Death and the Maiden [New Year's Extravaganza]
Jan 22, 2019 23:09:20 GMT
Post by girl-like-substance on Jan 22, 2019 23:09:20 GMT
This is a New Year's Extravaganza fic for Cavespider_17! I wasn't confident enough with the Coltar material to write something in that world, so I tried instead to write something set in a world where people are as damaged as they are in that setting. As for specific prompts, I went for something steelix-related and in response to the prompts 'family love and hate' and 'last days'.
Chrysaor is old. How old is difficult to say, but the doctor said probably about eight hundred.
“Evolved before you met him, right?” he'd asked. Reeve had nodded. “Eight hundred,” he repeated. “Maybe a little older. You know they never stop growing, and he's big for a septacentenarian.”
There had been a pause, and then he'd said it:
“Might be time to let him go,” he told her. “He needs to find somewhere to rest before he can't move any more.”
She'd nodded then, too. She hadn't trusted her voice at all.
Now Chrysaor lies in loose coils on the baked earth behind the house, glittering ferociously in the summer light. Reeve goes out every day to sit with him and offer him rocks, but in truth she's doing it for herself. Chrysaor doesn't need the company, and he doesn't eat any more, either. He barely even moves. Just lies there, staring out over the drought-sick land sloping down through the heat haze to the town.
The doctor didn't ask for any money. Once he was done, he shook her hand, gave her a leaflet and drove off down the road, blanketing his car in red dust. Reeve keeps expecting a bill to arrive at some point, but so far none has. Maybe he didn't think he'd earned his fee.
She's grateful, in a distant sort of way that stands on the other side of her grief. She doesn't really have much left to pay him with.
Mostly she doesn't think about it. Mostly she sits out there under a makeshift canopy, boiling in her sweat from the heat reflected off Chrysaor's steely body, and tries to encourage him to eat.
There are a lot of other things she's supposed to be doing, a lot of bills that haven't been paid in a while, but Reeve still sits there with her bucket of rocks and her sunglasses, staring into the distance with her partner at her side.
A steelix's life is a story about hardening. From the moment they crawl out of the magma, little threads of lava writhing with uncanny life, the die is cast: first they cool to rock, then, as they grow and dodge the igneous boldore or deepdiver sableye who want to eat their silicon brains, the rock grows harder and harder, metal threads webbing their skin until they are fully encased in heavy iron armour. It never stops. They grow, and grow, and the metal spreads, and spreads, and one by one their nerves turn to nickel and their joints to immobile chromium, until their bodies become an inescapable prison and their brain crumbles into ore.
Chrysaor is not there yet. Steelix aren't known for their intellect, but he is still lucid (Reeve thinks) and he can move, if slowly. He just doesn't want to – hasn't for a long time, honestly. All he wants to do is lie there and let the metal take him.
He doesn't feel anything. Reeve knows this. He hasn't felt pain in at least five years, when the last of his surface nerves wore out. And it's not like he hasn't lived a rich, full life. Eight hundred is pretty good, even for a steelix.
She keeps sitting with him, though. With his ball in her pocket and a glass of rapidly warming water. Waiting and staring out at the russet dustbowl of the Eastern Goldfields.
One thing Reeve's always liked about this place is that nobody can ever sneak up on you. She used to live in Fremantle, what seems like a million years ago. Then Kalgoorlie. And now out here, in the middle of nowhere. She wanted space, after everything. Wanted to be able to see anyone coming miles before they arrived.
She can see someone coming now, as it happens. A big car cruising up the road from the town, rippling with heat and airborne dust. Probably coming for her, if she had to guess – if you're coming up this road, you're visiting her or you're committing to the longest drive of your life though the desert – but she can't think who it would be. People know her, of course; this town has a population of fifty-two, and even the weird misanthrope who lives fifteen miles away with a steelix and almost nothing else gets recognised. But nobody actually visits her.
She glances at Chrysaor.
“Might have visitors,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, but it's okay; she often doesn't speak for days at a time, ends up surprising herself with how hoarse and odd she sounds.
Chrysaor doesn't respond, so she repeats herself a little louder, forcing her voice into a lower register so he has a better chance of actually hearing, and this time he turns his head slowly to face her, neck squealing like a rusted-up hinge.
“Yeah,” she says, wanting to pat him but too aware that she'll burn her fingers to follow through. “Visitors.”
The car is closer now. Hard to say who it belongs to – no matter what colour your car, it ends up red after a while on these roads, and they all look the same then – but she supposes if the driver is after her, she'll find out soon enough.
Like every time, she considers returning Chrysaor and running, or heading inside and grabbing a weapon, but it's okay. It is, even if it doesn't feel like it; someone would have to really hate her to bother coming all the way out here just to hurt her. She keeps sitting there, waiting and sipping her warm water, and then the car disappears behind the house and the engine cuts out.
Car doors. Thanks so much. Ah, it's nothing. Well, I appreciate it anyway. Good luck, be seeing you. Yeah, goodbye.
Reeve listens without putting the pieces together. She knows these voices, or she thinks she does, but it's hard to place things these days. After all this time spent out here, she feels like she has only one concrete memory, and all the others have faded to rags with the sun and the dust.
The car starts up and drives away again, back towards town. A moment later, someone knocks at her door.
Another glance at Chrysaor, who doesn't appear to have noticed.
“I was right,” she says. “Visitors.”
More knocking.
“Christie?”
Reeve's heart almost stops.
“Christie? You home?”
(A spring morning. The bus. The stranger. Impact.)
“Christie, I saw Chrysaor from half a mile away. I know you're here.”
(Ms Kocharyan? You'll be fine. Please don't worry. You'll be fine.)
Reeve grips the arm of her lawn chair, hard enough that the sun-warm plastic shifts like stiff putty beneath her fingers. And maybe the air is putty too, because it's hard to breathe, her lungs frozen in her chest like Chrysaor's inside him―
He moves his heavy head with a squeal of tortured metal and the laser-like brilliance of the light on his jaw cuts across her eyes, slicing through the past and yanking her unceremoniously back to the present.
“Bloody hell,” she mutters, letting go of the chair with some effort. “How did she …?”
Her visitor is still knocking, still calling out.
“Christie! For God's sake!”
Reeve takes a breath, trying to calm her heart, and then she gets up and walks around the house to the front.
Just as she thought. There's a woman there, a few years her junior. Dyed-red hair, heavy mascara. A reddish sandshrew scratching placidly at the floorboards by her feet. Not knocking now, but leaning dispiritedly against the door.
“Christie,” she calls. “I'm not leaving. I literally can't, my car's totalled.”
Reeve folds her arms, puts her shoulder to the wall.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The woman starts away from the door, eyes wide, and freezes like a snake before a bird.
“Christie …?”
“Reeve.” She scowls. “Answer the bloody question, Kate.”
“Jesus,” says Kate. “What happened to you?”
The facetious answer is that she cut and bleached her hair, stopped wearing make-up and started doing manual labour. Some part of Reeve wants to say this, but the greater part of her is as dead as the left side of her face, and refuses to say anything at all. In the end, she comes out with a compromise:
“You know what happened.”
“Sorry.” Kate takes a step closer. She's staring, of course – everyone does – but she's trying not to. Kind of her. “I … can I come in?”
Reeve stares back for a long moment, at the woman who isn't quite her little sister any more, and then she sighs and waves her over.
“C'mon,” she says. “Back door's open.”
They sit in the kitchen, looking at each other across the table and their glasses of iced water. Kate looks older, although Reeve knows that she herself looks older still. Sun and work and fear have made her something other than what she was.
“I hit a kangaroo,” says Kate, after a moment. “Middle of nowhere, wrecked the car. Fortunately this guy Mike – I guess you probably know him – he came by and saw me.”
Mike is the son of Pete, who owns the nearest thing in town to a supermarket, and he spends a lot of his time driving back and forth between here and civilisation with a truck full of goods. If anyone would, he'd be around to rescue someone who just found out the hard way that while kangaroos sometimes survive cars, cars often don't survive kangaroos.
“I mention this because he asked why I was coming here,” Kate continues. “And I said I was looking for my sister, Christie.” Reeve is expecting herself to flinch, and manages to hide it by looking out of the window at Chrysaor, still coiled there, still staring down towards town. “He said he didn't know anyone called Christie, so I told him when I thought you'd arrived, all that, and he said that the only person who'd moved here since anyone could remember was this woman called Reeve and her steelix.”
