Fic: Feathers Falling on White Blossoms

Title: Feathers Falling on White Blossoms
Fandom: Simoun
Characters/Pairing: Rodoreamon/Mamiina
Summary: Prompt: ‘Then out of these roses she made a bed / A scarlet pillow for her head / She laid her down, no words she did speak / She's like the swallow that flies on high / I love my love, but love is no more.’
Word count: 1,061
Warnings: I refuse on principle to ‘warn’ for homosexuality. But there are spoilers for the entire series.

When the storms came, and the wind shook the briar-rose in the courtyard, the lightning whose swift brilliance broke the sky killed the sweet-singing birds. The Plough in the stars came to till the earth in the winter months, when the blizzards froze the flowers in their roots and blasted the eagles down from Heaven. Rodoreamon sat and sighed in the bowed casement. Who could unravel, in storm and sunlight, with the augurs of the birds or the language of the flowers, the horoscope of a shattered heart? The broken pieces of happiness—could she find them in the flowers that ate of her lover's body? In the beaks of the seaside swallows who danced with the soul that kited eternally through the blue? In the gizzards of the lesser birds that ate the flower-petals?
She went out into the garden and plucked a white rose. The thorns pricked the pads of her fingers and her blood fell upon the ivory-coloured petals. The vermilion splash on the sinless white was an outward sign of her inward feelings. The Lady Rodoreamon sent away the servant who came to bandage her fingers and put the blossom silently to her lips. She looked up into the blue-grey skies that had so recently billowed through blackness with watery light in the inexorable greatness of a summer storm.
Beneath the gardens, down by the River Beliel, lay the tombs and effigies of the House of Mofas. The graves were mostly weather-worn, some unrecognisable. Only the relatively new statues of her father, Raef II, and her uncle Aarief V before him, still looked more or less as they had in life—and one more statue, which the servants had built on their own time and with only Rodoreamon's personal money. It was the first statue of a servant of the House of Mofas since Aarief III's butler had died protecting him from a rabid wolfhound two hundred years ago.
Rodoreamon went down to the Tombs of the Lords with the flower still in hand. Her blood soaked through and turned the white to pink, pink the colour of a scullery-maid's dress two years past that seemed to her mistress like centuries. She passed an open plot, its headstone labelled RODOREAMONF IV with the F roughly crossed out with a downward slash of a chisel. She resisted the sudden urge from the dark spaces of a grieving soul to lie down and get it over with and wait for the wind and weather to cover her over.
She came to the statue. Around it was planted a bed of amaryllis lilies, pink into white. Rodoreamon let the rose fall on to the lilies, and mechanically, her heart to heavy to spring in proper motion, picked a lily instead. She twirled it in her hand and looked into its fluted mouth. An exercise of the mind above consciousness made Mamiina's voice come again to her ears. The words were very distinctly formed, but by the bodily ear they were not heard. The voice from the tip of the lily was sweeter than honey, clearer than the sound of horns. The yellow-dusted anthers curled out liked small sweet tongues. The raindrops on the pale pink petals glittered like the summer stars.
When they had found the body of a House scullery-maid seven miles away, in a little field of edelweiss in a hollow of the Stone Mountains, Rodoreamon’s father had wanted to have the bones (by then it was just bones) buried then and there. It was not out of cruelty but misplaced love. He knew his daughter’s feelings well. He knew them, in many ways, all too well, as Rodoreamon’s mother had spent most of her time cooped up in her chambers for the past decade and Rodoreamon thus had only father dearest to confide in. Raef’s theory had been that to see her love as nothing more than a skeleton would destroy Rodoreamon’s fragile inner peace and send her back down into the spiral of grief that had gripped her in the weeks following her beloved servant’s death. But Rodoreamon had insisted. Whatever remained of her love would be buried in the Tombs of the Lords, given the full honours of a Mofas House sibylla, and have a statue erected just as all other sibyllae of the family had. And if need be, she would pay for all of this herself.
Her father had been inclined to accept. But the next time the storms came, her father died of an ague. The cousins who had come to take Rodoreamon's father's money from her—which a woman beneath the age of twenty-five could not inherit—had run into more resistance than they could have imagined. Rodoreamon took up her seat in Parliament. She petitioned the Chief of State, who had flown with her when they were all sibyllae. She went to the Plumbish capital and had dinner with the Vice-Consul. It was a desperate, lonely delight. The delight that came when she was pierced in the soul. The delight that seized her and forced her to stay alive. The delight of fighting for the right to fund the honour of a fallen goddess.
Rodoreamon let the lily fall with the rose and turned away. The granite eyes of her love followed her back up the hill, and when she got back into the inner gardens she stripped off her galoshes and lay them among the struggling beds of out-of-habitat edelweiss. The edelweiss would never thrive, but it even surviving was enough. These were the flowers that had re-eaten the body that Rodoreamon had never got the chance to touch as lovers touch, the flowers through which the soul came back.
A great while ago, history began in a rush of wind and rain. And it was wind and rain that had taken Mamiina into their own being. It was wind and rain that seized Rodoreamon’s heart and made her fight for eighteen months for the right to inherit her family’s holdings. But it was stillness and sunlight, the milk of kindness and charity and pure love, that moved her heart to build the statues, and plant the gardens, that one day, when the clerks of history put quill to paper or finger to typewriter key, the name ‘Sibylla Mamiina, Scullery-Maid Messiah’ would be writ across the sky in stars.