Fic: You People With Hearts, Inkheart

[antistar_e]

Title: You People With Hearts (Never Need Fear)
Fandom: Inkheart trilogy
Characters/Pairings: Meggie/Dustfinger (all canon pairings implied -- all two thousand of them e.e)
Word Count: 5,300

I started writing this when I was only half-way through Inkspell, so spoilers through there and AU for everything after. You can read this here or @ AO3.



"All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."
- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

||| After three days passed and the thin, silver cord connecting Meggie to the earth remained unbroken, strong and ringing true like the string of a guitar fresh plucked, she woke to find Dustfinger missing from the chair beside the bed. His shape was still there, worn white and convex into the weathered wood, as if it was so used to holding him it couldn't imagine how else it had once been.

Her eyes were sticky like gum and her mouth felt like she had put two pieces of cotton in each cheek and slept like that, and when she wrestled out from underneath the covers to stand, the world tilted sharply, like tea cups sliding off a platter. She waited until the disorientation passed, and walked out into the yard. It was a bright day, the sunlight cast sharp and high the way it does when summer is on its way. She could feel the beginnings of hot, oppressive heat stirring in the light that warmed her skin. She followed the cobblestones that wound through the yard, hopping from one to the other like she was a child leaping across a stream. Her legs felt wobbly and coltish underneath her, and she could have sworn they were longer than the last time she checked.

She found Dustfinger at the end of the trail, standing at the gate between the two high walls that protected his home. The goose stood in between his ankles, and the way she ruffled her white feathers indignantly at the smallest noise put Meggie in mind of those silly little white dogs that she'd seen some women carrying in their purses in her home world, the fluffy ones who thought they were ten times their own size.

Dustfinger didn't stir when she came up behind him, spare to give her a quick, searching look, as if to make sure she wasn't sleep-walking. But when she looked back at him, her eyes clear and as bright a blue as Farid had once described them, he turned back around, satisfied, and she came up behind him to see what he was looking at.

The problem was immediately apparent. The path that wound from Roxane's cottage up the hills towards the distant mote of Ombra was all in shadow, darkened by the carcasses of several large, felled trees. They lay across the dirt like children's building blocks, tossed asunder, their broad canopies tangled together. Meggie couldn't recall if they'd always been there, standing sentinel over Roxane's land and keeping her close to the Wayless Wood that thanklessly deposited Dustfinger on her doorstep less often than she'd like, or if they'd be dumped there like some cosmic hand had tossed them down like toothpicks.

"That's not good, is it?" she asked, and Dustfinger shook his head mutely. The way the trees lay haphazardly scattered, it almost corralled them in, leaving nothing at their backs but the dark of the forest. While she had her head craned around in that direction, she felt him looking at her again, this time more closely, obviously trying to judge the risk of taking her away from the cottage in her state, lifting her over the stone wall and stealing into the woods to find a path not blocked by timber.

She met his gaze again, and, inexplicably, his lips tightened into his expressionless smile. "Come," he said, tone brusque, not unlike what he used with the goose, turning her around and walking her firmly back to the cottage. "It's time you ate something other than sickly broth. And a bath wouldn't be amiss, either."

She swiveled her head around, indignant, and just barely caught the glimmer of a true smile dancing like candlelight in his eyes.

||| Meggie was embarrassed to find exhaustion later hemming at the edges of her mind, still so soon after she woke up. She bathed and put her own clothing back on; the fabric was stiff from having been lying out in the sun, but it smelled clean and the fabric put her immediately in mind of Elinor's sofas, as comforting as a lullaby hummed in her ear. She'd been wearing what she assumed was one of Roxane's shifts, and it still smelled like her, underneath the stench of sickness. When she was done emptying the basin and hanging the wash towels on the clothesline, she found Dustfinger in the kitchen with a bowl of soup waiting. The worry clenched hard at the lines around his eyes, pinching them like a paper fan, but he smiled again when he caught her nodding over a spoonful of potatoes and carrots. "You should go back to sleep, Meggie," he said.