Chrysaor. Reeve always knew that if anyone ever found her, it would be because of him; steelix aren't common partners. But she couldn't let him go, could she? Just like she can't let him go now. She cast aside everything and everyone else, but not him.
“I asked him where you lived, he offered to drive me out. And here I am.” Kate smiles stiffly. “It's so good to see you, Christie.”
“Reeve.” She feels bad as soon as the word leaves her mouth, but it has to be said. “Reeve Winter.”
Kate looks like she might cry. From under the table, Reeve hears the scratching of claws, and knows that Sands is coming for her. The way Chrysaor did for his own partner just a few minutes ago.
“I … I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't know what I was expecting.”
“But I'm not it.”
“I wasn't gonna say that.”
“No,” agrees Reeve. “You weren't.”
A long pause. Humming of the fridge. Crunch of dirt as Chrysaor moves his tail slightly to the left.
Reeve looks at him, and breathes in.
“I'm sorry too,” she says. “But I just had to go.”
“I'm not angry. I mean I was. For ages. But not now.” Kate gets up, starts moving around the table. Reeve lets her. “I've been looking for the past six years, Ch― Reeve. I had no idea you were even … I thought you'd have gone to another city or something. We were worried. That note you left …” She shakes her head. “Police said you're not a missing person if you just don't want to be found. So I did it all by myself.” A crooked sort of smile. “I don't even know how I managed it. Asked a lot of people if they'd seen a woman with a steelix, I guess. But I'm so glad I did.”
Kate gets closer as she speaks, and then she reaches out and Reeve stands up to be hugged.
“I missed you,” Kate whispers, her voice thick with tears, and Reeve sighs and holds her closer.
“Yeah,” she says, tonelessly. “I missed you too.”
Chrysaor would have saved her. In his day, he was unstoppable: twenty-seven tonnes of metal and stone, so huge that he was barred from gym challenges. Too big for the arenas, too big to be more than stung by the attacks of opponent pokémon – and too big to hit them back; he had trouble tracking anything smaller than a human, and even more difficulty actually moving fast enough to hit it.
So he was her mascot more than anything, back on her trainer journey: a massive presence at her side, happy to slither along next to her and shred the ground when she was on the trail and to wait outside the city limits or in his ball when she was visiting civilisation. What exactly he got from his partnership with her she never knew. Most pokémon join up with a person to get stronger, and according to Reeve's research it's usually only onix that partner with you; steelix are old, slow, self-assured. Already part of a different world. Geological rather than human.
But he did partner with her. And he didn't want to leave after the journey was over, either; she released Alix and Leighton, and they both left – though Alix flew back to visit a couple of times a year until Reeve moved – but Chrysaor stuck around. He spent most of his time offshore, swimming around near Carnac Island and diving further out to eat bits of seafloor; the second Reeve set foot on the beach, though, he would surface and head for shore, a million cameras flashing as tourists took pictures. Coming to find his partner.
There aren't a lot of ways that a steelix and a human can interact; steelix armour is too thick for them to even feel the touch of human hands. But he kept coming back for her, and she kept coming back for him, and somehow this series of haphazard meetings was enough to keep the love alive.
So he would have saved her. But she was on a bus, and he was out at sea, and so there was nothing at all he could do to stop the collision of fist with head that shattered half her face and everything she'd ever known.
Kate stays. Her car is being seen to in town, but Cole is going to have to order in some parts, and it will take a while. Have a spare room, says Reeve. I'll drag the junk out and make up the bed for you.
She has a lot of questions, and Reeve has a lot of time on her hands. What happened? How did you end up here? What do you do now? (Ran away. This was as remote as I could find. I break rocks and build things.) She takes Reeve's car into town and returns with a bunch of nicer food than Reeve thought you could even get in this place, spices the overheated air with cinnamon and fenugreek. The meals taste like their childhood, which Reeve suspects is some kind of ploy to lure her back to Fremantle, but which she appreciates nonetheless.
Kate says she's not really an account manager any more, that she now manages the account managers. (She says it in a way that asks Reeve to laugh, but Reeve hasn't laughed in so long that she can't figure out how to do it.) She has a week off work – saves up her annual leave so she can go looking a couple of times a year – but she can get one more if she needs to. Her new boss' cousin disappeared when he was twelve, and he understands Kate's need to keep searching for her sister.
Reeve has to think about it for a while, but in the end she decides she's glad. I'm glad, she says, and Kate smiles like her sister's approval really matters. Maybe it does, to her.
Like Reeve would know.
“You spend a lot of time out here, huh.”
It's Kate, coming out with two cups of iced coffee, redolent with ground spices. Privately, Reeve is sure that their father's treasured coffee recipe is intended to be drunk hot, but she supposes he never really expected it to be transplanted from Ejmiatsin to a January heatwave out here on the fringes of the desert.
“Yeah,” she says, taking one cup and sipping. It tastes exactly as good as she remembers. Funny how Kate has managed to hang onto these things; even before she ran off, Reeve couldn't have made any of this stuff. “I like to be with Chrysaor.”
Kate follows her gaze. Chrysaor is as he always is, hulking, motionless. After a few seconds, he notices that he's being watched and creaks his head slowly around to face them, his chipped carnelian irises grinding as he tries to focus.
Sands trots out from behind Kate's heels, peering curiously up into Chrysaor's face. He leans back on his haunches, squeaks, but gets no response. He's too small and his voice too high for Chrysaor to even know he exists.
“He's old now, huh,” says Kate. “A real distinguished gentleman.”
“Yeah.”
Several long seconds pass. Kate stays standing out in the sun, looking impossibly glamorous in her shabby surroundings; Reeve stays in her chair beneath the canopy, feeling her glass growing warm in her hand. Sands gives up on trying to get Chrysaor's attention and shuffles off to investigate the bucket of rocks on the off chance it has any tasty bugs inside it.
Okay.
“He's dying,” says Reeve, closing her eyes. “When steelix get old, they turn to metal. On the inside. Burrow down deep underground and turn into ore deposits.”
Kate swears softly.
“Sorry, Ch― Reeve. I had no idea.”
“It's okay.”
It very obviously isn't. Kate has been here three days, and Reeve has spent all of them slowly cooking herself out here at Chrysaor's side. There's no way Kate hasn't figured out how things stand by now.
“But he's stuck around, huh?” she asks. “Hasn't gone yet?”
“Nope.”
Kate looks from her to Chrysaor and back again, then sits down in the second chair that Reeve put out under the canopy the day she arrived. She hasn't done this much; it's even hotter under here than it is out in the open. But she does it now, with a studied sort of casualness that would probably fool anyone who didn't know her as well as Reeve.
“Are you going to let him?” she asks.
Chrysaor swivels around again, turning towards the desert this time. Looking out through the haze at the gum trees and muddy columns of stone. At the wild.
Reeve says nothing. As with the doctor, she doesn't trust her voice at all.
Chrysaor accepted every move without question. He swapped the trail for Fremantle, Fremantle for Kalgoorlie, Kalgoorlie for this lonely nowhere house, all as if it were nothing. He needed space to live, of course, to swim or dig or just to slither around looking for stones and dirt to eat – but at heart, like any other partnered pokémon, he needed her. Like when she'd come down to the beach back in the city and watch him surge out of the water, glaring in all directions. Trying to figure out which of these tiny fleshbags was his partner.
Or when they'd walk together off the back of the plot behind her bungalow in Kalgoorlie. She'd come home tired and aching, her body unused to this kind of work, and slip around the side of the house to where he held court in the yard. He'd be waiting, probably already uncurled, and the two of them would just go, out into the arid nothingness and the groves of silvery trees.
It's always hard to tell what a steelix is feeling; their faces are immobile, their eyes unreadable, their emotions mineral and alien. You have to watch their actions instead to find the traces of their affection. Take Chrysaor: he didn't just bulldoze through the vegetation the way a wild steelix would; he stuck close to her, wound his coils effortfully between trees so that he never tore down more than the odd branch. Not because she told him to, but because he had seen her reaction when he flattened woodland and raised the stink of broken eucalyptus leaves, and didn't want to do that to her again.
