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Mór dreams.
Her dreams are always repetition. Her dreams are tracing the nature of a thing, meticulously, over and over. She doesn’t always take things. She has to get something exactly right, first. The size and the shape, curves and straight lines, color and shadow and function. Mór dreams in precision, because she does not have time for inaccuracy.
Mór dreams differently at the Barns.
She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know if it’s the remoteness of it, the small towns of one gas station and the closest grocery store a half an hour away. She doesn’t know if it’s the wildness of it, the rolling hills and thick trees and jagged mountains, the sense of nature encroaching.
It used to feel comforting, and then, eventually, stifling.
She doesn’t remember if dreaming was always like this at the Barns. She doesn’t remember what a lot of things used to be like at the Barns. Her memory isn’t very good, less delicate lace and more ragged quilt, with unexplained holes and patches of fabric so thin it barely exists.
Dreaming at the Barns now is overwhelming.
She dreams of the woods. She dreams of a Forest. She dreams in a way she can’t elsewhere, the objects eager to take shape in her hands.
She dreams in a way that feels like walking in circles, her feet finding pathways her mind doesn’t know. Her heart tells her you’ve been here before and her gut tells her you don’t want to be here again and her mind tells her you don’t remember, you can’t and you shouldn’t.
Mór doesn’t get frightened, not in the way others have described the emotion to her. But she trusts the alarms her instincts raise, because if there’s one thing she knows, it’s how to survive.
The Forest calls to her. She ignores it and keeps walking.
Her feet don’t know this path as well. She wonders if it’s one she took last time. She wonders if it’s a path that Niall walked, too, or if it’s one she walked alone.
Mór dreams, but she doesn’t take anything out.
She feels a relief she can’t explain.
Mór wakes up.
It’s early morning, the dim light not yet creeping through the blinds. In near darkness, the room looks just like it used to when she lived here before. The same walls, the same dressers, the same quilt on the bed. It’s a patchwork quilt, but not handmade — it was their first purchase as a couple, back in Belfast.
She looks to her right, and that’s the same, too. The same man she knew when she lived here, curly-haired and wild when awake and always soft in his sleep. He curls towards her, unknowingly and unconsciously.
For a moment, she’s locked in the past.
For a moment, she’s Marie Lynch again. For a moment, she wonders when their son will come knocking on the door, still too young to reach the cereal, and too cautious to stand on the kitchen’s rickety chairs. For a moment, she wonders when the alarm will go off and she’ll have to haul herself out of bed to go feed the cows. She never did care much for the cows, but Niall loves them, and she loves Niall, in a way. For a moment, she wonders when Niall will wake, because he’s always been a heavy sleeper, except when they’re in bed together.
She must stir too much, restless in memory, because the man next to her wakes.
He stares at her for a long moment. She gazes into the blue eyes, sleep at the corners. She almost leans in for a kiss, to take advantage of a moment of silence. But his face goes guarded in a way Niall’s never was, and something twinges inside Mór.
It’s an unpleasant aching of an old wound.
“I’m not him, love,” the New Fenian says. His hand reaches up and cups her cheek, his fingertips brushing the ends of her hair. She’s suddenly, self-consciously aware of the body she’s in. Her hair is shorter. There’s more meat on her bones. Her joints ache, sometimes, in the morning chill.
Time has moved on, and her body has too.
She wonders how many times the New Fenian has said this to her. The fact that he recognized what she was feeling tells her that it’s happened before. She wonders if this is another memory held in his bag, or maybe more than one. Mór will get older, but the New Fenian never will.
“We need to change this room,” Mór says, because she isn’t going to erase this memory. Not out of embarrassment, or shame, or a desire to move on from her past completely.
She’s staying in the place she used to call home. There is no way to escape the past, anymore, so she’s going to have to learn to live with the memories she has.
Most of the time, Mór thinks the Barns is a decent place to be on the run from Boudicca.
It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s a home made for living in. Even in the cold of winter, with the ground heavy with frost and the trees bare, it’s a place that is brimming with life. Even the greyest sky still somehow feels greyer at the Barns than it does in other places.
A lot of the issues other people have with the Barns aren’t issues for her. Ronan set up a security system for the Barns, she’s told, that makes people relive their most painful memories. She has to be told this, because she doesn’t remember anything that intense. Declan looks sick when he talks about it. She doesn’t believe him, at first.
