TW: death/dying, grief, swearing. tell me if there should be more! ey/em maruca k <3

Dearest Maruca,

...

(the beginning)

She's eleven years old when she sees em for the first time.

The first thing she notices are eir eyes. She'd heard that was the first thing you should notice about a person when you were going to fall in love with em, and she's pretty sure (from the first time she sees em) that they will fall in love. Or she will, at least.

So, eir eyes.

The thing was, she doesn't really have the words to describe them. She searches for some, but she has never been good at words like Fitz is. She can fake being smart like him when she's speaking, but inside her head are thoughts, not words. So the best way she can describe Maruca Chebota's eyes isn't with anything poetic.

They're blue.

Blue like—she rifles through her brain for a metaphor— the sea? Or the sky? Everyone's eyes are blue here. It's hard to come up with original metaphors that aren't already in songs.

She isn't good with words. So how does blue make her feel?

Not very good, if she's honest with herself. She hates her blue eyes. They're boring when they match her father's and brother's and everyone else in this fake utopia that she's perfectly suited to. She's seen pictures of humans with brown or green eyes, and she thinks she wouldn't mind that. Being different.

Because the thing is, Maruca's eyes are the same blue everyone else has. But, somehow, they're nothing like Biana has ever seen before.

"Say hi, Biana," her father nudges her gently, and she startles.

"Hi," she whispers, and then she remembers that she's a Vacker and her mother curled her hair this morning for a reason and she doesn't have anything to hide like the rest of her family does anyway. "Hello," she says so ey can hear her.

Maruca looks up, and smiles, and Biana's almost certain her heart skips a beat. She counts them to reassure herself that, yes, it's still beating, blood is still pumping through her body, she can still breathe even though it seems she's forgotten how.

"Hello," ey says, and that's confidence. The kind Biana wishes she had. Wishes she could figure out how to have.

"I like your eyes," Biana blurts, even though now she's wondering why people don't try to describe voices instead of eyes when they meet their first love. Blue as the sky is easier than soft like a symphony, she supposes. Stick to the script, she tells herself. Eyes are jeweled oceans. Voices are used to speak.

Maruca laughs. Biana rewrites her thoughts: they should describe laughs instead of words, instead of eyes. "Thanks. I think yours are pretty cool too."

No, they aren't, she thinks. "They're the same as everyone else's," she says, and changes the subject from what she started. "Are you excited to start at Foxfire?"

Marcua wrinkles eir nose, and something changes. Dims, maybe. "Yeah." If Biana were an empath, maybe she would know if ey was lying. Leaning in like eir telling her a secret, ey whisper, "I don't want to go. School sounds lonely."

Lonely. Biana wants to be lonely, sometimes. When the voices are too much. She's never thought that maybe she already is a little lonely. Maybe she only has her brothers. Maybe she wants someone like her to talk to.

Eleven years old is a little too young to be lonely. She should wait until she's older to decide that she wants friends.

Still, she says, "It doesn't have to be lonely if you have a friend."

Maruca looks at her and she looks at em, and it's very simple, really.

It's very simple to fall in love.

...

Here's the thing about first meetings: they're impossible to remember.

While it was happening, Biana thought, I could never forget this.

And then she woke up the next day and wasn't quite sure what color Maruca was wearing, couldn't quite recall the shadows under eir eyes. So as it turns out, it's very easy to forget someone. Too easy.

And when there's more than a night separating her from em, when there are weeks, and months, and a full year, many years, it doesn't hurt as much to think of blue eyes that were never like anyone else's, and see them blur into the sky. Or an ocean, when Biana never really thought eyes could hold an ocean anyway.

Because, of course, it stung at first, stung like the way the bark of the tree cuts into Biana's back as she leans against it. She can count those firsts, those stings:

First time she walked through the hallways alone. First time she knew how to breathe without her second set of lungs.

First time she went to sleep without shedding a single tear. First time she woke up without puffy eyes and dreaming of em.

First time Biana looked in the mirror and saw herself again. First time she held her own hand and didn't imagine it was ey's.

And here's the thing about lasts, too: you never know they're there until they're gone.

When the last time was happening, Biana thought that everything would be fine. She thought that they could go back to the way things were. She thought she could never forget the exact sound of Maruca's voice.

But then she woke up and didn't know if it was higher or lower than hers. She couldn't remember the sound of eir laugh. The way it dipped after a question instead of rising. The way ey rolled eir words around because speaking. Softer than a symphony or louder than a raindrop? She doesn't know anymore.

Last laugh. Last kiss. Last smile. She can count these, too. The night stretches out, the days add up, and maybe someday Maruca will be a blip. Another first (first partner, first kiss, first love) to be added to the list, when Biana was so sure ey would be the last.

Biana rubs a petal between her index finger and her thumb and lets it stain her fingers purple. The same purple as the streak in Maruca's hair was.

Isn't it rotten? That she remembers the end better than the beginning?

