ficrepost: "Little Petals, Tangled Stems" Daisy/Demi
Title: "Little Petals, Tangled Stems"
Fandom: Little Women universe
Pairing: Daisy/Demi
Warnings: Twincest.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/Timeline: Theoretically compliant through the end of Jo's Boys (She said all the marriages ended happily, not that all her OTPs got married!)
Disclaimer: On that note, Alcott's OTPs are not mine. Nor is her universe.
Notes: For jamie_dakin, my official Yuletide 2007 recipient. Originally posted here.
Summary: Though they've wandered far from home, Daisy and Demi Brooke are still two buds on one vine.
Wordcount: 2157
Little Petals, Tangled Stems
The marketplace teems with slick creatures, oiling over Demi's cheerful manners: easy words, deceits, tasks half done, and the sweet slide of drink as it warms men's hearts, loosens their tongues, loosens one man's bow tie and another one's belt and every man's ties to home, and Demi is homesick. He feels like Emil trapped on land, phantom salt abusing his nose and chapping his lips and the siren croon of wild waves against a thin hull penetrating even the darkest, dustiest schoolroom. He is sick for home and peace, for sweet and honest labor, for hearty cooking, for Daisy's soft and cooing laugh.
The weeds of homelife doldrums begin at Daisy's feet, which walk the same path every morning, from bed to water basin, where she washes away the sins of the night, idleness and tears, to barn, to kitchen, back and forth and bustle. There's a childlike stubbiness in her legs, still, and she is always trotting, always a little late, the day's goals receding as she becomes trapped by a dusty shelf that must be wiped at once or patchwork that needs attention before lunch can be seen to. Every task, so pleasant to begin, becomes tiresome and dull like needles that have pricked and pricked through thick cotton, cool linen, and the heavy wool of winter till they are pointless and thrown away, like salt that has lost its saltiness, or a housewife with no husband.
The first number they knew was two, the first word, twin, the first idea that found itself in their matching curly heads was other -- you. Demi sobbed when Daisy skinned her knee, and when his mother coddled Daisy, scolded him for making a fuss, he said, "But Mummy, I hurting."
"Silly," Mother Meg teased, but Demi couldn't understand, even when his trousers were rolled up, his knee shown unblemished.
He stared at the scrape on Daisy's knee, neatly bound in gauze, touched it and kissed it gently, but still puzzled over his lack. "But where is mine?"
They were born two, but they needed to learn that they were different.
They learned in a looking glass that Demi's eyes were brown and Daisy's blue, though both had fair hair and matching chubby cheeks, though Demi's were more frequently stained with the results of outdoor excursions, and Daisy was more eager to scrub both of them clean at hourly intervals and more resigned to usual morning and evening libations. "So we will be pwetty again," she whispered to Demi, who consented manfully to most ministrations his sister suggested, although he put his foot down at hairbows and braids.
So they learned difference.
Sameness, they always knew.
They knew the ebb and pull of dancing before Daisy ever betook herself to learn, weekends with Aunt Amy, the minutia of the ballroom. Daisy knew how to lead Demi in his leading, to push him without seeming to push, to drag herself behind his steady movement, step, turn, step, to be twirled in arms that held her awkwardly, unused to dainty movement or to exercise beyond lifting schoolbooks. And Demi knew to follow as he led, to pull Daisy, like a wave, through dances he had no notion of, to feel himself her master when he was born enslaved.
When Daisy danced first with Nat, primped and pretty, Demi knew new feelings, and a new sensation: the bottom falling out of his world. When he'd lifted his head to lofty places, to new skies full of theorems and theories, seen in these clouds visions of a world rebuilt with justice as the blueprint and love the mortar, he'd always looked down to see Daisy. A world where she didn't a fit, a world without room for placid and unchanging sisters and their quaint ways, was no true world but a fancy constructed from fairy timber and not spun from the sturdy cloth of love and duty that Daisy so freely donned. Demi might climb, spend hours in the willow tree with Dan's hand clapped to his knee, share whispers of butterfly wings and the varieties of ants, and other, secret dreams, of the wide-open, far-away West, so vast and alluring -- but he always climbed down again, and there was Daisy with a picnic basket, demanding to know whether he had caught any fish that they might have a proper supper. He always came down to her, in the end.
