PtT - "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Title:"Nothing Gold Can Stay"
Author: -M
Psalms-verse, after 23 but before 24
Rating: G
Notes: It's cute enough as a standalone, and can be read as one, but it is technically a piece of PtT, fitting in somewhere between 23 and 24. You'll get it by the last line, and if you don't then boogie along to the A/N, and I'll explain.
Warnings: Kleenex, especially if you start Secret Garden's "In Our Tears" at the beginning of the third full paragraph from the end. (bug me via e-mail for an mp3 si quieres; it's beautiful. this lj-name @ livejournal dotcom.)
-The title's shamelessly snatched from Robert Frost-
My mother…
is the most beautiful woman I have ever known. My father called her his wind-spirit
…she wasn't that, though.
She was Irish.
She was beautiful. I have her green eyes. All the rest of me is my father, but my eyes are hers.
She had this beautiful blue dress, almost turquoise. She wore it because my father thought the color was ridiculous, but mostly because I loved to watch it rush along after her. I would chase it, when I was very young. We would run across the grounds, laughing, and she would go slowly for me because her legs were so much longer than mine. I would reach out as far as I could, and I would catch her skirt, just by brushing it with my fingertips and closing my hands into small empty fists. She would feel it, though, and fall down onto the grass and wrap me up in her arms. She'd kiss my forehead and my cheeks, and then she would press her cheek to the top of my head and say, 'I've caught you now, Jamie, and I'll never be lettin' you go.'
Her voice sounded like music, like flutes and violins, like I imagined the wind in the grass on the hills of Ireland must sound.
She would sing to me, too. Haunting songs, and beautiful ones, and ones that sounded like the sun was rising right in the very tune. We would go down to the shore line with our feet bare and walk along the foamy tongues of the waves, and she would sing. She would have to pick up her dress so the sand wouldn't stain it. I would find seashells and give them to her, but only the prettiest ones.
When I was seven - but only so by three days from my eighth birthday, so I suppose one could say I was eight - I changed everything.
We were running through the garden, and I wasn't quite yet used to my longer legs, and she wasn't keeping ahead so much as she usually did. Her foot must have struck something and she stumbled, and before I could stop behind her my toe caught the hem of her dress and the lace pulled. It was a big, gaping loop now. The lace hung limp and scraggy like the teeth of a decrepit old shark. I watched it carefully as we left the garden, waiting for it to fly up and devour me, or at least to snarl. To tear the silence like I tore it. We went into the house right away, to her room where she kept a small sewing-kit, and I held the back of her hem up to her so she could sew the lace back on. We didn't want Da to see what had happened.
When she pricked my finger I started to cry, because it was all too much together - seeing her fall, tearing the lace, trying not to whimper when she sat in such perfect silence, fearing the monster in the skirt hem, and now bitten by a needle.
She pulled me up onto her lap and held me tight, and whispered that we wouldn't play chase any more. When I asked her why, she said I was getting too old for those games, and I could probably out-run her now anyway, if I tried. I told her I wouldn't try; I even promised not to, but she said no, this was the last of our running games. I bit my lip and nodded, and she smoothed my hair until I had quieted again. After we finished sewing her skirt, she told me that she was sick. She said it was just a cough, but one that would get worse, not better. She didn't want me to let Da know that she had told me, though, because he hadn't wanted me to know of it. I remember taking my arms from around her neck, dropping my legs over the side of her lap, and asking her quite clearly how much longer she had to live. She laughed at me, even though her eyes had hurt in them, and said she didn't know. To that I nodded with the solemnity that only a child who is being asked to become an adult too quickly can have.
She frowned, and I saw little tears in the corners of her eyes, and she pulled my face in between the palms of her hands and kissed my forehead.
