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If it were up to Yelle she’d use mushrooms. The kind that die fast even without her nudging them along the path of life, the kind that vanish and take her secrets and feelings with her. But Alyria said that maybe she should treat her feelings with a little more permanence, and Winona suggested finding something sturdier than mushrooms and moss, and even Holly said that diaries aren’t supposed to decay.
The diary itself was Jawbone’s idea, and Yelle doesn’t like it, but that’s probably the point, right? Jawbone had watched her squirm at the thought of writing down her feelings and then said nice and gentle, “If it were easy, everyone would do it,” and it was a platitude but at least it was a nice one. He helped her find a new therapist that she could see in Elmville, and they agreed the diary was a good idea, so Yelle’s still doing it.
Either way, Antiope’s over at the yurt, hanging out, when she says, “Oh shit, did you make a whip?” and reaches under Yelle’s bed, and pulls out a long braided rope of grass and straw.
For a second Yelle can’t move. She has to remind herself that it’s not immediately recognizable for what it is, and even if it were Antiope couldn’t read it, and even if she could she would never. Still it takes a second for her to swallow and say, “Could you put that back?”
Antiope does without question. “Sorry, I thought it was a whip,” she says. “If you couldn’t tell.”
“I could,” Yelle answers, and she’s proud of how she barely wavers. "But that's actually my diary, so I'd rather you didn't look at it."
“That’s—” Antiope looks under the bed again, not reaching for the braid but squinting at it. “Yelle, you know I love you, but a diary is objectively different from making art as a hobby.”
“It’s not just art,” Yelle says. “Let me show you.”
She is, without a question, not high enough for this conversation, but she still goes over to a little wooden chest by her bed and pulls out a careful fistful of straw. Antiope lifts her eyebrows. “Where do you get that?”
“I take whatever Katja doesn’t use. She’s cool with it.” Yelle sits down across from Antiope and arranges a handful of the straw into careful parallel lines. Normally she doesn’t care a lot about detail, but Jawbone did and so does her new therapist, and it bugs them when the straw is too messy to read back. There’s an anxious hummingbird hum to every motion she makes, a nervous edge that she tries to quash as much as she can.
Antiope watches, her eyes careful and analytical. Yelle likes Antiope’s eyes. She looks through Yelle but not in, like, a scary way, or a way that makes Yelle feel like she’s being pulled apart under a microscope, or like Antiope is liable to start randomly asking about Yelle’s feelings. She looks through Yelle like she’s trying to see what’s on the other side, and Yelle likes that.
She looks down, making sure all the straw is set up correctly, trying to look busy and not like she does this every night. “Do you know any shorthand?”
“A little,” Antiope says, and then puffs out her chest in that way that means she’s about to impersonate her mom. “Joneses should know a little bit of every language. That way an enemy can never catch them off guard.”
“Antiope,” Yelle says sincerely, “I would love to know how knowing shorthand means you won’t get caught off guard in battle.”
“How does anything I know help?” Antiope mutters, but her mouth is curving into a pleased smile. “It’s good for taking notes in class. Soft skills, you know how it is.”
“This is a kind of shorthand.” Yelle carefully begins braiding the strands together. It’s meditative most of the time, but right now she’s painfully aware that Antiope is staring at her hands. “Some of it is things I developed on our own, like knots for our names. Some of it is common words.”
“Who taught you?”
“My mom.”
“Which one?”
“Alyria, mostly.” She’d been delighted about helping Yelle find a new way to commune with nature and herself at the same time. “But Holly helped. It was her idea to ask Katja for the straw. And Winona is the one who suggested the braiding.”
“All three of them together,” Antiope says, with that sort of plaintive note she gets sometimes. Danielle understands. She can’t imagine not getting along with her moms.
“Winona thought it would be good for me to do something with my hands,” she continues, trying to focus on what she’s tying. “So this is my diary. Or my journal. I haven’t decided which I prefer, but I’m leaning towards diary. It feels more personal.”
“What are you writing now?”
Yelle leans in a little, and Antiope does the same, their heads bowed together over the straw. “I’m home,” Yelle reads, “with Antiope. That’s as far as I’ve gotten right now.”