And not just dancing, but spinning in some elaborate pattern that seemed to whirl Daisy away from her smiling, confidently maternal devotions into some new, enraptured life, where her feet followed music that only she and Nat could hear, and only Nat could produce. Demi wanted, for the first time in his short and peaceful life, to hit someone with all the strength in his small and still-soft fist. He knew, not as a brother, but as a boy, that Nat was spinning Daisy away, and Demi did not want Daisy spun.
He wanted her softly spinning wool into yarn, knitting yarn into blankets, wanted her wrapped in the warmest blanket any March or Brooke could create, sitting, content, devoted, by a fire built from logs he'd hewn. He wanted, if he allowed his body to still for a moment from its tense frenzy of violence, for Nat to roast on that fire. With a last, shuddering look at Daisy, smiling innocently into Nat's weak but gentle eyes, Demi quitted the room and raced to find the hardest work he could.
Daisy watched him go and knew, woman and sister both, that Demi was leaving. She'd wondered before, but knew it now, a thought that bubbled, a perfect sphere of absence, to the front of her mind -- Demi was going and gone. Her face found Nat's chest, and a small tear forced itself to her eye, but tears retreated beneath the cloak of formal dancing before she could sob properly. "Could we sit, please?" she asked, so winning that even had Nat been a colder lad, he could not have refused the lowered eyes and flutter of nervousness. Nat blamed this on his natural eagerness to move quickly to the deeper stages of courtship, and seeing Daisy's uneasiness taught him a timely lesson in patience that would have cheered Demi's heart had he known, but Daisy remained discomfited.
"Tell me," Nat whispered, and Daisy thought of sweet confidences she had shared while Nat fiddled, new dreams just cresting on the shore of consciousness, of the happy home she meant to make for Demi and herself, the room that she would prepare for Mother, soft and warm and full of the luxuries Meg craved most.
"I can't," she said, miserable, for there had never been any secrets between them; her lap had always been ready for tears shed over schoolroom disappointments and the tormenting energy of Tommy or Dan, but Nat had no such lap, and when Daisy thought of the words she might use, they seemed idle and untrue. It was a child's fancy that Demi should stay true to the promises they'd made over mud pie banquets to be always each other's onlies.
And yet, Demi's leaving pinched at Daisy, made her stays tighter and her breath constricted with loneliness and seclusion. Demi was the string that tied her to the outside world, the vast country that existed past the environs of Plumfield, the ladder that led to the sky and to the heavens beyond. Demi had taught her to use Grandpa's telescope; Demi had taught her to read almost as efficiently as he taught himself. But he was running too fast now, and had become too silent, too brooding, his eyes and heart awakened to colors beyond the spectrum that Daisy could ever see. She would be left alone, she knew, and her world would shrink to the smallness of a loaf of bread without any yeast to give it loft.
She had no words for this, and only looked at Nat imploringly. "I'm rested now. We could dance again."
Nat couldn't then, nor ever, believe his luck, that Daisy consented to dance with him, and Demi, after that first fit, never lost self-control again, but offered Nat the brotherly affection due his sister's consort. Daisy felt her love for Demi grow cordial, could not remember what it meant to desire life above the pleasant patterns of quilting and cooking, found that the softness of Nat's smile and the warmth of his hands contained pleasures that she had only thought possible in the depths of Demi's brown and thoughtful eyes.
When, years later, Demi discovered that, when roused to full and dignified debate, Alice Heath was nearly as exciting as once Daisy's pies had been, satisfaction settled over him. They were, to be sure, not quite as two as he and Daisy had been. Alice was hearty and sweet and sensible, but hadn't Daisy's trick of lowering her eyelids to admit Demi into the soul they hid, and she knew none of Daisy's little, housewifely tricks that were beginning to make life at the Dovecote more than pleasurable. But marrying Alice, in due time, would mean Demi always had a home to return to at day's end, a freshly made bed and a hot brick when needed, and kisses that were sure to be efficient and guiltless.
He was resigned to this, though no formal promises had been made, when news of Daisy's broken engagement reached his ears from a frantic Josie, and he felt himself falling without support, rushing to meet ground, the very bottom of his world that had been whisked away ten years ago when Daisy had danced away from him. Every plan since then, every whim, every choice of career, newspaper and book-selling alike, had been predicated, finally, on the knowledge that this life was second best to the one that he and Daisy might make together. He manfully sat through tea with Josie, nodded at appropriate moments, agreed mechanically that he was very worried for Daisy, and sent her on her way as soon as politeness allowed.