Sometimes he'd make a ring of his coils around her and rear up to watch, the way he might around a new-formed onix. Sometimes he'd lower his head to the earth so she could put a hand on the hard, dry lenses of his eyes, the only part of his body where he could feel her touch. Sometimes he'd curl his tail around for her to sit down on, and lift her up towards the sun, steady as a rock. Sometimes she would let go of him up there, hold out her hands to the sky and know that if he wanted to he could let her drop forty feet and break both her legs.
He never did that. And she never jumped, either. No matter how tempting it was.
Once she gets over how mean and dirty her sister's life has become, Kate's excitement is always there, just beneath the surface. Sometimes Reeve will look up and catch her staring with a wild, desperate brightness in her eyes. It's hard to take; Reeve did this, after all. And it's not like she didn't know that it would hurt people. It's just that she had no idea what else she could possibly do.
They talk. Or Kate does; she learns early on that Reeve can't go into detail, can only repeat the same bare facts over and over, and stops asking. She talks to Reeve about her job, about her colleagues, her friends. She visits their father's grave once a month and their mother in the care home every week, unless she's out of town on one of her find-Christie trips. It's okay, she says. Mum calls me Christie at least as much as she calls me Kate, sometimes more. She doesn't know you're not there.
Reeve detects no bitterness in her as she speaks. It is this, more than the words, that snatches away her voice and stops her from replying.
In the evenings they sit there together beneath the star-heavy sky, swatting insects and drinking the wine Kate bought when she picked up all the food and spices. (Reeve drinks beer these days, when she drinks at all.) These are quiet times for the most part, barring the odd squeak from Sands as he snuffles around in the dirt at their feet. Kate puts the radio on and leans her head on Reeve's shoulder like they're kids again, humming along to the music.
The first time she does this, two nights into her stay, Reeve freezes up in fear at the sudden contact. Kate pulls away, looking up at her with worried eyes, but Reeve takes a breath and puts an arm out to pull her back again, and they sit in silence, listening to Pavement and watching the stars ripple in the heat radiating from Chrysaor's spiny back.
“Is he sleeping?” Kate asks.
“No.” The answer feels too curt, too rude, so Reeve tries to expand it: “They don't. When they're this old. So slow they're barely even awake.”
Kate nods, her hair brushing Reeve's throat.
“How old is that?”
“The doctor says eight hundred.”
Kate puts down her glass and slips her hand into Reeve's own. It feels small and smooth in a way that bothers Reeve; she wasn't really aware how rough her own hands had become until now.
“A distinguished gentleman,” she says, like before. “I'm glad you took him with you. He would've been heartbroken. And … and it's good to know you weren't alone.”
Reeve swallows.
“I had to take him. I couldn't have … I couldn't. I can't. You know?”
She's reaching for the words, but they won't come, no matter what. She reaches for a long time, willing Kate to speak and end this awful, broken moment – and then she does and it's worse than the waiting.
“He loves you,” she says, sitting up in her chair. “He won't ever leave you unless you tell him to. I'm sorry, Reeve. He'll die here unless you do something.”
It's like being stabbed in the gut, messy and graceless. For a brief and terrifying moment Reeve wants to hit her, but she knows too well what happens when a strong person hits someone to follow through.
“I hate you,” she murmurs. Kate waits for her to say something else, but she doesn't, and in the end she scoops up Sands and her glass and goes inside.
Running was so, so easy. Frighteningly easy. Christie Kocharyan was a woman with a lot of ties, but every single one fell apart at the lightest touch. She had a job; she just didn't go back. She had an apartment; she walked out, with all her possessions still inside. She had a family; she stopped visiting, left them a note saying she couldn't stay here and not to come after her.
Easy. Even the medication, honestly. It was just prescription painkillers; she decided she could live without them. The important stuff, the reconstruction, that was all done with. And with that finished, Christie Kocharyan didn't need to exist at all. She recalled Chrysaor to his ball, bought an old car, and vanished.
Kalgoorlie was okay. She lived right on the very edge of town, in a scruffy house that backed onto the wild emptiness surrounding the highway. Room for Chrysaor to roam, although even then he was starting to slow down. (There are no sudden changes when it comes to steelix; their hearts beat just six times a minute, and it takes them over a month to so much as contract a cold.) She dug ditches and cut plants, waited tables some evenings and taught herself how to build things at the weekends. It was infinitely rougher than her old life, where she sat at a desk and wrote emails, but nobody would find her, and that was what mattered.
Except that people could find her, if they wanted: just drive east, and after a while you'll end up in Kalgoorlie. If someone, say someone who rides buses and knows how to throw a punch, wanted to track her down, they – he – could do that pretty easily. And besides, Kalgoorlie is a decent-sized city. Full of strangers. Full of people who might at any moment turn around and break someone's face so badly that parts of it would never move again.
So she moved a second time: left everything, jumped back in the car and drove. To this place, to the smallest life in the biggest void she could find. Somewhere nobody would even look, let alone actually find her. Somewhere tiny enough that it has no strangers at all.
And then Chrysaor coiled up behind the house and stopped moving, and Reeve moved her lawn chair and canopy over to him, and there you go.
Ecce homo, Christie Kocharyan might have said, but Reeve Winter never said anything at all.
Kate doesn't push it. She continues to tidy up Reeve's life, cooking and cleaning, killing the bugs, throwing out trash. It's a full-time job, honestly; the house had been empty for five years when Reeve arrived, and though she's fixed enough of what was broken to make it liveable, she hasn't taken good care of the place. Sands trots along at Kate's side, his scales as red as the dust she wages war on, and scratches patterns in the dirt with his claws.
Reeve watches them both silently. She isn't sure if she's grateful. She isn't sure about anything, really, least of all the way Kate has returned to her and slid so elegantly back into her life. Obviously she'd thought about this before, about what she'd do if her family ever found her, but somehow she expected that the shock would last longer. That they would be too stunned and joyous to even interact for days.
Chrysaor doesn't do anything at all. Reeve knows she has to release him, before this nothing becomes the last thing he ever does, but she doesn't. Or she can't. She isn't sure how charitable she should be to herself about this, given how much she's hurting Chrysaor right now.
On the fifth day, Kate asks about the unopened mail in the hall, and Reeve shrugs, tells her whatever. She comes out to Reeve's canopy a little while later with a handful of letters and a worried expression.
“Did you know these are bills?” she asks helplessly, unable to figure out how to respond to the weirdness of the situation.
“Yeah,” says Reeve, without looking at her.
“They're saying your electricity will be shut off on the sixth.”
“Makes sense. I haven't paid 'em.”
Kate stands there for a while, fidgeting with the letters.
“Are you okay for money?” she asks, hesitant. “I, um … I mean this isn't even much, so … like I can …”
Reeve keeps looking out at the town, distant and tiny beneath the uncompromising blue void of the sky. So bright it hurts her eyes.
“I'm good for the money,” she says. “Just need to go back to work.”
“How long have you been, um … unemployed?”
“Since Chrysaor.”
She's not looking, but Reeve can sense Kate's attention shifting over to him again.
“Reeve,” she says, in a quiet voice that goes in softly and explodes into a ball of fish-hooks deep in Reeve's brain. “Please. I want you to be okay.”
“I'm fine, Kate. I'm fine.”
“No, you're not!” she cries, the papers crumpling in her clenched fist. “Christ, Reeve, I can't let you die out here. D'you hear me?” She marches over to place herself between Reeve and the horizon, forcing her to look at her. “D'you hear me? I am not abandoning you!”
Reeve can hear the last six years in her voice; it's almost as exhausting as the heat. She closes her eyes while she thinks of a response, except she can't think of one and the moment stretches out into rudeness.
“Don't bloody ignore me,” snaps Kate, after a few seconds. “This is important, you know that. You―”
“Please,” says Reeve. “Please, just let it go.”
“Let it …?” Something seems to drain from Kate then. Reeve senses it even with her eyes shut, as if a cloud has passed over the sun. “God, Chri― Reeve. Damn it.”
She's not shouting now. Reeve drags her eyes open, and sees her standing there with her fingers to her temple, looking as tired as Reeve feels.
“I'm not asking you to come home,” she says. “I'm not even asking you to like me, all right? I just want you to be okay. If that means helping with your bills and driving out here every weekend to check on you, that's what I'll do.”
