Two fics
One of these is spoilery and set in the next generation. One of these is not. And there seems to be an unintentional theme of bridges.
Not spoilery, but very long.
[The color of innocence]Catching Fireflies
The darkness surrounded her.
Oh, it wasn’t really, truly dark - she could see her bare feet sunk into the soft long grass beyond the bridge, the grass that they almost never bothered to mow, which would come up to her waist by the end of the summer - but it was dark enough. The yard looked different in the dark, not just washed of color and secretive, but with shapes she wasn’t certain she remembered. Of course, that could be the fact that she was standing in the middle of the clearing, watching for the yellow to green fade of the fireflies, with a plastic jar in one hand, squinting to make out the position of the tiny bugs in the dark. Whenever she sprinted after one, she found that she’d missed its position, closing her hands on air and watching as the black soft speck like a large grain of rice drifted away against the night, lighting its tail lazily behind it.
Some of them flew and some of them lived in the grass. Her big sister-in-law told her that they were looking for each other, which was why they had the lanterns. Her big brother told her that the chemicals in lightning bugs were very important, and were being used in all sorts of research. Her mom told her that they had been born from sparks that fell from the first shooting stars, and auntie Elu told her to wish on them - it couldn’t hurt.
She needed a big jar of them for all her wishes, but she only had a couple in her jar so far. For something that flew so lazily, they were certainly too fast for her. And she didn’t want to go charging off into the inky darkness beneath the pine trees, in case she stepped on the ones that flared in the grass, first the yellow light and then the green fade. The three that she had caught had felt soft and chalky against her palms, not at all hard and shiny like ladybugs or feathery and shaking, like moths.
There - near her beneath the pine trees, she saw the flare, and she jumped after it, her feet suddenly crunching against the needles as she held her hand up in the way of that fading speck. The bug blundered against her and she closed her fingers around it, feeling it stop and then start poking it’s feelers against her palm. It started searching purposefully for a way out, and she had to sit down and brace her jar between her knees so that she could get the lid off and pop the insect in. She shook it out of her fist and snapped the red lid back on as fast as she could, to keep the others, already crawling up the sides, from escaping.
Once she looked up, there was another, and then another, and one by one her hand was filled with the chalky softness and the heatless light, and the insects in her jar crawled over each other, flaring and fading, searching. Then, she sat down with one of the still-warm rocks of the clearing against her back and stared at her captured wishes.
She saw the back door open out of the corner of her eyes and pretended that she hadn’t.
“Ariadne!” called her big sister-in-law, Calla. She wasn’t going much further than the porch, though, because Ariadne was going to have a nephew in a couple of months, and Calla had started to find it hard to walk around all day at her job. They weren’t really serious about it being time to come in until they sent someone who could catch her.
After a minute of standing in the doorway, Calla turned and went back in, just like Ariadne had thought. Absently, Ariadne slapped away one of the first mosquitoes of the year, smearing her own blood across her knee, and stared deeper into the jar of fireflies.
If she had ten fireflies, she had ten wishes. Or perhaps she had ten chances at the same wish. She had the darkness and the summer night on her side, but not for much longer, because bedtime was so close after sunset when the days were longer. It was only because it was the weekend and school would be over soon that she’d been allowed to stay up late enough for it to get this dark. So she was going to use as much time as she possibly could to make certain that she had the right wish.
She knew what she wanted - she wanted the mysterious dark and the captured pieces of stars. She wanted it all to be true, to see all the intricate connections of the world in the flare and fade of fireflies, to taste the north wind on her tongue, and to live in the world that she knew existed beyond the routines of school and homework and bath time and bedtime, the world where the fireflies really were born of stars or of wandering souls. It was exciting there, in the world that her parents had once known and left behind, the world where magicians lived and knights and maidens went adventuring, and where the white cities on the spines of mountains rose out of the clouds for no reason other than that they could. She couldn’t understand why they’d left, because it seemed like a world worth keeping, a place where it was easy to set things right, so different from here.
They always treated her like a little kid, but she knew how hard it could be to set things right here - there were bad laws that her oldest sister was fighting, laws that wouldn’t let her not-really-brother get married, laws which weren’t fair - and she knew that on the days when her daddy came home and didn’t talk, he’d tried to help someone and failed. She could wish for her daddy to be the best surgeon in the world and her sister to win all her arguments, her mom and Calla to not be sad anymore when they believed in one of their students more than their own parents did, and she could wish for everyone to be able to fix all their problems - but she didn’t know if things would stay fixed. They thought she didn’t know that things were wrong, but she could hear all the same. Sometimes they forgot, because her sisters and her brother were so much older than her, that there was a kid in the house at all.
In a few months she’d be an aunt and responsible for a little baby. Soon enough after that, she’d be an aunt to a lot of babies, because her oldest sister was going to have her twins soon after Calla had her first nephew. Ariadne already knew the babies’ names, and she was practicing saying them in her head. Saelen would be the oldest, the twins would be Lysander and Tanith. She wouldn’t be the only kid any more - but she’d be in charge of things, once she was an aunt, and that much closer to being an adult.