Then, without bothering to undress, he lay flat upon his bed and considered the hominess that had just become his again. Bread rising, a quaint lace apron, and --
Meg had been whispering obliquely, and the growing dread in Daisy's heart had become a garden of terror. Suspicions and hints had become a quiet certainty, and she was equally certain of her own repulsion, of Nat's haphazard interest. If Nat -- and it was difficult to believe that anything her mother said might be about Nat, manful as he was with his beard and bank account -- then Daisy couldn't. She became pale and quiet, dithered and wept, quite distracted, till Nan was forced to prescribe a weekend at the sea, which she'd never imagined hearty, happy Daisy requiring. Daisy had returned from the shore convinced that the only cure for her seasick anxiousness was to prune Nat from her life.
-- it was evening when Demi roused himself from bed, rumpled and drunk with confusion. He shook his head, gazed at the mirror that showed his whiskery and lined face, and made up his mind, in one moment, to shave and dress and discover whether the Dovecote would fulfill the promise of Josie's news.
Daisy sits alone, quietly admiring the flowers she's tended faithfully, when a familiar footstep rouses her from contemplation.
"Daisy. I only just heard -- I am sorry, though you look lovely this evening, and, not, I think, unhappy." Her brother holds out a hand to her, and she rises to find he's no longer Demi, twinned always, impishly mirroring her cherubic heart, half the pair that only she can complete -- his hand is lined and strong, and he is John. And she's only Daisy, rosy and blushing at his compliment.
"I never wanted to be anything else, brother," she says, afraid to call this new man Demi, but loathe to lose her twin to the specter of John Brooke. "Only your Daisy."
"You have blossomed, Bess," he tells her solemnly, and looks too hard at her hand, as if afraid to see her face. He's unlike Nat, who's bashful and rash. "It's been too long. I think that I hardly know you now."
"I'm the same, John. It's you who's --"
"I'm here now, though."
She closes her eyes and feels her heart expanding, her spirit growing, lifting to heights of bliss she has never imagined, levels of heaven she's never seen, and Demi's hand is sturdy and steady and strong in hers, his arm gentle around her waist, his kiss unexpected and rough against her lips, a sweet small seed of promise, that, planted in the good soil of her love, will grow into a garden of joy.
Fandom: Little Women universe
Pairing: Daisy/Demi
Warnings: Twincest.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers/Timeline: Theoretically compliant through the end of Jo's Boys (She said all the marriages ended happily, not that all her OTPs got married!)
Disclaimer: On that note, Alcott's OTPs are not mine. Nor is her universe.
Notes: For jamie_dakin, my official Yuletide 2007 recipient. Originally posted here.
Summary: Though they've wandered far from home, Daisy and Demi Brooke are still two buds on one vine.
Wordcount: 2157
Little Petals, Tangled Stems
The marketplace teems with slick creatures, oiling over Demi's cheerful manners: easy words, deceits, tasks half done, and the sweet slide of drink as it warms men's hearts, loosens their tongues, loosens one man's bow tie and another one's belt and every man's ties to home, and Demi is homesick. He feels like Emil trapped on land, phantom salt abusing his nose and chapping his lips and the siren croon of wild waves against a thin hull penetrating even the darkest, dustiest schoolroom. He is sick for home and peace, for sweet and honest labor, for hearty cooking, for Daisy's soft and cooing laugh.
The weeds of homelife doldrums begin at Daisy's feet, which walk the same path every morning, from bed to water basin, where she washes away the sins of the night, idleness and tears, to barn, to kitchen, back and forth and bustle. There's a childlike stubbiness in her legs, still, and she is always trotting, always a little late, the day's goals receding as she becomes trapped by a dusty shelf that must be wiped at once or patchwork that needs attention before lunch can be seen to. Every task, so pleasant to begin, becomes tiresome and dull like needles that have pricked and pricked through thick cotton, cool linen, and the heavy wool of winter till they are pointless and thrown away, like salt that has lost its saltiness, or a housewife with no husband.
The first number they knew was two, the first word, twin, the first idea that found itself in their matching curly heads was other -- you. Demi sobbed when Daisy skinned her knee, and when his mother coddled Daisy, scolded him for making a fuss, he said, "But Mummy, I hurting."
"Silly," Mother Meg teased, but Demi couldn't understand, even when his trousers were rolled up, his knee shown unblemished.
