Comme La Pluie

comme la pluie

*

Fleur saying, "Pour moi: le ciel doit pleurer comme la pluie."

*

Fleur imagines dying over & over again; it's always grass growing over her body in tender green tendrils and choirs singing in high-ceilinged churches even though she doesn't believe in God. That feeling when you press your hands against L'Arc de Triomphe and imagine the dead souls trapped inside, and they're screaming but the noise of the traffic drowns them out.

Instead: the bright lights on the set leave her blinded with white, and people become pale filmy ghosts & that makes all of it easier. Only she can feel him, on top of her, inside her, fingers digging into her shoulderblades & the sharp jut of his hip. Ghosts are supposed to be insubstantial; he is more like a negative image on the back of her eyelids.

That is her cue: she opens her pretty red mouth and says, "Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die..."

The same tired game, the same brute whisper. "Die, then! Die, die..."

The numbing pull of silk rope at her throat and fading to a noiseless summer blue.

Fleur keeps her promises.

*

They say that no magic can bring back the dead, but that is, like so many things in the wizarding world, only a half-truth.

*

They bring her back from the brink each time; the grey between life & death, like she's floating above herself. A ghost perhaps, not even a ghost, a stream of consciousness wrapping around itself in eternities, wrapping around the letter I. Lazarus reborn; but she doesn't believe in God, and she has looked him straight in the eyes. They pull her back from the brink, but each time she brings some of the brink with her. It's not a safe game to play in front of cameras, watching yourself die in a thousand different shots from a thousand different angles so many times that you've perfected the last gasp the angle at which to hold your neck & seen the vapours of your soul escape from your lips.

*

In a world of illusion some things must be real.

*

Fleur comes home one night and one of her tapes is playing. Gabrielle's cast a Suppono Charm over the Revera Spell and Fleur opens the door just in time to see her ghost-man's outline fade as Gabrielle takes his place and pushes her back onto the bed and digs into her shoulderblades and winds a silk rope around her neck and whispers in reply, "Die, then! Die, die..."

She drops her keys on the carpet, activating the musical charm hanging on the chain and Gabrielle looks up at the clear sound of the flute.

The Fleur underneath her fingers dies exquisitely, Fleur cannot help but notice, even in slack death her hair falls to her shoulders in silvery swathes; a storybook picture of death except for the deepening bruise underneath the rope. The Revera lasts for another few moments and then the imitation Fleur's skin cracks so slightly and she breaks into pieces of light.

"You killed me," is all Fleur can think of saying, her fingers at her own throat as if she can feel a rope tightening around it.

Gabrielle shrugs her shoulders delicately. "You should be used to it by now."

*

Fleur imagines dying over & over and it's never like this. Gabrielle once asked what she wanted for her funeral and Fleur had laughed & said:

"Pour moi: le ciel doit pleurer comme la pluie."

And that is how Gabrielle always remembers her.

*

When she does die, though, and she does, dying a million fictional deaths does not excuse her from the real thing, she hovers in that area between life & death & floats above herself & waits for them to bring her back but the thing about half-truths is that half the time they're completely true. When they lower her into the ground, each ray of light is like a white fracture in the sky threatening to split it apart.

Perhaps it will break into rain instead of sunlight?

Tu as eu l'espoir, ma soeur.

Gabrielle smokes cigarettes over Fleur's grave until it is dark, and then casts a shaky Revera & Suppono on the tape in her purse. Fleur's outline forms hazily and then solidifies, and she's leaning so casually against her own headstone and Gabrielle pushes her back against it with a rough kiss.

Fleur smiles and opens her pretty red mouth and says, "Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die..."

*

Finis.