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A dream: a cup of coffee, the radio crackling, the fear and the thrill of flying and falling and a flash of bright eyes and a rainbow sky, the sound of birds—
Harvey wakes up as he always does: alone. Something along his spine trembles, and he wonders if he’s finally reached that age where it begins to get difficult to get out of bed on one smooth motion. He grapples against the covers, and swings his feet to the ground. It is unfamiliarly cold, and he wonders once again—shouldn’t there be a rug here? No. No, it’s just the creeping grasp of fall fooling him. Maybe he is getting older.
He dresses in his usual way: pants, shirt, socks, shoes, tie. The green jacket feels more worn than he remembers, but it’s also been a while since he’s bothered to shop for new clothes—these are serviceable enough, and there really isn’t anyone to impress here anyways.
To his disappointment, he is out of coffee, even the instant stuff. Maru won’t be in today, so he can’t send her on an errand. He’ll have to make do. Slowly, Harvey descends to his clinic, already dreading the coming day. Flu season is starting up, and he knows that soon enough he’ll be swamped by fevers and sniffles and coughs. It’s good money, sure, but illness spreads as quickly as gossip in Pelican Town.
At the front desk, he barely has time to begin paperwork for the day’s upcoming appointment—Gus had called yesterday and apparently had some kind of tickle in his throat, and wanted to nip anything in the bud before he became too contagious to open the Stardrop—before the door damn near slams against the wall with the force that it’s been kicked open, and Harvey drops his pen in surprise and there is a tremble down his spine and the sound of birds—
A woman stands before him in mud-speckled overalls, and there is a steaming mug of coffee in her hands. Her eyes are bright and lively, but—clinically, of course—there are bags under her eyes and her cheeks seem too hollow for her face.
“Hello,” she says gently, to his great shock. Harvey’s pretty sure there might be a dent in the wall from where the door hit it. “I’m the new farmer in town. It’s nice to meet you.” Then she places the coffee on his desk, leaning forward enough that he catches the scent of earth and sweat and something more, something green and deep. “I know it’s getting to be flu season, so I figured a pick-me-up would be in order.”
He cannot help himself from leaning forward, inhaling the scent. Of the coffee, of course. “This is my favorite thing,” he says. “How did you know?”
She smiles, and the crooked catch of her tongue against her teeth has him falling faster than he’s ever fallen before. He takes a sip of the coffee and it is strong and there’s the faint taste of salt, an old farmer’s trick he’d heard of (where?) to mask the bitterness.
The introductions pass by in a blur, and it is not until she leaves that he notices the posters on the clinic wall, where the door had slammed. They are for missing children: a girl and a boy, young enough to toddle alongside their parents. They both have auburn hair. The girl has green eyes, and the boy’s eyes are bright and lively. The posters look fairly aged, in all honesty, and the post date matches his assumption—they’d be teenagers by now, in all likelihood, if they were still alive.
Hm. He doesn’t recall seeing the posters before. Maybe Maru had put them up, and he’d simply forgotten. He is getting older, after all.
—
There is a headiness about the farmer, which he only realizes as the season goes on. When he meets her eyes, there is a raw honesty and pain shining there that he cannot help but to want to fix, physician that he is. A flaw of his, perhaps. But even more than that, there is something intoxicating about her: in his more fanciful moments, alone in his bed, he imagines that the world seems to bend to her whims, that time and reason pass by only with her approval.
She seems embedded in his life, somehow, even though they have only barely met. She seeks him out at the fair, and laughs at his paltry jokes. She invites him to look at her grange display, and he watches as she wins first prize with stoic acceptance. She brings him coffee every day, and it almost seems that this is the only time in which he feels truly alive, truly real.
In his head, he knows this fixation is unhealthy, a tormented response to someone paying him a kindness. In his heart, he cannot help it—it feels so welcome and familiar, like he’s coming home whenever he’s around her.
One day, she walks in on a house call for George, and she supports him in his professional decisions. Another day, she enters his apartment and listens to him prattle on about airplanes.
In the first week of winter, he enters his clinic to find her already there. Her back is to him, and she is staring at the aged posters, her head cocked to one side. She hears him enter, and turns around quickly, eyes bright.
