Nor wake with wings in heaven, nor weep for pains in hell

Chuck had never really believed in Heaven; not in the angels-with-harps variety, anyway. Now she found that she must have believed in something all along—all questions answered? All secrets revealed? Joyful reunion with family?-because whatever she had believed in, this wasn't it. It honestly had not occurred to her that, after her death, her life would continue on, more or less as normal.

She was still Charlotte Charles, still twenty-eight; her heart beat on, thump-thump thump-thump, as stubbornly as it always had. Chuck lay awake at night, listening to it all-—her heart, her breathing, Ned's steady breathing from across the room-—no use. She got up, thinking vaguely of getting a drink. The nightlights (plenty of them, at Ned's insistence) cast a hazy glow, showing a clear path to the door and—as she looked back at him, asleep in the far bed—throwing Ned's features into relief, shadows pooling in the hollows of his face and throat.

Chuck liked to watch Ned asleep: his face was relaxed and unfrozen from its usual mask. Unguarded. Even now, she could see one corner of his mouth tugging into a smile. Maybe he was having a good dream. She hoped so.

Digby whined as she passed his spot; Chuck knelt down and scratched his ears. He thumped his tail in thanks.

"What was it like for you?" she murmured. "Coming back? Or did you even realize you'd been dead?"

But Digby only yawned, and Chuck recoiled at the dog breath.

Crowned with calm leaves, she stands

When Chuck woke again, morning was well advanced and Ned was gone. Chuck made a cup of coffee, drank it, then made another one and let herself out of the apartment with it. The heavenly smell of freshly-baked pies got stronger and stronger as Chuck got further downstairs. She let herself into the kitchen quietly; Ned didn't notice. As usual, he was doing several things at once: pulling out two cherry pies from one oven, perfectly done, with heart-red filling bubbling up under the lattice; checking on the blind-baking pie shells in the other oven; assembling graham-cracker crust and nut crusts on the big main table. He was teaching her to bake, in the afternoons after the day's main baking was done, but she still wasn't very good at it. Ned's pie crusts were little miracles: wonderfully light and flaky, beautifully browned, sturdy enough to hold a big forkful of filling while being tender enough to melt in her mouth, and never doughy. Chuck's were usually tough.

She watched the pie-maker, absorbed in his work; his long body, often so stiff and awkward, moving with an ease and fluidity of motion that she hardly ever saw in him...

Ned was carrying a pair of pies, one in each hand, when he nearly tripped. He swayed, gracefully as a willow, and righted himself with a sigh.

"Digby," said Ned, "Out of the way."

The old dog looked up at his human and panted, either from the heat or from the anticipation of scraps. Ned sighed again, extended a shoe, and carefully prodded Digby in the side. The golden retriever seemed to get the picture; he trotted over to Chuck and lay down near her instead.

Ned's eyes followed Digby's movement; and, as usual, his expression of amazed delight when he saw her in the doorway made her fall in love with him all over again.

"Hi," he said, simply.

"Morning! I brought you coffee," she said. "I'm going to put it on the prep table, OK?"

Since Ned didn't seem about to move, she felt safe enough to cross the kitchen and place his cup on a clear patch of table, near a bowl of rotten cherries. "Want me to pit the cherries for you?"

"That'd be great," said Ned.

"Okay. I'm going to the front to help Olive." But as Chuck glanced back at him, from the other end of the kitchen, he was as awkward as if she were standing right next to him, all his agility flown.

Summer song rings hollow

Olive, as it turned out, did not need help. The morning's deliveries had already been boxed and sent off, and few people were in the restaurant at ten o'clock in the morning. Chuck glanced back at the kitchen; Ned seemed to be back in full swing, though she doubted that he'd had time to resurrect the cherries yet.

A thump issued from the kitchen, one remarkably like a rolling pin hitting a tile floor. "Digby!" said Ned, plaintively.

A wet mat of leaves greeted Chuck as she left the Pie Hole with Digby. Treacherous. Last week's dusting of snow hadn't stuck; it had melted and refrozen in a greasy layer of ice over leaves. The very thing to catch her unawares, and send her flying... and, suddenly, idle thoughts of getting Ned to go on a walk with her seemed suicidally reckless.

