Time in a Bottle

Haze's façade has always been that of a priestess, of someone ceremonial and regal and righteous and bright. She never takes a step out of turn, never falters or bounces. She is simply steady. Simply right.

She looks like a keeper of things, a watcher of winds. She looks like the more permanent, everlasting one, from certain angles, where Jin and Lora seem made to fall. It's something about how robustness breeds the expectation of lifeblood more than looking like a porcelain doll ever will - but, then, Haze isn't the writer.

A doll can't die. A doll can't live, either. A doll is forever.

But Haze knows she isn't. She knows she will be, ultimately, the one to pass on without a trace.

If anyone gets to remember, by whatever twisted machination, it'll be Jin. She knows that much for certain.

And that's fine, right? He deserves it.

He deserves to reap the rewards of raising Lora from a child, practically a babe in arms since, so she's heard, that's what her lady's original living situation had reduced her to.

No, Haze wouldn't try to write the memories down. She doesn't just want to look back; she wants to live forward. She wants to scoop each bubbling-bursting bauble of time into its own special jar, or a hundred thousand million clinking around inside the big one, and then later, when Jin is long gone and there is only the erstwhile stain of a red-haired girl on her Core left to mark this time in Torna's borderlands...

Then she'll unscrew the lid, and let the time out, let the air in.

Then she'll think of holding hands with gloves thrown off, whether cuddled at night or frolicing by day. She'll remember the crisp taste of watercress that Lora couldn't stand to stomach, the peculiar rocks in the river where she herself couldn't stomach to stand even though she could handle heights just fine, and her lady couldn't.

Could, couldn't. Should, shouldn't. Would, wouldn't.

She wouldn't put anything else in the jar. Not Addam's ghost stories, not Aegaeon's sweets, not Minoth's hugs, not Mythra's snacks, not Hugo's good mornings, not Brighid's good nights.

Not even the first time Jin said hello to her. Because after forever has come and gone, she probably won't even have the matching goodbye.

Every night, she prays for forever. Every morning, it comes in spades, and by the time she's realized it, Lora's prayers have been answered, and Haze never has time to bottle up another thing.