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seafleece · 4 years

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sand plucked from the sea, or: five times the divine belgard considered her place in the universe and one time she did not

“I wish I had known. What it was. I should have known.”

“Would you have said yes?”

Belgard does not whisper. Can’t. There’s no cause for it, no medium.

“I don't know,” Belgard whispers.

The empty body of Empyrean stands, wings dropped. Head fierce and tall against the awful light and dark of Volition.

Belgard is quiet. There’s this faint, but repeated pull at her, like the tide— she wants Signet to return. Wants to think about anything other than that she looked like this, once.

“Can you carry them?”

—

ii.

“Can you open the Exuvia?”

It’s a bad day. The latest in a series. Belgard’s cables lace over her suit instead of where it ends, where the sleeves of it don’t quite meet her shoes. It’s too much to touch, to feel, to be felt.

She opens an eye. It’s crawling along the floor, miles away. On days where her hands would be wrapped proper in the sashes, she’d let herself drop, fall and fall until the cold panels of the bottom of Belgard rushed to meet her and catch firm, swaying. Reach down a hand and snag it, and ascend again, like something arboreal.

But the swing she’s cradled in isn’t fashioned from her own twisting, it’s Belgard knotting herself together under Signet, holding her aloft. She doesn’t even rock.

She tugs, downward, and Belgard lowers her.

The Exuvia goes still in her hands, like it knows crawling would make her drop it again.

“Here,” Belgard tilts Signet in her swing until she’s mostly horizontal, still curled in on herself like an oyster around grit, no pearl in sight.

“I don’t— I don’t know how to tell you about them yet.”

“I know. I thought I would read to you instead.”

The wings of the Exuvia flare out and close again.

—

iii.

“Signet,” Belgard says, “Signet, Signet.” She sounds like she’s smiling, but she should be crying.

Signet scrabbles at the straps around her wrists. “No.”

“You know it already.”

“Don’t.” She can’t say it. In the air, even between them, it will exist, and the truth of it is so compelling and awful she can’t bear it.

“Such a beautiful passage. My favorite, I think.”

The Assemblage is so long that a favorite passage is meaningless. She knows it, and Belgard knows it. To pick one and hold it above the rest is like emerging with a single grain from the ocean floor. Beautiful, maybe, in the sunlight, but what makes it separate from the others is only that it happens to be in your palm. That, rather than sweeping your hands through the rest of the ocean, you’d leave that one there instead. To make it yours, and give it you. To forgo.

A Divine is for people. Not a person. Belgard telling her that she is Signet’s is saying the worst thing there is to say. That she’s done.

There's a plate on Belgard’s wing that’s shaking loose. Big enough to enclose her, carry her to safety.

“Please.” She reaches out, desperate, buries her hands in two straps, then four, ten, like gathering up a kelp forest. All of them wind around her, enclosing her.

Belgard’s entire body rattles with the force of another explosion, but in the open space of her cockpit she keeps Signet still. Screens open in the corners of Signet’s vision like compound eyes— first, who it is that needs healing, then their middle name, their favorite color. All of the things they can continue to be, if Belgard stops being.

Belgard holds her for a second, and another, and another.

Then, she lets go.

—

iv.

“Hello, Belgard.”

“On the shore the seas gathered themselves like gifts, folded lines like petals unfurling under newest light. How are you?”

They laugh. It sounds like crumpling paper.

“Not so bad. Did you get to meet them?”

“They were busy with rites, the keeper told me. I think they are nervous to see me.”

Shore waves a hand, drawn with age and shaking. “Don’t worry. They’re a good egg. They just want to get it right the first time.”

Belgard doesn’t have eyes to close. Instead she simply tries to picture fewer things, and sticks on the roll in Shore’s shoulders as they laugh quietly. “They’ll figure it out soon enough.”

“That if things were right the first time, we would not be part of the fleet. Yes.” She lights up her panels to prove she gets the joke, even if Shore can’t see them.

She can tell when they look at her again, a fierce and fixing thing unmitigated by their position. She wants to spread her wings and unpin herself from it, feel her Excerpt weaving the two of them out and away from Thyrsus. But Shore is here, and dying, and so she has nowhere to go.

“You’re going to be okay.”

She says nothing.

“Belgard.”