It sounded like a good idea. When she'd first crawled out, her toes and fingers hot and sticky with sleep-sweat and her hair mussed, she'd never wanted to see another pillow again, but now, just thinking of it, her vision swam again. A little nap couldn't hurt, could it? She would be awake again to help Dustfinger with dinner. Or whatever he needed help with.

His hands were on the back of her chair, pulling it inexorably away from the table. "Come on. Falling asleep in your bowl won't help you recover any," he continued, in that tone that was half-gentle, half-reproachful.

She glanced up at him suddenly, a thought occurring to her. "But if I'm taking up the bed, where have you been sleeping?"

"Jehad's cot. It's really not uncomfortable, if you don't mind your feet hanging so far off the end they look like chicken legs on a skewer." And there it was again, the spark of laughter catching in his eyes, and she wasn't sure why, but it reassured her enough that she went without protesting, snuggling up into the covers of Dustfinger's bed as if there were no more comforting place in the world.

||| "Do you think they'll come looking for us?" she asked him one cloudless morning while they were in the garden. She settled back onto her heels, pulling at the strings of her sunhat. She slipped it off, shaking her hair out into the breeze with relief. An unobstructed view of the sky told her it was almost noon. She pivoted around to look at Dustfinger, crouching on the balls of her feet, which instantly broke out in pins and needles as protest. He looked as if he hadn't heard her question.

He could build spectacles of fire as gracefully as a cake decorator could spin trellises across a cake, he knew the three whisper-quiet tongues of the fairies, he knew the names and habits of almost all the strange creatures of the Wayless Wood, he knew all the dark stories of kings and Capricorns and he knew which fruits hanging from the branches healed and which caused visions, but show him a row of green stems and ask him to differentiate between a carrot and a weed and he'd be absolutely hopeless. Meggie had spent enough time in Elinor's garden with the gardener that she was at least a little better off than he was, so she'd offered to tend to Roxane's garden while they were here. At least it'd put a little more variety in their meals; Roxane had a lot of the same things in the larder, and Dustfinger and Meggie were magicians, not chefs.

He didn't answer her, not for such a long time that she almost returned to work. He looked so strange without either marten with him, either draped over his shoulder or tangled over his hand in search of a piece of bread. No, there was only the goose who fancied him a gander and never left his side whenever he was outdoors. There wasn't even Farid, forever doing silly things to get his attention.

"Your father would turn over every pebble in Lombrica if he thought you were under it," he said at length, startling her. "And probably Argenta, too."

Meggie pursed her lips, giving him a hard, searching look, but it was like trying to read a sentence in a foreign language; she caught something familiar there, flickering across his eyes when he noticed her looking, and something there, in the sudden twist of his mouth, but nothing that made sense in the larger context. "It's not like any of the Motley Folk are going to keep where I live a secret from him or your mother. They'll come for you."

She frowned at him for excluding himself from the statement. She set the sunhat down in the earth and stood, walking over to him, in between the rows of herbs and vegetables. He avoided her eyes tellingly, and now she knew what it was that was written on his face. Grief made his flesh tighten and grow white, as if it was clenching all around his bones like a curled-up fist, pale from the effort of holding him together. It made the scars on his face stand out, thin ropes like the claw marks of an animal.

"They're coming for you, too," she told him with a calm and certain voice, like those repeating well-known facts, placing a hand upon his arm. "I've been in this world for years now, long enough to know that everyone in this realm is besotted with you, and no one -- no one that matters, at any rate -- has a bad thing to say about you. They'll be glad to know you're alive. In fact, there should be a holiday." The last was mumbled thoughtfully, less to him and more to the ground. Poet's words were tangling together in her brain, waiting for her to pick them apart and weave them into a story, all the words needed to describe the festivities.

