The sonnet is by Pablo Neruda, who wrote the most exquisite love poetry, and I believe it's Sonnet XXXIII from '100 Love Songs'.

Bluebells and Branches

Bury me in the bluebells.

She had left the request in her will. She was nineteen, and she had written the first draft of her will.

It had seemed fitting to come out into the woods and find a seat amidst her bluebells, which had bloomed, withered and died among more endings than she could say. Each tilted up to catch the sun like a desperate man cupping his hands for water, and the faint, sweet smell of them drifted on the air.

Inside, she was shaken, beset by a deep, slow fear. By making the will, she had acknowledged her weakness, the likely possibility that one day – one day far too soon – she would find herself at the mercy of a Fury.

The only question, really, was which one it would be.

~*~

She’d taken the document to the lawyer to sign and seal, dispensing her possessions among her friends, leaving them pieces of herself to keep in case of accident, just as an organ donor might someday find their heart lodged in a stranger; their lungs breathing exotic air.

To Jepar, first and foremost – first for a smile, a kiss, arms to protect and preserve and later, your friendship, which has never wavered despite the numerous times I have given you cause to – I give my gratitude, undying where I cannot be, and my photos.

He would love that. He kept photographs of everyone, and whenever he had a quiet moment, he’d sit and flick through the albums. “Remember that?” he’d say, smiling, holding up some ludicrous scene of fixed grins and red eyes. “Wasn’t it great? We should do that again.”

And then he’d cajole and urge, and somehow they would all find themselves trapped in a camera lens once more, high on the mountains or sitting on the roof of a car, or shuffled into a scrum of bodies while Jepar coerced some poor, frightened stranger into capturing these rowdy people in a picture.

For Lisa. What I most want to give you isn’t really mine to give, so instead, I ask you to keep a promise that I know will bring you happiness. Make Vaje yours. Make him remember who he was before the Furies, make him remember who he wanted to be once. You already make him a better person – now make him an amazing one.

My hopes, and all my books are also yours, because you haven’t returned half of them anyway.

She’d smiled when she wrote that line. She’d crashed into Lisa’s room countless times, demanding back a favourite read, enraged at months of deprivation to find that the vampire had put it down partway through a chapter and forgotten all about it.

Thom, who has listened to many of my problems. I thought you might like these files that I stole from Pursang’s vaults which explain some of those conspiracy theories you love so much. I think you’ll find the one called ‘The Third Gunman’ particularly fascinating. I did.

She’d struggled. Wanting to say more to him – but she knew that he would appreciate the brevity of her farewell. “I don‘t like to get close to people,” he’d said once. “God knows how you lot did it.”

“Persistence,” she’d said.

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it was that night you got me monstrously drunk then let Jepar photograph the occasion.” He’d shuddered. “Cougar threatened to post the pictures up if I kept ignoring him.”

And Cougar. Yes. She had vacillated for ages, not knowing whether saying anything would be saying too much or if he would consider her silence a snub, and not the only true eloquence she could call upon to express what was too vast for such rudimentary speech. In the end, knowing his prickly nature, she had chosen words, and chosen them with the care and precision of a poet.

For Cougar. Nothing I can give you will be enough; but if home is where the heart is, then I can only give you my house and hope that you will live in it as I wish you had lived in my heart.

She had put her name on the page, signing in ink and wondering why it felt so much like blood.

It had not been a will so much as a confession of mortality. And at the end of it all, before she had passed it back, she’d paused, and below all the neat type, scrawled that last, fervent desire: to immerse herself in a blue that was earthly and perennial and gentle, that held nothing of stark, raw skies or distant, burning stars, nothing of elsewhere and shadows.

Bury me in bluebells, she’d written, knowing she had meant something else entirely.

~*~

She was half-asleep when he arrived with the suddenness of a tsunami, leaping into her senses in a wall of towering, barely controlled power that arced over her like the foam on a wave – she had barely a moment to register it before a callous grip pulled her upright and threw her back against a tree.

She gasped as branches raked her back; brief, hot pain, repeated as Blue hauled her up, his face a mask of secret amusement. One hand splayed across her ribcage, a warning pressure.

His smile was beautiful and bladed. “Pray tell me, my witch, what is this dross?”

She focused on the sheaf of papers he was holding. Oh. He’d found it. “My will. Read it and weep.”

“I think not. Dull as it is – and really, all that gratuitous affection makes me feel quite nauseous – I think I’ll be able to choke back my tears. Yet...I can’t help noticing you’ve missed one salient fact.”

She suspected said fact was glaring at her.

Her voice was loaded with all the stinging sweetness she could muster. “Feeling slighted?”

“Oh, I never feel slight,” he purred with breezy innuendo; and then the pressure on her chest vanished; in one swift motion, he ripped the will in two and let it waft to the floor. “You have no need for that.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she retorted, but before she could stoop to gather up the pieces, he caught her chin, his grip pinching like a vice.

“Are you so willing to die?”

“More able than willing, really.” She met his eyes, which were flat and still as a becalmed ocean. “I’m just being practical. I’m amazed you object.”

“Committing your deathwish to paper is about as practical as a concrete lifebelt. It’s merely a goad for those who would betray you, and while I can’t claim any admiration for your demented attempts to introduce your bohemian ideals into the Furies, your death would cause a good deal more turmoil than your continued existence.”