...

(the end)

"Do you remember the letter you sent me when I was in the Elite levels?"

Biana sits next to Maruca's cot, hands squeezed tightly into the folds of her dress. The jewels sewn into the fabric cut into her palms. Can she still like diamonds after they draw blood?

She studies eir face. It's soft with sleep. Soft with pain. A series of opposites one after the other: eyebrows tight but full mouth slack, eyes resting gently shut but nostrils flared in shock. It's unnatural, and she kind of hates it. It almost makes her forget to keep talking.

"I—I read it a few too many times, to tell you the truth." Her voice keeps breaking. It's not really fair, that she has to feel like this and Maruca gets to stay asleep. "Yeah, I know I'm a cheesy romantic. You can make fun of me when you—um, when you wake up."

Her breath catches in her throat, snags on a splinter of her broken heart. She still hasn't managed to piece it back together. She should probably get on that. Maruca will expect her to be whole when ey wakes up.

"You know that line you wrote? The opener. You said, 'Dearest Biana.' I'll always remember that. And then you said, 'how can I hate you when there's so much to love?' Like you were kind of trying to. And I appreciate that. How you told me you tried to stop loving me but couldn't really succeed." Biana's hands sweat into the fabric on her dress, twisted tightly between her fingers. They're starting to go numb. She should let go, but she can't really force herself to.

"Elwin says I can't touch you. Otherwise, I'd be holding your hand. You understand, right? That I can't make myself touch you?"

Because then it'll be real. Then ey will actually be dead.

Biana forces her mind away from the thought and focuses on Maruca's face again. She doesn't want to look at eir dormant chest, the lungs that aren't breathing, the heart that stopped beating. She's waiting for Elwin to bring em back to life. She's been waiting for minutes. Hours. Days.

"Biana," a tired voice sounds behind her, and she doesn't take her eyes off Maruca's brown skin. The gray tint is just her imagination. "Biana," they repeat, and she presses her lips together.

"Yeah?" she says, voice pitched high.

"I think it's time to go," Fitz says, coming into her line of vision, and she laughs, a brittle thing that could probably snap if she presses too hard.

"Ey needs me. I need to stay here."

Fitz reaches out for her hand and extricates it from her dress. There's a red imprint on her palm from the jewels. She didn't realize how much it hurt until her fingers stretch out and lace with his.

"Bee," he says, and she doesn't look at him, because she doesn't want to cry. "Bee." His voice breaks, and that's not fair because Fitz never cries. He's not allowed to break like she is, and he wouldn't let himself if she weren't splintered like she is right now.  She swallows and feels her throat crack. She hasn't had water in over a day.

"I'm waiting for eir to wake up," she whispers, and he grabs her shoulders and forces her face to look up at his. He's crying. She's not sure she's ever seen him cry before, not even when Alden's mind broke or he killed Alvar. Not even when they had to rebuild the world from scratch and still had to lose more of themselves to the fog.

"Bee," he repeats. "Biana. I think it's time to go."

"Go where?" she asks him, like a child. She's a fucking child again without em. But she still has em. Right there, dead on eir cot she has em.

A tear slides out of her cheek, and Fitz reaches to brush it away with his thumb. "You're gonna go home, okay?"

She casts another glance at the greying skin drawn over tight bones, drooping mouth, flaring nostrils, peaceful pain. At her dearest dead.

"Okay," she says softly, as soft as Maruca's lips on hers, barely a day previously. "Okay."

She trips over herself as she leaves the room, not looking where she's stepping. She doesn't want to look away. Just in case ey wakes up.

...

Biana traces words onto Maruca's roots. They're a rich brown, deep as eir skin was before it turned grey. Her hands look pale next to it. She focuses on that instead of missing em.

"Do you remember," she whispers, "The next few lines of the letter you wrote me?"

She waits for em to respond, but she doesn't remember eir voice enough to pretend ey does.

"It's okay that you don't remember. I'll remind you. You wrote, 'Dearest Biana' just like that. And then, 'how can I hate you when there's so much to love? good thing you won't have that problem with me.' And I never asked if you meant that you were easy to hate or easy to love. I never asked because I knew you wouldn't know, either. That's okay. I'm not really sure either."

She's quiet for a moment, plucking a blue petal from the ground and pressing it between her fingers. She knows it smells like Maruca's perfume even before holding it to her face.

"You were easy to hate. You were easier to love. I don't know—" Biana draws in a sharp breath. "Shit. I didn't want to cry today." A pause while she tries to force her tears to stay in her eyes, and fails, and lets them drip down her cheeks. Shakily: "You hate it when people cry in front of you. But you let me do it anyway. Thanks for that, I guess."

There isn't really much more to say. She's screamed it all before.

Biana stands and brushes herself off. She thinks about grey skin and blue petals and nails digging into tree bark.

"Bye, Maruca," she says, soft as death. "I'll see you next month." And she walks away.

...

Love, Biana.