Chuck waved to Olive as she and Digby passed the Pie Hole's front windows. Olive waved back, half-heartedly; perhaps not surprising, considered that Chuck had just lied to her again. After she'd announced her intention of taking Digby out for a walk, she had gone out the front door and around the back, to Olive's bewilderment: "Kitchen's that way," she'd said, and Chuck had had to invent some transparently silly reason why it was simpler to go the long way around rather than cross the kitchen. Olive hadn't bought it, and Chuck didn't blame her, but the truth, as usual, didn't suit.

And the truth was that Chuck was tired of Ned recoiling from her, even if it meant he loved her. She wanted to hold him, of course, but even more than that, she wanted to see him happy, happy around her—-and tense and edgy, lanky limbs folded down tight, did not equal happy. And maybe this was the best he could do for her, this wary sort of affection. Maybe she had no right to ask for more.

A wind knifed through Chuck's overcoat. She let Digby do his business up against a great black skeleton of a tree while she wrapped her coat's cherry-colored folds closer and re-tied the belt, tighter this time. It was an ugly day; windy and raw, neither cold enough to snow nor warm enough to rain, but relentlessly threatening both. Not even yet as cold as it was going to be. More layers insulating her from the world.

"I hope you've grown your winter coat," she told Digby. Had he? Could he? Maybe it had been summertime when Ned had brought him back. Maybe he was stuck in his thin summer coat forever.

No such things grow here

"Are you all right?"

Chuck nearly dropped the cherry pitter. She looked up from her work: Ned was sitting across the prep table from her, chin propped on his hand, watching her.

"Becuase it's okay, if you aren't," he continued. "I mean, not okay that you're not all right, but I know that you've had to adjust to a lot and-"

"Yes," said Chuck, firmly, and the cherry she was pitting spat out its pit with so much force that it bounced out of the bowl and hit Ned on the ear.

"Oops," she said, and then had to laugh, because Ned was laughing even as he blotted away the juice with a bit of paper towel. "I mean, yes. I'm all right." But she felt the pie-maker's gaze on her as she continued the pitting, and put down the tool with a sigh. "I mean, no," she averred, finally.

"Okay," said Ned, after a pause, "Could you narrow it down a bit?"

"I hate winter," she said, "and I hate not being able to touch you."

"Touch is overrated."

Chuck raised an eyebrow, in such a good imitation of the way Ned did it that it got a smile out of him despite himself. "Overrated or not, I wish I could hug you. I just want a hug." She hadn't meant for her voice to crack, not least because of the pain she knew, even without looking, she'd see on Ned's face. "And I'm cold enough not being able to hug you. Winter just makes it worse."

"You get used to it," said Ned, hesitantly. "The not touching." He shot Digby a glance, then got up: hunched over, arms wound tightly around his torso. "You get used to it, eventually."

We are not sure of sorrow, and joy was never sure

"So... the trick to a flaky crust is to not mix the dough? How zen."

"If you want to put it like that, sure. Just-—don't mix it so long that the dough comes together on its own. Mix it just long enough that it almost comes together, but stop it before it does."

Chuck stopped the mixer and expectantly dumped its contents onto the floured table, and got a small mountain of what looked like coarse crumbs.

"Well," said Ned, "maybe mix it a bit more than that."

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal

The Pie Hole was closed Sundays. Naturally, thought Chuck sourly, that was the universe's cue to wait until Saturday night to unleash the first storm of the season.

Ned was doing something in the apartment's kitchen. The bells on his slippers made an irregular rhythm; not the patterned synchronized jingle of Morris dancers or Christmas carols, more of a jingly stuttering sound. It was oddly soothing.

Chuck was taking down her summer clothes. They were spread out over both beds, all the bright colors she loved, like a layer of leaves shed by some fantastic storybook tree. The thin silks caught on her hands, already roughened from the weather, as she folded them and smoothed them and tucked them away in boxes, to wait for spring. Like the trees, she thought; they look dead, but aren't. She was just fitting the lid onto one box when a dim gold flutter from the closet caught her eye, and Chuck's breath froze in her lungs.

