there is a tree as old as me
rating: teen
tags: future fic, outside POV, trespassing, established relationship, engaged steddie💍
✨for@kallisto-k at my BIRTHDAY MONTH PROMPT FEST for the prompt: To Build A Home—The Cinematic Orchestra: ‘and now, it’s time to leave and turn to dust // out in the garden where we planted the seeds // there is a tree as old as me
She catches the trespassers by chance, really.
She’s awake early even for her routine, age doing nothing for the capacity to sleep in on a good day but her hip’s been a trial, and she needs buy a new mattress but Richard’s insistent he can’t bear to sleep on a stone slab, Patricia, good god—she wants to get one of those Select Comforts that splits their settings between two sides as a compromise; he argues those are for lesser mortals, which she’s long learned has evolved in recent years to mean not just that he thinks he’s above something in general, but more now that he thinks he’s better than technological advances.
And Patricia Harrington has standards, certainly, but she can also recognize when
She’s also old enough to remember when ‘new’ was an opportunity to throw her Black Card and gloat a little in the rush of the novelty, the momentary shine until the next new thing appeared to repeat the cycle.
She might be feeling her years, but she doesn’t understand when her husband got so damn old.
At least he’s still savvy enough to the time that they’ve got an airtight security system for the house itself, given the trespassers—more likely would-be-burglars, given the evaluation they’d just paid taxes on for the property—that she spies out the window, hears where she cracked the window in the kitchen to light a cigarette as she brews an early coffee.
Maybe Richard will agree to motion sensors for the yard, if she tells him about these…miscreants.
They’re moving carefully, like they don’t want to be seen, or more likely caught—suspicious, obviously—but they’re also moving like the know where they’re headed, as if they’re familiar with the space they’re traversing even in the pitch dark: even more suspect, really, and she wonders if they’ve cased the home, adds full-property camera surveillance to her list of proposals for reevaluating their security.
“I can’t believe you convinced me to—“ she barely catches the hiss from one of the criminals from across the yard, but it doesn’t last.
It doesn’t last because the second party drags the first close and: the lighting’s horrible, the moon’s crescent at best, but there’s really only one thing to be doing when two bodies press close, and then break apart with a pop she makes out on the breeze and, well. She was young, once.
“Believe it, baby,” the second trespasser rumbles low, and, oh, good god: “we gotta hit all the landmarks.”
They’re men. They’re both of them men and they were just—
“Landmarks?” the first one hisses sharper, this time, and Patricia…she doesn’t care nearly as much as Richard does about what people do in their bedrooms that she personally doesn’t agree with.
But this isn’t anyone’s own bedroom. This is her lawn.
“Of our story,” the second one, he—he—has got such curly hair she likely would have assume it was a very tall women, if it weren’t for the voice; “all our highlights.”
“What, exactly, was—“ the first man, he sounds a little exasperated as he whispers, but…fond. Fond like Patricia hasn’t heard in…well.
A very, very long time, at least.
“Here,” the curly haired fiend traipsing her property stops at a redbud tree Richard had always despised, said it looked tacky, common. Patricia canceled every removal service he’d had whichever secretary he instructed to send.
The second man turns, moves slow toward the tree before reaching, placing a hand on the trunk almost carefully, reverently. There’s something…familiar about him. The shape of his face, the way the the coif of his hair catches in shadow—
“My nanny used to tell me this tree was planted the year I was born, that it grew up with me,” and oh, oh, that’s, he’s—“so that I’d have to eat my vegetables and stuff, if I wanted to see it grow.”
He sounds so nostalgic, so soft at the edges; Patricia doesn’t know if she’s ever heard her son sound like that.
Because that’s who it is; why he seemed familiar even at a distance.
Even if she hasn’t seen or heard from Steven in nearly twenty years.
Keep reading
