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The pink trees were not the weirdest thing she'd experienced since waking up here. Neither was the clearly defined path of them, the grass, green and lush amid so much freshly fallen snow, the smell that tickled at something like familiarity deep inside her brain and wouldn't let her go. She'd been on the business end of one too many reality bending, brain breaking realizations and existential crises to question this one. She simply tossed it onto the ever growing pile of unexplainable shit that made her head hurt if she thought about them too much and tentatively poked her head inside. It was warm. Safe. Inviting.

The rational part of her brain warned her that this was how people died in horror movies. Her irrational body only saw the hill, the tree, the sky full of stars just beyond even as the morning sun warmed her back and didn't listen. She stepped through.

Lights twinkled in the distant city below. If she squinted, she could probably pick out her house, but that wasn't where her eyes were. She made a beeline for the tree and the initials she knew were carved there. She pressed her nose against the trunk, scraping against the rough bark, and closed her eyes. She could see, as clear as day, a hand reaching out. Her hand, brushing the shavings gingerly away to marvel at their handiwork.


"There," Grace said, with a satisfied kind of finality. "Now, even when we're long gone and far away from this place, we'll still have left our mark."

Persephone only hmm'd in response, her chin resting on Grace's shoulder, eyes half-lidded and content. She could feel a hand against her cheek, a thumb tracing the line of her jaw, the smell of wood and sap and her. She smiled, cupping that hand with her own. "Our vacation home in the mountains?"

"Somewhere high, away from the city, where we can see the stars," Grace agreed. She opened her eyes, sliding Grace's hand forward to press a kiss to her palm and gaze with all the love of two lifetimes into her eyes. They were even more beautiful than she remembered in the dim starlight.


Tears fell, one after another, streaking the fur of her cheeks as Bragi pressed her forehead against their initials. Her eyes squeezed shut, savoring the memory, gripping it like it was her last lifeline in the middle of the ocean, until her knuckles turned stark white and her fingers went numb. Her breath hitched in her throat and a low, keening whine escaped her.

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