He stared at the scrape on Daisy's knee, neatly bound in gauze, touched it and kissed it gently, but still puzzled over his lack. "But where is mine?"
They were born two, but they needed to learn that they were different.
They learned in a looking glass that Demi's eyes were brown and Daisy's blue, though both had fair hair and matching chubby cheeks, though Demi's were more frequently stained with the results of outdoor excursions, and Daisy was more eager to scrub both of them clean at hourly intervals and more resigned to usual morning and evening libations. "So we will be pwetty again," she whispered to Demi, who consented manfully to most ministrations his sister suggested, although he put his foot down at hairbows and braids.
So they learned difference.
Sameness, they always knew.
They knew the ebb and pull of dancing before Daisy ever betook herself to learn, weekends with Aunt Amy, the minutia of the ballroom. Daisy knew how to lead Demi in his leading, to push him without seeming to push, to drag herself behind his steady movement, step, turn, step, to be twirled in arms that held her awkwardly, unused to dainty movement or to exercise beyond lifting schoolbooks. And Demi knew to follow as he led, to pull Daisy, like a wave, through dances he had no notion of, to feel himself her master when he was born enslaved.
When Daisy danced first with Nat, primped and pretty, Demi knew new feelings, and a new sensation: the bottom falling out of his world. When he'd lifted his head to lofty places, to new skies full of theorems and theories, seen in these clouds visions of a world rebuilt with justice as the blueprint and love the mortar, he'd always looked down to see Daisy. A world where she didn't a fit, a world without room for placid and unchanging sisters and their quaint ways, was no true world but a fancy constructed from fairy timber and not spun from the sturdy cloth of love and duty that Daisy so freely donned. Demi might climb, spend hours in the willow tree with Dan's hand clapped to his knee, share whispers of butterfly wings and the varieties of ants, and other, secret dreams, of the wide-open, far-away West, so vast and alluring -- but he always climbed down again, and there was Daisy with a picnic basket, demanding to know whether he had caught any fish that they might have a proper supper. He always came down to her, in the end.
And not just dancing, but spinning in some elaborate pattern that seemed to whirl Daisy away from her smiling, confidently maternal devotions into some new, enraptured life, where her feet followed music that only she and Nat could hear, and only Nat could produce. Demi wanted, for the first time in his short and peaceful life, to hit someone with all the strength in his small and still-soft fist. He knew, not as a brother, but as a boy, that Nat was spinning Daisy away, and Demi did not want Daisy spun.
He wanted her softly spinning wool into yarn, knitting yarn into blankets, wanted her wrapped in the warmest blanket any March or Brooke could create, sitting, content, devoted, by a fire built from logs he'd hewn. He wanted, if he allowed his body to still for a moment from its tense frenzy of violence, for Nat to roast on that fire. With a last, shuddering look at Daisy, smiling innocently into Nat's weak but gentle eyes, Demi quitted the room and raced to find the hardest work he could.
Daisy watched him go and knew, woman and sister both, that Demi was leaving. She'd wondered before, but knew it now, a thought that bubbled, a perfect sphere of absence, to the front of her mind -- Demi was going and gone. Her face found Nat's chest, and a small tear forced itself to her eye, but tears retreated beneath the cloak of formal dancing before she could sob properly. "Could we sit, please?" she asked, so winning that even had Nat been a colder lad, he could not have refused the lowered eyes and flutter of nervousness. Nat blamed this on his natural eagerness to move quickly to the deeper stages of courtship, and seeing Daisy's uneasiness taught him a timely lesson in patience that would have cheered Demi's heart had he known, but Daisy remained discomfited.
"Tell me," Nat whispered, and Daisy thought of sweet confidences she had shared while Nat fiddled, new dreams just cresting on the shore of consciousness, of the happy home she meant to make for Demi and herself, the room that she would prepare for Mother, soft and warm and full of the luxuries Meg craved most.
"I can't," she said, miserable, for there had never been any secrets between them; her lap had always been ready for tears shed over schoolroom disappointments and the tormenting energy of Tommy or Dan, but Nat had no such lap, and when Daisy thought of the words she might use, they seemed idle and untrue. It was a child's fancy that Demi should stay true to the promises they'd made over mud pie banquets to be always each other's onlies.
