sharp tongues {Embry Call}

¹⁹ Heinlein

They didn't find her, they didn't find a body.

Harper remembered during one of their more jokingly morbid conversations how they wanted to die. Sage romanticized it a bit. She wanted to have her last breathes in a field of sunflowers. She wanted to be calm and happy. Harper could imagine a lively Sage closing her eyes in her usual pair of baggy jeans and a tightly fitted tee-shirt. She would be lying in a field of those tall yellow flowers. A smile stretching across her lips as her chest rose and fell before it slowed to an end.

Harper brought a sunflower. Sage's parents didn't stop her when she opened the empty casket and placed the golden flower in it. The flower didn't look like it belonged when she placed it in there. Yellow amongst the creme interior. Quil had placed a four-leaf clover in there. "For luck," he told her with a watery smile. It was an inside joke that she couldn't pass by a clover without plucking it from the ground and twirling it between her fingers. Sage had said the same thing each time.

The two laced their fingers together as they sat in the second row. Each of them holding on like the other was a lost line. It was a promise that they wouldn't leave each other. They would be friends. Harper would stay and she would sit with him at lunch. Quil would distract her from her work with some video game or car fixing debacle he was working on. He would sit at Moonstruck diner and they would work on homework when it wasn't too busy.

She would be a Jake and Embry replacement and he would be a Sage replacement. It wasn't great, but it was better than being alone.

The pack stood in the back row with their lips sit in a grim line and shoulders taught. Each of them could remember the conversation they had before. Uncomfort settled in them as they saw Harper and Quil walk pass, each of them looking at the pack in disdain. The bright flower attracting all the attention as it stood in a sea of black. It stood out against Harper's dark dress and her tan hands that grasped it like a lifeline. Sage's parents sucked in a breath as they saw it.

Harper thought that at the very least something should rot away in the wooden box.

"We're going to be okay," she whispered to Quil as they went back to their spots.

Quil's eyes were rimmed with red and he nodded. He ran a scarred and calloused hand through his short hair before nodding his head again. His breath was shaky and Harper's lips tilted down. On an impulse she took the hand closest to her, the one not fidgeting wildly, in her hand. 

"We're going to be okay," she repeated quietly. 

Quil nodded again and held her hand tighter. "We're going to be okay," he echoed her. His voice was hoarse. No, Harper thought it was a shell of his former voice. There was no mirth. No happiness. It was hollow and devoid of any and all meaning. 

They grew up together. Her casket held a clover and a sunflower. They grew up together. She was nothing more than a whisper, a memory. They grew up together.

There would not be any growing old together.

"We're going to be okay," Quil repeated.

Embry's eyes stared at the empty casket, knowing that it should have been filled. Sage didn't have a pulse. She shouldn't be walking around with skin cold as ice, skin that glittered like diamonds. They didn't have to mourn her, but it felt right to the pack. She was dead to them. She was dead.

She was a part of them, but now she wasn't. She was dead and she would stay dead, the problem was that now she was walking around.

He heard her voice and tore his eyes from where Sage should lay to her. "We're going to be okay," she had said as she laced her hand through Quil's. Embry thought he would have been jealous but he wasn't. That green-eyed monster didn't show. Not when Quil had been crying and he couldn't comfort him. Not when Jake had left him too. Not when Sage was gone and Harper was all he had left.