brigits_flame - Strike
Author's Note: I think this marks the first time I've ever broken into tears while writing. I have felt a lot of things while writing (fear and mania being the most common), I have felt things after writing (like a drained sense of grief after The White Parade), but I have never been so moved by my own stuff so as to actually sit there and cry while writing.
While I could blame it on something like the playlist I built or the birth control I'm on, neither one is really it. The story just... In my head, it was so beautiful and sad at the same time. I'm not really sure I did it any justice but I hope I came close enough.
---
'Til Death Reunites
“Love is supposed to start with bells ringing and go downhill from there. But it was the opposite for me. There’s an intense connection between us, and as we stayed together, the bells rang louder.”
- Unknown
Three days ago, Lucy Amherst realized she was going to die.
The realization did not lurk for a while at the corners of her mind, the way it does with some people, nor did it come with any potential for doubt. This was not paranoia, not panic induced by old age (though any who would call Lucy old was likely to be struck with a glare or her broom). This was nothing born of an inclination towards suicide; life experience left an abhorrence towards the thought. No, this realization just was and it was just there, full-blown and developed from the moment it presented itself during her afternoon tea. She understood this and accepted it--welcomed it, one might say.
Lucy Amherst is going to die. And that is more than all right with her.
Mind you, Lucy is not a woman of ill health; even now, in her seventy-sixth year, she is the picture of health and strength. Her fiery red hair (which had so attracted her husband in their youth) has not dulled into the brown that is the fate of most redheads, and her green eyes still sparkle with the sort of life that seems solely the property of younger women. She lives alone in London, in the home she shared with first her husband, then her husband and son, and then solely with her son until he had to make his own brief life. Often, her family will ask why she does not leave. The house is unnecessarily big for her, with too many rooms she does not use.
“Sell the house!” they tell her.
“I cannot,” she always answers.
“Why?” they ask.
“So he can always find me,” Lucy says, always with a smile that suggests they should know this already. “It will be easier if he always knows where to find me, and here is easier than anywhere else. Here is comfortable. Here is our home. Here is where he will always find me.”
Her family has always been frustrated by this. Years upon years of frustration have kept them from completely understanding her desires. He has been dead and gone for years--gone away by his own hand, no less!--and while adherence to her wedding vows is honorable, her family has often been quick to remind her of their final clause. And if it is not him of which he speaks, then certainly the other--who has also been dead and gone for years, though from justifiably tragic means--would understand and encourage his mother to move on.
But that time has passed. She could have another husband, could have even had another child if she adopted, but she wanted neither. Now she is seventy-six and now, currently, she is speaking with her lawyer on the phone to ensure that some minor details of her affairs are in order.
“…and you will see to it that my baby sister gets my silver jewelry while my oldest niece gets to have all the gold pieces--and that’s including all of the white-gold pieces. I’ve marked them so that they are not confused with the silver. I did give you a key to the house, correct?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Good. And…” Lucy pauses, looking at her notes. “And you will see that all of my husband’s medical books--as well as all of my husband’s medical instruments--are delivered promptly to my nephew Alain. He lives in America, in New York, but I would like it very much if you would deliver them to him in person.”
“Of course, madam. I will make arrangements to fly out there as soon as I have handled your affairs here and contacted him.”
“Very good.”
“Is there anything else you wish me to take care of, apart from what has been discussed?”
She hesitates for a moment, her green eyes settling on a leather-wrapped parcel sitting ominously in the middle of her kitchen table. The parcel had been her husband’s, his inheritance, along with that damn bloody farm where he had grown up and later died hanging in the barn. Lucy has seen its contents, knows where it is supposed to go (where it should have gone years upon years ago), but doing so would have required contact with it again. And though her deeper understanding of the world and her husband’s family history allowed her to believe it all, the impressions given off by the collection of diaries and photographs is one of--
“Mrs. Amherst?”
“Yes.” Lucy brings herself out of reverie. “Yes, I-- Actually, I have one more parcel I would like you to deliver, which was also my husband’s, but which will go to a young man living in Seattle.”
“To whom shall I bring it, madam?”
“My great-grandson. Ean Amherst.”
Over the sound of Wagner, in a place far removed from England, an attendant addresses his easily irritated superior.
“Your Grace--!”