His eyes lingered on her fingers, each distinct against the red and black fabric of his costume, long enough that she grew self-conscious and withdrew her hand, letting both her arms hang awkwardly at her sides. She wished she had the sunhat, so she could fiddle with the strings, at least, something to distract her from the disbelieving silence he met her words with.

It was easy to convince children of things, she thought, thinking of Fenoglio's sweet, loose-tongued grandchildren and of Despina and Ivo, holed up in the gloom and close quarters of Ombra with their mother. They were so easily distracted from their fears and worries by a soft touch and some choice stories, but what could she say to soothe Dustfinger's restlessness, Dustfinger who was so agonizingly used to heartbreak? He had told her, often enough that it was pointless to bring it up, that Death was the only story her voice couldn't and shouldn't call people back from. Not Meggie's voice, nor the beauty of Dustfinger's flames would bring the love of his life up that path and into her garden.

And suddenly, Meggie knew why they were both here. The White Ladies hadn't come for her, not while she lay feverish and delirious in the bed with Dustfinger standing guard, but for Dustfinger, too, because didn't some poet once say that one dies, too, after the death of their loved ones?

We'll keep each other alive, she thought fiercely, placing her hand back on his arm and keeping it there, whatever look he gave her. At least until they come for us.

She couldn't remember, later, which they she'd been thinking of; Mo and Resa, or the White Ladies.

||| Although he had honestly been expecting it -- she wouldn't be Meggie if she didn't at least try -- it still floored Dustfinger when Meggie asked him if there was any way they could clear the path. Fever persistently clung high on her cheeks like nestling birds, and though she tried to hide it from him, her limbs trembled after helping him with the washing and she could barely catch her breath. And here she was, asking him if they -- a sick young girl and an aging man, alone -- could clear that mammoth of an obstacle course.

He stared at her with such naked incredulity that she instantly set her jaw, determination flaring up in her eyes faster than the fire in gunpowder. It was that same defiant spark that he loved in Roxane, that he loved in Resa, that he felt himself softening against his will.

"You are more than welcome to try," he said with thin sarcasm, flapping his hands at her as if she was as silly as the goose. "Let me know where you plan on getting the army to lift them all. Some of those trees are probably older than the sovereignty of your home country."

She ignored his tone, putting the kettle onto the stove and checking the coal in its belly to make sure it was lit. "You're the best fire-eater in this entire country," she said, as surely as she would state the capital cities. "Can't you burn them down without setting fire to the whole forest? If there was anyone the fire would listen to, it'd be you."

He could tell from her tone that while she believed in what she was saying, she also knew that if he could do it, he would have done it already. He shook his head. "It's not that simple," he said, as she shivered and tried to surreptitiously rub her arms through the threadbare cloth of her dress, the same one her mother had made for her year's ago. It was a cool evening, and the high wind whispered through the walls and around the uneven cracks by the windowframe no matter what Dustfinger said to it, but part of her chill, he assumed, had to do with the fever, for the fat, heavy belly of summer was upon them and it wasn't that cold. "Fire here is a living thing, as prone to its own decisions as any one of us. Even if I begged, it wouldn't touch those trees. It considers their death too unnatural."

She sighed, understanding. Another shiver ran through her, this one harder to suppress, and Dustfinger drew his fingers together, whispering in the soft, low crackle of fire-speech, and when he snapped his fingers, fire flared up in the grate of the fireplace. He'd once questioned Roxane for having a fireplace and a coal-stove in the same room, sharing the same chimney. She'd merely shrugged and said she'd lived with a fire-eater too long, and guessed it didn't scare her as much as it would any other woman.

Meggie shot him a grateful smile, and when the kettle whistled impatiently and he made as if to stand and attend to it, she waved him back, fetching their mugs from the rungs above the spice rack. She poured the tea for him without even asking how he liked it, and when she handed it to him, he felt his smile falter, uncertain as to when the tolerance between them had softened into something like friendship.

