backstory RP
Eight days since the bacchanal. Six days since the purification, holding the bleeding limp piglet over one another's heads and hands at Henry's hard-faced direction. Five days since Camilla could speak again finally. Language had come back to her slowly, in murky spurts like water from a rusty spigot. First to return was the French she'd learned in high school: naming everything in the room by memory, picturing in her head the labeled textbook page. Later, English.
She told Charles she couldn't quite recapture Greek yet, and that it worried her. She needed to talk to Henry, she said. He could drill her in grammar, revive the language for her. Just a refresher, so she could hold her own in the classroom until the gears started meshing properly in her head again.
Charles, who'd been forging her homework all week, nodded sleepily from the couch. He was too tipsy, or too preoccupied, to see she was lying. She could do her Greek homework as well as anyone else. She just hadn't felt like it; every time she tried to concentrate, she found her mind wandering to the woods.
She didn't need help -- at least, not with Greek. What she needed was a pretext to see Henry without the others around and without her brother thinking anything amiss, and this was the one she'd chosen.
"He's probably at home," said Camilla. She half imagined Charles would be able to hear the pound of her heart the way she could, her pulse thumping in her ears. "I'm going to go over and see."
"It's not like he'd have anywhere else to be." Charles yawned, uninterested, and turned his idle attention back to the novel in his hands as his sister shoved a battered Liddell and Scott into her bookbag. It was a Friday, almost noon. No Greek class on Friday, and that meant Julian wouldn't be on campus. That was what Charles meant, Camilla knew. Had their professor been on campus, Henry might have been with him, breakfasting together and then chatting or working, whatever it was they did together. Everyone knew Henry was Julian's favorite. (And no one begrudged him that. He practically had a natural right to it: he was the brightest of them, a genius in his own erratic way. He'd published an annotated translation of Anacreon when he was only eighteen, for heaven's sake.)
"Right, then, I'm off," her back already to her brother so he wouldn't see the color rising in her cheeks, and the door shutting behind her only barely missed cutting off his mumbled goodbye.
She hadn't talked to Charles about what had happened in the woods. She hadn't talked to anyone about it. The others all tried to piece together their scraps of inchoate memory, while Camilla sat mute with a red muffler wrapped around her throat for warmth. The muteness had not been strictly voluntary, but she hadn't been sorry for it either. When she could speak she didn't want to speak about that.
Except she did remember some things, the way the others remembered some things, and what she did remember -- some of it was more than regrettable. And some of it was wonderful. But how much of it had been real, and how much illusory? She couldn't believe it had all been real. She remembered thinking she was a deer for a while, and she was positive she hadn't really transformed into an actual deer. So how much else of it wasn't real?
(The dead man was real. She was sure of that. The clean-up afterward had been enough to prove that. Not just all the blood, but bits of his brain -- No, don't think about that --)
She needed to ask about it, as much as she'd rather not. And there was one authority in these matters. He'd led the whole thing, after all. It had been his idea. A messenger had come to him in a dream. He would know, if anyone knew, how much had been real. He would be able to tell her what she should think. She didn't want to deal with the others, her brother's anxious solicitude, Francis's hysterics. She didn't want to have to soothe anyone or downplay anything. If she could just talk a little with Henry but without the others, Henry would level with her, she was sure of it. If only he'd answer his door, which was by no means a sure thing, especially with Bunny all worked up --
But in the end Camilla didn't have to worry about Henry answering the door. She spotted him before she'd even turned up the walk to his front porch. He was in the yard, wearing his gardening clothes, doing something to the rosebushes. Getting them ready for winter somehow? She couldn't tell, because he was between her and the roses, his back to her.
"Hello," she called to him. Her voice sounded rusty to her even now. Fallen leaves shushed along the concrete at her feet until she'd gotten through his front gate, where the walk had been raked clear. For a weird illogical moment she wondered if she was loud enough to be heard over the leaves. Then he straightened and turned, and the sight of his face was a relief to her, composed and still as always.
It was the depth of that relief that made her aware she'd been almost certain she wouldn't be able to talk to him at all. It startled her, a little, to realize this. "Hello," she said again, to cover her own uncertainty.