Untitled Flashfiction

It had been a while since I wrote a flashfiction piece and I felt the itch again. I asked for prompts on Facebook, and Misty gave me sunrise, cold and flannel. Here’s what I did with this prompt.

600 words with new characters I’ve recently started playing with… I’d love to hear what you think of them!

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A light knock on her door pulled Vivien from the indistinct dreams she’d always refuse to call nightmares. She sat up at once, her heart suddenly pounding so fast that the beat of her own blood in her ears was all she could hear. She thought of another attack and the further deaths that would ultimately be her responsibility—and then she realized that someone sent to kill her would not have bothered to knock. She called herself a fool, took a deep breath to steady herself, and went to the door.

The stone floors felt cold under her bare feet. She crossed her arms, hugging herself within the long men’s flannel shirt she had taken to wearing to bed in the absence of anything more appropriate. She missed her fuzzy slippers. She missed her comfy pajamas. She missed home.

She pulled the heavy wooden door open just a crack, just enough to see who was standing there. In the faint light of the candles at her back, she couldn’t see the color of his eyes, and at first she couldn’t tell which of the twins it was. When he spoke, though, she knew.

“Come with me,” Aedan whispered. “I want to show you something.”

She wanted to protest that it was night, she was tired, and she was cold and barely dressed, but already he was offering her his hand, and she couldn’t say no. She took his hand and let him lead her down the hallway, past his brother’s room and to the back of the house. They slipped out into the garden.

It wasn’t the middle of the night as she had thought, Vivien soon realized. The sky was beginning to lighten, and already a few birds were chittering to each other in the trees that bordered the property. She stopped on the edge of the lawn, unwilling to step on the wet grass barefoot. Aedan looked at her and seemed to understand with one look. Without warning, he picked her up in his arms. A bubble of surprised laughter burst on Vivien’s lips as she clung to his neck.

“What are you doing?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

“I told you, I want to show you something.”

For a few moments, Vivien was acutely aware of how little her shirt covered, and how warm and strong Aedan’s arms felt around her thighs and at her back, how solid and comforting his chest seemed. His shoulders flexed under her hands, and that simple touch was reassuring. She looked at his face, and her own heated up at how close he was. She could have counted his eyelashes. She could have leaned closer, only a couple of inches, and caressed his lips with hers; they looked so soft…

“Here.”

She blinked at the word, uncertain what he meant, and turned her head to follow his gaze. Her mouth fell open, and she gasped softly. He had walked right to the edge of the cliff that marked the end of the backyard, and as she looked down, she could see the valley come to life. Far in the distance, the sun had just breached the horizon, throwing a symphony of reds, pinks, and oranges into the sky. The light swept through the valley toward them, lighting up fields of gold, woods of the deepest green, prairies of wild grass and wilder flowers of every color imaginable.

“It’s… beautiful,” Viven whispered.

“And it’s yours,” Aedan replied. “Your world, now. It’s not just pain and death. We have beauty here, too.”

As she looked at him, Vivien could only agree.