“Which one is my name?”
She brushes a finger over a couple of the strands, two pairs twisted tightly that become a four-strand braid. “That one.”
“That’s what I look like to you?” Antiope says. There’s some kind of emotion in her voice that Yelle knows is awe or amazement or something in that family of emotions, something that feels uncomfortable when it’s pointed at her.
“I can teach you the alphabet if you want,” Yelle says. It’s a defense mechanism, a wall she doesn’t mean to put up, but it’s just — anything, anything she can do to stop Antiope from looking at her like that. She’s getting better at being the center of attention, but that’s not the same as being good at it. Especially not when the one looking is Antiope.
“Sure,” Antiope says. It’s not the cleanest subject change, but if Antiope isn’t going to call her on it, Yelle isn’t going to wait for her to do it. She needs a way out of this, stat.
Unfortunately, she chose the wrong way out, because Antiope keeps… looking at her. Obviously, because Yelle is explaining how to hold the strands, how to get the tension right without pulling the straw apart, how to do a perfect twist. Antiope has to look at her to learn. It’s too much. It’s close to perfect.
Antiope’s great at this. Yelle should’ve known. For all the time that Antiope spends looking at her, Yelle spends plenty of time looking back. Antiope the arcane archer, Antiope who led them into the Red Waste and out of Talura’s clutches, Antiope who Yelle loves so much that it scares her, Antiope who Yelle has made yards and yards of grass braids about loving and being scared by, Antiope who shot her once and that’s water under the bridge.
Antiope has good hands. Yelle already knew that.
Her alphabet is sloppy but passable, and even though she cuts herself on the hay a couple times she’s beaming when she’s done. “Can I have some more? I want to practice.”
Yelle is already working on a new braid. On new words, actually, because she doesn’t think she has shorthand for “in love” yet and she’s starting to think that she’s going to need it. She barely remembers to wave a hand. “Take as much as you want.”
Normally hanging out with Antiope is a lot of gossip, a little bit of quiet check-ins, and some music. This time neither of them play any music. Yelle likes journaling in silence, and Antiope is far too focused on what she’s doing, sitting on Yelle’s bed, looking at her long woven strand of alphabet and then back at what she’s doing. She never asks Danielle for help, and Yelle… tries to feel normal about that.
Eventually Antiope’s crystal lets out a small, gentle chime, the outside world reminding them that it exists and would like to see them. Antiope sighs. “I have to head home. But this was fun.”
“You’re a natural,” Yelle says. She tried ten or fifteen symbols for love and none of them were right, weaving and re-weaving and trying to make her own word for exactly the way it feels as Antiope smiles softly at her. “Next time we should do this outside. It feels better.”
“Outside sounds great,” Antiope says, and doesn’t even question what Yelle means by next time. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow,” Yelle says. She doesn’t know what’s happening tomorrow, but it’s a given that she sees the Seven most days. A given, and a gift.
Antiope’s fingers graze Yelle’s shoulder as she walks out, the smallest motion that could be an accident. It could be deliberate. Yelle thinks, almost like it’s someone else’s thought wandering into her mind, that she could reach up and take Antiope’s hand if she really wanted.
But the fingers graze and the moment passes, because time can never stay, and Yelle doesn’t take her hand. Antiope lets herself out, free to come and go as she pleases, and Yelle gets to her feet, feeling the pleasant stretch in her legs. This is another thing she’s learning to love: muscle and bone and the way it belongs to her.
It’s only now as she stands up that she realizes one of Antiope’s practice braids is still lying on her bed. Yelle tilts her head and looks at it. The tension is better than that first alphabet braid, even if the knotwork is still a little messy. But it’s legible.
Y-E-L-L-E.
She sits on her bed and takes the braid in both hands, looking down at it. It’s her name. Antiope doesn’t leave things behind by accident. Antiope made her a gift. Yelle’s not sure she’s ever braided her own name before. She never needed to.
Yelle carefully lifts the braid to her chest, clasping it near her heart, and slowly, slowly lies down on her bed. And slowly, she feels a smile blooming on her face, and something warm and sweet blooming inside her chest, spreading through and through and through.