Work Text:
The dolls were talking again.
You’d think they wouldn’t have much to say, put away in their acid-free boxes, swaddled with tissue paper, spending the majority of their time in a storage room that more closely resembled an attic than a sterile vault. But they were a chatty bunch, even if Margaret was the only one on staff who could hear them, their voices whispering like dry leaves just at the edge of her hearing.
Margaret had tried to talk to them once, but they hadn’t acknowledged her. Nobody else at the museum ever confessed to hearing them, so she never brought it up. And it wasn’t like they predicted the future, or uttered dire warnings. They just liked a good gossip, much like the elderly ladies that were the backbone of the museum, twittering in the hallways like finches.
The museum was nestled in the heart of Washington, D.C., a tiny overlooked jewel, according to the guidebooks. Furniture and porcelain and maps weren’t as popular as the airplanes and the dinosaur skeletons further down the Mall, so there were never more than a trickle of visitors. But people who appreciated the curve on the back of a finely-carved sofa, quilters counting stitches to the inch, costume lovers coming to admire mannequins displaying beautiful, fragile dresses - they found their way here, and were able to roam in peace.
Margaret’s father, peripatetic in the service of the Army, had landed them in the city when he was reassigned to the Pentagon and the family ceased wandering. Things had changed. The rationality of the gear and the atom was slowly dissolving, although nobody knew why or where it all would go. Suddenly, people wore charms, amulets, made signs, gestured strangely. New churches were springing up, with gods nobody remembered seeing before. It wasn’t much, but people could see things were building up, like a layer of dust on a bookshelf you thought you had just dusted the day before.
Daddy had a touch of magic himself, although not one particularly useful to military applications. He could occasionally read patterns in the flights of birds, giving him a hazy but generally correct enough peek into the near future. Convenient flocks of birds never seemed to come along when they were wanted, which made Daddy’s talent rather more miss than hit. Still, it was enough for the brass to put him in charge of a division of seers, haruspices, augers, prophets, and readers of tea leaves. They were just barely accurate enough, said Daddy whimsically, that they kept their paychecks and their tiny office with all the low-hanging ductwork. Ah, well, that was the government for you.
So DC and the suburbs around it became Margaret’s new home. The city was a strange place. Margaret, who had lived in so many others, felt its difference the first moment she stepped onto the gravel paths of the Mall, with the Capitol at one end and the Washington Monument far off towards the other, anchoring down the strip of faded green-brown grass that led further to the serene Lincoln in his chair. Lincoln's statue was getting a reputation for occasional oracular pronouncements, and Margaret's daddy no doubt had had a fat file on him. The place was steeped in history, but it had all been formalized, put up in white marble or given a monument, frozen in some way. Whirling in the center of the ice was the seething energy of the politicians and the sullen pulse of the bureaucrats, expending a lot of light in all directions but devoid of heat. Even with new things stirring, it was somehow inert. Margaret rapidly became fond of the place but was not blind to the fact that rather than a proper city, bustling with hectic fevers, it bore more resemblance to a mausoleum. A very pretty mausoleum in the spring, when the grass was green and the cherry blossoms were fluttering pinkly in the wind off the water, perhaps. A sweltering southern cemetery in July when the damp heat rolled in. At all times, an historic cenotaph. But not, really, a proper city at all.
It was also a good place for walking. On her lunch breaks Margaret would stroll around the Tidal Basin, near the people flying kites around the Washington Monument, up and past the White House. She watched everything and passed unnoticed.The streets she walked were formerly seedy at best, dangerous at worst, but now the area hummed with cheerful activity and very few traces of the old disreputable past still visible. Margaret, accustomed to elderly ladies, had taken on some of their aura, and slipped by with no-one paying the least bit of attention to her.
On the weekends she frequently came back in, riding the Metro and getting off at the stop with the Navy memorial. Margaret liked standing on the map of the world set into the center of the memorial. She would walk from Singapore to Japan, Japan to Hawaii, California to France, looking at all the places she used to live, standing over flattened countries, trampling nations under her feet. She roamed the halls of museums everyone visited, and also ones nobody knew about. She knew where more forgotten memorials lived than the most dedicated tour guide bleating over the PA system of the Tourmobiles.
Most frequently of all, she would go into the Botanic Garden and study orchids, feeling the rich hum of plant life booming around her. It smelled like places she had been, like places she never had seen but longed to go. A Green Man lived there, but he was shy, perhaps unsure about his small, lush home in the center of so much concrete. Margaret had only seen him twice, his leafy face peering at her from behind a tree. She never expected to see more of him. After all, while she did have magic, it was such a small, un-useful thing. Much like Margaret herself, she sometimes thought.
And then one day, she saw the Green Man again.
She was sitting on a bench along the narrow walkway on the second level of the greenhouse, idly looking at a spangle of red and orange flowers like tiny fireworks blazing against deep green leaves. She was thinking about drawing them, but didn’t have a pencil, paper, or for that matter any talent in drawing, so she was simply considering how she might draw them, if she possessed the right tools to do so. There was a creaking noise, a whisper of mist, and from behind her left shoulder the Green Man’s fingers alighted on her shoulder as lightly as a plant’s tendril.
Margaret screamed, her voice echoing, and turned to see what had brushed against her. As her eyes met his, she was frozen in place, lost in slow, vegetable time. She saw...she encompassed...an old memory of giant forests spreading across the earth. She saw hidden dark places within them, each a birthplace of another little god, another pool of magic, another foothold of whatever was returning to push away what should be and replace it with what might be.
And then she knew, just as certainly as she felt her pulse fluttering inside her, that it was not, in fact, a memory. It was a gift of the future, as true as any fillip of upcoming time that her father had seen in a glimpse of starlings. Forests returning, pushing through concrete, retaking what had been lost to the axe. Eyes in the dark.
It was time, the Green Man’s eyes told her. Time to begin planning.
Margaret returned to herself, who knows how many long minutes later, as a group of tourists pushed past her on the walkway, looking with badly-disguised curiosity at the dowdy young woman standing with such a look on her face. Margaret didn’t notice them. She turned and walked, very briskly, out of the building, past the Capitol standing proud on her right side, over the map of the world under her feet. Home on the rattling Metro train, home to her little house in the big suburb. From a big box in the attic, she unearthed her daddy’s Rolodex, spun it to P for Prophets, and started making phone calls.
Three years later, she was in a room full of low-hanging ductwork, somewhere in one of the myriad levels of the Pentagon. She was surrounded by a group of seers, haruspices, augers, prophets, and readers of tea leaves, all of them in comfortable footwear and sensible suits. They were, all of them, trying to read an uncertain and terrifying future. But it was a purpose, and part of Margaret stretched and blossomed under the responsibility.
She still volunteered at the museum, on weekends. The dolls were finally talking to her.