Written for that challenge thingy. You know the one.
Keeping The Green
- smaur -
When the Earth turned to ashes and dust, they smuggled aboard a spacecraft and flew to the new world. Elanna watched through a small grimy window as her planet dwindled to a speck, as the sun — a raging chaos of saffron and scarlet, that savage beautiful thing she had worshipped all her life — faltered to a dim glow. She stayed glued to the small panel of dirt-smeared glass, fingers splayed across its smooth surface, watching long after her solar system had vanished from sight.
August tried to comfort her. We are stowaways, he told her, eyes bright with laughter and adventure. Like in the books. But she was quiet, withdrawn, even when he snuck away to scavenge for food, even when he returned bearing an armload of candy bars. She ate because he told her to, not because she was Elanna and she loved chocolate. She wasted away, features stripping down to reveal a sickly skeletal form. He took her to the belly of the ship, where the engine lay in tangles of cord and metal, and she pressed her face against the door of the engine room, weeping.
"They're all dead," she sobbed, lifting a tear-streaked face to him. "What will we do? What is there left?"
Then he showed her, unfurling his hand to reveal a tiny white pod sheathed in green. A seed. She touched it wonderingly, tiny fingers skimming the pale green skin. Wrinkly beneath her hands, still warm from August's touch.
"You kept it alive. How?"
August laughed. "How did we keep the trees alive?"
Elanna turned the seed over and saw the tiny pinprick of August's magic pulsing at the heart of the seedling.
"It's for you," August said quietly, to her unspoken question. "But only when we get there. And only if you eat."
Weeks drifted by. They stole through the ship, tiny, fae, childlike, staring wide-eyed at the humans on the lower decks herded together like cattle, filthy and tattered. In the topmost tiers of the ship, men and women lived in decadence, waltzing beneath crystal chandeliers to the swell of orchestral music. August stole a china plate heaped with mashed potatoes and drumsticks, and they feasted beneath a massive oak dining table like starved children. At night they curled up in the cargo hold, Fairy King and Fairy Queen lying side by side on a bed of luggage.
They crawled through the maze of the engine room, a vast dark room that stank of grease, memorizing the towering silhouettes of boiler tanks and motors, the black lines of pulleys and pumps and gears. Elanna, dread creeping into her stomach, found that August knew the ship as well as he knew their beloved forest — better, even. He was forever scampering off, impish and gleeful, to explore the ballroom on the twelfth floor or the kitchens on the middle deck or the observation tower at the top of the ship. This is August, she told herself. He loves everything. But the knots in her stomach refused to leave.
On the eighth floor was an arboretum — grass swaying underfoot, slender flowers dipping under the weight of crystal-bright water, vines speckled with sunlight. When August first showed it to her, Elanna nearly wept with joy. It took her days to believe that it was all fake, that the tiny beetles that scuttled across the dirt were robotic, that the flowers were an elaborate construct of gossamer and silk, that the grass was delicately woven from plastic fibres. The rain was no more than a sprinkler system; the sunlight, a blend of electric lights that mimicked the temperature and gradient tones of the sun. August explained this to her in slow, careful words as if he were afraid that the knowledge of this lie would break her. It didn't. She played in the tall grass all day, weaving daisy chains and braiding dandelions into her hair.
August did not join in the fun; he disappeared for long hours and returned near the end of the day to collect her, his face smudged with grease and soot. They talked little, the silence a palpable pressure hanging in the air. She could not understand him anymore; he spoke a language of engines, of cold metal, of closed dark spaces. She tried to find the forest in him and lost herself in the claustrophobia of his new world. I am going to lose August, she thought, and then realized, I already have.
One day, she followed him as he skulked through maintenance shafts. He brushed the walls with his hands as he passed, an innocuous, intimate gesture that knifed Elanna's gut. She could remember all too well the old days, the Earth days, August laying his palm on the trunk of a tree. Claiming it as his own with that small, harmless action. Here, as they wound through narrow sloping corridors, as the walls squeezed inwards, Elanna fought to keep her nausea at bay. She could not be scared, she would not. If August was not strong, she had to be; they had to carry the forest to the new world. This love for the ship, it would pass — August was nothing if not fickle. It would all pass. Everything would return to normal.
They were approaching the belly of the ship. The engine room. August glanced around, nervous as if he were visiting a mistress. Elanna ducked out of sight; he slipped into the room. She followed. The sharp, salty sting of grease filled her nose — beneath it lay the cloying scent of gasoline. The room smelled of other things, too — of darkness, of metal, of betrayal. And something else. Something inexplicable, something strange and intoxicating, something familiar ...
She crept towards the center of the room. The engine of the ship was humming with heat, a hulking silhouette that trailed slippery cords like blackened arteries. And amidst it —
Elanna froze.
Their tree. Her tree.
August had planted the tiny seed in the heart of the engine room.
In those few weeks, it had grown, nourished by the scorching engine fire and the pinprick-glow of August's magic. A sapling had sprouted, roots sinking into the floor of the room, curling and snaking around the thick muscly cords that fed into the engine. Spiny, scraggly, its branches were inextricably woven into the metal web of gaskets and piston rings.
The tree was entangled with the engine.
She must have cried out, because August looked up, startled. He blanched. "Elanna?"
Words. For a moment, she could not remember how to form them. She stared at August, raw horror and shock lodged in her throat. He stepped towards her.
"What have you done?" she whispered.