So then we would walk on the sand always, and no more would we tumble through the gardens like friend and companion, brother and sister, staining our feet green and both dodging Da's scowls together. Her Irish blood had been tempered by English weather and English sickness, I think (though people tell me that her white plague is known across all the oceans), and we were mother and son, now, just so. We would walk the same path we had when my feet were smaller, because there are only two ways to walk along the tide, and one single path. Sometimes she would sing, but sometimes the sea-salt scraped her voice up (this is what she said to me. I knew it was the sickness, but I did not tell her) and she would just tell me stories instead. I loved her stories; they were full of color and magic and poetry. Every word was music, and each name was a song. Sometimes I wouldn't even attend to the story, and I'd just let the words fall over my ears instead, mingled with the ocean whispers and the soft sounds of my mother's skirt and both of our feet. We walked almost every day; some days, though, not many, a few, she couldn't go because she would have a bit of a cold. We both knew it was the sickness beginning to prey on her, not a cold at all, but neither of us said so. On those days we would sit in the house and I would play piano in the parlor for her, stumbling over the keys until I found amongst their mysterious ivory and ebony boxes the notes that were on the paper. She would hum a different tune over my fumblings, one that didn't quite match but sounded beautiful all the same, free and exotic and something magical.
I think she had some magic in her, my mother, though it wasn't enough to keep her with us, because she found the greatest beauty in the strangest things.
In my youngest days I, like every other child, was horribly afraid of thunderstorms. But my youngest days only, because as soon as I was old enough to waddle from my nursery to my mother's bedroom she showed me how wonderful that fear was. She would rise out of bed, an angel in her frothy nightgown, and beckon me over. Her hair would be down - she always slept with it down, though the maids would complain about it in the mornings when they had to brush it - and it would look like a mane of fire around her mystical, beautiful face. Her lips looked reddest those nights, her eyes greenest and her skin palest, but with a life-loving glow. She would pick me up, when I was very small, and kiss me, then she would sit me on her hip and walk to the window. She would put her hand on one side of the drapes and tell me to take the other, and then she'd say, 'Pull, Jamie!' It would take me a few pulls, but once we'd gotten it she would open the latches and fling the windows open, laughing. The first night we did this I burrowed my face between her breasts, because the rain stung my little eyes and I was afraid of it. I thought it held the lightning. But she lifted her hand to my face, stroked my cheek, and laughed again, making my head bounce up and down beneath her chin. She lifted my head, firmly but gently, in that way a mother has, and turned my face out to the rain. She wiped my eyes when the rain overflowed them. When the thunder shook us, I began to cry. That was when she wiped my eyes again with her thumb and told me never to cry in a thunderstorm, because it wasn't any use. I saw her smile, so I laughed, and I didn't stop laughing until the rain was over and I was settled back in bed. That whole night we danced, and every stormy night after, out on the terrace past her bedroom window, her spinning in circles and whirling me with her, just spinning, the two of us, and looking up into the breaking sky and laughing.
The only time I've laughed more with her was our last walk in the sand at the side of the water. This time a little scuttling crab had decided to follow us. We were walking slowly, then, so the crab could keep up. He was actually ahead of me. Every so often he would fall behind, so I would toe him ahead a few inches. He'd scrabble for a bit of a second, but then he'd catch right up. The trouble was one time when I nudged him a little too far ahead… he clipped at my mother's heel. She squealed and dashed ahead, and I ran after her. I saw her green eyes slant back toward me, just before she dug her heel into the sand and took off on her toes, springing like a deer. She was laughing, so I laughed, and I ran as fast as I could. The sea rushed past me in a watery smooth blur on one side, gone now of any waves or disturbances. A gull was up ahead of us in the sky, but I think we passed it, and laughed at it when we did. We were probably close to a mile away from where we first started walking when I overtook her, tagging her skirt with my fingertips as I passed. She threw her arms around me and we both tumbled into the sand, half of it wet and half of it dry. We sat up and shook the sand out of us. Then she pulled her knees up under her skirt, but I kept my legs straight out in front of me, watching my toes wiggle.
