As The Roses Bloom

let it bleed through my fingers

Kicking off the story with some angsting...

Present

It was an interesting sensation. That's what Holland found himself thinking as he knelt on the ground, making sounds not unlike a dying animal, his hand clenched in the loose, damp soil of the palace gardens. An interesting sensation.

He'd heard fairy tales of this sickness taking hold of natives of Red London—people who'd grown up in a world saturated with magic, breathing it in and out of their bodies without thought from the first moment out of the womb. The stories always dealt with fair young women, the waists of their dresses clinched tight around sickly-thin bodies, coughing delicately into silk handkerchiefs. Blood speckling the white cloth like a gentle spray of freckles, flowers with creamy petals curiously dry of blood or saliva. The gasps and comforting murmurs that accompanied the first leaf, which indicated two more weeks to live. Those stories suggested there'd be a sort of elegance to Heart-Sickness.

A kind of beautiful, attractive suffering.

Holland retched again, feeling the raw scrape of his throat. He tasted blood and wasn't sure whether it was coming up his throat from somewhere in his lungs or if it was from the wreck that was his throat itself. It felt as if the vines of roses were clawing their way up his throat with brutal determination. When he swallowed, he thought he could feel the thorns digging into his flesh, lodging themselves somewhere around his Adam's apple.

This was certainly no attractive suffering.

Every morning, Holland had checked the progression of his illness with a morbid curiosity: his already pale skin had grown sallow. The bags under his eyes had darkened. His thin frame grew thinner.

White was the only color that looked even close to acceptable on him. It was a good thing, then, that he'd always worn it.

The rose rested peacefully on the ground before him innocently, flawlessly, not a single petal bent. Blood-red like an accusation of Holland's guilt. Guilty, guilty. Looking at them made Holland's hands shake. Harnessing a breath of the magic that filled Red London to the brim, Holland circled the air above the red blossom with his finger.

It released the sickly-sweet odor of old flowers, it shriveled, it turned black, it bent and curled and gently disintegrated into soil, indistinguishable from the ground Holland knelt on.

Dully, he imagined what it would feel like to dissolve into nothingness in the same way. He nearly had.

Past

The world of White London is as barren as Holland remembers it to be, the air crisp and empty. It feels both hollow and familiar. He can't help taking in a sharp breath as he enters, dropping Kell's arm and feeling coldness where their bodies had been touching a moment before.

He stands there, a gentle wind rustling the grove of trees Kell has deposited them in, feeling the air play across his skin. He is consciously exhausted without moving, tediously aware of his boots on the hard-packed dirt, the straightness of his knees and how he's squaring his shoulders. Aware of the effort it takes just to stay upright, and to not let Kell see how weary he is.

He's tired. He's so tired.

Is Kell going to leave?

Holland doesn't have the capacity to harbor dislike for the other Antari anymore—holding grudges suddenly seems unfathomable and petty—but he hopes Kell will leave soon.

He can feel Kell's eyes on his back. He starts counting in his mind, one, two, three, four...

And then footsteps, the soft grind of hard soles against hard dirt., a little fainter with each step. He starts counting those, too: three, four, five—