“I figure it’s about time for a checkup, Doc,” she says. She is holding two coffees, and her cheeks are chapped and red from the cold. She doesn’t wear a coat, oddly enough.
He cannot help but to smile at her, and gestures to the front desk, where they share the drinks and chat idly—her about the farm, him about the new flu strain, the both of them about the interminable war with the Empire. When he later takes her pulse, he is surprised to find it racing.
“Oh!” he says. “Hospitals make you nervous?” But he knows this isn’t right even as he says it, and she grins crookedly.
“Not hospitals, Doc,” she says, and then—wonder of wonders—she takes him by the lapels of his worn green jacket and kisses him soundly.
It is the height of unprofessionalism. He does not care. He returns the kiss feverishly, and she gasps and arches up against him. His hands can span the small of her back, he discovers, and he presses himself to her. They are moving in instinctual synchronicity, like it’s been practiced, and he cannot help but to marvel at the immediacy. He pulls himself back to breathe.
“It’s Harvey,” he says, and he can hear the gravel in his voice, and she chuckles, low and throaty to match him.
“Point taken, Harvey,” she says, then leans herself up to him once again.
It takes a while, but they eventually separate. She redoes the straps of her overalls and fixes her rucked-up shirt, while he tries—with moderate success—to discreetly adjust himself and tuck his shirt back in.
“Listen, Harvey,” she says, and he immediately braces himself—for what, he’s not sure. She sees his flinch, and reaches for him, tracing a rough hand along his cheek. “Hey, hey. Calm down.”
Something feels off, something feels wrong—there are winter doves perched outside the window and he can hear them cooing—
“Pretty sure I did this in the wrong order,” she says ruefully. “Do you want to go on a date? I probably should’ve asked you my first week, but…”
He leans into her hand. “I would love that,” he breathes. “I would absolutely love that.”
She grins, crooked and coy. “Wonderful,” she says. She hops off of the examination table and cups him gently. “I’m looking forward to it.”
He gasps, and she snickers, and dashes out of the room. He has to readjust himself once again, thinks about aviation, of airplane models and distance averages. By the time he returns to the waiting room, she’s gone.
Something else is gone too. The missing children posters have been taken down. The wallpaper they’d been hung on is slightly brighter than the surrounding wall, a testament to their age. Odd. He resolves to ask her about it tomorrow.
—
The next day, she brings him a bouquet and presents it to him in the park where he’s been quietly contemplating the frozen fountain. Harvey’s heart stutters with joy, and he forgets about the posters entirely. He has a date to plan, after all.
—
They marry in the spring. Marnie dances for joy and Lewis has tears in his eyes, saying that he’d worried about the farmer fitting into the community in the first place.
To Harvey, this seems ridiculous. It’s as if his farmer had been here—in the valley, in his heart—for years, and he tells her so in a whisper after their kiss. He is surprised when she does not laugh or blush but instead grows pale.
“Are you alright?” he asks her lowly. Perhaps the stress of the day, perhaps the stress of spring planting. She was a busy, busy creature, his wife. Wife! Oh, the word itself was a wonder.
“I’m fine, Harv,” she says. “Just fine.” Then she kisses him once again, slow and strong, and he melts against her ferocity.
They go home and make love, as married couples do. The next morning, she hands him a cup of coffee, and he thanks her. She kisses him in response, and asks him about trying for children. He drops his coffee.
“You always manage to shock me,” he says as they begin to clean. “From the beginning.”
“It’s a special skill of mine,” she responds. Her grin is like when he’d first met her, in the spring (what? no, the fall), tongue against a crooked flash of teeth.
“But… back to the matter at hand. I would love to have children with you.”
“We’re not moving too fast?” she says.
“This entire relationship has been too fast,” he replies, mostly joking. It’s a thought he’s had before, but never one he’s really said to her. They’d both known they’d gone quickly, and they’d silently agreed to ignore it.
“Seriously though, Harv,” she says, wrinkling her nose.
“What makes you ask this now?”
His farmer—his wife—shrugs. “Kids… kids are something that we have to be ready for.”
“Unlike marriage?”
She shoots him a look under hooded eyes. “That’s different for us, and you know that.”
