The Weight of Ordinary Light

Three days later, Celestina could sit up without the room tilting.

It felt like a triumph.

Tally did not treat it as one.

"You're still the colour of old porridge," she said, which was her way of saying I was frightened for you and possibly also don't do anything foolish. She'd been saying variations of it since Celestina had first opened her eyes properly, blinking against the light while Tally stood over her with an expression that was trying very hard to be stern and not quite managing it. "Sitting up is not the same as being well."

"I know."

"I'll make the tea."

"I know."

Tally had made the tea. It had been terrible. Celestina had drunk it anyway, because some battles were not worth fighting and because the way Tally's shoulders unknotted fractionally each time she did suggested it was less about the tea than about having something useful to do with her hands.

She understood that particular need rather well, these days.

*********************************************

It was on the third morning that Tally came in while Leander was out—she could hear him somewhere around the side of the cabin, the distant, irregular sounds of someone keeping themselves occupied—and stood in the doorway with an expression Celestina couldn't quite read.

"How are your legs?"

Celestina considered the question seriously, which she suspected was the right approach with Tally under most circumstances. She shifted, testing. The room stayed where it was. "Functional, I think. Unsteady."

"Mm." Tally crossed to the bed and held out a hand with the businesslike air of someone who had already decided and was simply waiting for the formality of agreement to catch up. "Then let's find out."

It was slow going. Tally bore her weight without comment and without fuss, one steady arm around her back, and said nothing about how often Celestina had to stop—once to let her ribs settle, once because the hallway tilted unexpectedly, once simply because the back door felt very far away and her body required a moment to disagree with that assessment. Tally waited each time with the particular patience she reserved for things she'd already decided were going to happen.

The air hit her first. Cool and green-smelling, threaded with pine and something living, the particular breath of a forest that had been going quietly about its business without her.

Then the light.

Celestina exhaled something that was almost a laugh and almost a sob and was mostly just relief, as the sun found her face. She felt the angel surge toward it with that desperate, wordless hunger. She stood in the doorway for a moment, gripping the frame, and simply let it.

"Come on, then," Tally said, not unkindly.

The rocking chair sat waiting at the edge of the deck where the afternoon light fell longest, already arranged with the precise intentionality of someone who had planned this well in advance. A blanket was shaken out and settled around her shoulders before she'd finished sitting. Another followed across her lap, tucked in with more care than Tally's brisk movements suggested. A mug was pressed into her hands—the tea that didn't taste like punishment, the one Tally only made when she thought no one was keeping track.

Celestina looked up at her.

Tally was already looking at the treeline, expression composed. "He won't be long," she said.

"No."

The rocking chair creaked. Somewhere in the branches above the deck, a bird was making an argument to no one in particular.

"Don't tire yourself out." It came out gruff. Underneath it lived something else entirely.

"Tally." Celestina waited until she looked at her. "Thank you."

Something moved across Tally's face—brief, unguarded, gone before it could be properly named. She made a sound that wasn't quite dismissive and straightened the blanket at Celestina's shoulder one unnecessary final time.

Then she went inside, and left her to the sun.

Celestina let her head tip back against the chair, closed her eyes, and felt the light soak into her like water into dry earth. The angel drank it in without restraint. She let it. She was so tired of rationing herself, of holding things carefully, of existing in small careful increments. The sun asked nothing of her except to receive it, and so she did—feeling the slow golden warmth move through her chest, filling the places that had been scraped hollow.

She was still sitting like that, face upturned, when she heard his footsteps round the corner of the cabin.