Title: Rabbit-of-the-stones
Fandom: Watership Down
Rating: G
Length: 720
Content notes: Suicidal ideation, bit of magic AU, dubious poetry
Summary: Silverweed can't stop thinking about Fiver.


Silverweed thinks of him often after they have gone, turning the memory in his mind and shaping it as carefully as Laburnum had once worked walls. There had been a burrow full of rabbits there, his warrenmates and the mismatched newcomers alike, but in this thought only the two of them are marked clearly; the others fade into scratches on dull earth. If it were truly a Shape, they would be outlined with river stone: the soapy and soft kind, worn down smooth as polished bone, from the stream where death curls in the grass of the banks.

He is supposed to be listening to the way of things, not remembering the hlessi.


In winter the ice ripples over the water,
The stones beneath the surface gleam and tumble free


There is ice - there will be ice - he lies cold, unmoving, beneath the red paws of a much larger rabbit - no. Silverweed paws at his whiskers almost violently, as if to knock stubborn snow from them, as if to forget what he has heard and felt. It does no good; the truth is on him now, laid over his earlier memory stark enough to replace it entirely. It does not matter if he does not wish to think of the hlessi lying dead in a faraway place: what will be, will be. He cannot change what is to come, only speak of it so the others can accept it. There is nothing else; there is no other way.

He flees it anyway, leaving the scent of fear and frozen fur behind him. In the tunnels he brushes past Cowslip who looks at him keenly but does not bother to try to speak to him, much less stop him. He is thinking that Silverweed smells more than half-tharn, that he may have to find another poet soon; Silverweed has been listening so carefully for the words that he cannot help but hear Cowslip's heart as well. It does not matter. Perhaps he is half-tharn and that is why the hlessi will not leave his mind and why the poetry speaks to him of peace that comes with the touch of diamond frost instead of silver and yew.

Outside, Inlé is bright; it glows round and wet, like the stones he had seen beneath the ice, like droplets of milk at the corner of a kit's mouth, like a life and a death in the dark. Silverweed lopes a few paces away from the burrow and stands tall, stares up and up into the blank sky, his ears cocked and straining for the rest of the verse.


Where are you going, stones? Far far away
Once into Inlé though only to return


There was once a story, he remembers, of El-ahrairah venturing into the Black Rabbit's land and returning alive to his owsla. But Silverweed does not know it; he has not heard it told either aloud or in silence. While he has thought often of what lies beyond the stream and below the loam and where the wind does not sing, he has never thought of coming back out again. He does not know if it can be done; they are no tricksters, he and the hlessi - only poets.

And he does not know that he would wish to return.


Take me with you, stones, past the shadow
I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-stones
With the clear ice above us, the ice and the rabbit


He should let it be, let this verse fade with the memory of a visit that all the rest but Cowslip have long forgotten, and turn his ears and his words back to the business of his own warren. What he wants has nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with longing: it is poetry but it is not listening. He will do it once, and only once, he tells himself, and then he will be gone and there will be no more temptation until they meet each other again in Inlé at the end of the stream beyond the edge of the world. Silverweed reaches through the distance and touches the sun-bright mind on the other end, feels the hlessi recognize him and whisper back a warning: You are closer to death than I.

If only it were the truth.