Roses

It rook two weeks of Juillietta singing to her for Luciana to wake up to a point where she could respond to words. By this time, her skin positively glowed once more, and her hair looked and felt like a dream.

Her health had reached it’s peak, and it didn’t look about to drop anytime soon.

Her responses weren’t anything special, Aurora thought. She’d only twitch a little if you spoke very loudly in her ear, or made a loud noise, but everyone else seemed very excited about it and her teacher- who made a point of asking her how Luciana was doing every day- almost cried with excitement.

Aurora thought this was ridiculous, as the teacher couldn’t have possibly cared that much. She barely even knew Luciana.

But she was wrong. The teacher cared for Luciana very much.

Aurora’s behavior- after that first day of silent contemplation- had become unruly once more, and she made a return to school the next day even louder than ever. She resisted all attempts to quiet her down or even just mildly subdue her. She befriended a kid who had just come back from having chicken pox and who had a few interesting scars to share with her and anyone else willing to look.

His name was Harold Crawlet, and he insisted on being called Harry- although Aurora said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to call him Harry if she had not even known him a day.

“Well if you carry on calling me Harold you won’t know me any longer. I don’t answer to that name,” he said proudly.

Aurora had relented on that point but when he tried to shorten her name- to Rory, no less- she had put her foot down.

“You are banned from shorting my name without asking my express permission first,” she’d snapped haughtily as she ignored her school dinner festering in front of her.

“Fine. May I call you Rory, Rory?”

“Of course not! What the hell do you think this is?”

That day marked the start of a beautiful friendship.

Their teacher didn’t think so. As people, she was sure that they were absolutely wonderful. As individual students, she wouldn’t mind admitting that they were perhaps a bit of a handful. As friends they were an unholy terror, a monstrous team from hell created to punish Miss Perky for every sin she had ever committed, would commit, think about committing or had heard of someone else committing, and their naughtiness was contagious.

Aurora’s favourite day was when they’d gotten the entire class to turn their chairs around and recite The Jabberwocky. It had taken a lot of breaktime practice, but they had managed it in the end and it was glorious.

Miss Perky had tried speaking to Juillietta and Will when they came to pick her up, but Juillietta just hung back dumbly and Will would only shake his head solemnly at Aurora and pretend to be disappointed while Miss Perky was looking and then burst out laughing the second her back was turned.

Calling Caroline wasn’t much use either- she was wound up so tight with all her worries and was so flustered half of the time that she couldn’t even remember what they’d been talking about at the start of a conversation by the time they’d reached the end.

She really cared for Luciana, and she couldn’t wait till Luciana came out of her coma.



Will had gotten a girlfriend.

It wasn’t that Juillietta was angry with him, because she wasn’t. She didn’t even like Will in that way. But it sort of stung because now he had a significant other, Aurora had a new best friend who- if Literature ever got anything right, would grow up to be her boyfriend and eventual husband. Even Chuck had started a flirtation with a girl on his table in Maths- her name was Beth Livingstone, and she loathed Juillietta for reasons that weren’t ever made clear. She was the girl who’d said Juillietta was sickly looking on the first day.

William’s girlfriend was one of Louise’s friend who was in his history class. Her name was Maria, and on the days when they weren’t visiting Luciana she was definitely to be found at Caroline’s house. This meant that Will’s room was suddenly no longer a place where Juillietta, Aurora or Chuck wanted to be.

This meant that Juillietta spent a whole lot more time at the hospital, preferring to share the silence in Luciana’s room with Robbie rather than being in Will’s room in Caroline’s house. When Robbie left the room, she would sing.

Sometimes, Juillietta could swear that the world changed while the song was being sung but she could never remember well enough afterwards to explain to herself what had happened and how, let alone to anyone else, and so she kept it firmly to herself.

Luciana begun to wake much more quickly because of this. After a while she began to speak- mumbled sentences in her mother tongue that didn’t seem to make any sense- sometimes it would seem like she was stuck on a single word that she would say over and over again.

