Convalescence

Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?

- ‘Leaving Early’, Sylvia Plath

i.

The operation was swift, the cut clean.  When Blue came to his arm was gone.  That was it.  Like so many other things in his life he never said a real goodbye.

He dove in and out of a swamp of healing magic and painkillers.  At one point he woke up and saw his hospital room lousy with flowers which were making it difficult to breathe.  He thought he saw at the foot of his bed a single red rose in an empty jam jar.

ii.

People came and went.  Snow and Bigby, sometimes together, sometimes individually.  Pinocchio a constant.  Once Fly visited with roses from Ride.  All this was hazy.  He was unable to say anything through the drugs.

He knew it was her when she arrived.  Her voice serrated, grating on the edges of his pain.  She came and stood by his bedside, a vague figure tipped with red like a candlewick.  The annihilation of her smile.

“Thank God,” he heard her say.  “I was so afraid we’d lost you.”

He made words for her, his first words since they knocked him out after the operation.  They were dry and awful on his lips.

“Were you?”

She stared at him, then put something down on his bedside table and left the room.

Days later, when he was finally able to observe his surroundings without them dissolving into swirls of milk, he discovered that it was another rose in a different jam jar.  By the time he found this out, it had died.

iii.

“You know,” Bigby told him one day during a visit, “Snow was never ready.  So I never pushed.”

“No,” said Blue.  “The two of you got whacked out by some spell and went camping and then you got her pregnant with septuplets.  My situation’s quite different.”

Bigby gave him a sidelong look.  “It could always be arranged.”

Blue threw his hand towel at him.

iv.

Snow was, of course, infinitely more pragmatic about the whole thing.  “Give it time,” she advised.  “Who knows, in a couple of decades maybe the cycle will repeat itself and she’ll get another crush on you.  You’ve all the time in the world.”

Blue didn’t throw anything at her because Snow was never wrong.

v.

“It’s all down to the testosterone, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“I mean, you’re holding our friendship hostage just because my rejection killed your male pride.  You can’t get over it.  That’s why you’re behaving like a total jerk!”

“That’s not – look, you were the one who rejected me!”

Rose looked away.  “I didn’t ask to be asked.”

Blue said nothing.  His phantom limb, he could feel, had reached out towards her hand.  His real arm lay inert on the bedspread.

“I’m sorry,” said Rose, “these aren’t things you say in a hospital.”

vi.

Snow spent the next few days indirectly apologizing.  “Something’s come up at the Farm” or “the Haven Fables need so much administration, she hasn’t got a second to get away”.  Blue pushed hospital pudding around with his fork.  “I understand,” he said, all too well.

vii.

“Do you love her?” asked Bigby.

“Yes,” said Blue.  “No.  At this point I really have no idea.”

“If it’s an infatuation, or sexual,” went on Bigby, “I suggest you forget it.  Time will get rid of it for you.  If you love her, of course, it’s a different matter.”

“If you love her, you will wait for her.  If she keeps you at arms-length forever, you will wait for her.  You will watch over her every move, because every hurt visited on her is visited on you tenfold. You will never be happy, because you left happily ever after back in the Homelands. But you will wait for her, centuries and centuries, because your immortal existence is fit to be spent no other way.”

“Or,” finished Bigby, “you will realize that you don’t love her that much.  It’s not worth it unless you do.”

Later Blue watched Bigby leave the hospital, watched the Range Rover swing by in the entrance drive. Snow got out, flitting over to the passenger’s side.  Bigby chucked her on the chin and she kissed him on the nose and he smiled, before moving over to the driver’s side.

Bigby was wrong about one thing, which was the happily ever after.  They read him and Snow, Blue and so many others in this town, like the fairytale endings that grew false so long ago.

viii.

His room was pretty much the way he had left it; no-one else had moved in.  Blue stood looking at it for some time, then went downstairs.

“I’d like to have my old room back,” he said when he found Rose in the kitchen.

Rose flinched, startled, and dropped a glass of milk.  “Oh, god,” went on Blue, in horror. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no – ” said Rose distractedly, “it’s, it’s fine.  I didn’t know you were discharged.  You should have called – did you walk down here?”

“I got a lift on the supply truck.”

“That’s great,” said Rose.  “That’s really great.”  She was staring at the glass shard by her foot, one of her shoelaces soaking up the milk.

The seconds dropped from the air like flies in the heat.

“Rose,” said Blue eventually, “Rose, could you please give me something to do?”

Rose looked up, though still not at him.  “Right.  Ah, there’s some heavy stuff around the barn I need – oh god, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I’ll find you some paperwork – can you write?”

“I’m left-handed.”

“Awesome sauce,” said Rose.  “I’m going up to get the stuff, be back in a jiffy, don’t touch the mess.  You mind waiting here?”

She took the long way around the table and disappeared into the hallway.  Centuries, he heard Bigby say.

“I can wait,” said Blue out loud.