serindrana | The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne

Title: The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne
Author:

serindrana
Characters: Matthias and Columbine
Rating: PG/PG-13? I think?
Words: 2538
Summary: Columbine listens to Matthias tell a story that sparks memories.
Note: Christmas-fic for David. :)

By the time that they settled down for the night, Columbine was fairly sure that she was finally competent at starting a campfire. It had been over two weeks since it had taken her more than one failed attempt, over a month since she had last singed herself, and for the last month, Matthias had either sat watching her fondly (in place of concern and expectation of some measure of failure) or, knowing she would be okay, gone off to take care of something else. This time, he had managed to put together everything they would need for dinner, which was now happily cooking away on her more-than-adequate (though slightly skewed) fire. His arm was loosely around her waist in that way he placed it that almost tried to deny what he was doing - hand propped up on the ground on the other side of her, inside of his elbow barely touching her back.

“Tell me another story,” Columbine said, lazily tilting her head back a little. She’d let her hair down for the night and was enjoying the feeling of it curling down her back, sliding over her shoulders and around her neck.

“Another?” Matthias replied with his quiet, laughing voice, eyes sparkling slightly the way they did when he was amused and happy. “You drink them up like a babe, you know. I’ll have to wean you one of these days, or I’ll be left dry of all my tales. You won’t leave me any for myself.”

Columbine couldn’t help but laugh, even as the lyric cadence of his accented words drew her up and down in a sort of sleepless dream. It was dangerous to listen to him talk when it was late and she was growing tired; she would just as soon nod off to sleep as watch in rapt attention. The only stop against her sleeping was his telling her a story, something she could latch onto and wait for the end of. “You can tell them all again, or I can tell them back to you,” she found herself suggesting in that softened-speech state of hers.

“I suppose so,” he smiled back at her, words somewhere between real and whispered in her mind. “Well, what will you have of me, then, best beloved? A folk tale from the far south, a divine myth of the far east...”

“A love story,” Columbine responded, seizing not on his spoken words but on the look in his eyes, drinking it in and letting it flow down and out through her mouth in response.

“I’ve told you so many already, though. I don’t know if I have any left.” And here, Matthias wasn’t teasing. His brow furrowed, his lips tightened, and he looked down and to the right, to where her hands lay clasped in her lap. “What haven’t I told you? There was Deidre... and I’ve exhausted the Greek myths. There’s no more Cupid and Psyche or Persephone and Hades waiting for us there.” His voice dropped to barely audible above the crack of burning wood and sigh of breeze. He sat in silent contemplation for several long minutes with Columbine inching closer, seeking to comfort, wishing she could suggest a story. But she wanted something new, and so all she could do was touch his forehead, press soft petal-lips to his cheek, and wait.

“If there are no more” (but it would be terrible to have run out of love) “then that’s okay,” she murmured, drawing back slightly. “You can tell another tale.”

He shook his head, glancing up at her with a slight smile. “There’s one I think you might like that I still haven’t told, I think. Have I told you of Diarmuid and Grainne?”

“No, I don’t think so. Is it Irish?” She liked it when he told the Irish stories. His face would glow, his lips curl happily, as he told her with pride the nearly-lost (beyond their borders) stories of the Irish. And he was nodding now, his eyes filled with a sort of loving fire. His arm crept up, stealthy as it wrapped in truth around her waist, hand coming to rest on the outside of her thigh.

“It is. Do you remember when I told you of Fionn mac Cumhaill, the great warrior?” At her nod, already rapt and beautifully searching, he smiled and continued, looking towards the fire, gesturing as if the figures would appear before them in the sparking dance. “Well, when I told you of him, he married Maigneis. But their love was not to last. She died, leaving an aged Fionn behind in grief and loneliness. His men found him a beautiful, intelligent woman to be his new wife - the lovely Grainne. But Grainne, meeting him at their betrothal party, found him disgusting, for he was as old as her father.

“But there was another man, one of Fionn’s warriors, the handsome and brave Diarmuid. She fell desperately in love with him that night.”

For Columbine, the illusory figures in the fire shifted from their mythical forms to the more familiar shapes of Matthias and herself. As Matthias described the feast in all its detail, her mind drifted away and back towards the evening she had met her storyteller. She’d been sitting in her father’s shop, finished with her periodic chore of polishing and dusting everything about. It was too early to go back and begin dinner (for they lived alone with no servants since the death of her mother - she was the only woman her father could stand to have around, and he dared not risk her safety with unknown men about the house) and she much preferred to watch the comings and goings of young lords and rich merchants to sitting in the back with her sewing or embroidery. She liked to watch the men handle dueling pistols, liked to imagine the passionate love stories that would bring them to duels over a woman’s honor or heart. She liked, too, the compliments those men would pay to her on the off-chance they noticed her.

That evening, she’d nearly drifted off to sleep when the door opened with a pronounced squeak (she never had gotten around to oiling that hinge) and she’d stirred only to find a tallish man with a roughly beautiful face and unnatural green eyes looking at her, face framed with a short, curled halo of gold-brown hair and the brim of a beaten-up top-hat. She’d sat up straighter, blushed (more from embarrassment than anything else), and he’d moved on to speak with her father who sat behind a wooden desk at the back of the shop room. She’d followed him with her eyes, picked up his name from the gentle, faintly exotic rise and fall of his words, watched as he inspected pocket watches and knives from the best of foreign forges. She even, when he was across the room from her father, rose to her feet and moved to his side in case he had any questions.