Aurora appreciated this much more than twitching, and accompanied Juillietta on her visits to the hospital more often.

Aurora didn’t sing. She refused the words admittance into her brain and instead asked Luciana nonsensical questions in her mother tongue that infuriated Juillietta and drove Robbie out of the room.

And she brought Harry to the hospital. This was because she didn’t want to go to his house and refused to invite him over to Caroline’s.

The hospital was, therefore, a sort of middle ground between the two.

Harry was entranced by actually meeting someone in a coma and as, after a while, Juillietta simply ignored him, he was entranced by the ways in which his singing managed to change the world. What he begun to see was the view of a rich, deep green forest from a window in a grey stone castle. He saw maids and courtiers galore, people in rich dresses, furniture his mum would have killed for and so much more. He saw Aurora in a tiara and a poofy dress, and all her finery.

The first time he told Aurora this, she told him off for being a soppy idiot, so he didn’t ever do it again. But he definitely saw it, and Juillietta would have been interested to know this.



The day when Luciana finally came out with a fully coherent, fully relevant sentence in reply to something someone near her had said was a day of dashed hopes and heartbreak.

Everyone had been there- even Harry- and they’d been talking about a car boot sale that Caroline was going to the next day, in order to buy more books from the shop.

And Luciana had said ‘I want The Importance of Being Earnest,’ clear as a bell.

Everyone had jumped, and then begun running every which way, calling in doctors and asking her sheer volumes of questions and she’d answered them all- simply, but coherently, and a doctor came in and ran a few quick tests on her- simple tests that the family were all used to- before informing the family that she was still in her coma.

“How can that still be possible?” Caroline had wailed as Aurora and harry had gotten bored with Luciana talking and were having skidding races. Aurora hadn’t heard the doctors’ verdict.

“Well it is possible, technically, but it’s rather bizarre,” the doctor said, checking his chart and, not for the first time, Caroline wondered if it was just a way for doctors to get out of explaining things that they didn’t fully understand themselves.

“So she can’t come back home then?”

The doctor shook his head sadly. “No, I’m afraid not. She’ll have to stay here to be monitored.”

The room fell silent and Harry and Aurora skidded to a joint halt and stayed there.

“She’s not better, is she?” Aurora asked. Caroline shook her head.

“Dammit!” Aurora swore. No one else said anything for the rest of the visit.



Robbie was sat by her bed later that night, after everyone had gone, his hands clasping one of hers.

He’d gone home on one of his bi-weekly returns the night before, and he’d come back clean-shaven, fresh clothed and exhausted. As he’d found out very early on in Luciana’s stay in the hospital, he couldn’t sleep at home anymore, not while knowing that Luciana wasn’t nearby. He had effectively lived at the hospital for the past few months.

He kissed the hand he held, not letting the tears that were waiting trickle from his eyes, tears of anger because her brain activity was just what it should be, just like everyone else’s and she still wasn’t awake.

“Luciana,” he whispered. It was the first time in all that time that he had tried –properly tried- to speak to her. It felt odd.

“Luciana,” he tried again, louder, trying to say her name the way her sisters said it. He’d had Aurora coach him. She’d said that half the art in speaking their mother tongue was believing with every fibre of your being that you could speak it, and you would speak it, and you would speak it well. Half the art lay in refusing to even acknowledge the possibility that you could be speaking it badly. As Aurora had so elegantly put it:

‘It’s like high fashion. The style is in the wearing. If you think you are not saying the words correctly then you are definitely saying them wrong. Whereas if you believe with everything you’ve got that the words you are saying are right then you probably sound perfect.’

However, sitting alone in a room with a girl who was probably sleeping it was hard to truly believe this. He said her name a third tame, because that was the easy part;

“Luciana,” he sucked in a deep breath. “I wanted to say… if you can hear me, that… O’ l’yi kiem.” The words were awkward and heavy, but Luciana’s eye lashes fluttered in slight recognition of them and so he said them again, with increased confidence.