This, Harvey concedes, is true. He’d told her once that she felt like home, and she had only nodded as though he was discussing the weather, not delivering a frightened outpouring of honesty from a lonely man. Then she’d tilted her head, and calmly repeated the same words back to him. He remembers—late in winter, after the Feast of the Winter Star, and there had been birds cooing from the balcony of his apartment. She had tucked her feet under his lap, laughing as he complained about her freezing toes.
“I think,” he says slowly, carefully, “that we would be excellent parents. I think you would be a wonderful mother.”
She smiles at him, but there is a strained edge. “I think—I know—that you would be an excellent father,” she says. “The best.”
“Then we’re in agreement?” he asks, trailing a hand along her shoulder. He is at once used and unused to seeing her so unsure: he knows he hasn’t seen it before, but nothing about this surprises him. It’s an odd sensation, like he’s beyond himself and his own mind.
She places her hand to cover his, and squeezes. As ever, her grip is strong and callused. “We’re in agreement,” she says.
Then she kisses him happily, and suggests they begin trying in earnest, and Harvey cannot help but to blush.
—
There is something wrong with his wife.
She brings him coffee every morning. He kisses her soundly before he leaves for the clinic, before she begins work on the farm. They make dinner together every night, and they try diligently for a child. Her next cycle may or may not happen soon, so Harvey has a bit of hope, but they have been trying for the better part of a year now, and that kind of hope has grown thin.
But there is something—a growing fear in her eyes. It’s not all the time. But he cannot get her to admit to anything—all she will say is that it’s not a problem with him. She won’t allow him to test her for fertility issues, either.
Perhaps, Harvey wonders in horror, the one time in life he’d moved too quickly with something would lead to the greatest heartbreak of his lifetime. But then she will lean up and kiss him on the cheek, or trail her fingers across his shoulders, or visit him in the clinic just to chat, and he rules that out. Her smile is still crooked and her eyes are still bright.
One day, he watches her set out from the farm with a slingshot in her hands, and she returns furtively with two dead doves. He doesn’t know that he’s supposed to see this, but it’s a perfectly crisp autumn day and he’s reading his journals outside in the garden.
He watches as she silently buries the doves in separate graves, and tears begin to trickle down her face. A low moan escapes her, and he tosses his journal aside and runs to her, cradling her to his chest.
She struggles at first, but eventually she clutches against his green jacket and allows herself to be carried inside.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—she’d been chanting, and all Harvey can do is tend to his wife and hope that she will talk to him. Instead, she straddles him in the night and shudders and writhes atop him, brushing his hands off of her hips, her thighs, her waist. He lets her, and she cries again after they’re finished.
He holds her, and she sobs herself to sleep. Then he rolls out of bed, his feet landing on the rug, and throws on a robe to go outside and inspect the newly-dug patches of earth.
His wife is odd; Harvey knows this. He’s known this since she dragged him through the hedge maze on Spirit’s Eve, how she’d known every turn and trap before it’d appeared. He’s known this since she cocked an unimpressed eyebrow at the cage full of animated skeletons, since she’d easily and readily exchanged loaded words with Rasmodius at the fair. But this—this burial—seems strange even for her.
He looks towards the house, towards the darkened windows, towards the second floor where the nursery was already prepared.
Harvey grabs two loose stones from the cobbled path towards the barns, and places one at the top of each grave.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and does not know why, but there is a knot in his throat. He tightens his robe and returns to the farmhouse, where his wife sleeps fitfully, and he tucks himself into bed alongside her.
The next week, her cycle is late, and she sobs in what Harvey can only hope is relief.
—
The seasons pass, and they have two children—a daughter and a son, both auburn-haired. The daughter has his eyes; the son has his mother’s eyes. Life is good and the farm is thriving, and the challenges of parenthood are matched only by the joys of being a father.
Harvey is happy. It’s a deep contentment of the soul that sometimes rushes in waves of giddiness, of disbelief—this is his life, day by day. Things have settled in a way that he never would have thought to hope for.