But standing beside him, she couldn’t help but gaze up into his eyes when he looked at her, follow the line of his profile when he turned. Her heart sped up when he spoke to her, when he laughed at her small jokes, when he told her sly sarcastic comments that she had to hold back from giggling out-right at. Their fingers even brushed twice in the course of that evening. And then, at the end of it, he said that he would return in a few days when he had had time to think on his potential purchases. She had walked him to the door. He had tipped his hat to her.

“He at first refused to leave with her,” Matthias murmured, taking up the narrative once more and pulling Columbine back to him. “He was loyal in the extreme to Fionn and recoiled from the ultimate act of betrayal, from stealing his leader’s wife. But Grainne was insistent. She went so far as to put a geis on him, compelling him to leave with her. And so they fled that night, when all the rest were asleep.”

She drifted away again, eyes becoming unfocused once more as she peered backwards into her older thoughts. She had been there the day he had returned. In fact, she’d been waiting every say since in case that day might end up as the day. And so, when he had opened the door, she had barely been able to restrain herself from trotting quickly to his side. The passing days had made her weave stories about him (none of them true) and turn herself about in the memory of him as if she were winding herself more and more tightly into a blanket. She had drowned herself in him and come close to the worship of his ideal.

When, at last, he had come by her and they could sit together a time while her father looked about in the storeroom for the items he had set aside, she had smiled up at him and he had taken to telling her stories. He refuted every idea about him that she had had, except for that he was an Irish man (though not a Catholic - and wouldn’t that make her father happy, him not being a Catholic?) with a beautiful voice who spoke charmingly to her and took her hand once in order to demonstrate something she couldn’t quite remember. He made her laugh; she cheered him in return. The whole of that encounter lasted perhaps ten minutes at most before he moved away at a sound Columbine couldn’t pick out. Her father returned. Business resumed.

But he was there that evening when she came out to take the extra scraps from the dinner table to the poor family down the street and around the corner that she visited (without her father’s knowledge) every night under the auspices of giving food to the local dogs. He fell into step beside her as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be there. He escorted her as if he were just her chaperone, perhaps a cousin or perhaps a lover. He bent his head to her and continued where they had left off, she pressing perhaps a little too firmly on his arm and he lowering his voice to too-soft tones. She colored, she fluttered, she followed him with quickened pace and eyes. They gave the family their meal together with smiles and quiet looks. And then they walked back while speaking the same way, her skirt brushing his leg and his arm against his side enough that she could feel the warmth of his chest through his not-quite-fashionable coat.

And then they parted way in a moment where he almost turned enough towards her that a kiss would have been possible. But it didn’t happen.

The strangest thing was that she had never once questioned why he had been there. She had always supposed that she had initiated things, that it had been she who convinced him a few evenings later to let her go with him into the wilds still left of the Continent or the unknowns of Canada. But now, looking back while sitting close enough to him to share his view, she could see that he would have refused if he hadn’t wanted her there and that he had, perhaps, hoped for that very outcome. Whatever the reason, they had run away together with her father’s anger looming on the horizon.

“Fionn, when he awoke and realized what had happened, sent the rest of the Fiann in search of the two lovers. The two fled from place to place, going on many adventures which I will tell to you only if you behave on the morrow. There isn’t quite time for them tonight. So instead, I will tell only of the two when they were alone with one another.” Matthias was smiling down at her, wondering at what was hiding behind her fire-bright eyes. “For they at first led a very strange life together, even ignoring their nomadic ways. Diarmuid, for the first months, clung tightly to the shreds of his loyalty for Fionn, and though he would not give Grainne up for the world - even without the geis, he loved her - he would also not lie with her. She teased him about it, told him that the river that would lap against her ankles was braver than he, until he gave in.”

Columbine had teased Matthias in like turn, though perhaps in milder and softer ways. She would often walk with her hand on his elbow, often gaze up at him adoringly when he spoke, often drop hints of affection into conversation. And he, at times, would return those hints paired with his own. But for the first weeks of their travels, he had refused to admit anything beyond a working partnership as he trained her to mend his leather and cook his meals. She had wanted him to take her hand in his, and finally, it had been she who had grabbed hold of his fingers (under the auspices of being afraid of falling) and held on longer than was necessary. He had smiled, then, and helped her down into his arms. He had kissed her.

“Eventually, after years of living constantly on the move, Grainne’s foster father - who had helped them oft along the way - was able to finally negotiate a peace with Fionn. Fionn stopped the pursuit and Grainne and Diarmuid were able to return to familiar lands and settle down together. They had many children and lived easily for years.”

“And lived happily ever after?” she supplied, finally speaking once more even as she hoped that her father - now cast in the role of Fionn in some strange, perverse turn of thought - would one day invite them back home instead of sending men after her to reclaim his stolen daughter.

“Well, yes,” Matthias said, laughing, watching gears and cogs click behind her eyes, guessing finally at the direction of her thoughts. “That is, until Fionn and Diarmuid, reunited, go out on a boar hunt. Diarmuid is gored fatally and Fionn, instead of healing him as he had the power to do, allows him to die.” Here Columbine allowed a pained sound to slip through her lips. She gazed up at him with worried eyes, as if she feared a similar fate for him. “In some stories,” he continued, unable to leave the story quite unfinished, “Grainne swears her sons to take revenge. In some, she grieves herself to death. And in some, she reconciles with Fionn in the end and marries him.”

“I’m not going to marry him,” Columbine said, unaware that she spoke aloud. Matthias just laughed again, leaned down and kissed her brow.

“You had better not - I would be quite disturbed and distressed.” She smiled at that and he smiled back, before he drew her back from the land of faerie stories and heroic loves to the world where their dinner was finished cooking and the stars were out in full above them.