“Luciana, o’ l’yi’ kiem. O’ l’yi kiem, o’ l’yi kiem, o’ l’yi kiem. I love you, Luciana, my beautiful friend. I love you so much. Aūmé Luciana.” The last words rose through his lips in absence of Juillietta’s, pushed themselves through without his say-so and sung themselves into the quiet air. He didn’t know what they meant, but obviously they meant something important.

It was like pushing a button, the effect they had on Luciana. Her eyes snapped open and she began struggling to sit up, managing it only when Robbie helped her.

“Piacheré,” she commanded him, but he didn’t know what she was asking.

“Umm, Luciana… hi. Umm, are you really awake?” he asked finally, cautiously. Afraid that the answer might be no.

“I was never asleep,” she replied, leaning back into the pillows, her eyes watching Robbie’s every move. “I heard you,” she said again, after a while. “Repeating and repeating ‘O’ l’yi kiem, o’ l’yi kiem.’ That was you, wasn’t it?”

Robbie nodded dumbly. There was something different about the girl he loved.

“Is it true?”

He nodded, still silent.

Luciana sighed, and Robbie didn’t know what emotion had fuelled it.

“Let me see your eyes, Robbie,” she asked finally. He stood up obligingly and leant over her so she could look into his eyes.

She looked for half a second before shaking her head like she was never expecting what she was looking for anyway, and gently pushed him away.

“I don’t love you,” she replied, plainly and brutally. “I’m sorry. I remember why now. It’s not your fault. It’s not any one’s fault, not any one I know. I fell in love a long time ago. And I was due to be married. To a stable boy, a boy with beautiful blue eyes. And every bad dream, every sudden vision, that was all the things my life could have been. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice strong, and confident, and clear.

“I don’t understand,” Robbie pleaded, hoping that she wasn’t saying what she thought he was.

“We were to marry. “

“To marry… but… who? When?”

“He died. He was shot through the neck. But if he hadn’t died,” Luciana’s voice faltered a little here, but she pulled it back from tears just in time. This was her worst nightmare, the reoccurring one, the one she couldn’t escape. “It was our wedding day. And everyone was happy. It was horrible because that was what should have happened, and now it never will.”

Robbie gave up on trying to make sense of her words and let them wash over him, and wash through him.

And she in turn told him everything about her life that she could remember- the last clinging remnants of important moments. And she wrapped up saying;

“And so I don’t love you. But I will try.”



It wasn’t the next day, or the day after but the day after that that Luciana was allowed home. The doctor gave a whole list of things they should look out for in her, and make sure she followed a strict daily diet to minimize the chances of her unexplained coma ever striking again.

She met Will’s girlfriend for the first time that day, as she fidgeted uncomfortable in her chair at the kitchen table, backseat cooking as the doctor gave strict instructions for her to ‘rest’.

Caroline took it good humouredly, although she took care not to let Luciana see her chuckle.

Will came home and opened the kitchen door with a flourish.

“Luciana, I’ve got a friend I want you to meet.”

Luciana nodded at him, impassively, and William ushered his girlfriend in.

She was petite and her straightened hair had been pulled up into a frustrated bun. Her dark brown eyes were rimmed with eyeliner that looked slightly wobbly.

“Luciana, this is Charis. Charis, this is Lucina, Juillietta and Aurora’s sister.”

“Hello, Charis,” Luciana said, still taking her in.

Charis, in turn, stared openly at Luciana. She’d been expecting… well, she wasn’t at all sure what she had expected but she knew at once when she saw Luciana what she hadn’t expected, and it was everything that she was not.

Her skin still had the glow of health the hospital had given back, the shafts of her hair that caught the light were almost blinding and her green eyes sparkled like they were living things. Living jewels.

Robbie came in then, smiled gently at Charis, then even more gently at Luciana. It was sickening, and suddenly Charis and Will knew how if felt to be Chuck, Aurora and Juillietta when stuck in a room with them.

“Is dinner ready yet mum?” he asked, going to stand beside his mum at the counter.

