In a bower of green

[queenofmay]

Marian had decided to take Guinan up on her advice from the first day finally. Even if talking to the computer was a strange thing, that still made her wince too much. Having a voice shoutout at her from nowhere was going to take a lot of getting used to. But she managed to ask for where she wanted to go, and get directions.

Which did get her to the doors of the Arboretum.

The fingers of one hand curled tight into the fabric of her skirts.

The holodeck might be an endless wonder, but it came and went, while there was something deep and true about honest green and growing things. The smell of them and the look of them, that rang a bell in her heart nothing else could. It takes only the breath of another second before she's gone, too.



Walking inward, fingers reaching out to brush through the lush greenness.

Comments

[the_seafarer]

It's such a little thing.

Such a small thing, the bump of a shoulder; hardly a touch at all, just a lean in and out of the space next to him, with enough force to knock his arm without pushing him off balance or lingering.

It's such a small thing.

But so is the strike of a match, which lights a campfire. So is the nail which holds together the frame of a door. So is the first far-off flash of lightning, before a storm sweeps its thundering curtain over the world. The touch of her shoulder is only a touch, there and gone again, but her warmth lingers, spreads from that small square inch of space across his chest, through his veins.

Without thinking too much of it, he lifts a hand, rubs idly at a spot just below his collarbone, where something throbs with a dull itch, and drops it again to swing easily at his side. "Aye," he agrees, "I feel the same. Now that this door has been opened to us, loathe would I be to leave with it unexplored and unquestioned. This ship, I feel, must have some thing or place or person it has yet to show us, some adventure that is yet to be revealed."

[queenofmay]

"And these people," Marian added right on his words. Layered right under with something akin to deadly seriousness.

But little less could really be expected of the girl who chose her people over herself for more than half a decade. Or the one who chose the work of helping to guard and vouchsafe those of Milliways even before she could really get used to hot running water.

"We could not leave them here and simply return to whence we came, while they were bereft of the same ability to leave." It might be the way of Milliways, and The Door. People got stuck places. Other places that weren't there. For a short time. Much shorter than this. But the doors always came back. And she couldn't imagine leaving this many people in this situation, and just going back to her own make-shift new home because it was offered. Even if her heart did so long for Ambergeldar, and Milliways.

She'd never be able to sleep. She'd get there only to want to come back. To feel she had should have never left. That she needed to find out if they could come through, too. If she could help find them ways home, through other doors in Milliways, and the marvels of the several there who knew of other magic of the same type. Moving between places. Opening Doors. Owning space-faring crafts that could travel great distances through the stars.

[the_seafarer]

"You believe that, were we to be released, the others would not be, also?"

It's a strange thing to consider. Responsibility. Whether they have any, and how they could possibly act on it if they do. Would they need to take strangers through the door to Milliways? If they did, would a new door open to lead them back home again? "I wonder if a door will open here for us, once we've returned. I admit, I would be loathe to leave this place for good. If we could journey back and forth, I would consider it a great boon."

Their doors open only to Ambergeldar, now: their lives, lived between the two worlds of Milliways and Amy's kingdom, but to have a third, filled with glorious new worlds and skies, full of new adventures and lessons...?

Truly, he would never have thought such a blessing could exist.

[queenofmay]

The look she passes in his direction is more complicated than a simple disagreement. But then she had to come to terms, and keep coming to terms, with being just one of too many who should have. Of Nottingham, it was just her. Whose needs she would never claim was as desperate as so many of her people. Even the men who came, for them it had been briefly, then never again. Just her.

Where it came to her escaping her end, it was just her, too. She lived. Of her father. Robin. Even Vasey.

The only other person to make it out resided as a shade of his once self, and someone she could still hardly look at.

It's a fast, too deep set of answers, that really only touch her eyes, before she's looking away to the greenery at her side and not answering at all. She might like The Door. She might be grateful to The Door, somewhere just under the surface, in a twist that still called its self selfishness, too, that it have given her the means to survive both situations. But she would never call The Door or Fate or God, or whatever you wanted to call it, fair to all those who were in need.

"It would be, wouldn't it?" Marian said, a beat late, looking at a flower to her side, answering the rest of his words instead. A swirl of red petals and a purple-yellow interior that likes of which her world, and the end of the universe, had never seen. All the new things that were still in the universe to be seen.