“Whatever message you have had better come quickly and succinctly; I am still in the midst of sorting out these numbers and if it can wait--”
“Your Grace, I have a message from Her Excellency. She says it’s very important.”
“Oh? The last time she said that, I was helping her court a rabbit out from behind a bookshelf.”
“Sh-she said you would say that, Your Grace, and told me to insist that it was very important.”
“Yes, you’ve told me. Twice. Now what is it that is so ‘very important’?”
“Her Excellency says that…that it’s time, Your Grace. She said you would know what she meant by that.”
Silence. The superior rises, immediately forgetting about the paperwork growing mountainous on his desk. He adjusts the glasses resting on his thin nose, tries to smoothen out his dress shirt… He will have to shower, dress; he will have to look appropriate. She would chide him if he doesn’t look appropriate.
“Tell Her Excellency that I will be leaving at once. And thank her for me.”
The Great Bell of London is announcing the eight o’clock hour to the city it calls home. Many people are heading home from their jobs, shifting power to those individuals who keep the city running while the day-workers sleep. In some homes, people are tucking their children into bed and telling them stories while others settle in to enjoy a quiet evening alone. The youth descend upon the pubs and clubs of the city, living as though they’ll never age, never die…
In her own home, Lucy goes about the evening as she would any other. A light supper at seven is followed by a little bit of quiet knitting by the radio; if she doesn’t finish this scarf for her grandniece, nobody else will--certainly not the girl’s mother, who can barely hold a knitting needle properly, much less produce a full scarf. Lucy hums along quietly to Norah Jones, conceding that girl’s cover of Loudermilk’s song is quite decent.
By eight-twenty, Lucy has finished putting the last touches on the scarf and spends some of her time writing letters to her closest relatives. She writes them all by hand on butter cream colored paper (though the work makes her fingers ache some), and is sure to make them personal for each person. To a cousin, Lucy wishes luck for his daughter’s dance career; to a brother, she passes on recipes for his restaurant. She assures those she writes that she is not afraid and that she loves them, and that she will see them when their time comes.
For her great-grandson, the letter Lucy writes is slightly different. She tells him what she can of the parcel and its contents. She tells him of his great-grandfather and of his skepticism towards the parcel’s contents--until, of course, it was too late--and presses him not to be the same way. She expresses regret that she could not have met him in this life.
“But fate reunites all Amhersts eventually,” Lucy murmurs, taking her own dictation, “and if tradition is upheld, it’s almost certain to happen this way…”
The letters are completed by the time the quarter bells announce the nightly arrival of nine-fifteen. Each is placed in a butter cream colored envelope and labeled for the recipient. Carefully, neatly, Lucy arranges them on the kitchen table. One is placed with the finished and folded scarf; another--the one for her great-grandson--is placed near the parcel as opposed to directly on it; a third is placed with the books and instruments meant for her nephew. The rest are left stacked one atop the other in two short stacks.
“‘Fare thee well,’” she says, remembering old poetry, “‘and if forever, still forever, fare thee well.’”
Before retiring to her bedroom upstairs, Lucy makes it a point to turn off every light on the bottom floor. Her eyes catch sight of the empty birdcages where parakeets once made their home and wonders if releasing them two days ago was right. She could have given them to her sister or to the neighbors’ son…
Westminster Quarters is floating through the London air again by the time Lucy exits the shower considerably more tired than before. It has been a long day full of work. Rest is the wanted reward.
She dresses as simply as she has always done for bed, choosing a newer peach-colored nightgown over some of the older ones. She avoids her slippers, preferring the feel of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet.
Before sleeping, Lucy repeats her activity of turning out all the lights, reserving the bedside lamp in the master bedroom for last. The clock by the lamp reads ten minutes to ten. She smiles a little, taking the clock--a wedding present from her brother Liam--into her hands.
“How time goes,” Lucy murmurs, running her fingertips over the clock’s face. “How quickly time goes…”
“Time goes, you say?”
Slightly startled, she turns her head to the new voice, smiling softly at the figure in the doorway. Tall, broad-shouldered; his hair is grayer than she remembers, his skin more lined, but through the eyes of a loving wife, the man in the doorway is as handsome as he was on the day they exchanged vows.
“I found you,” he says softly.
“I made it easy.” Lucy returns the clock to the bedside table, staring at it. “Will it hurt? Do you know if--if it will hurt at all?”