She told me of the Selkies, then; mythical seal-women, beautiful and wed to the sea. I do not think I would believe the same story were it told me now, after all I've seen and all I've been through, in just five years since, but it was just the yarn to spin for a boy of ten whose mother called him a changeling. I thought they, Selkies, were much like her, except that she was in name wed to my father, and the sea's lover only in my imagination. When she finished her tale I sank against her between her arm and her side and said I wished she really were a Selkie. She asked me why and I said I didn't think Selkies would get sick. 'How do you know?' she said to me, standing up with her skirt like a waterfall. 'Could be that I am, and they do. Watch.' She lifted her skirts - her ankles were tiny, pale and thin - and began to wade into the water. At knee-height, she stood still and let go of her skirts, and they floated on top of the water like a cloud, or better still, something of one of her tales. I imagined, in that moment, that my mother was really a Selkie, and that she was returning to the water for a short moon's stay, to come back to us hale and whole after. Then she began to cough, and I rushed out into the shallows to get her and bring her back. I gave her my handkerchief, and we waited beside the water, sitting on the sand, huddled into one another with me rubbing her back, until her fit was done. We agreed not to tell Da. When she gave me back my handkerchief, it was dotted with little specks of red. I did not tell her of it, but on the way to the house I said I would rather we stay indoors, or close to the house, from then on.
She died about a year later, when I was eleven. I knew she was dying, so I told her I was going to enlist in the Royal Navy when she was gone. She asked me to stay as long as Da would be alone without me. I said I would. The next day was her last. She died in the afternoon. That night, just before and through sundown, there was a thunderstorm. The only things I can remember of that day are from the time since that storm started. When my father left the room to make final arrangements with the physician, I went out the window to the terrace where we danced, and did not look back in at her. I knew how she would look, and I knew how I wanted to remember her. My only consolation was the peaceful mask on her face. I looked beside me at where she stood when so long ago she first took me out in the rain. It was emptier than if it had never been filled. The freshwater rain began to sting my eyes. I covered them with my hands and let my chest heave as I turned slowly in place, a circle beseeching the heavens and earth, an eleven-year-old boy's question why. I climbed over the terrace wall and dropped down into the flowerbed. Mother would have scolded me for crushing the flowers. But they smelled dead.
I took my hands from my eyes and walked out across the grass and the gardens, a straight unaltered path, as though I were an animated golem. Such is how I felt, or didn't feel. I looked up at the broken sky, and I felt a hot tear slip down my cheek, to the point of my chin. Never cry in a thunderstorm, Jamie; it isn't any use. I opened my mouth and sobbed. I remember feeling shattered. Split in two, two ways. Down the middle and across my waist. And my heart had been bored through at the intersection. I wailed into the roll of thunder and the tears coursed freely down both sides of my face. I dropped my hands to my sides and stood stock still, just crying. It was all I could do; I could do no more. The rain pelted me steadily. It beat down on my shoulders and bit into the bare back of my neck. It collected on my eyebrows, then trickled warm down my eyelids and spilled off my lashes. The warmest rivulets were the ones down the sides of my face, from my hair, just above my ears, to my chin. The wind ceased to be able to billow my clothes; they were too waterlogged. I didn't move for the longest time, then I turned around and walked to the great door. My steps were slow and all of me was slack and immobile. Inside the entry hall, I leaned back against the shut door and just…breathed. None of the servants came by; Da was still busy; that was good. I went to my room and put on dry clothes.
I stayed at home for three years while Da recovered and found a new wife. She was pretty, in a conventional, acceptable way, and she was a conventional, acceptable person. I hated her, but in my years with only my father I had learned the importance of obligation, commonality, and society. So I was polite and kissed her hand when I told my father I would be leaving with the next ship to take me. He was livid, of course - I am the only child. But…you asked about my mother. So there it is.
Is this all right for the sparrow's tail?
My Two Cents: Oh for the love of backstories… In the tradition of the Jack-erlude, I give you… the James-erlude, being James' response to Jack's asking him about his mother. James agrees to speak if he can also find a way to be sure Jack won't fall asleep… so they settle on the sparrow tattoo. And James answers.
