IP: 90.252.233.57
Posted on August 3, 2017 at 00:32:11 AM by aura
But all that has changed, and now I'm bold.
The living care about the dying in a different way to the dead. You want to save them; we want to guide them on.
Aura had to bite her tongue to keep herself from saying it. Poppy obviously had a full head of steam on about something.
Not when your own granddaughter is in danger.
Ahh. There it was.
She should have guessed, really. Aura’s impromptu meeting with her granddaughter had been… traumatic? Eye-opening? There weren’t really words to describe it. It had been a struggle enough to realise that she could not intervene to save a life, not even the life of a child, but to look over the edge of the castle and see her own eyes staring back up at her… Aura repressed a shudder at the memory of it. Eselda was unhurt and apparently unconcerned by the entire event, so she’d tried to brush it off. Focus on work instead. Aura had imagined half a dozen conversations with Brock in her head about it, each one worse than the last, so she’d busied herself with the dying instead.
Here was something she couldn’t ignore – or at least, not anymore. Poppy had been ignored by just about everyone for most of her long and not particularly happy life. Her father, as far as Aura knew, had turned her over to the Council of Originals at his earliest opportunity and never looked back. Aura, outraged at the injustice of having both a child and a crime thrust upon her through no mistake of her own, refused to have anything to do with her for a thousand years. Poppy hadn’t even known the identity of her godly parent until she’d come to Shaman.
Aura took a breath, preparing to say something – she immediately forgot what – when Poppy rolled out that line. It felt like a punch in the gut.
It was the first time, as far as Aura knew, that her daughter had ever called her mum. Those nine, poison-coated words, through their simplicity, said so much. Aura’s jaw slackened, her sharp blue eyes widening subtly at the edges.
The first, pathetic thing she could think of was: I never knew you wanted me to care. It was eye-rollingly inadequate - of course a child would want their parent to care – but Aura had never considered herself a parent of, or to, Poppy. She’d just assumed that Poppy never had either. Theirs was a relationship characterised by what she’d always believed was a mutually desired distance.
The creak of a bed in the hospital behind her reset her numb brain. Fleur was in there, ready to pass at any second. Without her staff, Aura couldn’t sense how far away the death was and might miss it. Poppy’s timing couldn’t be worse.
She took a breath, again.
“This isn’t about Eselda.” She stated quietly. This had never been about Eselda. “But now is not the right time. I promise I will make time for you if that’s what you want, but I need to take care of someone right now. If you have questions, I will answer them as best as I can when I get back.”
It was all she could do not to screw up her face in a very public wince. What a cop-out that sounded like. But if Aura didn’t help Fleur now, then the old lady would be left wandering the Realm of the Dead, forever searching in vain for her family.
Her jaw set, Aura turned and pushed the door to the hospital back open, holding it out for a second for Poppy but not really expecting her to join her. Fleur was still with them, fortunately, although her breathing was so shallow it was barely audible. Aura scooped her staff up off the floor and braced herself against the shift into her Reaper’s wardrobe: her teenage-esque clothes vanished, replaced with the flowing, icy robes of her new profession. The staff twitched, irritable, reminding her that she had seconds.
“Sorry, Fleur.” Aura sat tentatively on the edge of the lady’s bed, deliberately not looking behind her to see if Poppy had followed her in. “That was my… my daughter. Are you ready to go?”
Fleur’s eyelids flickered. “Famille,” she sighed, “so important.”
Ignoring her squirming insides, Aura took hold of Fleur’s hand and tugged it gently. She vanished on the spot, while Fleur released her final breath in a death rattle.
It was about another ten or fifteen minutes before Aura returned, stepping out of the shadows on the other side of the bed. She lowered her hood slowly.
A u r a
They thought I was weak, but I am strong; they sold me the world but they were wrong
And now that I'm back, I still belong.
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