"Oh, god." August looked stricken. "Calm down. Calm down. It's okay."
"You killed it," Elanna said brokenly, moving towards the tree.
"I didn't kill it." There was a touch of exasperation in his voice. "I saved it."
She whirled around, eyes dark with anger. "We were taking it to the new world!"
"The seed would never have made it," August snapped back, defensive.
"You're wrong." Elanna was shaking her head. "You're wrong. We're almost there. You could've waited a few days."
"Oh, Elanna," August murmured. "You have no idea, do you?"
"I'm not a child," she hissed. "Don't treat me like one."
August laughed. "We won't be there in a few days. We won't be there in a few weeks. It will take us years — years!"
Elanna caught her breath.
"There's no point in waiting, in hoping," August said harshly. "We have to change. That's the only way to survive. Otherwise, it will break us — space, pining for the forest, everything."
"Stop it." She backed away from him. "You sound like a human."
"Is that so bad?" he asked. "Look at them. Look at us. They live, they change, they do things — we, we only exist. We skulk in their shadows. We stow away on their ships."
"You took the seed," Elanna said. "You stole it. You said — you said — it was for me."
His shoulders slumped. "I'm sorry, Elanna." He watched as she walked to the tree, gingerly touching the trunk. It felt cold against her fingers. Craggy. Alien.
"Can it be moved?"
Behind her, August's voice was soft. "You know it can't."
She turned to face him, dread in the pit of her stomach. "What will we do when we come to the new world?"
"We?"
"You and I."
August looked at her, wordless, features taut with a look that she could name but did not want to, a look that curdled the dread in her stomach. A look that made her want to sink down and cry.
She fled.
Days oozed past, slow and heavy with the viscous consistency of treacle. August did not return. Elanna frequented the cargo hold less and less; lying on her own in the darkness, the hard ridges of suitcases digging into her back, was an unbearable thought. She gravitated towards the arboretum, where artificially generated breezes cooled her nerves, and birds with jewelled eyes chirped at calculated intervals. Her dreams tasted of Earth, the painful familiarity chewing away at her stomach. The vines spoke to her with longing: Come. Play. She heard undertones of the forest in them — green, verdant, beautiful — but they were only plastic, cold and dead in her fingers.
She began to imagine footsteps pattering across the edge of her consciousness. Everywhere she turned, she caught feet disappearing into the green out of the corners of her eyes. The grass murmured, and beyond it, tiny voices burning with desire. Play. The weight of their words, these tiny voices from a dead world of ashes and dust, hung in the air. Waiting for her.
Amidst the long grass and brambly weeds, she recreated the Fairy Court; the lithe, curly-haired musician peeking out from behind a bush, a fresh-faced child dangling from the limbs of a giant oak. The arboretum was teeming with fae, hidden in underbrush, chattering with laughter, weaving chains of flowers.
At dawn, the sky awash with muted tones of lavender and honey, they gathered at the base of an elm to pay their respects to the queen. Like starving children, they stretched their hands out to her, hollow-eyed with need. Help us, they whispered in ragged voices. She must be strong for them, for it was she who carried their existences in the palms of her hands. And so the queen touched their faces, and they fell to their knees and wept.
As the sun rose over the forest, framing the world in a glow of saffron and scarlet, they sang songs in her praise and danced with joy. In the long lazy summer afternoons, they held revels by the riverside, and graciously she permitted them the presence of her company. They whirled and spun to the court musician's fiddle; they lay in the shade of the giant elm and admired the queen's hair. A handful of young men, eyes bright with mischief, sailed tiny sturdy boats strung with paper ornaments in the lapping river, racing each other as the court laughed and cheered from the riverbanks. The queen bestowed a red silk handkerchief upon the winner; blushing and stuttering and grinning stupidly, he tied it to his wrist and kissed her hand.
She dispensed advice to eager young girls and they thanked her, laughing and praising her name in lilting voices. Their faces radiated admiration. The queen watched them chase each other down the riverside, smiling to herself.
A shadow fell over her. She looked up.
The man was tall and ragged, his face smudged, worn. He smelled of something that stung her nose, filling her stomach with unease. Wordlessly, he sat down beside her.
The queen blinked. "Who are you?"
"My name is August," he said. "What's yours?"
"I am the Fairy Queen." She drew herself up, frowning. "I've never seen you here before."
"Of course you haven't," the man murmured.
They sat in awkward silence. She stole glances at him from the corner of her eye; he stared up at the sky, wistful.
"Perhaps you'd like to meet my court," she said suddenly.
"What?" August jerked his head away. "No. No, that's okay." He dropped something in her lap. "Here. That's for you."
Bemused, the queen held it up. It was a seed, small and dirty, encased in a wrinkled skin of green.
"The tree sprouted these. There's dozens — hundreds, maybe. You could grow a forest."
"Why would I want this?" she asked, smiling. "I have a forest already."
August winced. "Yes, of course you do. How silly of me." He stood up, slow, weary.
"You seem so sad," the queen said, frowning again. "If you stay with us, you'll be happy."
"I know." He hesitated.
"Stay with us," she urged.
"I'm sorry. You know that, right?" August stooped down and kissed her. "Goodbye."
The queen watched him as he strode through the tall grass, heedless of the little children playing underfoot. They scampered away as he came near, staring wide-eyed. When she turned, she saw that her entire court had gathered behind her to watch as the stranger left.
Such a strange, filthy little man.
In minutes, she had forgotten him.