“No, it’s not. Go away, all of you, unless you’re being helpful.” Everyone lingered. “That mean’s everyone except Luciana. Get out!”

Luciana laughed as they left, and Will turned around in shock before being pushed, not so gently, out of the room by Robbie.



Aurora was watching Juillietta put on make up in the mirror.

“Why are you doing that?” she asked as Juillietta powdered. “You’re making your skin look all flat and gross, like everyone else’s.”

Juillietta ignored her and began to apply mascara.

“Christ, it’s not because Chuck’s coming round later, is it? You don’t even like Chuck. You like Robbie, remember?”

Juillietta moved on to eyeliner, perfectly rimming her eyes with the fluid.

“It’s making you look like you got the colour sucked out of your skin with leeches. You look like a corpse.”

Them came lipstick. A pinkish colour that was a couple shades lighter than her natural lip colour.

“Well congratulations. You look just like everyone else. Except sick,” Aurora said, rolling onto her back and leaning her head over the side of the bed so she could continue to stare disapprovingly at Juillietta’s makeup.

Juillietta studied herself, before sighing.

“You’re right, it’s all awful.”

“Of course I’m right,” Aurora said, shutting her eyes in triumphant self-righteousness and folding her arms across her chest.

“Shut up, Aurora.”



Juillietta was putting on makeup because Chuck would be there. She figured that if there was no chance of her getting Robbie, she could at least have Chuck instead. If she’d have told Aurora this, she knew she’d be told off for settling, and for leading Chuck on, so she was trying to hold off the inevitable revelation for as long as possible.

She considered the make up she and Louise had bought for her and sighed. It wasn’t going to be any help at all.

“If you are going to go after Chuck, you’re going to have to rely on your personality,” Aurora had said, after Juillietta had told her to shut up. Juillietta had sighed internally, but had ignored her sister.

Surely it wouldn’t be hard to draw Chuck’s interest back to herself. He had liked her before, before he even really knew her.

He could like her again, right?

She almost found herself asking Aurora, but she pulled herself back just in time.

The success of her plan lay as much in making sure Aurora didn’t catch wind of it as it did in her personality.

It was nigh-on impossible, but Juillietta was determined to at least give it a try.



It was later.

Chuck was stretched out on the sofa that Robbie slept on, unconcerned. He was –or at least, he felt that he was- as much a part of the family as the sisters were, and so had no qualms about stealing so much of their sofa space.

Charis was sat watching him slyly from the armchair she sat in.

She was slightly nervous of him. She was slightly nervous of everyone, including Will who- despite Caroline’s warning- was checking how dinner was going.

Robbie sat in the other armchair opposite, flicking through a book, clearly bored.

It concerned her that her that no one was trying to talk. Was it because of her? Was it because she was there? And they didn’t like her? What if they all absolutely loathed her? And they didn’t talk because they didn’t think her worthy of hearing their conversation. Oh, Christ, they all hated her.

Robbie flung the book down, and didn’t even see Charis flinch.

Will came back in with Aurora on his shoulders, laughing uproariously at whatever delightfully disgusting something she was whispering into his ear.

Juillietta followed, entering more sedately, and sprawled herself across the other sofa, blankly and automatically watching the TV.

Will dropped Aurora on Chuck, startling him awake, before joining his girlfriend on her armchair.

Aurora settled back into Chuck, ignoring his complaints, and started humming loudly in between making deeply cutting remarks about everyone who came on the television screen.

Luciana and Caroline were the last to enter the room. Juillietta sighed and made room for them on her chair grudgingly.

To Charis, the silence in the room felt tense although no one else seemed to be suffering from it.

“I’m considering online journalism,” Robbie said suddenly. Only Caroline seemed to take any interest whatsoever, and even she didn’t display much.

“You always say that,” she commented, blandly, not looking up from her Good Food magazine. “But you never do it.”

“Well I’m really considering it now, properly.”

No one said anything.

