep and heavy like stone that robbed her of breath so many times, that she mistook for terror. Anguished, she sits down hard on the ground, and then lies back, seeing those limbs crisscrossing a pale sky through blurry moisture. Because the person that was her, the eighteen -year-old her, she’d died here, and Gwen knows that in so many ways, she had not come back. This is still a grave for a scared child, because that Gwen is irretrievably gone. She’d died frightened and in pain, even though she had not been alone, and the woman who had woken up next the Oak wasn’t the same. Hot, steady tears slide down her temples and into her hair, a halo on the ground. Here, now, there is nothing she can do anymore for that Gwen. She’s already been gone from the world for ten years.
Bare months later, in that following fall, Webster had told her every word of his eulogy, about the girl he’d idolized and mourned, and Gwen knows now that he’d been right, the girl he had loved died on that path. Everything she is came from those ashes, not from the lifetime before, and Gwen weeps for that, for what part of her that she’ll never get back. It’s a sharp ache that she’d never acknowledged, that she struggled to understand, and with the brightening sky above her, she wishes that she could go back and comfort that girl, hold her, anything. Tell her that she had been loved, even when she doubted it, that her short life had still been wonderful and filled with so much. That in dying, she gave a different kind of freedom to the person who came after, a thirst to know the entirety of the world and to see it and not fear death. But now, all she can do is cry until her eyes are hot and dry, her skin damp, until the sun is so high it cannot be ignored.
She won’t be alone here too long. The ghost of that girl would stay there forever, but the forest moves on all the same, and new feet walk the paths, new voices travel through the underbrush. This isn’t her place anymore. That, too, has its own ache, but it’s less bitter, less fatal to her heart. She does have other places that are hers, and she knows each of them are a gift from this quiet teenager who had done her best to be a good person, a kind person. She wouldn’t be there today, if it hadn’t been for a young girl's somber death that came before. So she would take it, remember this present for what it is.
For now, something else beckons. Someone else. And while it won’t be the last time she grieves for that lost girl, it will be enough for today.