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“Alright, that’s enough,” Ashton says when they finally drag her upstairs, six goblets of wine and a relief that has nothing to do with alcohol warm in her stomach. He pauses outside the door; the rainbow in his head flickers like the lights on the dance floor. Blue-pink-green.
“Glad to have you back,” they say. They almost stick their hands in their pockets—instead he reaches out and clasps her shoulder awkwardly. It’s good, Imogen thinks, that in that long, lonely week Laudna had had someone like Ashton, who could pat her shoulder and give her some color besides red. Maybe she should let Ashton go in. Ashton will probably not throw up on the bed.
“Go on.” Ashton rolls his eyes. “Use that liquid courage, will you?”
She stumbles into the room, dazed and burning. When she flops onto the bed, she does not throw up. Small miracles.
“Imogen!” Laudna gasps, which is the real miracle. Laudna here, alive, breathing, not shunted off into a ditch or a desert or an ocean. Laudna looking at her like—well. Like her hair is a little bit singed, which it is; Laudna had gone upstairs before Fearne pulled Mister out to terrorize the dance floor, touching Imogen’s hand as she went. Imogen had wondered morosely if that was all they’d ever be—a brush of fingertips as fucking fate pulled them separate ways—and then Chet had come over in his bright pink scarf, asking if her face was going to stay like that. It was a celebration, didn’t she know? “Hello, darling—I didn’t think you were coming up till later—”
She blinks. “Laudna,” she says. Maybe with the looseness of her tongue Laudna will be able to hear all the things she means when she says her name: you’re alive, you’re here, I’m sorry, you came back to me. “I missed you. Downstairs.”
(Maybe not. Maybe she’s pushed it—whatever she feels (who do you think you’re fooling?)—so far down that no one will hear it, ever. Even in a moment as perfect as this, she can’t bring herself to say—)
“Did you like it?” Laudna asks, cocking her head. The moonlight catches in her hair, parting it into dark and silver, and Imogen remembers the thousand glittering crystals of the tundra, the light off the bloodstained sands of Bassurass. Laudna’s face swims in her vision: a corpse, a dream, a memory.
“The wine,” Imogen blurts. “Th’ wine was so good, Laud.”
(Use that liquid courage, will you?)
Laudna smiles, the twist and stretch of it so familiar that it makes Imogen ache. “I can see that.”
And there’s only gentle laughter in her voice—Laudna is so gentle with her, even when Imogen doesn’t—but. Imogen feels it as a burst of shame in her gut. Not the usual kind, the rubbed-dull spiral of sorry, I can’t hold my walls anymore; sorry, I didn’t mean to see that; sorry, we have to leave. But shame that even with the circlet on her head, drinking freely and laughing with the friends she’d thought lost to the solstice, she still can’t tell Laudna that—
That—
(The words unravel without the static. Imogen had never needed the world to keep her silent; she does that fine enough on her own.)
(How much courage will it take?)
“I’m glad you liked it, Imogen,” Laudna says earnestly. She is so good. She is alive and she is beautiful and she is holding Imogen’s heart; and Imogen cracks in her hand.
“I never liked being in my head,” she says, the words drink-slow and true, “until you were there, too.”
“Laudna,” she breathes. Means: I missed you, I thought of you, I was so afraid for you. I love you. Can you hear it? I love you.
Laudna’s mind tangles itself up with hers, like she’s reaching out in the dark to hold her hand again. Like they’ve never stopped. It feels better than wine, better than gold, better than freshly flipped pancakes or the magic of the dawn coursing through her veins.
Laudna presses a kiss to her forehead, and Imogen’s eyelids droop. “I like being with you too, darling. Always.”
“In m’ head?”
“Anywhere. Everywhere.” Laudna nestles into the mattress, spider limbs curling around Imogen’s body, cobweb whispers settling within Imogen’s mind. Her heart staggers in its own brave rhythm against Imogen’s chest, like a slow, slow waltz: one-two-three-one-two-three. “To the end of the world.”