white_flowers | (no subject)

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midsummer rising

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She walks silently away from them all as the last light fades from the sky.

(This one has her life and her potential. What do you have now, White Rider?)

She knows the answer, and it is bitter as ash on her tongue.

She has nothing. Not even her oldest name.

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"'S usually good to have an idea."

Still gnawing. A piece of bark falls to the ground.

"So helpful you are."

Flatly.

"We can't do much," she says, "if people don't accept help when it's offered."

"Oh, and were you offering, dear?"

Bitterly said, as she looks up at the bird.

"Well," and she snaps off a small twig, "I did tell you I'd help you get out of here, a long time ago, if you wanted to try not doing anything dumb."

"Why, and here I thought that was no longer an option, not after what happened next," she snaps back.

"For a while it wasn't," she says thoughtfully. "Now it's different, maybe. I said I wouldn't give you a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. It wouldn't be that now."

She shakes her head and looks up at Blodwen. "But all that depends what you want."

Her laughter is sudden and shocking and ragged.

"What I want? How can you say that matters now, after what has happened? I don't even know who I am!"

Peach suddenly wishes Cordelia were here.

"It always matters," she says, after a long pause. "What else would? What do you want?"

"Not to be like this!" she cries out, and then turns away from Peach so that the bird cannot see her face.

...Yeah, really wishing Cordelia were here.

"Well, I can't do that," she says. Not just won't: can't, though she doesn't sound especially sorry about it.

"You're on your own with that one. What I can do is I can try and help you get someplace where you can figure out who you are - or we can head back to the bar and I can get you a drink."

She stands with her back to Peach, and her breathing is harsh and unsteady as she looks blindly out across the grass.

"Why?"

"Why wouldn't I?" she asks innocently. "I'd put it on Carl's tab, anyway."

She whirls on the bird, and the high light voice cracks,

"Don't! Don't -- you -- don't mock me!"

There is nothing of that otherworldly coldness in it now, but something lies beneath her tone, something of desperation and despair.

"Not you. Not you."

Peach blinks, and opens her beak and shuts it again, and looks down.

"We don't need reasons to help somebody," she says after an awkward pause, and it's uncertain just who 'we' is. "Only need a reason not to."

She claws at the branch and looks at Blodwen again. "So I'll do what I said, if you want, unless you wanna give me a reason I shouldn't."

She shakes her head, wordlessly.

Tears well in the blue eyes, and she blinks them back, refusing to let them fall.

Peach is silent.

After a moment she leans down and starts gnawing at the branch again, not saying anything, waiting to see if Blodwen will speak.

She looks past the bird into the darkness of the forest beyond, where she has spent so much time.

That, of course, was before.

The silence has almost developed a weight of its own by the time she speaks again.

"I don't know where to begin. Or how. Or-- or even why I should."

She looks back at Peach.

"Don't you understand? There's nothing. He made me nothing."

"Wow," Peach says after a minute, "you're crazy, lady. I'm not mocking you," she goes on quickly. "But - seriously, I know a lot of people who aren't Riders of the Dark and none of them are nothing."

She gestures with one wing toward the bar. "Bunch of 'em over there. You could talk to them and figure out why they do things, if you wanna go get that drink."

She shakes her head, quickly.

"No-- no."

There's a silence, and then she adds softly,

"Not yet. I can't. Not yet."

"All right," Peach agrees amicably. "Well, I'll owe you a drink when I see you in the bar again, eh?"

"All right," she says, and the light musical voice is very soft indeed.

She hesitates, almost as if she might say something else--

(they took the blossoms - and produced from them a maiden - and gave her a name)

--but in the end she merely shakes her head in helpless silence and goes on her way, walking through the edge of the forest.

(I will not slay thee, but I will do unto thee worse than that.)

Lleu never saw her again, after she tried to kill him. After Gwydion avenged him.

"Go well," Peach says - in Welsh, not in the Speech. She drops off the branch and glides quietly back to the bar.

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