“No, my love. No.” He begins to cross to the bed. “It won’t--”
“Be a dear, Wyatt; close the door. I’ve closed every door but the last.”
“Why?”
She looks over at him. “I was waiting for you, of course. I was…waiting.”
Her husband nods, closes the door. He crosses the room and draws the shades over each window, singing softly under his breath as he often did during his yearly visits.
“It’s not the pale moon that excites me…
That thrills and delights me…oh no.
It’s just the nearness of you…
It isn’t your…sweet…conversation
That brings this sensation…oh no…”
Lucy smiles. “You always loved that song, didn’t you?”
“Always.” Wyatt smiles. “Always, though…I could never sing it right.”
He sits down on his side of bed. Lucy opens the drawer of her bedside table, retrieving a hairbrush. For a moment, they are a normal married couple. She brushes her hair; he removes his shoes, his socks, his watch… They talk of common things--he of work, she of her relatives. Wyatt laughs when Lucy tells him about the incident at the market last week--of how the neighbor’s pet pig caused havoc all through the fruit section.
“I had figured you would like that story,” Lucy says, smiling. “Given your childhood pets…”
Wyatt merely nods, the last few chuckles escaping as gets beneath the blankets. “The poor pig. He must have been so frightened to be at a market.”
“I suppose…”
Finally, with little hesitation, she turns off the light. The tiredness that came earlier feels doubled in the darkness. Indeed, it has been quite a long day. When she lies down, she feels a sense of relief that penetrates to her bones. How much toil it had been, holding upright for so long! Rest was important now, was natural now.
“Wyatt? Wyatt, love--”
“Here.” Her husband embraces her. The familiar scents of him--of peppermint and tea and even of old books--comfort her. “I’m always here.”
“Wyatt, don’t be sad. Don’t…” Lucy sighs. “Don’t cry. Sing to me. Sing to me that song…”
Despite himself, he chuckles again. “Lucy, I can’t sing.”
“I don’t care. Just sing to me. Sing the part you love.”
There is silence, and then…very, very softly…
“I need no soft…lights to enchant me,
If you’ll only grant me the right…
To hold you ever…so tight…
And to feel in the night
The nearness…of you.”
Lucy smiles, closes her eyes; in the city of London, though the tenth hour has come, the Great Bell remains curiously silent.
While I could blame it on something like the playlist I built or the birth control I'm on, neither one is really it. The story just... In my head, it was so beautiful and sad at the same time. I'm not really sure I did it any justice but I hope I came close enough.
---
'Til Death Reunites
“Love is supposed to start with bells ringing and go downhill from there. But it was the opposite for me. There’s an intense connection between us, and as we stayed together, the bells rang louder.”
- Unknown
Three days ago, Lucy Amherst realized she was going to die.
The realization did not lurk for a while at the corners of her mind, the way it does with some people, nor did it come with any potential for doubt. This was not paranoia, not panic induced by old age (though any who would call Lucy old was likely to be struck with a glare or her broom). This was nothing born of an inclination towards suicide; life experience left an abhorrence towards the thought. No, this realization just was and it was just there, full-blown and developed from the moment it presented itself during her afternoon tea. She understood this and accepted it--welcomed it, one might say.
Lucy Amherst is going to die. And that is more than all right with her.
Mind you, Lucy is not a woman of ill health; even now, in her seventy-sixth year, she is the picture of health and strength. Her fiery red hair (which had so attracted her husband in their youth) has not dulled into the brown that is the fate of most redheads, and her green eyes still sparkle with the sort of life that seems solely the property of younger women. She lives alone in London, in the home she shared with first her husband, then her husband and son, and then solely with her son until he had to make his own brief life. Often, her family will ask why she does not leave. The house is unnecessarily big for her, with too many rooms she does not use.
“Sell the house!” they tell her.
“I cannot,” she always answers.
“Why?” they ask.
“So he can always find me,” Lucy says, always with a smile that suggests they should know this already. “It will be easier if he always knows where to find me, and here is easier than anywhere else. Here is comfortable. Here is our home. Here is where he will always find me.”
Her family has always been frustrated by this. Years upon years of frustration have kept them from completely understanding her desires. He has been dead and gone for years--gone away by his own hand, no less!--and while adherence to her wedding vows is honorable, her family has often been quick to remind her of their final clause. And if it is not him of which he speaks, then certainly the other--who has also been dead and gone for years, though from justifiably tragic means--would understand and encourage his mother to move on.