“On the shore the seas gathered themselves like gifts, folded lines like petals unfurling under newest light.”

It’s a beautiful passage. She wonders if Shore can tell she is afraid of when she can no longer say it.

“You talk through it, okay? When it feels like the world should have stopped with you. You explain why you can’t do the things you need to, and one day you find you can.”

“Shore.”

“They’re going to pick Meadow, at the ceremony. They asked me what passage was your favorite and I didn't tell them it was mine. Because it isn’t. Don’t let it be.”

“Shore.” Belgard has no function resembling tears. Her panels, unseen, flare with frustration instead.

“You have to love them, too. Not because they’re the next me, but because they’re someone else.”

She’s a large being, enough to cover Shore a hundred times over. The love for them feels like it spills out of her already.

—

She feels the moment Signet starts to go slack. The Exuvia clips its shell into a single golden dome again.

Belgard has never written for the Assemblage. The few left to tell stories had no time to read them, and then there were none.

She thinks about breaking rocks into sand and scattering them into the sea. Her hands are shaped like hands by coincidence more than anything else— they’re erosion incarnate, even so.

The singular grain that is Signet goes fully limp in her cables and Belgard wants to be smaller so she can press against her contours.

She carried Empyrean’s body home after they fled it. Signet brought the unrecognizable threads of them to her and they wanted her to inhabit her shell again for the shell’s sake, not the ocean. They begged her to keep the sand in her fists, and Signet is safe, quiet and asleep and here, because she held on. First to Signet, and then to herself.

In the dark, the Divine Belgard holds her grain of sand and thinks on becoming an oyster instead.

—

“They marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose, and beheld as the signet sealed upon our pact. You look so beautiful like this.”

Belgard flares all around her and grows dim again in a moment— laughter, surprise, captured as a reflex. The cables around Signet’s arms, her waist, slacken and tighten. Not unsure, but aware.

Signet is content to let that thought sit with her— like she had leaving Polyphony’s city. Something to turn over and over again in her mind like a stone, worried smooth over time and trips across the system and to Thyrsus, to ask for someone who liked to sing.

It is such a different thing, to be alone with them again. They must know, she thinks. Must have felt it from her when they met again, that something they had given her had been so rattling as to stay with her. She looks down at them from where she’s suspended— thinks, actively, about what the places where she and Belgard meet must look like in other eyes— and flushes.

It’s Belgard who speaks instead. “Are you afraid?”

Polyphony laughs. Properly.

“No. I don’t believe it will hurt me.”

Belgard says something else to Polyphony, something about bravery, but Signet doesn’t hear it. A cable curls along her wrist and she wraps her fingers around it.

You are beautiful like this, Signet. If only they could see you when you are even more beautiful, when—

Startled, she falls a bit in the cables and Belgard holds her fast.

Below, Polyphony looks curiously on as Belgard’s panels flare again, another show of mirth.

Belgard’s alive with this infectious sort of curiosity today, buzzing where they meet. She pulls on the cable in her fingers, questioning.

I am interested in who it is that would make you ask to be sung to, Signet. I think I get it, now.

Below, Polyphony gathers their skirts under them and accepts the second swing Belgard offers. The weight sends connected cables bouncing for a moment with momentum, moving Signet about.

Belgard moves every single part of herself with purpose. If cables move towards Polyphony that, at another junction, find Signet, Belgard wants her to feel Polyphony in them.

She grips the strap in her fist and presses her smile to another one, captivated by the quiet brazenness of it all. Belgard hums and they sway again together, lazy and thrilling.

Jealous? she teases.

A single panel lights near Signet’s face. A restrained laugh.

You are a different kind of beautiful when they are near. Call it comparison.

Things grow quiet and tense again as they near Volition, and Belgard doesn’t tease her when she returns alone with Polyphony’s lipstick blooming wistful and faded blue at the corner of her mouth. She merely offers the little cable, unconnected to any controls and empty of data, and Signet holds it fast and presses her mouth there, shaking with things unsaid and trusting she will be held in kind.

#friends at the table #twilight mirage #belgard #signet #...signet...#they marked scars of light in pitch; born in fiercest purpose and beheld as the signet sealed upon our pact #my writing #in which i TOE THE LINE that janine never crossed with signet the whole season #you know the one

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