Ta,
-M
Author: -M
Psalms-verse, after 23 but before 24
Rating: G
Notes: It's cute enough as a standalone, and can be read as one, but it is technically a piece of PtT, fitting in somewhere between 23 and 24. You'll get it by the last line, and if you don't then boogie along to the A/N, and I'll explain.
Warnings: Kleenex, especially if you start Secret Garden's "In Our Tears" at the beginning of the third full paragraph from the end. (bug me via e-mail for an mp3 si quieres; it's beautiful. this lj-name @ livejournal dotcom.)
-The title's shamelessly snatched from Robert Frost-
My mother…
is the most beautiful woman I have ever known. My father called her his wind-spirit
…she wasn't that, though.
She was Irish.
She was beautiful. I have her green eyes. All the rest of me is my father, but my eyes are hers.
She had this beautiful blue dress, almost turquoise. She wore it because my father thought the color was ridiculous, but mostly because I loved to watch it rush along after her. I would chase it, when I was very young. We would run across the grounds, laughing, and she would go slowly for me because her legs were so much longer than mine. I would reach out as far as I could, and I would catch her skirt, just by brushing it with my fingertips and closing my hands into small empty fists. She would feel it, though, and fall down onto the grass and wrap me up in her arms. She'd kiss my forehead and my cheeks, and then she would press her cheek to the top of my head and say, 'I've caught you now, Jamie, and I'll never be lettin' you go.'
Her voice sounded like music, like flutes and violins, like I imagined the wind in the grass on the hills of Ireland must sound.
She would sing to me, too. Haunting songs, and beautiful ones, and ones that sounded like the sun was rising right in the very tune. We would go down to the shore line with our feet bare and walk along the foamy tongues of the waves, and she would sing. She would have to pick up her dress so the sand wouldn't stain it. I would find seashells and give them to her, but only the prettiest ones.
When I was seven - but only so by three days from my eighth birthday, so I suppose one could say I was eight - I changed everything.
We were running through the garden, and I wasn't quite yet used to my longer legs, and she wasn't keeping ahead so much as she usually did. Her foot must have struck something and she stumbled, and before I could stop behind her my toe caught the hem of her dress and the lace pulled. It was a big, gaping loop now. The lace hung limp and scraggy like the teeth of a decrepit old shark. I watched it carefully as we left the garden, waiting for it to fly up and devour me, or at least to snarl. To tear the silence like I tore it. We went into the house right away, to her room where she kept a small sewing-kit, and I held the back of her hem up to her so she could sew the lace back on. We didn't want Da to see what had happened.
When she pricked my finger I started to cry, because it was all too much together - seeing her fall, tearing the lace, trying not to whimper when she sat in such perfect silence, fearing the monster in the skirt hem, and now bitten by a needle.
She pulled me up onto her lap and held me tight, and whispered that we wouldn't play chase any more. When I asked her why, she said I was getting too old for those games, and I could probably out-run her now anyway, if I tried. I told her I wouldn't try; I even promised not to, but she said no, this was the last of our running games. I bit my lip and nodded, and she smoothed my hair until I had quieted again. After we finished sewing her skirt, she told me that she was sick. She said it was just a cough, but one that would get worse, not better. She didn't want me to let Da know that she had told me, though, because he hadn't wanted me to know of it. I remember taking my arms from around her neck, dropping my legs over the side of her lap, and asking her quite clearly how much longer she had to live. She laughed at me, even though her eyes had hurt in them, and said she didn't know. To that I nodded with the solemnity that only a child who is being asked to become an adult too quickly can have.
She frowned, and I saw little tears in the corners of her eyes, and she pulled my face in between the palms of her hands and kissed my forehead.
