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English
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Yuletide 2020
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Published:
2020-12-24
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1,206
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1/1
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5
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33
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Thunder

Summary:

The dreams started after Thunder cantered through the middle of a fairy ring on the beach below Malory Towers.

Notes:

Sort of inspired by kelpie myths, and very inspired by Walter Crane's Neptune's Horses paintings.

Work Text:

The dreams started after Thunder cantered through the middle of a fairy ring on the beach below Malory Towers, except that wasn't it at all.

"Of course it wasn't a fairy ring," Bill insists, rubbing her tired gritty eyes with her fingers until the dazzling spots she presses there dance across her vision and turn Clarissa into an auburn blur in the dim lamplight of their room. "It was driftwood and happenstance."

"That's very poetic of you," Clarissa says, gently teasing.

"And thinking that flotsam gets strewn across the beach by fairies isn't?"

Clarissa tucks herself closer under Bill's sturdy arm, finding her hand and turning it over in her own to idly trace the lines on her palm and the ragged edges of her stubby bitten fingernails, touching her as tenderly and reverently as if she were something beautiful. "I suppose it has been very stormy lately, hasn't it? Poor old Mam'zelle almost took off like a kite yesterday."

Bill's laugh clatters out of her, stifled at once by Clarissa's anxious hand until Bill bats it away and winds their fingers together instead. "I saw Belinda's sketch, it was tremendous. I wish I'd been there."

The settle again, curled together in the window seat with the cool glass chilling their sides through their nightgowns. Outside, the midwinter sky is a blue so dark that it confuses the eyes, like a sort of mirage or optical trick making one think of velvet and blankets and warmth and not a space so infinite that it reaches out beyond the stars. "Don't you feel sometimes that you could reach out and pluck a cloud from the sky like a flower?" Clarissa asks suddenly, and Bill grins against the back of the pale hand she's still holding, kissing it.

"Now who's the poet?"

"Shush, silly thing," Clarissa tells her, laughing softly and turning to press her cold nose into Bill's unruly hair until Bill shivers at the touch of warm breath falling on her ear. "Will you tell me? About your dream?"

"I don't remember very much," Bill says truthfully—although she does remember a little, flickering strange shadowy flashes of it like a film that's missing half its frames. "Something... something that was almost dreadful, or felt as though it ought to be, but wasn't. Does that make sense?"

"No." Bill feels Clarissa's mouth smile against her ear. "And yes. Dreams are odd like that, aren't they? You were talking, you know, in your sleep. Calling for Thunder, and I think for me."

"Well, that much does make sense," Bill points out, half-joking only because the truth of it has never quite stopped feeling overwhelming. "You know I'll always call for you."

The girl in her arms is so warm, radiating heat through both of their thin cotton nightgowns, that it makes the window beside them feel even colder as though it's made of ice instead of glass. Bill leans over to breathe on the chilly pane, clumsily drawing Clarissa's initials in the fog then swiping them away with her cuff.

"Secret," Clarissa whispers.

"It's no secret that I love you," Bill says stubbornly.

"Some things are secrets. Precious ones," Clarissa adds, kissing the damp condensation from Bill's fingertip. "Can you sleep again, do you think? Or shall we stay here a while longer?"

"Will you stay with me?"

"Always."

She can tell when Clarissa starts to drift off, the heaviness of her head against Bill's shoulder a sure sign. Bill is tired too—pleasantly tired from their long ride across the raw icy moors earlier; a different sort of tired from studying too hard for their looming end of term exams; an unsettling, unwelcome sort of tired at the thought of being so close to the end of their schooldays with no sense whatsoever of feeling ready for adulthood—but the cold is enough to keep her awake. She wishes she'd thought to put on her dressing gown, or bring a blanket for them to share.

"Clarissa, darling," Bill starts to say, moving to gently shake her awake—but she stops before touching her arm, suddenly frozen and silent and thinking she must still be caught in her dream after all.

Outside the window, the lawn stretches a short way before the cliffs begin. Just visible is one rocky corner of the natural swimming pool, almost entirely flooded now by the high tide, and beyond that the white roil of crashing waves glinting in the moonlight. The otherworldly horses she dreamed are there again in the waves and the surf, bubbles and seaweed for manes and hooves thundering their hectic beat onto the shoreline before shuddering and shattering into foam and a million shards of starlight. Again and again they come, a wild battalion of riderless, salt-spray horses in every advancing row of waves, illuminated in intermittent flashes by the sparking forks of lightning that keep cracking the night sky above. She thinks of Thunder, the heat and the power and the boundless, magnificent love of him, and the only thing stopping her from racing to the stables to ride him out to meet his spectral cousins is Clarissa's head on her shoulder, Clarissa's fingers curled possessively in the front of Bill's nightgown, pinning her still to sense and reason and reality, at least for now.

"The horses," she manages to say in a trembling little whisper. "Clarissa—did you see them? Did you see the horses in the water?"

"What horses?" Clarisa murmurs, more asleep than awake. "Bill, I'm so cold."

"Wake up. Wake up and look, can you see them? I think they're the storm."

"You're dreaming again. Do you think perhaps we could light the fire? It's so col—oh!"

Another streak of lightning splits the sky, and the horses

(the Thunder)

advance again in a surge of noise and power and are dashed to nothingness on the shore, soaking into the gaps between the beach pebbles and vanishing from sight. Clarissa's icy fingers are curled so tightly now in Bill's nightgown that she's afraid the fabric might tear, and her green eyes are wide and sparkling with the sort of tears that have nothing to do with sadness and everything to do with stupefied wonder.

"If you're dreaming then I must be dreaming too," she says in a voice made small by bewilderment, watching the horses rear up joyously out of the waves again.

"Or neither of us is dreaming. Goodness, what I'd give to go out there and ride one."

"I don't think they're for us."

But they are, Bill thinks urgently, in some undefined, inexplicable way. They're for any one of us who awakes frightened from a dream only to find herself in a frightening life. Perhaps that's why Malory Towers was built so impractically here at what feels like the edge of the world—to provide this strange, magnificent glimpse of strength and magic and glory when it's most desperately needed.

She doesn't say so out loud; the quiver in Clarissa's breath makes Bill feel certain that she already understands.

"No," Bill says instead, and another scintillating flare of lightning makes her start and laugh and press a hand over her thudding heart. "I have my own Thunder, after all."