Every morning, without fail, his wife brings him coffee and kisses him deeply. He spends some days at the clinic but tries to stay home as often as he can. Her routine is more varied than his, but it always tends to boil down to the same thing: farm, fish, socialize, children. He supposes others may find the routine boring, but there’s comfort in this daily grind.
“We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” his wife mouths against his chest one night, like a mantra.
When he tries to think of it, he has difficulty placing how long they’ve been married. Surely not so long, he believes, but at the same time it seems impossible for this peace to have come about in such a short period of time. Maybe he’s just getting old.
Harvey asks his wife, and she smiles tightly. “Time flies when you’re having fun,” she murmurs as their daughter shrieks past in her pajamas. He wonders for a bit at the edge of that smile, but chalks it up to exhaustion—she’s been spending more time in the mines as of late, much to his horror. But she’s always come back safe, if sometimes a little late for dinner.
She’s looking for something, he knows, because she’s got that questing, restless look in her eyes.
He’s not entirely sure how he knows that look, though. He discards the thought when it comes up. If he needs to know, she’ll tell him, his lovely, crooked-coy wife, sturdy to her bones and brighter than the sun.
He trusts her.
The seasons pass, and eventually his wife returns from the mines triumphantly. She shows him a rainbow-colored shard of stone, and it is hypnotic and priceless, and she tells him that she loves him very much.
The next day, the children disappear.
Penny—who had been watching the children—calls the clinic in a wild panic.
“I swear—“ she cries into the phone, as Harvey’s spine tingles in a way that it hasn’t in so very, very long—“I swear I looked away for just a second because there was a noise in the bushes, and then they were gone, Harvey, they were just gone—“ and he has already thrown the phone down and begun sprinting to the farmhouse where, indeed, there is no trace of his daughter or his son.
Harvey sits on the floor of the nursery and cries. His wife—who only shows up after dark, apparently having been deep in the woods somewhere—finds him and sits with him and cries as well.
“Why us?” he asks between the waves. “Who would do this?“ and she only holds him tighter. She’s whispering something against his shoulder—
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry—
Winter doves coo outside of the nursery window, and his wife shudders against him.
The town enters high alert, and missing signs are printed. Harvey and his wife damn near plaster the town with the posters, and the fellow citizens of Pelican Town all begin to mourn as time goes by and the children fail to reappear.
Harvey is hollowed out with grief come summer, the idea that his children are really and truly gone taking root within his spine.
It is a clear, humid day when he walks to the clinic—his wife had left early that morning, citing some sort of paperwork she needed to fill out after a hasty kiss and cup of coffee—and sits at the front desk. The posters are hanging near the entrance of the clinic, sure to catch one’s eye on the way out. A lingering impression, a vain hope.
A lingering…
The patches of wallpaper had been brighter, newer, less sun-exposed when he’d hung them up. Why?
What had hung there before?
Harvey stands up and walks from behind the desk, abandoning Sebastian’s file. He runs his fingers over the edges of the printed faces—auburn hair, his daughter with his green eyes and his son with his mother’s eyes, the familiar crinkled smile.
What had hung there before?
There is a coo of doves, and the door flies open. Harvey just barely jumps out of the way before it hits him, and his wife rushes in, looking around wildly.
“Harv,” she says when she spots him, and throws herself into him. “Harv, I love you,” she says quickly.
“I—I love you too?” he says, confused. “What’s going on? What’s the rush?”
She laughs, wild and frightening. “Nothing, Harvey. Nothing’s ever a rush.” She kisses him sloppily. “I love you, no matter what. This is the worst part but it’s okay, it’s okay, we can start over, we can always start over,—“
He grabs her by the shoulders and peers into her eyes. “Slow down. I think we need to sit, dear.”
But she shakes him off. “Do you know how long I’ve been married to you, Harv? Because I lost count at fifty years, this time.”
Harvey stops. His wife is having a psychotic br—
“And now you’re thinking that your wife is having a psychotic break, but I swear to you Harvey, it’s not that, time stops working in this fucking valley after a point and I am so tired of the same thing every fucking time—“
She is gesturing wildly. Her eyes are still bright but they’re fierce and angry and this is a side of his wife—his lovely, laughing, happy wife—that he has never seen before.
But that’s not true.
He has seen it.
