[This part will be all about driving out to the trail in the redwoods, setting up why they're out there, mention of the proximity to the anniversary of Tim's death, some banter in the car between Robin, Anders, Fae and Holly, the like.]
[There may not actually be a scene split here, it might be seamless, but this is them at the beginning of the trail. It'll have Anders and Robin in the lead, and they pull pretty far ahead pretty quick, talking with each other. Holly is rather slow, and Fae stays behind with her. They have some conversation, and Holly eventually shoos Fae off, not wanting to slow down her usual pace. Fae's like: "You sure?" and Holly is like: "Yeah." So Fae walks ahead, and proceeds up a long hilly climb, the forest spread out and pine needles all over the ground, and she's mostly in her head — I'd love her to be looking at things and identifying them, just like, naming bugs and bushes and trees in her head, stuff like that. Gods, gonna have to actually research for that, bleah.]
[This is what I'm thinking of actually writing first. She reaches the top of the hill, and thinks that's a good moment to take a break. She sits down, gets out her water bottle, takes a swig, and just overlooks the forest. The trees are huge — many are dead. A big forest fire came through here recently, and took out a huge swathe. She watches birds perch on dead trees, and springing greenery in the underbrush. This is like a metaphor for Tim's death, and her growth. Something like: "Death and life are not opposed."]
My eyes tracked the geese migrating across the bright gray sky, and as I did, their shapes began to twist and thin. The brightness of the sky was getting to me, so I cast my eyes back down at the rich brown soil, and found it blurry and indistinct. My brow furrowed, and I blinked, heavy, and felt something was wrong. Something in my eye. I reached up, and wiped. Moisture came away in my hand, and, startled, I stared at my palm. Oh. I put a hand to my chest, and breathed, deep. Calmed my nerves. I blinked incessantly, and wiped at my eyes with the backs of my dirty hands.
"Heh," I gave a one-note laugh. It was amusing. I hadn't expected to be affected so much just by looking out at the landscape. But I was pulling myself together. The walls stood. The beach was empty. I was good again. I sniffled, once, and then resumed my watch of the tall black woods. I looked at the little grasses sprouting up from the ashy earth, I saw the flowers on their stalks. A dragonfly landed on a shrub to my left, and its bright orange caught my eye. And as I looked at it, its perfect figure and shimmering wings, its shape expanded, the world became bleary, and my breath caught in my throat. I hurried to bring my hands to my face, and I took a deep breath. My eyebrows came together. I looked at my hands uselessly, and this time the tears kept coming.
So my hands met my lap, and I looked back at the world with this new lens, and I watched as everything bled together, and experienced that for its own sake. No one is here to see me, I consoled myself. If I can just get through it, maybe it'll go away.
So I let it have its way. My breath was stifled. My vision unusable. My nose ran and all I could smell were tears. I couldn't remember the last time I cried, and I couldn't come up with a good reason it was happening now.
The windows shuddered. The ocean's roar came, loud.
But I just let it, and I sat there like that, on the anniversary of Tim's death, in the redwoods he loved, the home he was buried in, hopeless and still and silently crying. Holding my breath, hoping for the moment to end.
And with my brain a buzz, my hands shaking, I let it roll over me. I let the tears clear paths through the grime on my cheeks, I let them drip off my chin into my clenched hands. I let my chest tighten, let the breaths come only when they asked. I let it all happen to me, and I endured, as best I was able, knowing that this had been coming, but secretly hoping that I'd escaped a long, long time ago.
And so it slowed. And I wiped my eyes, and they cleared. Some pictures had fallen off the shelves, but I had a roof over my head, I had a door between myself and the ocean. I could handle it. So I decided that I'd sat here long enough — exercise was sure to work this energy out of me. So I grabbed my pack, and I stood up, and I took several deep breaths.
I looked at the sky, and I gazed through the branches of the redwoods, up at a bright spot where the sun spun behind the clouds.
But I was at the same time afraid. I was startled, I was nervous. I looked back at the burnscar, the bars of wood and the perching birds. I sniffled, and I huffed. I felt a delusion that something had reached out and gripped me, had squeezed me until the tears came out, and, though my feet were under me, my arms in the straps of my backpack, I was rooted to the spot, and if I turned to leave now, that grip would tear something free, and I wasn't sure I knew how to get it back.
