Work Text:
A Necessary Thing
Fandom: Cold Mountain
Written for: Jae W. in the New Year Resolutions 2006 Challenge by halotolerant
A Necessary Thing
This is how it doesn't happen:
Ruby doesn't walk over to the piano the night Ada plays it like it could reply to her, like it's still the only other human in the house. That night, Ruby stays hidden on the stairs, even though it feels fearful similar to a servant's place, to watch from a shadow like that. She doesn't touch any of the things she wants to - not the smoothness of the keys, not the crisp sheet music, not the candle-wax she could roll into a ball and save for later. Not Ada's hair, or Ada's fine, thin neck or the point high in each corner of her strange, slanting eyes.
Over the next few days, then weeks, then months it becomes clear without need to say it that Ruby is staying, but Ruby will not sleep in Ada's bed until winter comes and the cold drives them together like chicks in straw. And that is not the way romantical things happen, or so Ada's books would have Ruby believe.
The sweet words Ada reads into the quiet warmth of their bed say that love is supposed to be a necessary thing, like breathing, like a part of your own self you never knew you lost until you found it. Ruby cannot conjure a phrase like that, but she can see the idea of the thing - one thing that must have another - and thinks of all the inseparable parts of nature, but they are so many and so complex that she concludes her feelings are part of a much larger pattern, and that that pattern does not necessarily mean anything will come of them.
Ruby doesn't tell Ada that she will wear trousers from now on, and asks permission to use one item of the Reverend's clothing at a time until Ada laughs and sighs and presses their hands together, saying "It's all yours as much as mine, all yours, anything at all."
`I'm not your sister.' Ruby thinks. `I don't want to be your sister.'
Ruby doesn't ask Ada why she reads a sheaf of tattered and torn letters over and over and over. Seeing her, Ruby is reminded of tonguing a cut inside your mouth, pushing at it to feel it hurt again, fascinated with your own pain. She never asks to be told anything about Inman, and let Ada take that as politeness or tact or lack of interest as she will.
Inman doesn't come that winter, nor the winter after. He doesn't sleep in Ada's bed and now Ruby always does. .
Ada doesn't have anyone to tell her she's lovely or is loved. Everyone who could is either dead or away or scared. But then, whilst Ruby doesn't write poetry or stand under a balcony or bring piles of gold she has declarations dug into the soil a hundred times a day, sewn into thrice-patched stockings, smelling like the rosemary in the stew they have more often now the spring has come again. In her own mind her feelings have become like a tree you plough around instead of felling, characterised mostly by the quality of `are there' and otherwise ignored through familiarity. Wanting and not having seems natural, by the time her father shows up, and one morning she considers a little and cannot believe she never thought of how Ada must feel over Inman, this same distant yearning.
At least he's out there for her somewhere, yearning back, like a magnet.
Ruby sometimes feels like half an egg-shell, important parts of herself spilling out the crack.
Their lives have been founded on the quality of not-Inman-not-here and the day he arrives she feels as ill as she ever has. She can see goodness in eyes, but also something worn and lost.
Slowly, she sees that the Ada and Inman who met outside a building site back when the world was the world are long dead. That was not her Ada. That was not this Inman. Ada and Inman cling to each other to try and discover some vestige of their old selves, try and believe that such a change could be wrought in all existence and leave them physically unscathed.
His death is not, to her, troubling, at least not more than his sudden existence. It is only after it that she considers he has been alive all this time after all, and has done things and had things done and to someone somewhere has not simply been away.
Ada doesn't speak of it for a while, only stares from her window and wishes for a piano silently, clearly. She wants it to talk back to her, about love that is not rational or pleasant but necessary and epic.
But of course, there has been no Inman for years now. Ada is stronger, firmer now. She's rounded out her life and found what she needs or at least taught herself to only need what she has and Inman isn't necessary the way he once was.
There is no piano any more, but there is a good farm. There is life, and hope and nature pressing on without regard for mourning. There is a child.
Sometimes, when Ruby minds it a spell, rocks it gently in her arms, Ada stands behind her, smiling over her shoulder, breath warm as it brushes past her ear. She reaches out her arms round Ruby till her hands are stroking the baby, and pulls them all close and snug and complete.
Two years later, on an ordinary sort of day in April, Ada wakes up and doesn't open the window or go down to start breakfast. She doesn't run into her daughter's room to check her. She doesn't turn over to doze.
What she does is run a gentle hand powerful as if it trailed gunpowder over and up Ruby's front, bringing it to rest cupped round her cheek near Ruby's wide, dark, terrified and hoping eyes.
"My darling" Ada says, possibly more than once, looking smugly happy and excited like the first day she ever solved a plantation problem quicker than Ruby. "Do you know you're everything to me?"
Ruby doesn't answer. Not with words.
In every shared touch she feels the truth of it - that this is how this happens.
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