“The Fly have a few entry level vacancies. I’ll need to send in a sample of my writing.”

“I didn’t know you wrote, Robbie,” Juillietta said and then cursed herself internally. She was meant to be getting over him. That meant not taking an interest in his life till she could be sure it was purely platonic.

“Yeah, I do a bit,” he replied airily, unaware of her internal struggle. “I haven’t in a long time, though.”

“Every now and then he takes an interest in journalism and media instead of trying to get a proper job,” Caroline said, and Will let out a bark of laughter.

“I thought you studied History?” Luciana asked before he could come up with something witty to say to his mother, her face puckering into a frown.

She couldn’t remember a thing that happened the night she woke up, and Robbie ha found that he was glad about this. He hadn’t understood anything she had told him about the man with the eyes made of blue ice, but something about the story plucked on his heartstrings, and made an ugly, discordant sound.

“I do, but I’m interested in journalism too. History is pretty useful actually, it teaches how to look for and use information-”

Aurora, at this point, got incredibly bored and started a conversation with Juillietta in their mother tongue about how different Luciana was from before her stay in the hospital.

Luciana frowned at them and said, very pointedly, in English:

“I am here and I can understand you. Stop that or leave,” she said, her voice containing icicles made of acid.

“Sorry,” Aurora simpered with a wink to Juillietta, and then laughed. Juillietta laughed as well.

Luciana sucked in a deep breath, as if trying to calm down, but apparently found it impossible to do so and so announced stiffly:

“I’m going to check on the dinner.”

Caroline didn’t protest, and they all watched as she strode out of the room, leaving unsure silence behind her.

Then Robbie stood up. “I’m just going to…” he gestured to the door, and everyone understood. He left room.

“Why do you always do that Aura?” Juillietta chided, but she didn’t really mean it, and so Aurora didn’t answer.



Luciana hadn’t gotten as far as the kitchen.

Robbie found her halfway down the hall, one arm outstretched and holding on to the wall, the other desperately clutching her head.

“Luciana… Luciana, is it another… is it another vision?” he asked, and she gave a strained nod. He reached out to pat her shoulder comfortingly and as his hand connected with her body, the world became different; overlaid with another room in another place.

They both pulled away from each other simultaneously.

“Was that… that’s what you see? The… no, a living room?” Robbie asked shakily, and Luciana nodded. “Do you know why I saw it too?”

Luciana shook her head, then nodded. “I might… I don’t know, really. It’s just a guess. An idea,” she said, massaging her forehead as if in pain.

“Tell me,” Robbie replied.

“I think I can… I don’t know. Show things. I’m not sure it’s just… I can’t explain it but I think that- I feel that-” this time when she stopped, she stopped completely instead of trying to start over again, and held out the hand that wasn’t still holding the wall, and concentrated, very hard. “Look. Do you see?”

Robbie looked.

He didn’t see.

He shook his head, and Luciana sucked down a breath and concentrated harder. And –for just a moment, Robbie thought that perhaps he might have seen a faint image flicker into view and then quickly out again.

“A rose?” he asked, unsure. Luciana nodded.

“Yes.”

They stood silent for a while. There was nothing else to say.

Robbie sat down on the hallway floor, leaning against the wall, and Luciana did the same, sitting opposite to him, shaking hands holding her head like she was trying to stop her brain from escaping.

Caroline found them like that when she actually went to check on the food.

She tactfully decided not to say anything, and passed by them as if they weren’t there.

“Do you know why that might be?” Robbie asked, after a long, contemplative silence.

Luciana shook her head. Robbie wasn’t looking at her, but he knew that would be the answer. He had asked the question more as a thing to say then anything else.

Caroline passed back again, saying as casually as she could manage “dinner’s ready, kids.”

They waited till she had slipped into the living room before getting to their feet and walking as steadily as they could into the dining room.

They sat next to each other silently for the entire meal, neither of them eating very much. Later that night they would both fall asleep on Robbie’s chair, and they would share the same dream. They would not talk about it in the morning.