Over her shoulder, ignoring her ranting, he looks at the posters of his missing children.
He’s made these posters before.
“This—this time?” he says slowly. He looks back to her, and she has fallen silent.
She nods. “This time.” He steps away from her, and she does not follow. She stares at the ground for a moment, then takes a deep breath. “This time,” she repeats. “It’s the third time, I think. The first time we didn’t have kids. The second time… we did. And this time too.”
Harvey steps away again. What the hell does any of this even mean—
His wife looks up and her face is set and determined. “I’m going to fix it,” she says. “I always will.”
Suddenly, Harvey understands that he doesn’t know this woman at all, and that sense of foreboding, of fear, is racing down his spine—
“You were my home,” he whispers.
Her face twists. She spins on her heel, opens the door, and walks outside to the cooing of doves.
Harvey wanders up to his apartment—long abandoned, but there’s no dust, as if someone’s been in here to clean recently. He sits on his old bed. Distantly, he knows he’s in shock, but he can’t—he can’t—
(in his ears, there is the sound of coins spilling to the ground and a wicked cackle, and he passes out)
—
A dream: a cup of coffee, the radio crackling, the fear and the thrill of flying and falling and a flash of bright eyes and a rainbow shard, the sound of doves—
Harvey wakes up as he always does: alone. Something along his spine trembles, and he wonders if he’s finally reached that age where it begins to get difficult to get out of bed on one smooth motion. He grapples against the covers, and swings his feet to the ground. It is unfamiliarly cold, and he wonders once again—shouldn’t there be a rug here? No. No, it’s just the oncoming summer storm fooling him. Maybe he is getting older.
He dresses in his usual way: pants, shirt, socks, shoes, tie. The green jacket feels more worn than he remembers, but it’s also been a while since he’s bothered to shop for new clothes—these are serviceable enough, and there really isn’t anyone to impress here anyways.
To his disappointment, he is out of coffee, even the instant stuff. Maru won’t be in today, so he can’t send her on an errand. He’ll have to make do. Slowly, Harvey descends to his clinic, already dreading the coming day. Summer is beginning its full bloom, and he’s worried about possible heatstroke. Not as many sick people, thankfully. It’s good money, sure, but illness spreads as quickly as gossip in Pelican Town, and there’s a simple peace to summer’s relative lack of disease.
At the front desk, he barely has time to begin paperwork for the day’s upcoming appointment—Elliot had called yesterday and apparently had some kind of tickle in his throat, and wanted to nip anything in the bud before he became too contagious to read his novel for the public—before the door damn near slams against the wall with the force that it’s been kicked open, and Harvey drops his pen in surprise and there is a tremble down his spine and the sound of birds—
A woman stands before him in mud-speckled overalls, and there is a steaming mug of coffee in her hands. Her eyes are bright and lively, but—clinically, of course—there are bags under her eyes and her cheeks seem too hollow for her face.
“Hello,” she says gently, to his great shock. Harvey’s pretty sure there might be a dent in the wall from where the door hit it. “I’m the new farmer in town. It’s nice to meet you.” Then she places the coffee on his desk, leaning forward enough that he catches the scent of earth and sweat and something more, something green and deep. “I know doctors’ lives aren’t especially exciting in the summer, so I figured a pick-me-up would be in order.”
He cannot help himself from leaning forward, inhaling the scent. Of the coffee, of course. “This is my favorite thing,” he says. “How did you know?”
She smiles, and the crooked catch of her tongue against her teeth has him falling faster than he’s ever fallen before. He takes a sip of the coffee and it is strong and there’s the faint taste of salt, an old farmer’s trick he’d heard of (where?) to mask the bitterness.
The introductions pass by in a blur, and it is not until she leaves that he notices the posters on the clinic wall, where the door had slammed. They are for missing children: a girl and a boy, young enough to toddle alongside their parents. They both have auburn hair. The girl has green eyes, and the boy’s eyes are bright and lively. The posters look fairly aged, in all honesty, and the post date matches his assumption—they’d be teenagers by now, in all likelihood, if they were still alive.
Hm. He doesn’t recall seeing the posters before. Maybe Maru had put them up, and he’d simply forgotten.
He supposes he's getting older, after all.