"You'd Wonder Where She'd Gone..."

[psalm_onethirtyone]

For mhari, who has lost teefs. <3

Hephaistos/Zara, DF canon.

He has Set My Feet on the Rock, and Given Me a Firm Place to Stand

Her hair is like copper caught in the firelight from the forge, and she blends into his walls, she walks among his works, as if she's part of them. She dresses dark as a shadow, and sometimes when she steps out to him he wouldn't know she was there if he couldn't feel her footsteps on the living rock.

Here, under the earth, she's healing. Her body is taking strength, from him, from his home, her brittle bones are growing strong again, like the outcroppings of stone that are made from layer after layer of hard water. When she came with him she had no copper hair, only a smooth head that she (in shame) covered with a kerchief, and now she has tangled firelight on her neck.

He puts no store by these things, but he feels them in her: her pride, her pleasure, her relief, and because of that he greets the incidents of her fingernails with rough warmth. He's shy, she knows that, she holds out her hands to him silently to show him, he nods to say it's good.

His aunt sends them bread and sweets from her baking, which quickly become covered in soot and grit from his (their) smithy here, and in the evenings when Up There the sun is lowering like embers in the far end of the sky they eat together. The bread is always soft inside the hard crust. He watches her quietly and finds that each day she eats a little more, pacing herself with surprising discipline. Only once, when perhaps she was trying to please him, to feel his silent satisfaction at how much she can hold these days, she eats the whole of one of the little loaves and is sick all night.

That night he works by himself in the shadowy light, and feels her absence unexpectedly. He's grown used to her. She's better company than his golden maidens; she swears more, helps more. She rolls her sleeves up, ties on the heavy leather apron, and works the bellows. She as she strengthens helps to beat the metal, and holds the casts steady when he pours hot bronze into them. She sifts through gemstones deftly, brings him exactly what he needs. She's good to have.

He notices that she's not there.

In the morning she's better. They work. She has a cough from the smoke, but it's not bad. Her broken arm is healed and she can do much more than she used to be able to, and, better still, she can carry heavy pieces of wood to the fire and bring him the refined silver to work with. Her shoulder is good to lean on when he walks. His limp is part of him, natural as veins of quartz jagging through a rock wall, but it's good to have something to lean on, something that harrumphs and coughs and makes snappish comments when he leans too hard. He pokes her in the back.

His aunt comes in the afternoon with a basket for them, more bread and little meat pies, cherry turnovers and brown ale--more practical than ambrosia and nectar, but his aunt is practical. She's a hearthfire who warms every place she comes to. She smiles at them, black-haired and beautiful, and his copper-haired mortal looks back sternly.

"It's good to see you're better," Hestia says.

"Hmm," she says.

"I'm so glad you're here. I know how important you are to my nephew."

He clears his throat and motions her to take the basket. She gives him a thin, sooty half-smile and nods to his aunt.

"Thanks."

Hestia kisses him on both cheeks and promises to come back soon. He's making her jewellery she doesn't know about, plain jewellery that will please her, little golden suns to put in her ears that won't get in her way, beaten bronze clasps for her gown, a flat clip for her hair inlaid with a forest and all the creatures of a forest--partly reported to him by his mortal, because he doesn't go above ground often enough to have seen them.

She describes them while she stokes the fire, talking in her rough, crabbed way about deer and bear and foxes.

"No unicorns," she says. "That's made up."

Weeks later, long after the gifts have been given, he makes new pins for her. He had once before, but she lost them, along with her hair, and, now that it's long enough to get in her face but not nearly to be tied back, he makes pins with dragons at the end, ruby-eyed.

It's evening. They've eaten already. She sits with her back against the stone and turns the pins over in her hands. When she looks up at him her eyes are dry.

"I wanted t'be a blacksmith. Told my daddy that's what I'd do."

He sits beside her, slowly, easing his body down. He's silent; he always is.

"He said even blacksmiths had t'talk t'people." She turns the pins over again. "Took up sewin', any way, so it don't matter. Only now I'm smithing."

He takes the pins from her hands and pushes them into her hair, one at a time, taking care to be gentle. As he puts the second one in she reaches out to him, touching his craggy face a little with her long, skinny fingers, her new strong nails. She traces his mouth and tucks her own up like resignation.

They sleep near the warmth of the forge. Her head rests on his broad shoulder, and she puts one of her thin arms across his chest, so he can feel her all night. She and the rock both breathe. The flickering light shines on her hair and face and on the walls. The ruby eyes of the dragons gleam from the dark pockets of shadow.

When morning comes he doesn't move; he leaves her there as long as she can be left.

Then they go to work.