She pretended not to notice his expression, but he could tell by the shuttering in her eyes that she had. She settled onto the rug in front of the fireplace, smoothing out the folds of her dress around the goosepimpled flesh of her knees, her own mug between her palms. "Well, can't we climb over them?" she continued. "I mean, I'm feeling much better and they're just felled trees."

"You say that now. Wait until you're the one who has to clamber over them."

She sighed. "I just don't like sitting here, waiting."

Dustfinger knew that feeling all too well. Things didn't usually move as fast as they had in the years she had spent in what she called the Inkworld. She and her father were just special, he supposed, and things tended to happen when they were together, like lightning mixing with the taste of metal in the air. Usually life here involved a lot more waiting; waiting for the crops to grow, the seasons to change from cold to warm and back again, waiting for a message to come, a message to go, waiting for a girl to grow into a lover, waiting for a king to answer the plea of his serfs, Roxane, waiting at the gate for a man who wasn't coming home, waiting for the worst news.

"It will be all right," he said in his usual stoic tone. "I imagine everyone has a lot on their plate right now. They know you're here, with me, and considering what's sitting right outside our front door, I think right here is the safest place you can be." She glanced up, firelight catching in the streaks of gold in her hair. Seeing the wry smile on his lips, some of the worry eased from around her eyes, a worry Dustfinger didn't quite understand -- it was as if she thought he was the one with the fever and the delerium, the one who had spent many hours cordially standing on Death's door.

She wrapped her arms around her knees. "What are you going to do after this?"

"Get some things settled, I suppose," he shrugged. "Maybe Farid would like to live in this house; he'd like it better than the caves he probably grew up in, assuming there is somebody willing to share it with him." Her face flushed red at his insinuation, but she didn't break from his knowing gaze the way she might have once. "I'm going to go as far away from Lombrica and Argenta as I can get: find some land that damned Fenoglio never imagined, if it even exists. Mostly I'm going to whatever opposite corner of the world from where the Silvertongues are."

"How faithless you are!" she declared, and he only just caught the teasing quirk to her lips in time. "Running from us? After all we've done for you?"

His eyebrows shot up. "After all you've done for me? What, you mean dragging me out of my world, almost getting me killed on more than one occasion, pulling me into more dangerous situations than my cowardly heart can handle? It's no wonder my heart wants nothing to do with you! You or your father!"

"Oh, does it? Then why did you bring me here, Dustfinger, if you're really so cowardly?"

"I was saving you life," he said, his words half-garbled into the circle of his mug as he took a drink, so that she didn't catch the pain that even he couldn't keep off his face, no matter how skilled he was with expressions. If he had his way, he never would have set foot in this house again, not with the memories of Roxane still breathing in the very wood of the walls.

She smiled at him, her mouth spreading against her soft face. "Well, then. Thank you, Dustfinger, for saving my life."

"It was the least I could do," he replied, and meant every word.

She got up from the fireplace, unfolding her limbs and brushing the soot from her dress as carelessly as if she had lived with fire-eaters all her life. She walked over to where he sat, and he knew what she was going to do the instant before she did it; caught the gleam of it in her eyes, bright and blue as the heart of a flame, just before she leaned down and pressed that sweet, magical mouth to his.

The kiss was closed and chaste, like a child's, but the gentleness of it sucker-punched Dustfinger in the gut. Without thinking, he grabbed her face between his blistered hands and held it there, letting the warmth of the contact seep into him. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, her cheek, the tip of her nose, moving with glacial slowness across her features. A dozen images danced in front of his eyes like a juggler dances balls; Roxane in all her moods, all expressions, and Resa as he last saw her, her jaw tight and chin tilted up just like Meggie's did, the anger of a woman no longer in her own world, who viewed it through a skewed but golden sense of justice. It was each of them that he kissed then, with a young girl's face between his palms, one kiss for everything he would never see again. Resa was another man's wife and Roxane had gone into the pages of a story he could not follow.