Reeve has to stare. This is Kate, right? Timid little Kate. When did she get to be so … like this? She remembers being thirteen and freshly returned from her trainer journey, walking Kate to the start of the League trail to begin her own. What if I get lost, Kate had asked, fidgeting with the straps of her backpack, and Reeve had smiled and patted her shoulder. You'll definitely get lost, she'd said. That's maybe the funnest part. And Kate had smiled back and hugged Sands anxiously to her chest.
How you get from that to this is beyond Reeve, although she suspects that having your sister vanish without a trace might have something to do with it.
“What about Mum?” she asks. It's not what she meant to say, but it's what her mouth comes up with.
“What about her?” Kate folds her arms, the bills crinkling against her chest. “I'll look after both of you if I have to. You're family.”
She says it like a threat: one wrong move and you're family, buster.
“You don't want to do that,” Reeve says, but it sounds unconvincing even to her, and Kate just sighs, shakes her head.
“I want you to be okay,” she repeats. “I already told you.”
Honestly, Reeve has nothing left to say to that.
There have been nights when Reeve can't go back inside. When there are shadow people in the corners of the room and strangers on buses in her nightmares, their features morphing before her eyes. (What colour was the fist? Reeve does not, cannot know; even the witnesses on the bus don't agree.) On nights like these Reeve drags the battered cushion off her chair for a pillow and curls up on the hard red earth, as close to Chrysaor as the heat will allow.
They won't find her here. Or if they do, she'll see them coming. Or if she doesn't, they won't dare hurt her when they see Chrysaor.
She's pretty sure Kate's noticed her doing this, but if she has she never mentions it.
The next day, while she's picking herself up off the ground and making the most of her chance to pet Chrysaor before he heats up in the rising sun, Kate brings her some coffee. Black, thin, unspiced. Reeve sips it and looks at her.
“I don't do it every time,” says Kate. “Otherwise it wouldn't be special any more.”
Something about this sentiment is touchingly childlike. Reeve almost smiles. Timid little Kate isn't so far gone after all.
“I'm sorry if I upset you yesterday,” Kate says.
Reeve shrugs.
“It's fine,” she replies. “You're probably right, anyway.”
“Yeah, well.” Kate twitches her nose. A little nervous tic that she kicked in her teens, coming back out of nowhere. “Look, I know you have your own thing now, and I know I don't get it at all, but I want to help.” She pauses – has to make herself do it; Reeve can see it in the lines of her face and the flutter of her fingers – then forges on. “But I don't know if that's what I'm doing here. I don't know if you want Dad's food and help with bills and someone to clean your shower.” She's been talking at Reeve's chin, mostly, but now she looks up and holds her eye. “What do you need, Reeve? Just tell me. 'Cause otherwise I think I'm just gonna make you hate me, and I can't lose you again.”
The words crowd Reeve's throat, unable to push past one another and reach her mouth. She needs so many things, has needed them for so long now, and has no idea what any of them are.
Her coffee spills over her knuckles: her hand has started shaking, although she can't feel it at all. Kate takes it from her and hugs her tight.
“Please, Reeve,” she whispers. “Let me help.”
“I want to,” mutters Reeve. “I want to … I have to – to …”
She pulls away, turns to Chrysaor, humped and immobile in the sand. He looks back with only the barest semblance of interest.
Kate's fingers tighten on her arm.
“Okay,” she says. “You know it has to happen, Reeve. It's time to let go.”
“Yeah,” says Reeve, her voice tearing from her like a wing ripped off a fly. “Yeah, I know.”
The heat builds fast this time of year. If they're going to do it today, and Kate seems quietly certain that they should, the window of opportunity will close by mid-morning, when Chrysaor gets too hot to touch. So. Here they are. Two sisters, a sandshrew, a steelix.
A resolution.
“Take your time,” says Kate, squeezing her hand gently. Somehow when she says it this is a possibility instead of just mockery, so Reeve takes a step forward and puts her hands on Chrysaor's eye. She stays there for a long moment, staring into the fading red of his iris and wondering where the lustre went, and then she pats it three times and takes a long step back.
“Time to go, mate,” she says. He won't hear – the signal for him was the three pats, not the words – but she needs to say it anyway. “Time to go.”
It takes a few seconds for the thought to work its way through his crumbling brain – but it does make it in the end, and then for the first time in what feels like forever, Chrysaor uncoils.
Scream of metal, clouds of dust, glare of reflected sunlight; he rears like a bomb going off in slow motion, filling Reeve's eyes with grit and blotting out the sun with the shadow of his massive head – and then, just as slowly, he descends again to nudge Reeve's hand clumsily with his snout. He almost breaks her arm doing it, but she wouldn't have it any other way.
“Yeah,” she says. Again for herself. “Goodbye, Chrys. Goodbye.”
He creaks open his mouth and spits out a noise like rocks grinding together, so loud and solid Reeve could swear she can feel the impact of it on her chest. And he turns, dragging his huge body after him, and slams his head into the ground.
Four blows later, he's made a hole with which he's satisfied, and by then all Reeve can see is his tail through the choking dust-cloud; she knows he's ready when the grinding gets louder, his segments rotating to drill him down into the earth like a screw into wood. The ground shakes – Sands squeaks and runs for cover – the dust rakes Reeve's face like russet talons―
The tremors fade, and the dust slowly settles to reveal an empty plain, stretching away to a distant stand of gum trees. There is no sign of Chrysaor except a mound of dirt and broken rocks around a huge, dark hole.
Reeve takes a long, shaky breath, airborne grit clawing at her throat. She thinks she'd like to cry, but she doesn't think she can, even with all this crap in her eyes. She considers falling to her knees instead; it seems like it might work, so she tries it – and finds it doesn't work at all: she falls and keeps falling, her legs suddenly too weak even for kneeling, and only then, as she crumples into the dirt, does she realise that he's gone.
The world is enormous without him next to her. So huge that Reeve has to be helped back inside, shoulders hunched against the emptiness of the sky and the plain. Inside, things are a little easier; when Kate brings her into the kitchen, she is able to turn the tap and wash her eyes out herself. This is, however, more or less the extent of her faculties right now. Once Kate has her settled on the couch, she finds she can't move, or let go of Kate's hand.
“Okay,” says Kate, when she tries to get up to get Reeve some water and is brought up short by her iron grip. “Okay, that's fine. I'm right here, okay?”
Reeve nods. Kate kicks off her sandals and pulls her legs up onto the sofa, curling into Reeve like a kid into her big sister. Maybe she's calculated it, maybe it's instinct, but either way it works, something golden seeping through Kate's skin and into Reeve's.
He's gone. Chrysaor is gone, and the world is still here, still as brutal and as careless as ever. If not for Kate weighing her down, Reeve feels like she might float up into the air and dissolve, her broken face and pointless muscles vanishing into the heat haze the way Chrysaor did into the earth.
“Are you okay?” asks Kate, after a little while.
Reeve tries to answer, then again. On the third time, it sticks.
“No.”
Kate nods.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't think I really know what he was to you. But he was a lot, and I'm sorry.”
They sit up a little, as if this is some kind of signal. Moving carefully, deliberately, Reeve loosens her grip on Kate's hand. Her fingers have left marks, but Kate doesn't show any sign of pain.
“What do you want to do now?”
“I don't know,” Reeve answers. “Haven't for a long time.”
Pause. Kate turns to look at her.
“You can absolutely say no,” she says, “but I have a spare room. And absolutely no expectation that you'll do anything in return. Ever. No strings at all.”
Reeve thinks about it. On the one hand: Fremantle, buses, strangers, life. On the other: emptiness, dirt, a hole in the yard. The desperate safety of solitude.
There's no Chrysaor. Wherever she goes, she will carry his absence with her, in the same rotting cyst that holds her trauma. But there's Kate. And maybe, after six years, she's ready for that.
“I'm not sure I can be Christie again,” she says, tentative, hardly hoping to hope; Kate just smiles, sweet and sad.
“D'you think you could be my sister, though?” she asks.
A moment. Another.
Reeve takes a slow, trembling breath.
“I think … I think maybe yes.”
“I would've accepted 'no' as well,” says Kate seriously. “I meant it when I said no strings. But, um, thanks, Reeve. Sis.”
What to say? Reeve has no idea. She kisses Kate's cheek instead, something she vaguely remembers doing as a child, and wonders if maybe she might be less sane than she thought.
Later, sitting in Kate's beautiful air-conditioned car with Sands on her lap, she asks about this, and Kate shrugs. I don't know, she says. Like it makes sense, what you did. It's just not something that people do. You know?