But that time has passed. She could have another husband, could have even had another child if she adopted, but she wanted neither. Now she is seventy-six and now, currently, she is speaking with her lawyer on the phone to ensure that some minor details of her affairs are in order.
“…and you will see to it that my baby sister gets my silver jewelry while my oldest niece gets to have all the gold pieces--and that’s including all of the white-gold pieces. I’ve marked them so that they are not confused with the silver. I did give you a key to the house, correct?”
“Yes, madam.”
“Good. And…” Lucy pauses, looking at her notes. “And you will see that all of my husband’s medical books--as well as all of my husband’s medical instruments--are delivered promptly to my nephew Alain. He lives in America, in New York, but I would like it very much if you would deliver them to him in person.”
“Of course, madam. I will make arrangements to fly out there as soon as I have handled your affairs here and contacted him.”
“Very good.”
“Is there anything else you wish me to take care of, apart from what has been discussed?”
She hesitates for a moment, her green eyes settling on a leather-wrapped parcel sitting ominously in the middle of her kitchen table. The parcel had been her husband’s, his inheritance, along with that damn bloody farm where he had grown up and later died hanging in the barn. Lucy has seen its contents, knows where it is supposed to go (where it should have gone years upon years ago), but doing so would have required contact with it again. And though her deeper understanding of the world and her husband’s family history allowed her to believe it all, the impressions given off by the collection of diaries and photographs is one of--
“Mrs. Amherst?”
“Yes.” Lucy brings herself out of reverie. “Yes, I-- Actually, I have one more parcel I would like you to deliver, which was also my husband’s, but which will go to a young man living in Seattle.”
“To whom shall I bring it, madam?”
“My great-grandson. Ean Amherst.”
Over the sound of Wagner, in a place far removed from England, an attendant addresses his easily irritated superior.
“Your Grace--!”
“Whatever message you have had better come quickly and succinctly; I am still in the midst of sorting out these numbers and if it can wait--”
“Your Grace, I have a message from Her Excellency. She says it’s very important.”
“Oh? The last time she said that, I was helping her court a rabbit out from behind a bookshelf.”
“Sh-she said you would say that, Your Grace, and told me to insist that it was very important.”
“Yes, you’ve told me. Twice. Now what is it that is so ‘very important’?”
“Her Excellency says that…that it’s time, Your Grace. She said you would know what she meant by that.”
Silence. The superior rises, immediately forgetting about the paperwork growing mountainous on his desk. He adjusts the glasses resting on his thin nose, tries to smoothen out his dress shirt… He will have to shower, dress; he will have to look appropriate. She would chide him if he doesn’t look appropriate.
“Tell Her Excellency that I will be leaving at once. And thank her for me.”
The Great Bell of London is announcing the eight o’clock hour to the city it calls home. Many people are heading home from their jobs, shifting power to those individuals who keep the city running while the day-workers sleep. In some homes, people are tucking their children into bed and telling them stories while others settle in to enjoy a quiet evening alone. The youth descend upon the pubs and clubs of the city, living as though they’ll never age, never die…
In her own home, Lucy goes about the evening as she would any other. A light supper at seven is followed by a little bit of quiet knitting by the radio; if she doesn’t finish this scarf for her grandniece, nobody else will--certainly not the girl’s mother, who can barely hold a knitting needle properly, much less produce a full scarf. Lucy hums along quietly to Norah Jones, conceding that girl’s cover of Loudermilk’s song is quite decent.
By eight-twenty, Lucy has finished putting the last touches on the scarf and spends some of her time writing letters to her closest relatives. She writes them all by hand on butter cream colored paper (though the work makes her fingers ache some), and is sure to make them personal for each person. To a cousin, Lucy wishes luck for his daughter’s dance career; to a brother, she passes on recipes for his restaurant. She assures those she writes that she is not afraid and that she loves them, and that she will see them when their time comes.
For her great-grandson, the letter Lucy writes is slightly different. She tells him what she can of the parcel and its contents. She tells him of his great-grandfather and of his skepticism towards the parcel’s contents--until, of course, it was too late--and presses him not to be the same way. She expresses regret that she could not have met him in this life.