She only had ten wishes and she didn’t know who to spend them on. It was going to be a hard choice, because wishing for everything to be fixed and everything to be all right seemed like an unreasonably big job for the little bugs in her jar, even if lost souls did hitch a ride on them from time to time. She wanted life to be exciting and new, but she also wanted to fix everything that was wrong, that made her family sad in ways they thought she couldn’t see.
The screen door swung open and shut and she heard footsteps on the stone path, then the wooden bridge (hollow underneath, her daddy had gone down there with a flashlight himself to show her that there was no troll and never could be,) and finally the soft crunch of the pine needles on the way to the clearing. Her daddy had come to fetch her.
“Time to go inside, Ariadne,” he said from above.
“I’m wishing,” she explained, knowing that he’d understand. She had to get it just right.
Her daddy looked at the jar full of fireflies and the frown on her face.
“What are you wishing for?”
“Can’t tell you,” she replied, because didn’t he know that you couldn’t ever tell a wish to another living soul or it would never come true?
Her daddy knelt down in the dirt beside her. “I bet it’s for Rocky Road ice cream.”
“It is not!” she protested, indignantly. “It’s very important.”
Since her daddy simply sat there in silence and let her re-gather her thoughts, it seemed like he agreed. The crickets and the little frogs in the creek started chirping as Ariadne screwed up her face in thought.
“Ready, princess?” her daddy asked, and she nodded. She was - that is, she knew what to wish for. After a second’s hesitation, she unscrewed the lid.
The fireflies, which had been so eager to escape before, had a hard time finding their way up and out of the jar. Finally, the first one crawled up onto the lip of the jar, waved it’s antennas, and then launched up, a blur of wings, signaling yellow and green once it had risen high enough. Then the next rose from the jar, and after that a third, until all ten fireflies had risen into the night and disappeared.
Ariadne and her empty bug jar rode piggyback across the bridge to wash up for bed, but the fireflies and wishes kept on rising until they were swallowed up by the night.
This is semi-spoilery, but very not specific.[The color of mourning]Preparing for a funeral
Tanith usually didn’t care if she wore black. She liked black jeans and skull t-shirts and highlighter colors - anything that was distracting, anything that stuck out from the herd. Today, standing in the mirror next to her mother, who was fussing over her black dress and Lysander’s black jacket, she thought it was the bleakest color that ever existed.
They hadn’t even reached the funeral parlor yet, the casket that would be empty, unlike the deep bottom of the river, the things they couldn’t find and could never find and wouldn’t be real. The long file of cousins wearing black. The crossing over that bridge, was it the same bridge, the long row of grey headstones, they all couldn’t be real. Of course they weren’t.
Tanith hated the color black.
Not spoilery, but very long.
[The color of innocence]Catching Fireflies
The darkness surrounded her.
Oh, it wasn’t really, truly dark - she could see her bare feet sunk into the soft long grass beyond the bridge, the grass that they almost never bothered to mow, which would come up to her waist by the end of the summer - but it was dark enough. The yard looked different in the dark, not just washed of color and secretive, but with shapes she wasn’t certain she remembered. Of course, that could be the fact that she was standing in the middle of the clearing, watching for the yellow to green fade of the fireflies, with a plastic jar in one hand, squinting to make out the position of the tiny bugs in the dark. Whenever she sprinted after one, she found that she’d missed its position, closing her hands on air and watching as the black soft speck like a large grain of rice drifted away against the night, lighting its tail lazily behind it.
Some of them flew and some of them lived in the grass. Her big sister-in-law told her that they were looking for each other, which was why they had the lanterns. Her big brother told her that the chemicals in lightning bugs were very important, and were being used in all sorts of research. Her mom told her that they had been born from sparks that fell from the first shooting stars, and auntie Elu told her to wish on them - it couldn’t hurt.
She needed a big jar of them for all her wishes, but she only had a couple in her jar so far. For something that flew so lazily, they were certainly too fast for her. And she didn’t want to go charging off into the inky darkness beneath the pine trees, in case she stepped on the ones that flared in the grass, first the yellow light and then the green fade. The three that she had caught had felt soft and chalky against her palms, not at all hard and shiny like ladybugs or feathery and shaking, like moths.
There - near her beneath the pine trees, she saw the flare, and she jumped after it, her feet suddenly crunching against the needles as she held her hand up in the way of that fading speck. The bug blundered against her and she closed her fingers around it, feeling it stop and then start poking it’s feelers against her palm. It started searching purposefully for a way out, and she had to sit down and brace her jar between her knees so that she could get the lid off and pop the insect in. She shook it out of her fist and snapped the red lid back on as fast as she could, to keep the others, already crawling up the sides, from escaping.
Once she looked up, there was another, and then another, and one by one her hand was filled with the chalky softness and the heatless light, and the insects in her jar crawled over each other, flaring and fading, searching. Then, she sat down with one of the still-warm rocks of the clearing against her back and stared at her captured wishes.
She saw the back door open out of the corner of her eyes and pretended that she hadn’t.
“Ariadne!” called her big sister-in-law, Calla. She wasn’t going much further than the porch, though, because Ariadne was going to have a nephew in a couple of months, and Calla had started to find it hard to walk around all day at her job. They weren’t really serious about it being time to come in until they sent someone who could catch her.