Reeve nods, her eyes locked on the rear-view mirror and the desert dwindling into a violent gleam in its depths. Yeah, she says. I know.
Content warnings for: (remembered) violence, alcohol, death, mental illness, dementia and trauma.
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
Chrysaor is old. How old is difficult to say, but the doctor said probably about eight hundred.
“Evolved before you met him, right?” he'd asked. Reeve had nodded. “Eight hundred,” he repeated. “Maybe a little older. You know they never stop growing, and he's big for a septacentenarian.”
There had been a pause, and then he'd said it:
“Might be time to let him go,” he told her. “He needs to find somewhere to rest before he can't move any more.”
She'd nodded then, too. She hadn't trusted her voice at all.
Now Chrysaor lies in loose coils on the baked earth behind the house, glittering ferociously in the summer light. Reeve goes out every day to sit with him and offer him rocks, but in truth she's doing it for herself. Chrysaor doesn't need the company, and he doesn't eat any more, either. He barely even moves. Just lies there, staring out over the drought-sick land sloping down through the heat haze to the town.
The doctor didn't ask for any money. Once he was done, he shook her hand, gave her a leaflet and drove off down the road, blanketing his car in red dust. Reeve keeps expecting a bill to arrive at some point, but so far none has. Maybe he didn't think he'd earned his fee.
She's grateful, in a distant sort of way that stands on the other side of her grief. She doesn't really have much left to pay him with.
Mostly she doesn't think about it. Mostly she sits out there under a makeshift canopy, boiling in her sweat from the heat reflected off Chrysaor's steely body, and tries to encourage him to eat.
There are a lot of other things she's supposed to be doing, a lot of bills that haven't been paid in a while, but Reeve still sits there with her bucket of rocks and her sunglasses, staring into the distance with her partner at her side.
A steelix's life is a story about hardening. From the moment they crawl out of the magma, little threads of lava writhing with uncanny life, the die is cast: first they cool to rock, then, as they grow and dodge the igneous boldore or deepdiver sableye who want to eat their silicon brains, the rock grows harder and harder, metal threads webbing their skin until they are fully encased in heavy iron armour. It never stops. They grow, and grow, and the metal spreads, and spreads, and one by one their nerves turn to nickel and their joints to immobile chromium, until their bodies become an inescapable prison and their brain crumbles into ore.
Chrysaor is not there yet. Steelix aren't known for their intellect, but he is still lucid (Reeve thinks) and he can move, if slowly. He just doesn't want to – hasn't for a long time, honestly. All he wants to do is lie there and let the metal take him.
He doesn't feel anything. Reeve knows this. He hasn't felt pain in at least five years, when the last of his surface nerves wore out. And it's not like he hasn't lived a rich, full life. Eight hundred is pretty good, even for a steelix.
She keeps sitting with him, though. With his ball in her pocket and a glass of rapidly warming water. Waiting and staring out at the russet dustbowl of the Eastern Goldfields.
One thing Reeve's always liked about this place is that nobody can ever sneak up on you. She used to live in Fremantle, what seems like a million years ago. Then Kalgoorlie. And now out here, in the middle of nowhere. She wanted space, after everything. Wanted to be able to see anyone coming miles before they arrived.
She can see someone coming now, as it happens. A big car cruising up the road from the town, rippling with heat and airborne dust. Probably coming for her, if she had to guess – if you're coming up this road, you're visiting her or you're committing to the longest drive of your life though the desert – but she can't think who it would be. People know her, of course; this town has a population of fifty-two, and even the weird misanthrope who lives fifteen miles away with a steelix and almost nothing else gets recognised. But nobody actually visits her.
She glances at Chrysaor.
“Might have visitors,” she says. Her voice sounds strange, but it's okay; she often doesn't speak for days at a time, ends up surprising herself with how hoarse and odd she sounds.
Chrysaor doesn't respond, so she repeats herself a little louder, forcing her voice into a lower register so he has a better chance of actually hearing, and this time he turns his head slowly to face her, neck squealing like a rusted-up hinge.
“Yeah,” she says, wanting to pat him but too aware that she'll burn her fingers to follow through. “Visitors.”
The car is closer now. Hard to say who it belongs to – no matter what colour your car, it ends up red after a while on these roads, and they all look the same then – but she supposes if the driver is after her, she'll find out soon enough.
Like every time, she considers returning Chrysaor and running, or heading inside and grabbing a weapon, but it's okay. It is, even if it doesn't feel like it; someone would have to really hate her to bother coming all the way out here just to hurt her. She keeps sitting there, waiting and sipping her warm water, and then the car disappears behind the house and the engine cuts out.
Car doors. Thanks so much. Ah, it's nothing. Well, I appreciate it anyway. Good luck, be seeing you. Yeah, goodbye.
Reeve listens without putting the pieces together. She knows these voices, or she thinks she does, but it's hard to place things these days. After all this time spent out here, she feels like she has only one concrete memory, and all the others have faded to rags with the sun and the dust.
The car starts up and drives away again, back towards town. A moment later, someone knocks at her door.
Another glance at Chrysaor, who doesn't appear to have noticed.
“I was right,” she says. “Visitors.”
More knocking.
“Christie?”
Reeve's heart almost stops.
“Christie? You home?”
(A spring morning. The bus. The stranger. Impact.)
“Christie, I saw Chrysaor from half a mile away. I know you're here.”
(Ms Kocharyan? You'll be fine. Please don't worry. You'll be fine.)
Reeve grips the arm of her lawn chair, hard enough that the sun-warm plastic shifts like stiff putty beneath her fingers. And maybe the air is putty too, because it's hard to breathe, her lungs frozen in her chest like Chrysaor's inside him―
He moves his heavy head with a squeal of tortured metal and the laser-like brilliance of the light on his jaw cuts across her eyes, slicing through the past and yanking her unceremoniously back to the present.
“Bloody hell,” she mutters, letting go of the chair with some effort. “How did she …?”
Her visitor is still knocking, still calling out.
“Christie! For God's sake!”
Reeve takes a breath, trying to calm her heart, and then she gets up and walks around the house to the front.
Just as she thought. There's a woman there, a few years her junior. Dyed-red hair, heavy mascara. A reddish sandshrew scratching placidly at the floorboards by her feet. Not knocking now, but leaning dispiritedly against the door.
“Christie,” she calls. “I'm not leaving. I literally can't, my car's totalled.”
Reeve folds her arms, puts her shoulder to the wall.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
The woman starts away from the door, eyes wide, and freezes like a snake before a bird.
“Christie …?”
“Reeve.” She scowls. “Answer the bloody question, Kate.”
“Jesus,” says Kate. “What happened to you?”
The facetious answer is that she cut and bleached her hair, stopped wearing make-up and started doing manual labour. Some part of Reeve wants to say this, but the greater part of her is as dead as the left side of her face, and refuses to say anything at all. In the end, she comes out with a compromise:
“You know what happened.”
“Sorry.” Kate takes a step closer. She's staring, of course – everyone does – but she's trying not to. Kind of her. “I … can I come in?”
Reeve stares back for a long moment, at the woman who isn't quite her little sister any more, and then she sighs and waves her over.
“C'mon,” she says. “Back door's open.”
They sit in the kitchen, looking at each other across the table and their glasses of iced water. Kate looks older, although Reeve knows that she herself looks older still. Sun and work and fear have made her something other than what she was.
“I hit a kangaroo,” says Kate, after a moment. “Middle of nowhere, wrecked the car. Fortunately this guy Mike – I guess you probably know him – he came by and saw me.”
Mike is the son of Pete, who owns the nearest thing in town to a supermarket, and he spends a lot of his time driving back and forth between here and civilisation with a truck full of goods. If anyone would, he'd be around to rescue someone who just found out the hard way that while kangaroos sometimes survive cars, cars often don't survive kangaroos.
“I mention this because he asked why I was coming here,” Kate continues. “And I said I was looking for my sister, Christie.” Reeve is expecting herself to flinch, and manages to hide it by looking out of the window at Chrysaor, still coiled there, still staring down towards town. “He said he didn't know anyone called Christie, so I told him when I thought you'd arrived, all that, and he said that the only person who'd moved here since anyone could remember was this woman called Reeve and her steelix.”
Chrysaor. Reeve always knew that if anyone ever found her, it would be because of him; steelix aren't common partners. But she couldn't let him go, could she? Just like she can't let him go now. She cast aside everything and everyone else, but not him.