But when he opened his eyes and found Meggie's so close and still so clear, their faces flew from his head like birds fleeing the shadow of a marten, and he was left with nothing but her. The surprise of it almost hurt as much as the kiss, the knowledge of it having lain underneath his weathered, old love for two women he couldn't have back for so long. He loved this girl too, in his own way; loved her voice that painted pictures more bright and detailed than any illuminator, her stubbornness and her bravery. He loved her for coming after him, for never once betraying him as he had once betrayed her. He loved her, and at the same time he hadn't quite decided if he liked her.

She stood perfectly still, bent over him, and without thinking he drew her closer, hands moving from her face to encircle her, so that some of the lines of her body bowed into his like the sapling branches of a tree. "Meggie," is all he had the breath to say, and he saw immediately that it was the right word. For once.

Her mouth came upon his again, and this time it had the same hot burn of a woman's kiss.

||| "And you said I didn't have the strength," she said to him, later, and though it was too dark to see her face, he could hear the blush rush up underneath her voice at her own words. "I mean, I think I could probably climb over those trees, if I really tried."

Dustfinger knew she could, too. He reached out, tracing the faint, etched outline of her shoulder in the dark, knowing without looking the map of freckles there. She shifted in the sheets, drawing closer to him as instinctively as if she was flame, answering an unspoken come hither. "Stay," is all he said, and she nodded, burrowing her face into his shoulder.

||| Roxane had only been a few years older than Meggie when she had Brianna, and Dustfinger clung to this fact when his fickle conscience came to collect, licking at the bottom of his heart with its treacherous tongue, making him feel like he'd been plunged into cold water every time he looked at her.

It wasn't enough, though, to stop him. Meggie came to him, pushing at the collar of his tunic with fairy tales falling from her mouth, and he responded as ardently as if he was a man half his age, conscience be damned.

The days passed in haze of this, the air clogged and slow-moving like a bowl full of cream, heavy with summer heat. It was courtship season for the fire-elves, and mornings found Meggie standing out in the yard, blanket pulled up over her breasts and sloping carelessly down the naked curve of her back, watching the display with childlike wonder. She readily forgave the Inkworld its horrors every time she saw the water nymphs under the silvery surface of a lake, or the giants that bellowed threats to each other across kingdoms, their voices slow as thunder, or the fire-elves that fought for dominance in great flares of heat and light like little stars exploding among the trees. The Inkworld became her, the flush of it high on her cheeks like a woman besotted.

And Dustfinger wasn't sure when Silvertongue's daughter stopped being a part of the story and started being the story. Watching her watch his world with her eyes sparkling bright, her mouth half-open, and he fell in love with it all over again. Farid had taught him that beautiful things are better when you have someone to share it with, as surely as he'd taught the boy to speak to fire, and Meggie continued the lesson.

"Remember when I first met you?" she asked him, as they plucked little white roots off their potatoes and ducked them in a basin of water. He rubbed one white filament between his fingers, wishing Gwin was here; he'd be curious enough to try and eat it. Longing for his marten, for Roxane, for Farid cut at him almost all the time, and as if sensing it, Meggie scooted closer, pressing the side of her body into his as if she could help hold that cut together.

He wondered, briefly, if she missed her parents just as sharply, and pressed back, just in case.

"You mean when you kept on looking at me as if I were an adder that had been tossed onto your dinner plate?"

"Well, my life certainly was never the same," she answered, a little defensively.

"Welcome to my story, little Silvertongue," his voice was dry as a cluster of embers. "It seems wherever you or your father tread across my path, it makes a change in the direction I least want it to go."

She tilted her head up to him, her expression suddenly grave. "I don't know," she said, peering at him closely as he reassuringly brushing his knuckles against her cheek, leaving a streak of water behind. "I don't think it did your character any harm. If anything, I like you a lot better now."

He refrained from a scathing retorting, but smiled nonetheless. Too late, he thought of warning her against falling in love with him. In honesty, he hadn't considered it a threat -- he remembered how darkly she had looked at him the day they drove to Elinor's for the first time, as if she was just waiting for him to slip up behind Silvertongue and wrap the noose around his neck himself, and he forgot how quickly children's hearts could change.