She walked over to the closet and pulled it off its hangar: the dress she'd been buried in. Chuck glanced back at the box on the bed, wondering if she could fit one more dress in it... but would she wear it again? It seemed inappropriate, somehow; though, as she thought about it, there wasn't really any reason it should be. She remembered that it had been itchy and hard to move in; hard to fault her aunts, though, for not taking that into account. (Ned was right-—being dead had made her morbid.) But she didn't feel right giving it away, either; so, in the end, she put the dress back on its hanger and shoved it deep in the closet, a golden splash against the pie-maker's monochromatic shirts.

"Chuck?" Ned's jingly footsteps got louder, then stopped as he paused in the doorway. "I made us some cocoa," he said, a note of pride in his voice and a wonderfully open smile on his face, and Chuck couldn't help grinning back.

"First storm of the season," said Chuck, around a swallow of cocoa.

Ned beamed back at her from the other end of the couch. "I know. Isn't it great?"

"It's... cozy." Stuffy.

Ned looked away. "You sound like you're not a fan of cozy."

"I like fresh air," she admitted. "I like sunshine on my face, and I like those little breezes that run fingers through my hair. And I don't think it's good for you to isolate yourself like this all winter, and I want—-I really, really want-—to go on a picnic with you, or even a walk in the park where I can hold your hand." Chuck's mouth snapped closed. "I'm sorry. I didn't meant to blurt all that out."

Ned sighed. "It's not like you can talk me into hugging you. I don't like it either. But I don't want to kill you." Then, a long time later, he snaked one of his long arms over the end of the couch and retrieved a pair of mittens. "I can give you a foot massage," he offered.

A thunderbolt of an idea hit Chuck right between the eyes, and she jackknifed upright. Seeing Ned's quizzical expression, she simply smiled and rearranged herself so that her feet in their slipper socks were resting in the blanket in his lap.

"You must really like foot massages," said Ned.

Chuck smiled to herself. "I do, yeah. I do now."

Comes out of darkness morn

It snowed all night, and all of Sunday, and all of Sunday night; and when Chuck got up on Monday morning, it was to a world made soft and fluffy and perfectly white.

Chuck opened her closet and surveyed the contents thoughtfully. A little smile played across her face as she made her choices. Long underwear. Leggings, good thick ones. Long-sleeved undershirt, with a yellow wool sweater to pull over it. The undershirt's sleeves were too long for her arms, which was why she'd chosen it; now she pulled on her orangey-yellow gloves and carefully tucked each sleeve into the base of a glove. She was starting to feel the first faint prickles of sweat, but there were more layers to go. A balaclava. One of the drawers held some scarves; she rummaged around until she found one she liked, and wound it around her neck and head, and added a floppy knit hat for good measure. Shoes, finally, and a daffodil-colored overcoat, and she was ready to go.

She found the pie-maker about where she expected to—-in the little alley behind the Pie Hole, kneeling in the snow as he fiddled with the lock to his car, which had frozen overnight.

"Hi," he said, softly, but with that smile again, "You look like sunshine." He straightened up and brushed the snow from his greatcoat, and that was when Chuck ambushed him.

"Breathe," she mumbled, into the wool of his coat. "It's important." And, as she nestled against him, arms wrapped as tightly around him as she'd always wanted, she felt his own arms unfreeze, encircle her hesitantly, then more tightly. She even thought she felt the pressure, through it was hard to tell through the balaclava and scarf and hat, of a kiss planted on top of her head. After a long time, Chuck pulled away.

"I don't actually want to die, you know. Not any more than you want me to."

"I do know."

"Good. Let's go for a walk."

He was still a bit hesitant; after she put one arm around his waist, she had to use her free hand to drape his arm around her shoulders, but he got the idea.

"Might be a long winter," Chuck opined, as they headed off for nowhere in particular. The snow began to fall again, in earnest, and he hugged her closer. "Cold."