She doesn’t realize until later that it’s because she’s used to dreampain. It’s the core of her dreams and the core of everything she pulls out of them.
It also helps that many of her most painful moments are tucked in the bag that hangs at the New Fenian’s side.
It does take Mór a bit to settle into life at the Barns. It takes her time to get used to the quiet. She spends the first few weeks paranoid at every moment, listening for cars from the road and voices from the woods. Boudicca has no reason to leave her alone. If she were them — if she were still them — she would have made a public spectacle of her, instead of letting her slide along into obscurity.
Mostly, though, it takes time to reconcile the thin strands of memory of the Barns she lived in with the Barns as they are now.
The existence of Matthew’s room is one difference. When she lived at the Barns, it was a guest bedroom for a home that didn’t ever have guests. Functionally, that meant it was storage for Niall’s whimsical and impractical dreams.
Her dreams were not whimsical or impractical, and her frustration dreams were too painful for even Niall to want to keep around.
The grown-up Declan’s room is another. There are no toys. The bedding has changed. Declan was always practical, but he was still a child. She remembers what the room used to look like, because wiping out Declan entirely would be losing years of her life, and it didn’t look this — largely devoid of color or personality. She wonders what happened, but decides it’s better not to ask. She does not care to fill the gaps of years lost.
It’s Ronan’s room that gets to her the most, though. She doesn’t remember Ronan. She doesn’t want to remember Ronan. She doesn’t remember what this room was used for back when she lived here, because her memory of the room is a metaphorical thin patch in the quilt.
There are parking tickets on the walls that make the New Fenian laugh. They remind Mór, in spite of herself, of Niall when he was younger. The fondness should carry through, but it doesn’t.
Ronan will always be a blank spot for her, by design.
She feels the most out of place at the Barns when Ronan is around.
The Barns was Mór’s home. Her name was on the deed. She helped rebuild some of the white-roofed barns and she watched the herd of cattle grow and shrink and she watched Declan grow from a baby to a toddler running through the grass. She picked some of the furnishings. She shaped what the Barns became. It was her kingdom, hers and Niall’s. It was the first place that really felt like it was her own.
But then she left. And Ronan never really did. It’s his name on the deed now, and he walks around the farmhouse with the ease of someone who has rarely known another home.
He’s proud of the Barns in the same way Niall was, even when he decides to leave it.
Mór doesn’t want to talk to him. Truthfully, he doesn’t seem to want to talk to her much, either. She finds him fascinating, because everyone in their world finds Ronan at least a little bit fascinating, but the reality of him is that he mostly acts like a teenage boy. Her patience for teenage boys has never been high.
The interactions they do have are awkward at best. Whenever Ronan looks at her, she sees pain in his eyes. Ronan isn’t good at hiding pain. He wears it on the surface like a raw wound, which makes it very hard to look at. She wonders at first if Declan ever shared whatever was buried in the little bag of memories with him. She thinks this might be the pain of rejection, of coping with the reality of the father he put on a pedestal having his secrets.
The New Fenian thinks she’s wrong, though.
“He looks at you like you look at me when you’re thinking of Niall,” the New Fenian says. “Aurora looks just like you did back then. She died, you know.”
Mór did know that, she thinks, but it’s not what sticks in her head. For a moment, living in the Barns, surrounded by the ghosts of her past, Mór had forgotten that Niall was no longer alive, either.
Mór and Ronan mostly avoid each other. Mór is always relieved when he leaves and she and the New Fenian have the place to themselves again.
They buy a duvet for the bed. The quilt needed to be replaced, anyway.
Mór doesn’t remember leaving the Barns.
She doesn’t remember making the decision. She doesn’t remember how she told Niall, or what she said to Declan. She doesn’t remember if she explained herself to Declan at all. She doesn’t know what explanation she would’ve given, because she doesn’t fully remember her rationale. She just remembers the fact of it — one day, she packed up the belongings she could fit in the trunk and backseat of her car, and she left.
It’s a memory she doesn’t regret giving away. It’s the wrong kind of painful, one she is less used to coping with.
Mór doesn’t remember deciding to leave the Barns, but she remembers deciding to come back.
And one morning, long past when the threat of Boudicca has dimmed, with the ley lines back online and Boudicca’s power diminished in turn, the New Fenian asks, “We’re staying here for good, aren’t we?”
“We are,” Mór says, and the New Fenian smiles.
It’s a memory that no one will ever take from her.