=====And Then Is Heard No More=====
[CW: death from old age]

When Della Faye opens the bunker to Strangeness and her stranger, they buckle under the weight of facing the sunlight head-on.  More accurately, they buckle under the weight of an ending rewritten, a wideness previously understood through the narrowness of a cat door.

The trio already knows each other well beyond the formality of speaking.  Yet Della Faye chooses to speak anyway, feeling the strength and weakness of vocal cords for the first time in a decade-cum-eternity.  The true conversations, of course, take place in the higher realms of visions and dreams brought on by the many hands that make light work.

Through the many journeys of Della Faye’s perennial house-guests, Osage the mechanical cat gains new springs in her step.  Sometimes, she seems so intelligent that her caretakers joke about her dreaming of electric mice.  Della Faye expected Osage’s life to end with hers.  Yet, after another watching the cat learn from the far reaches of the world, they find themselves writing a will that endows Osage to Strangeness and Martya.

Not all things are meant to change.  Laughter and company, though good medicines, do little to stop the shrinking of bone mass and the thinning of skin.  Della Faye never cuts their hair, though she allows her two best friends to tenderly trim the worst of ten years of split ends.  In her last days, when speech evades them once again, they say their goodbyes through a dance on a ballroom floor.  Della Faye never much liked ballrooms, nor dancing, but for those she loved, she learned to call both place and practice home.

Even without ragged breaths to keep time, their dance does not cease.  Even as she rests and rots in their hand-dug grave, she remains, ethereal, in that higher realm, long hair floating off the floor as if liberated from its growth.  When the tresses of her grief and theirs weave together in visions and dreams, does it matter if and when she was real at all?