So then we would walk on the sand always, and no more would we tumble through the gardens like friend and companion, brother and sister, staining our feet green and both dodging Da's scowls together. Her Irish blood had been tempered by English weather and English sickness, I think (though people tell me that her white plague is known across all the oceans), and we were mother and son, now, just so. We would walk the same path we had when my feet were smaller, because there are only two ways to walk along the tide, and one single path. Sometimes she would sing, but sometimes the sea-salt scraped her voice up (this is what she said to me. I knew it was the sickness, but I did not tell her) and she would just tell me stories instead. I loved her stories; they were full of color and magic and poetry. Every word was music, and each name was a song. Sometimes I wouldn't even attend to the story, and I'd just let the words fall over my ears instead, mingled with the ocean whispers and the soft sounds of my mother's skirt and both of our feet. We walked almost every day; some days, though, not many, a few, she couldn't go because she would have a bit of a cold. We both knew it was the sickness beginning to prey on her, not a cold at all, but neither of us said so. On those days we would sit in the house and I would play piano in the parlor for her, stumbling over the keys until I found amongst their mysterious ivory and ebony boxes the notes that were on the paper. She would hum a different tune over my fumblings, one that didn't quite match but sounded beautiful all the same, free and exotic and something magical.
I think she had some magic in her, my mother, though it wasn't enough to keep her with us, because she found the greatest beauty in the strangest things.
In my youngest days I, like every other child, was horribly afraid of thunderstorms. But my youngest days only, because as soon as I was old enough to waddle from my nursery to my mother's bedroom she showed me how wonderful that fear was. She would rise out of bed, an angel in her frothy nightgown, and beckon me over. Her hair would be down - she always slept with it down, though the maids would complain about it in the mornings when they had to brush it - and it would look like a mane of fire around her mystical, beautiful face. Her lips looked reddest those nights, her eyes greenest and her skin palest, but with a life-loving glow. She would pick me up, when I was very small, and kiss me, then she would sit me on her hip and walk to the window. She would put her hand on one side of the drapes and tell me to take the other, and then she'd say, 'Pull, Jamie!' It would take me a few pulls, but once we'd gotten it she would open the latches and fling the windows open, laughing. The first night we did this I burrowed my face between her breasts, because the rain stung my little eyes and I was afraid of it. I thought it held the lightning. But she lifted her hand to my face, stroked my cheek, and laughed again, making my head bounce up and down beneath her chin. She lifted my head, firmly but gently, in that way a mother has, and turned my face out to the rain. She wiped my eyes when the rain overflowed them. When the thunder shook us, I began to cry. That was when she wiped my eyes again with her thumb and told me never to cry in a thunderstorm, because it wasn't any use. I saw her smile, so I laughed, and I didn't stop laughing until the rain was over and I was settled back in bed. That whole night we danced, and every stormy night after, out on the terrace past her bedroom window, her spinning in circles and whirling me with her, just spinning, the two of us, and looking up into the breaking sky and laughing.
The only time I've laughed more with her was our last walk in the sand at the side of the water. This time a little scuttling crab had decided to follow us. We were walking slowly, then, so the crab could keep up. He was actually ahead of me. Every so often he would fall behind, so I would toe him ahead a few inches. He'd scrabble for a bit of a second, but then he'd catch right up. The trouble was one time when I nudged him a little too far ahead… he clipped at my mother's heel. She squealed and dashed ahead, and I ran after her. I saw her green eyes slant back toward me, just before she dug her heel into the sand and took off on her toes, springing like a deer. She was laughing, so I laughed, and I ran as fast as I could. The sea rushed past me in a watery smooth blur on one side, gone now of any waves or disturbances. A gull was up ahead of us in the sky, but I think we passed it, and laughed at it when we did. We were probably close to a mile away from where we first started walking when I overtook her, tagging her skirt with my fingertips as I passed. She threw her arms around me and we both tumbled into the sand, half of it wet and half of it dry. We sat up and shook the sand out of us. Then she pulled her knees up under her skirt, but I kept my legs straight out in front of me, watching my toes wiggle.