After a minute of standing in the doorway, Calla turned and went back in, just like Ariadne had thought. Absently, Ariadne slapped away one of the first mosquitoes of the year, smearing her own blood across her knee, and stared deeper into the jar of fireflies.
If she had ten fireflies, she had ten wishes. Or perhaps she had ten chances at the same wish. She had the darkness and the summer night on her side, but not for much longer, because bedtime was so close after sunset when the days were longer. It was only because it was the weekend and school would be over soon that she’d been allowed to stay up late enough for it to get this dark. So she was going to use as much time as she possibly could to make certain that she had the right wish.
She knew what she wanted - she wanted the mysterious dark and the captured pieces of stars. She wanted it all to be true, to see all the intricate connections of the world in the flare and fade of fireflies, to taste the north wind on her tongue, and to live in the world that she knew existed beyond the routines of school and homework and bath time and bedtime, the world where the fireflies really were born of stars or of wandering souls. It was exciting there, in the world that her parents had once known and left behind, the world where magicians lived and knights and maidens went adventuring, and where the white cities on the spines of mountains rose out of the clouds for no reason other than that they could. She couldn’t understand why they’d left, because it seemed like a world worth keeping, a place where it was easy to set things right, so different from here.
They always treated her like a little kid, but she knew how hard it could be to set things right here - there were bad laws that her oldest sister was fighting, laws that wouldn’t let her not-really-brother get married, laws which weren’t fair - and she knew that on the days when her daddy came home and didn’t talk, he’d tried to help someone and failed. She could wish for her daddy to be the best surgeon in the world and her sister to win all her arguments, her mom and Calla to not be sad anymore when they believed in one of their students more than their own parents did, and she could wish for everyone to be able to fix all their problems - but she didn’t know if things would stay fixed. They thought she didn’t know that things were wrong, but she could hear all the same. Sometimes they forgot, because her sisters and her brother were so much older than her, that there was a kid in the house at all.
In a few months she’d be an aunt and responsible for a little baby. Soon enough after that, she’d be an aunt to a lot of babies, because her oldest sister was going to have her twins soon after Calla had her first nephew. Ariadne already knew the babies’ names, and she was practicing saying them in her head. Saelen would be the oldest, the twins would be Lysander and Tanith. She wouldn’t be the only kid any more - but she’d be in charge of things, once she was an aunt, and that much closer to being an adult.
She only had ten wishes and she didn’t know who to spend them on. It was going to be a hard choice, because wishing for everything to be fixed and everything to be all right seemed like an unreasonably big job for the little bugs in her jar, even if lost souls did hitch a ride on them from time to time. She wanted life to be exciting and new, but she also wanted to fix everything that was wrong, that made her family sad in ways they thought she couldn’t see.
The screen door swung open and shut and she heard footsteps on the stone path, then the wooden bridge (hollow underneath, her daddy had gone down there with a flashlight himself to show her that there was no troll and never could be,) and finally the soft crunch of the pine needles on the way to the clearing. Her daddy had come to fetch her.
“Time to go inside, Ariadne,” he said from above.
“I’m wishing,” she explained, knowing that he’d understand. She had to get it just right.
Her daddy looked at the jar full of fireflies and the frown on her face.
“What are you wishing for?”
“Can’t tell you,” she replied, because didn’t he know that you couldn’t ever tell a wish to another living soul or it would never come true?
Her daddy knelt down in the dirt beside her. “I bet it’s for Rocky Road ice cream.”
“It is not!” she protested, indignantly. “It’s very important.”
Since her daddy simply sat there in silence and let her re-gather her thoughts, it seemed like he agreed. The crickets and the little frogs in the creek started chirping as Ariadne screwed up her face in thought.
“Ready, princess?” her daddy asked, and she nodded. She was - that is, she knew what to wish for. After a second’s hesitation, she unscrewed the lid.
The fireflies, which had been so eager to escape before, had a hard time finding their way up and out of the jar. Finally, the first one crawled up onto the lip of the jar, waved it’s antennas, and then launched up, a blur of wings, signaling yellow and green once it had risen high enough. Then the next rose from the jar, and after that a third, until all ten fireflies had risen into the night and disappeared.
Ariadne and her empty bug jar rode piggyback across the bridge to wash up for bed, but the fireflies and wishes kept on rising until they were swallowed up by the night.
This is semi-spoilery, but very not specific.[The color of mourning]Preparing for a funeral
Tanith usually didn’t care if she wore black. She liked black jeans and skull t-shirts and highlighter colors - anything that was distracting, anything that stuck out from the herd. Today, standing in the mirror next to her mother, who was fussing over her black dress and Lysander’s black jacket, she thought it was the bleakest color that ever existed.
They hadn’t even reached the funeral parlor yet, the casket that would be empty, unlike the deep bottom of the river, the things they couldn’t find and could never find and wouldn’t be real. The long file of cousins wearing black. The crossing over that bridge, was it the same bridge, the long row of grey headstones, they all couldn’t be real. Of course they weren’t.
Tanith hated the color black.