“I asked him where you lived, he offered to drive me out. And here I am.” Kate smiles stiffly. “It's so good to see you, Christie.”
“Reeve.” She feels bad as soon as the word leaves her mouth, but it has to be said. “Reeve Winter.”
Kate looks like she might cry. From under the table, Reeve hears the scratching of claws, and knows that Sands is coming for her. The way Chrysaor did for his own partner just a few minutes ago.
“I … I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't know what I was expecting.”
“But I'm not it.”
“I wasn't gonna say that.”
“No,” agrees Reeve. “You weren't.”
A long pause. Humming of the fridge. Crunch of dirt as Chrysaor moves his tail slightly to the left.
Reeve looks at him, and breathes in.
“I'm sorry too,” she says. “But I just had to go.”
“I'm not angry. I mean I was. For ages. But not now.” Kate gets up, starts moving around the table. Reeve lets her. “I've been looking for the past six years, Ch― Reeve. I had no idea you were even … I thought you'd have gone to another city or something. We were worried. That note you left …” She shakes her head. “Police said you're not a missing person if you just don't want to be found. So I did it all by myself.” A crooked sort of smile. “I don't even know how I managed it. Asked a lot of people if they'd seen a woman with a steelix, I guess. But I'm so glad I did.”
Kate gets closer as she speaks, and then she reaches out and Reeve stands up to be hugged.
“I missed you,” Kate whispers, her voice thick with tears, and Reeve sighs and holds her closer.
“Yeah,” she says, tonelessly. “I missed you too.”
Chrysaor would have saved her. In his day, he was unstoppable: twenty-seven tonnes of metal and stone, so huge that he was barred from gym challenges. Too big for the arenas, too big to be more than stung by the attacks of opponent pokémon – and too big to hit them back; he had trouble tracking anything smaller than a human, and even more difficulty actually moving fast enough to hit it.
So he was her mascot more than anything, back on her trainer journey: a massive presence at her side, happy to slither along next to her and shred the ground when she was on the trail and to wait outside the city limits or in his ball when she was visiting civilisation. What exactly he got from his partnership with her she never knew. Most pokémon join up with a person to get stronger, and according to Reeve's research it's usually only onix that partner with you; steelix are old, slow, self-assured. Already part of a different world. Geological rather than human.
But he did partner with her. And he didn't want to leave after the journey was over, either; she released Alix and Leighton, and they both left – though Alix flew back to visit a couple of times a year until Reeve moved – but Chrysaor stuck around. He spent most of his time offshore, swimming around near Carnac Island and diving further out to eat bits of seafloor; the second Reeve set foot on the beach, though, he would surface and head for shore, a million cameras flashing as tourists took pictures. Coming to find his partner.
There aren't a lot of ways that a steelix and a human can interact; steelix armour is too thick for them to even feel the touch of human hands. But he kept coming back for her, and she kept coming back for him, and somehow this series of haphazard meetings was enough to keep the love alive.
So he would have saved her. But she was on a bus, and he was out at sea, and so there was nothing at all he could do to stop the collision of fist with head that shattered half her face and everything she'd ever known.
Kate stays. Her car is being seen to in town, but Cole is going to have to order in some parts, and it will take a while. Have a spare room, says Reeve. I'll drag the junk out and make up the bed for you.
She has a lot of questions, and Reeve has a lot of time on her hands. What happened? How did you end up here? What do you do now? (Ran away. This was as remote as I could find. I break rocks and build things.) She takes Reeve's car into town and returns with a bunch of nicer food than Reeve thought you could even get in this place, spices the overheated air with cinnamon and fenugreek. The meals taste like their childhood, which Reeve suspects is some kind of ploy to lure her back to Fremantle, but which she appreciates nonetheless.
Kate says she's not really an account manager any more, that she now manages the account managers. (She says it in a way that asks Reeve to laugh, but Reeve hasn't laughed in so long that she can't figure out how to do it.) She has a week off work – saves up her annual leave so she can go looking a couple of times a year – but she can get one more if she needs to. Her new boss' cousin disappeared when he was twelve, and he understands Kate's need to keep searching for her sister.
Reeve has to think about it for a while, but in the end she decides she's glad. I'm glad, she says, and Kate smiles like her sister's approval really matters. Maybe it does, to her.
Like Reeve would know.
“You spend a lot of time out here, huh.”
It's Kate, coming out with two cups of iced coffee, redolent with ground spices. Privately, Reeve is sure that their father's treasured coffee recipe is intended to be drunk hot, but she supposes he never really expected it to be transplanted from Ejmiatsin to a January heatwave out here on the fringes of the desert.
“Yeah,” she says, taking one cup and sipping. It tastes exactly as good as she remembers. Funny how Kate has managed to hang onto these things; even before she ran off, Reeve couldn't have made any of this stuff. “I like to be with Chrysaor.”
Kate follows her gaze. Chrysaor is as he always is, hulking, motionless. After a few seconds, he notices that he's being watched and creaks his head slowly around to face them, his chipped carnelian irises grinding as he tries to focus.
Sands trots out from behind Kate's heels, peering curiously up into Chrysaor's face. He leans back on his haunches, squeaks, but gets no response. He's too small and his voice too high for Chrysaor to even know he exists.
“He's old now, huh,” says Kate. “A real distinguished gentleman.”
“Yeah.”
Several long seconds pass. Kate stays standing out in the sun, looking impossibly glamorous in her shabby surroundings; Reeve stays in her chair beneath the canopy, feeling her glass growing warm in her hand. Sands gives up on trying to get Chrysaor's attention and shuffles off to investigate the bucket of rocks on the off chance it has any tasty bugs inside it.
Okay.
“He's dying,” says Reeve, closing her eyes. “When steelix get old, they turn to metal. On the inside. Burrow down deep underground and turn into ore deposits.”
Kate swears softly.
“Sorry, Ch― Reeve. I had no idea.”
“It's okay.”
It very obviously isn't. Kate has been here three days, and Reeve has spent all of them slowly cooking herself out here at Chrysaor's side. There's no way Kate hasn't figured out how things stand by now.
“But he's stuck around, huh?” she asks. “Hasn't gone yet?”
“Nope.”
Kate looks from her to Chrysaor and back again, then sits down in the second chair that Reeve put out under the canopy the day she arrived. She hasn't done this much; it's even hotter under here than it is out in the open. But she does it now, with a studied sort of casualness that would probably fool anyone who didn't know her as well as Reeve.
“Are you going to let him?” she asks.
Chrysaor swivels around again, turning towards the desert this time. Looking out through the haze at the gum trees and muddy columns of stone. At the wild.
Reeve says nothing. As with the doctor, she doesn't trust her voice at all.
Chrysaor accepted every move without question. He swapped the trail for Fremantle, Fremantle for Kalgoorlie, Kalgoorlie for this lonely nowhere house, all as if it were nothing. He needed space to live, of course, to swim or dig or just to slither around looking for stones and dirt to eat – but at heart, like any other partnered pokémon, he needed her. Like when she'd come down to the beach back in the city and watch him surge out of the water, glaring in all directions. Trying to figure out which of these tiny fleshbags was his partner.
Or when they'd walk together off the back of the plot behind her bungalow in Kalgoorlie. She'd come home tired and aching, her body unused to this kind of work, and slip around the side of the house to where he held court in the yard. He'd be waiting, probably already uncurled, and the two of them would just go, out into the arid nothingness and the groves of silvery trees.
It's always hard to tell what a steelix is feeling; their faces are immobile, their eyes unreadable, their emotions mineral and alien. You have to watch their actions instead to find the traces of their affection. Take Chrysaor: he didn't just bulldoze through the vegetation the way a wild steelix would; he stuck close to her, wound his coils effortfully between trees so that he never tore down more than the odd branch. Not because she told him to, but because he had seen her reaction when he flattened woodland and raised the stink of broken eucalyptus leaves, and didn't want to do that to her again.
Sometimes he'd make a ring of his coils around her and rear up to watch, the way he might around a new-formed onix. Sometimes he'd lower his head to the earth so she could put a hand on the hard, dry lenses of his eyes, the only part of his body where he could feel her touch. Sometimes he'd curl his tail around for her to sit down on, and lift her up towards the sun, steady as a rock. Sometimes she would let go of him up there, hold out her hands to the sky and know that if he wanted to he could let her drop forty feet and break both her legs.