Indeed, the way she looked at him now, it was as if he'd never burned her. As if the blisters he'd left on her heart as surely as he'd left her in Capricorn's dungeon were never there.

And he would be damned if his fool heart didn't want to give her a chance, too.

||| Each day, she asked him, could they try this to get around the blockade? Surely there must be something; they'd gotten out of tougher scrapes than this with far less power than they had now. They were just trees.

Each day, his answer was the same. No, that wouldn't work. No, she didn't have strength enough yet for that. No, they were not just trees, what use did she think that was? She might as well just bring the whole Wayless Wood crashing down around their ears! She and Fenoglio had made a big enough mess of Dustfinger's world without adding to it!

And each day, he kept her for a little bit longer. His excuses ran thin, though, and his hold on her weaker, as her eyes grew clearer as they looked out towards the horizon, as if they could see right through Roxane's high stone walls, and she reminded him less and less of the women he'd loved and lost; he tried holding onto them, but the details slipped away as easily as minnows in a sun-warmed stream, leaving a space that was easily filled with Meggie's shy smile curving against his kisses. Soon, very soon, she wasn't going to need him anymore, and when, oh when, had that begun to seem like the worst of his fates?

Between the two of them, they'd had the strength bare enough to ward off the White Ladies who came haunting around the door after Dustfinger had crawled here, not so long ago really, Meggie slipping so close to death and grief stopping up his throat like chalk.

Although, although -- and this he could only admit when his heart was at its most cowardly -- he wouldn't have tried to stop them if it was just Meggie they wanted.

No. If given a choice between saving his own skin and saving Meggie, he would choose himself each and every time. It was getting too tiresome, sitting back and letting someone else orchestrate the circumstances of his death.

||| They came through the woods, the long way through a forest so black it may have never seen sunlight, and the only way to reach Roxane's cottage that way was to follow the stream. It wound close to the stone walls like a snake's tail hanging off the edge of its nest, but there were places in the Wayless Wood where the undergrowth grew so thick there was no other choice but to walk in the current, so when Dustfinger saw them, dark against the summer-thick grass like weevils in a bowl of oatmeal, he was not surprised to see them soaked to the knees and disheveled.

He went back into the house just as Meggie went flying out of it, having seen them coming from the window above the sink, apron strings loose and trailing behind her. He thought, perhaps, of drawing up some hot water for them to rest their feet in, or something to drink, at least, but the idea went just as quickly out of his head at the look on her face.

Dustfinger paused just as Silvertongue reached the gate, and nothing he had ever seen compared to the expression on Meggie's face, hard and shining, when she flung her arms around him.

At once, he felt the fool. Of course, of course nothing had changed; a girl's first love was her father, and hers for him ran deeper than Dustfinger had a prayer of forging, not for all the fire flowers in the world. It was his luck, he supposed, that most everything he grew fond of he lost to Silvertongue in the end.

Resa and Farid were only a few steps behind Silvertongue, and Meggie tumbled into her mother's arms without truly leaving her father's, leaving them tightly knotted, half-in half-out of an embrace. Resa's voice carried with the volume of its joy, demanding answers of her daughter and giving them in turn, but Silvertongue said nothing, just held the girl as tightly as if it was his own heart restored to him. Farid hovered close by on the balls of his feet, as light as a spark, drinking in the sight of Meggie with his eyes before he turned, searching for Dustfinger's silhouette against the door.

The boy approached him cautiously, and well enough he does, Dustfinger supposed, since last they saw each other was the day they drew the burial shroud up over Roxane's face, and he had not been at his best, then.

"What took you so long?" Dustfinger demanded of him, pretending not to notice the concern writ plain as day on Farid's dark face, because he should be used to this, really. "We're going to need your help. Did you see the trees out front?"