This idea froze me, and though I thought it stupid, though I condemned the idea the moment it entered my mind, it proved real, if only because I truly couldn't bring myself to move.
I heard a howl of wind from somewhere very far away, a howl I recognized, from a storm I had yet to step out into these many, many years.
So, to fight free, I addressed the gripping presence.
"Tim," I said, though I wasn't sure I had. It carried no volume. The sound died on my lips. I tried to clear my throat, and found it tight.
"Dad —"
My body clenched, and the sound turned from a word to a childish squeak. Like a little boy, I thought, and that's when the windows flew open and my knees went out.
I buckled, and managed to stand for a moment, but the effort was futile. I twisted out of the backpack straps and clumsily tossed it to the ground, and fell to my knees, and hung my head, and hated the noises that came out of my chest, like Felix had been locked out but as the windows clattered and the walls creaked and the front door flew open, there he was, and I thought I'd locked him out for good reason, out in the storm, the barren beach framing his shoulders, the tall wave cresting just over his head, but as he stood there, in the doorway, he looked at me, wet and cold and confused, and our eye contact broke a part of me, maybe a very thin, worn down part, maybe something that I shouldn't have built in the first place, and as I knelt there, barely able to breathe, knees in the dirt and hands at my eyes, even as I broke a little, all I felt was sorry, and even as the house protested, red on my cheeks and nose, I held out my arm, and I beckoned him inside, and to my surprise, he came.
"Dad," I tried again, and the word came out in three syllables, punctuated at the end by a sob, "I meant to have a talk. I really did."
"I wanted…" I was cut off by a clenching of my stomach, and I fell forward, my elbows on the forest floor. When I next spoke, I had no volume: "I just wanted you to be my dad. I wanted to be your…" My throat fought me. I squeaked: "I wanted to… to be your daughter."
For long moments I just sobbed, thoughts scrambling to find shape and purpose.
When I finally found my voice again, it was strong enough to yell: "Why'd you have to die!? I thought… I thought we might have been getting somewhere. Why'd," I chuckled, and sniffed, "why'd you have to be so slow, Dad?"
I sat myself up, my ass on my heels, and gulped in air. "Oh my god," I said, my teeth clenching as I bent forward, then gasping in air, just to say again, "oh my god."
A bird cawed nearby, careless for my state. The world kept turning as my world came down.
"I met the woman you left mom for, and she's lovely, and you're right. She's sick, and she needs more attention than I do. You're right. You were right." I couldn't handle saying it, it was as if in doing so I'd made it real. I took a moment to recover, and then yelled: "So what's that make me? Am I self— am I selfish? I, I just wanted your time, that's all I really wanted. I loved you Dad, I—"
…
"Fuck," I nearly cough the words, my throat was so tight, "I love you."
The waves came in.
The walls held nothing back. The wind tore everything down, the windows broke. Wood chips and glass flew around me, nicking me, cutting me. Water crashed against me, soaking me, cold, shivering, but I held on. Onto Felix. I hugged him, I met his eyes, even as I came apart.
He was of this world. He had weathered the storm already. Soaked, cold. But it didn't touch him. Not anymore. It was my turn.
"He loved you, too."
I turned around to see Holly, a sad smile on her face. I rubbed a sleeve across my eyes. "No," I protested.
Holly sat beside me. "Yes," is all she said.
"No," I reinforced, "he loved his son, Felix. He never loved me."
Holly tried to speak, but I interjected: "He never knew me enough to love me."
"He loved you. He didn't understand you."
"I didn't want his love for Felix. I didn't want his love for his son. I wanted his love for a daughter. I wanted him to see me. I —" I sniffled, rubbing my nose in my arm. Holly reached out a hand, and rubbed my back.
I stared for long moments over the blackened trees, and the short shoots of grasses in-between them.
I chuckled, short and sharp. "I hate this. Crying."
"Why?"
"I feel like a little boy, again. All my progress, undone. I'm a child."
"Hmm," Holly intoned. "Maybe you had to go so far back to get him, because you forgot to bring him along with you."
I sniffled. I looked down into my hands. My face contorted once more, and I sobbed. I put the palms of my hands against my eyes, careless of the dirt and dust it got on my face. She was right, and I felt like such a fool.