He never did that. And she never jumped, either. No matter how tempting it was.
Once she gets over how mean and dirty her sister's life has become, Kate's excitement is always there, just beneath the surface. Sometimes Reeve will look up and catch her staring with a wild, desperate brightness in her eyes. It's hard to take; Reeve did this, after all. And it's not like she didn't know that it would hurt people. It's just that she had no idea what else she could possibly do.
They talk. Or Kate does; she learns early on that Reeve can't go into detail, can only repeat the same bare facts over and over, and stops asking. She talks to Reeve about her job, about her colleagues, her friends. She visits their father's grave once a month and their mother in the care home every week, unless she's out of town on one of her find-Christie trips. It's okay, she says. Mum calls me Christie at least as much as she calls me Kate, sometimes more. She doesn't know you're not there.
Reeve detects no bitterness in her as she speaks. It is this, more than the words, that snatches away her voice and stops her from replying.
In the evenings they sit there together beneath the star-heavy sky, swatting insects and drinking the wine Kate bought when she picked up all the food and spices. (Reeve drinks beer these days, when she drinks at all.) These are quiet times for the most part, barring the odd squeak from Sands as he snuffles around in the dirt at their feet. Kate puts the radio on and leans her head on Reeve's shoulder like they're kids again, humming along to the music.
The first time she does this, two nights into her stay, Reeve freezes up in fear at the sudden contact. Kate pulls away, looking up at her with worried eyes, but Reeve takes a breath and puts an arm out to pull her back again, and they sit in silence, listening to Pavement and watching the stars ripple in the heat radiating from Chrysaor's spiny back.
“Is he sleeping?” Kate asks.
“No.” The answer feels too curt, too rude, so Reeve tries to expand it: “They don't. When they're this old. So slow they're barely even awake.”
Kate nods, her hair brushing Reeve's throat.
“How old is that?”
“The doctor says eight hundred.”
Kate puts down her glass and slips her hand into Reeve's own. It feels small and smooth in a way that bothers Reeve; she wasn't really aware how rough her own hands had become until now.
“A distinguished gentleman,” she says, like before. “I'm glad you took him with you. He would've been heartbroken. And … and it's good to know you weren't alone.”
Reeve swallows.
“I had to take him. I couldn't have … I couldn't. I can't. You know?”
She's reaching for the words, but they won't come, no matter what. She reaches for a long time, willing Kate to speak and end this awful, broken moment – and then she does and it's worse than the waiting.
“He loves you,” she says, sitting up in her chair. “He won't ever leave you unless you tell him to. I'm sorry, Reeve. He'll die here unless you do something.”
It's like being stabbed in the gut, messy and graceless. For a brief and terrifying moment Reeve wants to hit her, but she knows too well what happens when a strong person hits someone to follow through.
“I hate you,” she murmurs. Kate waits for her to say something else, but she doesn't, and in the end she scoops up Sands and her glass and goes inside.
Running was so, so easy. Frighteningly easy. Christie Kocharyan was a woman with a lot of ties, but every single one fell apart at the lightest touch. She had a job; she just didn't go back. She had an apartment; she walked out, with all her possessions still inside. She had a family; she stopped visiting, left them a note saying she couldn't stay here and not to come after her.
Easy. Even the medication, honestly. It was just prescription painkillers; she decided she could live without them. The important stuff, the reconstruction, that was all done with. And with that finished, Christie Kocharyan didn't need to exist at all. She recalled Chrysaor to his ball, bought an old car, and vanished.
Kalgoorlie was okay. She lived right on the very edge of town, in a scruffy house that backed onto the wild emptiness surrounding the highway. Room for Chrysaor to roam, although even then he was starting to slow down. (There are no sudden changes when it comes to steelix; their hearts beat just six times a minute, and it takes them over a month to so much as contract a cold.) She dug ditches and cut plants, waited tables some evenings and taught herself how to build things at the weekends. It was infinitely rougher than her old life, where she sat at a desk and wrote emails, but nobody would find her, and that was what mattered.
Except that people could find her, if they wanted: just drive east, and after a while you'll end up in Kalgoorlie. If someone, say someone who rides buses and knows how to throw a punch, wanted to track her down, they – he – could do that pretty easily. And besides, Kalgoorlie is a decent-sized city. Full of strangers. Full of people who might at any moment turn around and break someone's face so badly that parts of it would never move again.
So she moved a second time: left everything, jumped back in the car and drove. To this place, to the smallest life in the biggest void she could find. Somewhere nobody would even look, let alone actually find her. Somewhere tiny enough that it has no strangers at all.
And then Chrysaor coiled up behind the house and stopped moving, and Reeve moved her lawn chair and canopy over to him, and there you go.
Ecce homo, Christie Kocharyan might have said, but Reeve Winter never said anything at all.
Kate doesn't push it. She continues to tidy up Reeve's life, cooking and cleaning, killing the bugs, throwing out trash. It's a full-time job, honestly; the house had been empty for five years when Reeve arrived, and though she's fixed enough of what was broken to make it liveable, she hasn't taken good care of the place. Sands trots along at Kate's side, his scales as red as the dust she wages war on, and scratches patterns in the dirt with his claws.
Reeve watches them both silently. She isn't sure if she's grateful. She isn't sure about anything, really, least of all the way Kate has returned to her and slid so elegantly back into her life. Obviously she'd thought about this before, about what she'd do if her family ever found her, but somehow she expected that the shock would last longer. That they would be too stunned and joyous to even interact for days.
Chrysaor doesn't do anything at all. Reeve knows she has to release him, before this nothing becomes the last thing he ever does, but she doesn't. Or she can't. She isn't sure how charitable she should be to herself about this, given how much she's hurting Chrysaor right now.
On the fifth day, Kate asks about the unopened mail in the hall, and Reeve shrugs, tells her whatever. She comes out to Reeve's canopy a little while later with a handful of letters and a worried expression.
“Did you know these are bills?” she asks helplessly, unable to figure out how to respond to the weirdness of the situation.
“Yeah,” says Reeve, without looking at her.
“They're saying your electricity will be shut off on the sixth.”
“Makes sense. I haven't paid 'em.”
Kate stands there for a while, fidgeting with the letters.
“Are you okay for money?” she asks, hesitant. “I, um … I mean this isn't even much, so … like I can …”
Reeve keeps looking out at the town, distant and tiny beneath the uncompromising blue void of the sky. So bright it hurts her eyes.
“I'm good for the money,” she says. “Just need to go back to work.”
“How long have you been, um … unemployed?”
“Since Chrysaor.”
She's not looking, but Reeve can sense Kate's attention shifting over to him again.
“Reeve,” she says, in a quiet voice that goes in softly and explodes into a ball of fish-hooks deep in Reeve's brain. “Please. I want you to be okay.”
“I'm fine, Kate. I'm fine.”
“No, you're not!” she cries, the papers crumpling in her clenched fist. “Christ, Reeve, I can't let you die out here. D'you hear me?” She marches over to place herself between Reeve and the horizon, forcing her to look at her. “D'you hear me? I am not abandoning you!”
Reeve can hear the last six years in her voice; it's almost as exhausting as the heat. She closes her eyes while she thinks of a response, except she can't think of one and the moment stretches out into rudeness.
“Don't bloody ignore me,” snaps Kate, after a few seconds. “This is important, you know that. You―”
“Please,” says Reeve. “Please, just let it go.”
“Let it …?” Something seems to drain from Kate then. Reeve senses it even with her eyes shut, as if a cloud has passed over the sun. “God, Chri― Reeve. Damn it.”
She's not shouting now. Reeve drags her eyes open, and sees her standing there with her fingers to her temple, looking as tired as Reeve feels.
“I'm not asking you to come home,” she says. “I'm not even asking you to like me, all right? I just want you to be okay. If that means helping with your bills and driving out here every weekend to check on you, that's what I'll do.”
Reeve has to stare. This is Kate, right? Timid little Kate. When did she get to be so … like this? She remembers being thirteen and freshly returned from her trainer journey, walking Kate to the start of the League trail to begin her own. What if I get lost, Kate had asked, fidgeting with the straps of her backpack, and Reeve had smiled and patted her shoulder. You'll definitely get lost, she'd said. That's maybe the funnest part. And Kate had smiled back and hugged Sands anxiously to her chest.