She told me of the Selkies, then; mythical seal-women, beautiful and wed to the sea. I do not think I would believe the same story were it told me now, after all I've seen and all I've been through, in just five years since, but it was just the yarn to spin for a boy of ten whose mother called him a changeling. I thought they, Selkies, were much like her, except that she was in name wed to my father, and the sea's lover only in my imagination. When she finished her tale I sank against her between her arm and her side and said I wished she really were a Selkie. She asked me why and I said I didn't think Selkies would get sick. 'How do you know?' she said to me, standing up with her skirt like a waterfall. 'Could be that I am, and they do. Watch.' She lifted her skirts - her ankles were tiny, pale and thin - and began to wade into the water. At knee-height, she stood still and let go of her skirts, and they floated on top of the water like a cloud, or better still, something of one of her tales. I imagined, in that moment, that my mother was really a Selkie, and that she was returning to the water for a short moon's stay, to come back to us hale and whole after. Then she began to cough, and I rushed out into the shallows to get her and bring her back. I gave her my handkerchief, and we waited beside the water, sitting on the sand, huddled into one another with me rubbing her back, until her fit was done. We agreed not to tell Da. When she gave me back my handkerchief, it was dotted with little specks of red. I did not tell her of it, but on the way to the house I said I would rather we stay indoors, or close to the house, from then on.
She died about a year later, when I was eleven. I knew she was dying, so I told her I was going to enlist in the Royal Navy when she was gone. She asked me to stay as long as Da would be alone without me. I said I would. The next day was her last. She died in the afternoon. That night, just before and through sundown, there was a thunderstorm. The only things I can remember of that day are from the time since that storm started. When my father left the room to make final arrangements with the physician, I went out the window to the terrace where we danced, and did not look back in at her. I knew how she would look, and I knew how I wanted to remember her. My only consolation was the peaceful mask on her face. I looked beside me at where she stood when so long ago she first took me out in the rain. It was emptier than if it had never been filled. The freshwater rain began to sting my eyes. I covered them with my hands and let my chest heave as I turned slowly in place, a circle beseeching the heavens and earth, an eleven-year-old boy's question why. I climbed over the terrace wall and dropped down into the flowerbed. Mother would have scolded me for crushing the flowers. But they smelled dead.
I took my hands from my eyes and walked out across the grass and the gardens, a straight unaltered path, as though I were an animated golem. Such is how I felt, or didn't feel. I looked up at the broken sky, and I felt a hot tear slip down my cheek, to the point of my chin. Never cry in a thunderstorm, Jamie; it isn't any use. I opened my mouth and sobbed. I remember feeling shattered. Split in two, two ways. Down the middle and across my waist. And my heart had been bored through at the intersection. I wailed into the roll of thunder and the tears coursed freely down both sides of my face. I dropped my hands to my sides and stood stock still, just crying. It was all I could do; I could do no more. The rain pelted me steadily. It beat down on my shoulders and bit into the bare back of my neck. It collected on my eyebrows, then trickled warm down my eyelids and spilled off my lashes. The warmest rivulets were the ones down the sides of my face, from my hair, just above my ears, to my chin. The wind ceased to be able to billow my clothes; they were too waterlogged. I didn't move for the longest time, then I turned around and walked to the great door. My steps were slow and all of me was slack and immobile. Inside the entry hall, I leaned back against the shut door and just…breathed. None of the servants came by; Da was still busy; that was good. I went to my room and put on dry clothes.
I stayed at home for three years while Da recovered and found a new wife. She was pretty, in a conventional, acceptable way, and she was a conventional, acceptable person. I hated her, but in my years with only my father I had learned the importance of obligation, commonality, and society. So I was polite and kissed her hand when I told my father I would be leaving with the next ship to take me. He was livid, of course - I am the only child. But…you asked about my mother. So there it is.
Is this all right for the sparrow's tail?
My Two Cents: Oh for the love of backstories… In the tradition of the Jack-erlude, I give you… the James-erlude, being James' response to Jack's asking him about his mother. James agrees to speak if he can also find a way to be sure Jack won't fall asleep… so they settle on the sparrow tattoo. And James answers.
Ta,
-M