"Maybe," Holly said, soft and motherly, "he didn't understand you, because he was looking for Felix, and you'd left him far behind."
"No," I squeaked the word, a drawn out noise in my throat. But it wasn't a negation of what she'd said. I leaned into her, and she hugged me from the side.
I'd left him in the cold, to weather the storm for me.
To be berated by the wind and rain, left him to die on the beach, while I'd hidden in my flimsy house.
I'd told myself I didn't want him. That he was everything I disliked about myself. And maybe he still was. Maybe he was my instability, my naivety, my innocence. Maybe he was my inability to move. My inaction. My ineptitude. Maybe Faeowynn was my confidence and drive, my agency.
But I'd forgotten how to cry. How to deal. It felt so bad I told myself I would never do it again. It was Felix's warm touch that might have grabbed Mom's hand and held it tight while she died. It might have been Felix's fragile heart that understood Robin in the wake of Tim's death. Maybe there was need for a child, unruly and unregulated, that would step through the archive and curiously pick at a file, putting it out of place, leaving something of a mess, an evidence trail that could lead me to my grief.
I sobbed again. Holly's bosom was becoming wet with my tears.
"It's alright," Holly hummed more than said, and I heard the rumble in her chest.
I shook my head.
"It's alright," she said again.
[much later in the scene, Holly:] "She's going to die how we all die. Little by little, in pieces, slowly over time, until all at once, she undergoes such a change that you look at her, and you'll think: 'she's dead.' But that's only because you're looking for something that isn't there anymore — she lives. What you'll really mourn is the relationship that was lost, the last little piece, the most important one. But that's only death to you. She'll live, in small ways, in huge ways, like you will, when you're gone. Like I will, when I'm gone. Like Tim does, right now."
Fae sniffled. Holly rubbed her back.
"Is the time for action really over?"
"No," Holly said. "It never is."
"How can both be true?"
Holly rubbed her back, but didn't respond.
[Separate section because I also might write this first, but it's as she's looking out at the world, staring up at the grayish sky, watching birds against the bright thin clouds, their shapes obscure, and she thinks that it's because of how bright the sky is, and she looks down, but the world is still blurry, and she furrows her brow, and blinks heavily, and wipes at her eyes, and she feels moisture, and she's like, "oh," and she takes some deep breaths, and calms her nerves, composes herself, and goes back to looking out at the world.
But it gets bleary again, as she's looking at a creek that runs through, and she wipes at her eyes again, takes a breath, but it shudders, and then she wonders: "What am I doing?" and gives up. Sniffles, and a tear runs down her cheek. "There's no one here to see me, I can let this pass through me." So she lets herself cry a bit, and it subsides, and she stands up, and she looks over the forest, still teary, and she feels a need to say something, and she goes: "Tim…"
Sniffle. Oh no. "Dad —" she can't finish the sentence, and she brings her hands to her eyes, 'cause now the floodgates are open, and she's a little frightened by that, we go to the imagery of the house with the wind blowing, the beach with the sea pulled back (we should have referenced that earlier, too), and she plunks her backpack down, and sits back down, because suddenly it's really obvious she's not going anywhere, and she just keeps crying, and eventually she starts talking, out loud, at Tim, about her life and their relationship, and how she wanted to be his daughter and she never got to, and she wishes he wasn't so slow, and she's finally gotten acquainted with her "step-mom," who she wanted to hate but she loves, and he was right, she needs a lot more attention than Fae does, and what's she supposed to do with that? "So am I selfish?" And she cries and cries. And crying makes her feel like a little boy, like she's regaining contact with Felix.
And eventually, after the worst of it but definitely not through it over all, Holly comes up from behind, and they have a conversation.]
[And later, Holly and Fae meet Robin and Anders at camp, where they've already set up their tent, talk about how they should have sent them with both tents so they could have gotten everything ready, Fae nods, they notice that Fae is acting, y'know, the way you act after you've had a big cry, and they set up camp, and sit down at a firepit, and they talk about it. A big heart to heart.
And the story ends with Fae falling asleep next to Holly, and feeling shaken, and worn out, and yet… despite everything… the night is quiet. And she gets to sleep.]