How you get from that to this is beyond Reeve, although she suspects that having your sister vanish without a trace might have something to do with it.
“What about Mum?” she asks. It's not what she meant to say, but it's what her mouth comes up with.
“What about her?” Kate folds her arms, the bills crinkling against her chest. “I'll look after both of you if I have to. You're family.”
She says it like a threat: one wrong move and you're family, buster.
“You don't want to do that,” Reeve says, but it sounds unconvincing even to her, and Kate just sighs, shakes her head.
“I want you to be okay,” she repeats. “I already told you.”
Honestly, Reeve has nothing left to say to that.
There have been nights when Reeve can't go back inside. When there are shadow people in the corners of the room and strangers on buses in her nightmares, their features morphing before her eyes. (What colour was the fist? Reeve does not, cannot know; even the witnesses on the bus don't agree.) On nights like these Reeve drags the battered cushion off her chair for a pillow and curls up on the hard red earth, as close to Chrysaor as the heat will allow.
They won't find her here. Or if they do, she'll see them coming. Or if she doesn't, they won't dare hurt her when they see Chrysaor.
She's pretty sure Kate's noticed her doing this, but if she has she never mentions it.
The next day, while she's picking herself up off the ground and making the most of her chance to pet Chrysaor before he heats up in the rising sun, Kate brings her some coffee. Black, thin, unspiced. Reeve sips it and looks at her.
“I don't do it every time,” says Kate. “Otherwise it wouldn't be special any more.”
Something about this sentiment is touchingly childlike. Reeve almost smiles. Timid little Kate isn't so far gone after all.
“I'm sorry if I upset you yesterday,” Kate says.
Reeve shrugs.
“It's fine,” she replies. “You're probably right, anyway.”
“Yeah, well.” Kate twitches her nose. A little nervous tic that she kicked in her teens, coming back out of nowhere. “Look, I know you have your own thing now, and I know I don't get it at all, but I want to help.” She pauses – has to make herself do it; Reeve can see it in the lines of her face and the flutter of her fingers – then forges on. “But I don't know if that's what I'm doing here. I don't know if you want Dad's food and help with bills and someone to clean your shower.” She's been talking at Reeve's chin, mostly, but now she looks up and holds her eye. “What do you need, Reeve? Just tell me. 'Cause otherwise I think I'm just gonna make you hate me, and I can't lose you again.”
The words crowd Reeve's throat, unable to push past one another and reach her mouth. She needs so many things, has needed them for so long now, and has no idea what any of them are.
Her coffee spills over her knuckles: her hand has started shaking, although she can't feel it at all. Kate takes it from her and hugs her tight.
“Please, Reeve,” she whispers. “Let me help.”
“I want to,” mutters Reeve. “I want to … I have to – to …”
She pulls away, turns to Chrysaor, humped and immobile in the sand. He looks back with only the barest semblance of interest.
Kate's fingers tighten on her arm.
“Okay,” she says. “You know it has to happen, Reeve. It's time to let go.”
“Yeah,” says Reeve, her voice tearing from her like a wing ripped off a fly. “Yeah, I know.”
The heat builds fast this time of year. If they're going to do it today, and Kate seems quietly certain that they should, the window of opportunity will close by mid-morning, when Chrysaor gets too hot to touch. So. Here they are. Two sisters, a sandshrew, a steelix.
A resolution.
“Take your time,” says Kate, squeezing her hand gently. Somehow when she says it this is a possibility instead of just mockery, so Reeve takes a step forward and puts her hands on Chrysaor's eye. She stays there for a long moment, staring into the fading red of his iris and wondering where the lustre went, and then she pats it three times and takes a long step back.
“Time to go, mate,” she says. He won't hear – the signal for him was the three pats, not the words – but she needs to say it anyway. “Time to go.”
It takes a few seconds for the thought to work its way through his crumbling brain – but it does make it in the end, and then for the first time in what feels like forever, Chrysaor uncoils.
Scream of metal, clouds of dust, glare of reflected sunlight; he rears like a bomb going off in slow motion, filling Reeve's eyes with grit and blotting out the sun with the shadow of his massive head – and then, just as slowly, he descends again to nudge Reeve's hand clumsily with his snout. He almost breaks her arm doing it, but she wouldn't have it any other way.
“Yeah,” she says. Again for herself. “Goodbye, Chrys. Goodbye.”
He creaks open his mouth and spits out a noise like rocks grinding together, so loud and solid Reeve could swear she can feel the impact of it on her chest. And he turns, dragging his huge body after him, and slams his head into the ground.
Four blows later, he's made a hole with which he's satisfied, and by then all Reeve can see is his tail through the choking dust-cloud; she knows he's ready when the grinding gets louder, his segments rotating to drill him down into the earth like a screw into wood. The ground shakes – Sands squeaks and runs for cover – the dust rakes Reeve's face like russet talons―
The tremors fade, and the dust slowly settles to reveal an empty plain, stretching away to a distant stand of gum trees. There is no sign of Chrysaor except a mound of dirt and broken rocks around a huge, dark hole.
Reeve takes a long, shaky breath, airborne grit clawing at her throat. She thinks she'd like to cry, but she doesn't think she can, even with all this crap in her eyes. She considers falling to her knees instead; it seems like it might work, so she tries it – and finds it doesn't work at all: she falls and keeps falling, her legs suddenly too weak even for kneeling, and only then, as she crumples into the dirt, does she realise that he's gone.
The world is enormous without him next to her. So huge that Reeve has to be helped back inside, shoulders hunched against the emptiness of the sky and the plain. Inside, things are a little easier; when Kate brings her into the kitchen, she is able to turn the tap and wash her eyes out herself. This is, however, more or less the extent of her faculties right now. Once Kate has her settled on the couch, she finds she can't move, or let go of Kate's hand.
“Okay,” says Kate, when she tries to get up to get Reeve some water and is brought up short by her iron grip. “Okay, that's fine. I'm right here, okay?”
Reeve nods. Kate kicks off her sandals and pulls her legs up onto the sofa, curling into Reeve like a kid into her big sister. Maybe she's calculated it, maybe it's instinct, but either way it works, something golden seeping through Kate's skin and into Reeve's.
He's gone. Chrysaor is gone, and the world is still here, still as brutal and as careless as ever. If not for Kate weighing her down, Reeve feels like she might float up into the air and dissolve, her broken face and pointless muscles vanishing into the heat haze the way Chrysaor did into the earth.
“Are you okay?” asks Kate, after a little while.
Reeve tries to answer, then again. On the third time, it sticks.
“No.”
Kate nods.
“I'm sorry,” she says. “I don't think I really know what he was to you. But he was a lot, and I'm sorry.”
They sit up a little, as if this is some kind of signal. Moving carefully, deliberately, Reeve loosens her grip on Kate's hand. Her fingers have left marks, but Kate doesn't show any sign of pain.
“What do you want to do now?”
“I don't know,” Reeve answers. “Haven't for a long time.”
Pause. Kate turns to look at her.
“You can absolutely say no,” she says, “but I have a spare room. And absolutely no expectation that you'll do anything in return. Ever. No strings at all.”
Reeve thinks about it. On the one hand: Fremantle, buses, strangers, life. On the other: emptiness, dirt, a hole in the yard. The desperate safety of solitude.
There's no Chrysaor. Wherever she goes, she will carry his absence with her, in the same rotting cyst that holds her trauma. But there's Kate. And maybe, after six years, she's ready for that.
“I'm not sure I can be Christie again,” she says, tentative, hardly hoping to hope; Kate just smiles, sweet and sad.
“D'you think you could be my sister, though?” she asks.
A moment. Another.
Reeve takes a slow, trembling breath.
“I think … I think maybe yes.”
“I would've accepted 'no' as well,” says Kate seriously. “I meant it when I said no strings. But, um, thanks, Reeve. Sis.”
What to say? Reeve has no idea. She kisses Kate's cheek instead, something she vaguely remembers doing as a child, and wonders if maybe she might be less sane than she thought.
Later, sitting in Kate's beautiful air-conditioned car with Sands on her lap, she asks about this, and Kate shrugs. I don't know, she says. Like it makes sense, what you did. It's just not something that people do. You know?
Reeve nods, her eyes locked on the rear-view mirror and the desert dwindling into a violent gleam in its depths. Yeah, she says. I know.