And yet, Demi's leaving pinched at Daisy, made her stays tighter and her breath constricted with loneliness and seclusion. Demi was the string that tied her to the outside world, the vast country that existed past the environs of Plumfield, the ladder that led to the sky and to the heavens beyond. Demi had taught her to use Grandpa's telescope; Demi had taught her to read almost as efficiently as he taught himself. But he was running too fast now, and had become too silent, too brooding, his eyes and heart awakened to colors beyond the spectrum that Daisy could ever see. She would be left alone, she knew, and her world would shrink to the smallness of a loaf of bread without any yeast to give it loft.
She had no words for this, and only looked at Nat imploringly. "I'm rested now. We could dance again."
Nat couldn't then, nor ever, believe his luck, that Daisy consented to dance with him, and Demi, after that first fit, never lost self-control again, but offered Nat the brotherly affection due his sister's consort. Daisy felt her love for Demi grow cordial, could not remember what it meant to desire life above the pleasant patterns of quilting and cooking, found that the softness of Nat's smile and the warmth of his hands contained pleasures that she had only thought possible in the depths of Demi's brown and thoughtful eyes.
When, years later, Demi discovered that, when roused to full and dignified debate, Alice Heath was nearly as exciting as once Daisy's pies had been, satisfaction settled over him. They were, to be sure, not quite as two as he and Daisy had been. Alice was hearty and sweet and sensible, but hadn't Daisy's trick of lowering her eyelids to admit Demi into the soul they hid, and she knew none of Daisy's little, housewifely tricks that were beginning to make life at the Dovecote more than pleasurable. But marrying Alice, in due time, would mean Demi always had a home to return to at day's end, a freshly made bed and a hot brick when needed, and kisses that were sure to be efficient and guiltless.
He was resigned to this, though no formal promises had been made, when news of Daisy's broken engagement reached his ears from a frantic Josie, and he felt himself falling without support, rushing to meet ground, the very bottom of his world that had been whisked away ten years ago when Daisy had danced away from him. Every plan since then, every whim, every choice of career, newspaper and book-selling alike, had been predicated, finally, on the knowledge that this life was second best to the one that he and Daisy might make together. He manfully sat through tea with Josie, nodded at appropriate moments, agreed mechanically that he was very worried for Daisy, and sent her on her way as soon as politeness allowed.
Then, without bothering to undress, he lay flat upon his bed and considered the hominess that had just become his again. Bread rising, a quaint lace apron, and --
Meg had been whispering obliquely, and the growing dread in Daisy's heart had become a garden of terror. Suspicions and hints had become a quiet certainty, and she was equally certain of her own repulsion, of Nat's haphazard interest. If Nat -- and it was difficult to believe that anything her mother said might be about Nat, manful as he was with his beard and bank account -- then Daisy couldn't. She became pale and quiet, dithered and wept, quite distracted, till Nan was forced to prescribe a weekend at the sea, which she'd never imagined hearty, happy Daisy requiring. Daisy had returned from the shore convinced that the only cure for her seasick anxiousness was to prune Nat from her life.
-- it was evening when Demi roused himself from bed, rumpled and drunk with confusion. He shook his head, gazed at the mirror that showed his whiskery and lined face, and made up his mind, in one moment, to shave and dress and discover whether the Dovecote would fulfill the promise of Josie's news.
Daisy sits alone, quietly admiring the flowers she's tended faithfully, when a familiar footstep rouses her from contemplation.
"Daisy. I only just heard -- I am sorry, though you look lovely this evening, and, not, I think, unhappy." Her brother holds out a hand to her, and she rises to find he's no longer Demi, twinned always, impishly mirroring her cherubic heart, half the pair that only she can complete -- his hand is lined and strong, and he is John. And she's only Daisy, rosy and blushing at his compliment.
"I never wanted to be anything else, brother," she says, afraid to call this new man Demi, but loathe to lose her twin to the specter of John Brooke. "Only your Daisy."
"You have blossomed, Bess," he tells her solemnly, and looks too hard at her hand, as if afraid to see her face. He's unlike Nat, who's bashful and rash. "It's been too long. I think that I hardly know you now."
"I'm the same, John. It's you who's --"
"I'm here now, though."
She closes her eyes and feels her heart expanding, her spirit growing, lifting to heights of bliss she has never imagined, levels of heaven she's never seen, and Demi's hand is sturdy and steady and strong in hers, his arm gentle around her waist, his kiss unexpected and rough against her lips, a sweet small seed of promise, that, planted in the good soil of her love, will grow into a garden of joy.