The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

4.0 — Watering Other Flowers

"You've kept me waiting," Vaelira said, without opening her eyes, "an embarrassing length of time. I hope you know that."

She was draped along the low stone wall at the edge of the World Fragment when I found her, one arm thrown over her face to block a light that doesn't actually need blocking, since I'm the one who decides how bright it gets — a fact she has never once let stop her from performing outrage at it anyway. Her hair had come loose from whatever careless shape she'd tied it into earlier, indigo shading to near-silver where it caught the low gold light, spilling over the stone like something poured rather than grown.

"I've kept you waiting," I said, sitting down beside her, "for exactly as long as the Roster said I would. You could have traded the day away if it bothered you this much."

"I could have. I chose not to, out of some deeply misguided sense of loyalty to my own patience, which I am beginning to regret extending to you specifically." She peeled her arm back just far enough to fix one gold, half-lidded eye on me. "Do you have any idea what I've had to sit through, waiting for my turn? I was there, you know. Curled up against your side like an afterthought, while you spent an entire evening pouring your whole soul out to Ilyrisse about a woman with a tragic backstory and cheekbones. I heard every word of it. I am, at this point, more informed about Vesalia's entire life than several of her own ancestors were."

"You were asleep."

"I am always asleep. That has never once stopped me from listening." She said it with the particular, lazy satisfaction of someone who enjoys being caught more than she enjoys not being noticed at all. "I have made peace with being your second thought most days, Eremos. I am the Witch of Infinite Time. I have outlasted empires that thought themselves permanent. I can survive being outlasted, in turn, by your gardening habits."

"My gardening habits."

"You water everyone," she said, stretching with the deliberate, unhurried satisfaction of a cat rearranging itself in a sunbeam it already owns. "Vesalia, and her grief. Ilyrisse, and her centuries of very dignified loneliness. That plant-girl, Flora, who I understand you are personally teaching how to want things, one excruciatingly patient lesson at a time. You go around this entire Between of yours with a watering can and a soft heart, and meanwhile I sit here, ancient and magnificent and criminally under-watered, waiting my turn like everyone else."

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"You make it sound like a chore."

"It is a chore. An extremely well-compensated one." She finally sat up fully, the loose fabric of whatever she'd been wearing sliding, unconcerned, off one shoulder, and looked at me with an expression that had gone, without warning, from teasing to something quieter, something she doesn't let surface often enough for me to ever fully get used to it. "I'm not truly complaining, if that's what you're worried about. I've had eons of solitude to compare this to. I know exactly how good I have it, sharing you with a garden full of women I mostly haven't even met. I simply enjoy telling you otherwise. It's one of the last pleasures left to a woman who used to find her pleasures considerably more destructive."

"I know you're not truly complaining," I said, reaching over to tuck a loose strand of that impossible indigo-silver hair back from her face, an old, easy gesture between us by now. "I still like hearing it, though. However you dress it up."

"Good," she said. "Because I intend to keep dressing it up for as long as this lasts, which, given who I am, may end up being considerably longer than either of us can currently imagine." She caught my hand before I withdrew it, held it against her cheek for a moment — a small thing, and yet not small at all, not from a woman who spent centuries deciding that wanting anyone's hand anywhere near her face was a weakness she couldn't afford. "No one else is here tonight," she said, quieter now, the teasing edge gone out of her voice entirely. "Just us. I checked."

"You checked."

"I am the Witch of Infinite Time, Eremos. Checking things is rather my whole domain." A small, private smile, there and gone. "I wanted it to be just us tonight. I don't often ask for that plainly. Consider this me asking."

"Then it's just us," I said. "For as long as you want it to be."

She held my gaze a moment longer, something unusually unguarded moving behind those pale, clock-ringed eyes, and then, as if she'd decided she had allowed enough sincerity out into the open air for one evening, she smiled — sharp and slow and entirely herself again — and rose to her feet, drawing me up after her with a hand that did not, for once, let go once I was standing.

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