Summer fic challenge 2019, part 1.

[merikuru]

Oh yeah. I'm doing that thing. Scratch that: I tried to do the thing and failed. EVEN SO.


"In the language of flowers," she told him, settling the slender stem into a buttonhole and meeting his eyes, "the orchid can represent several things. But of them all, there are two in particular that I think I should speak of. One is strength--" she paused, hummed gentle amusement, and lowered her eyes, gazing for a moment at scarlet petals before drawing breath to go on. "And the other..."

He waited, watched her; when she closed her eyes and didn't continue, he covered her hand gently with his and prompted her with a bare breath. "The other?"

Still another hesitation, as she turned her hand beneath his, linking their fingers, holding on tight. "Do you remember," she began at length, just as quiet as he, shaking her head when he gave her a faintly puzzled frown at the apparent non-sequitur. "What I told you when you first began to court me? The night you found me alone, in the gardens--" a brief, pained tension in her shoulders now, one she was clearly doing her best to suppress.

Memory prickled at the back of his mind, a bitter pain that made him unconsciously clasp her hand tight. "Your lost child," he responded, forced away the guilt that sat heavy on his tongue at speaking the words aloud and went on. "Your condition...yes, I remember. But why do you ask, so suddenly?"

Again, her reply skirted the subject; again, the incline of her head indicated he should hold any protest. "I have been reliving their words these past weeks - the ones that told me with such certainty that any further effort should be worthless. Reliving them over and over again, a hellish symphony without end in the depths of my heart. And yet--" now she raised her eyes to his once more, took a slow breath. "Yet, they have ceased to pain me. They have ceased to hold meaning any longer. Do you know why that is?"

He opened his mouth, started to say he did not know, and then found himself unable to speak when the realization dawned on him.

"Fertility - that is the second meaning," she said finally, adjusted the flower in his buttonhole once more and smiled, soft, uncertain. "I - we are..."

He gave her no chance to continue; he swept her up in his arms and kissed her, held her tight, felt joyful tears dampening his cheeks as well as her own.

Nine months later, he felt he knew perfection when he held his son for the first time.

A month after that, holding the lifeless body of the woman who had borne his child at what proved to be the cost of her own life, perfection became despair.

It was raining as he left the city he'd almost felt could become his home, the son he loved so deeply he knew he could not stay, the life he had nearly had; and the colors of the setting sun rippled indistinctly through the puddles that dotted the ground.

When he turned back to look for the final time, he thought in his grief that the reflections looked like nothing so much as an unearthly apparition of scarlet flowers.