“But fate reunites all Amhersts eventually,” Lucy murmurs, taking her own dictation, “and if tradition is upheld, it’s almost certain to happen this way…”
The letters are completed by the time the quarter bells announce the nightly arrival of nine-fifteen. Each is placed in a butter cream colored envelope and labeled for the recipient. Carefully, neatly, Lucy arranges them on the kitchen table. One is placed with the finished and folded scarf; another--the one for her great-grandson--is placed near the parcel as opposed to directly on it; a third is placed with the books and instruments meant for her nephew. The rest are left stacked one atop the other in two short stacks.
“‘Fare thee well,’” she says, remembering old poetry, “‘and if forever, still forever, fare thee well.’”
Before retiring to her bedroom upstairs, Lucy makes it a point to turn off every light on the bottom floor. Her eyes catch sight of the empty birdcages where parakeets once made their home and wonders if releasing them two days ago was right. She could have given them to her sister or to the neighbors’ son…
Westminster Quarters is floating through the London air again by the time Lucy exits the shower considerably more tired than before. It has been a long day full of work. Rest is the wanted reward.
She dresses as simply as she has always done for bed, choosing a newer peach-colored nightgown over some of the older ones. She avoids her slippers, preferring the feel of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet.
Before sleeping, Lucy repeats her activity of turning out all the lights, reserving the bedside lamp in the master bedroom for last. The clock by the lamp reads ten minutes to ten. She smiles a little, taking the clock--a wedding present from her brother Liam--into her hands.
“How time goes,” Lucy murmurs, running her fingertips over the clock’s face. “How quickly time goes…”
“Time goes, you say?”
Slightly startled, she turns her head to the new voice, smiling softly at the figure in the doorway. Tall, broad-shouldered; his hair is grayer than she remembers, his skin more lined, but through the eyes of a loving wife, the man in the doorway is as handsome as he was on the day they exchanged vows.
“I found you,” he says softly.
“I made it easy.” Lucy returns the clock to the bedside table, staring at it. “Will it hurt? Do you know if--if it will hurt at all?”
“No, my love. No.” He begins to cross to the bed. “It won’t--”
“Be a dear, Wyatt; close the door. I’ve closed every door but the last.”
“Why?”
She looks over at him. “I was waiting for you, of course. I was…waiting.”
Her husband nods, closes the door. He crosses the room and draws the shades over each window, singing softly under his breath as he often did during his yearly visits.
“It’s not the pale moon that excites me…
That thrills and delights me…oh no.
It’s just the nearness of you…
It isn’t your…sweet…conversation
That brings this sensation…oh no…”
Lucy smiles. “You always loved that song, didn’t you?”
“Always.” Wyatt smiles. “Always, though…I could never sing it right.”
He sits down on his side of bed. Lucy opens the drawer of her bedside table, retrieving a hairbrush. For a moment, they are a normal married couple. She brushes her hair; he removes his shoes, his socks, his watch… They talk of common things--he of work, she of her relatives. Wyatt laughs when Lucy tells him about the incident at the market last week--of how the neighbor’s pet pig caused havoc all through the fruit section.
“I had figured you would like that story,” Lucy says, smiling. “Given your childhood pets…”
Wyatt merely nods, the last few chuckles escaping as gets beneath the blankets. “The poor pig. He must have been so frightened to be at a market.”
“I suppose…”
Finally, with little hesitation, she turns off the light. The tiredness that came earlier feels doubled in the darkness. Indeed, it has been quite a long day. When she lies down, she feels a sense of relief that penetrates to her bones. How much toil it had been, holding upright for so long! Rest was important now, was natural now.
“Wyatt? Wyatt, love--”
“Here.” Her husband embraces her. The familiar scents of him--of peppermint and tea and even of old books--comfort her. “I’m always here.”
“Wyatt, don’t be sad. Don’t…” Lucy sighs. “Don’t cry. Sing to me. Sing to me that song…”
Despite himself, he chuckles again. “Lucy, I can’t sing.”
“I don’t care. Just sing to me. Sing the part you love.”
There is silence, and then…very, very softly…
“I need no soft…lights to enchant me,
If you’ll only grant me the right…
To hold you ever…so tight…
And to feel in the night
The nearness…of you.”
Lucy smiles, closes her eyes; in the city of London, though the tenth hour has come, the Great Bell remains curiously silent.