Her eyes narrowed. His professionalism nettled her. “And you never know, it might even cause you a bit of turmoil.”

“Becoming a gibbering lunatic isn’t exactly an impediment to a career in the Furies,” he pointed out with far too much accuracy. She couldn’t help but think of Ross’s sparkling smile and addled eyes; of Aspen in those black, dreamy fugues, hands halfway between reaching for comfort and reaching to strangle. “But confessing your fear certainly is.”

“Who said it’s anything to do with fear?”

It was everything to do with fear, of course. She had become so used to the feeling, lingering around her like the stale reek of cigarettes, that she barely noticed it. When she awoke each morning, she dressed in dread like a soldier armouring himself before battle. It had its uses: it kept her alert, turning aside complacency.

He let her go, expressionless. “You lie so badly, my witch. Your eyes always give you away.”

“Think of it as charity, from me to you,” she advised icily.

“A paltry gift,” he dismissed, and she heard the razor-fine edge in his voice. “Here you are, handing my brother your home, inviting him to sleep in the bed where you sleep, to lie close to you as if he were pressed against your grave, and you hand me incompetent lies.”

She stared at him. She had not expected this angle of attack, snaking past her defences. “Why does it bother you? I’ll be dead. He still won’t have me. All he’ll be left with is my home and my furniture, and I’m pretty sure he’s just not that attached to Ikea.”

“And what will I be left with?” he asked, seemingly nonchalant if not for the fire in his eyes, gleaming like sunlight through gold rum.

“The satisfaction of being responsible, I imagine,” she answered.

“Hardly a tangible trophy,” he drawled, each word spiked and arctic as an icicle.

“How callow of me. Clearly I forgot to bequeath you my head so you can nail it to your wall.”

In his mouth, she caught the first hints of a succulent, rich smile that didn’t match the malice in his voice. “Oh, I think I already nailed you.”

His sudden moments of crude scorn always unnerved her. “Amazing. Here I was wondering if you could lower the tone any further-“

“Was six feet under insufficient?”

She ignored that sally. “-and you managed it in under ten words. Congratulations. There’s probably a marketing career in it for you.”

“I’ve already found my niche,” he murmured, his hand curving around her neck, thumb stroking her jugular vein. “And I have to say, I feel I fill it rather well.”

Relentless, she carried on, the words flowing up with anger and with strength, fluttering like the torn paper on the bluebells beneath them. “I have nothing to leave you, Blue. I’ve already given you everything I have to give, and if you find no worth in it, that’s your fault, not mine. Why shouldn’t I leave my friends the scraps? I owe them that, at least.”

He was silent, watching her with something skin to fascination, though it was colder, distant as the ever-circling moon.

“You took the better part of me,” she said bitterly. “You just didn’t realise. You didn’t even know.”

And then because she found herself struggling for control, she lashed out and he melted from her strikes like water, stepping back to let her trample over the flowers she loved so much, to let her flee.

You have left me hollowed, emptying myself into you like a river: and the terrible truth of it is that I will not stop because I find some solace in you I cannot explain. Here is the power you hold over me, and I huddle in you as if you are my only shade against a scorching world, using you to cradle my dwindling humanity amidst your cruelty; I fight because of you when I might otherwise have yielded. I speak where I might have stayed silent.

But I will die where I might have otherwise lived. And that is because of you too.

~*~

“Bluebells?” her lawyer had asked, somewhat bemused.

“They’ll understand,” she’d said. They wouldn’t really; it was a witch’s wish, knowing she would wend her way up through the earth, that someone might some faint echo of her body in the curl of the petals, might break a branch and find her running in its sap, but it was one they would respect.

She had briefly considered making Blue executor of her will, suspecting he would appreciate the ghoulish joke – but in the end, she could not trust him, and so she named Jepar instead.

His eyes filled with the strangest look when she told him. “You didn’t need to do that,” he said.

“You’re my oldest friend. If anyone has to-”

“Gods, Toya, that wasn’t what I meant.” He gripped her wrist, anguish soft in his words. “You’re not going to die. Look at you! Ross says please and thank you when he comes to call. One of the biggest psychos in the Nightworld treads around you like he thinks you might break him in two.”

I might, if I was cruel enough. He good as handed me the weapon when he fell to his knees before me and spoke to me of love denied. If there is anything I know how to use as a weapon, that is it: the deepest cut, the wound that nothing can staunch.

“It isn’t Ross that worries me,” she confessed. “It’s the rest of them. It’s so hard, Jepar. I can’t show them the slightest bit of weakness – if I do...they wouldn’t hesitate. They’re predators. That’s their first thought – can I kill it? What do I get out of it if I do?” She laughed tiredly. “And when they look at me, I can see the answer: everything.”

“Surely Blue...” he began, but trailed off, unsure.

“They don’t know.”

He boggled. “I can understand why you didn’t want us to know, but how can it harm you? They’re all terrified of him!”

“And if they know, what do you think their first thought will be? Same as before, Jepar, only the stakes are even higher. He let me live. He let me live, and if they know, every last one of them will wonder why.”

The silence pooled while he gazed at her, pensive. “I wondered that too,” he said. “I want to ask you, Toya, but I don’t think I’m going to like the answer.”

“You won’t.” And that was an answer in itself, of course. He grimaced, like an older brother accepting something he didn’t particularly want to hear but couldn’t change. “I spend all my time fighting them. Do you know, I have check my coffee every morning in case one of them’s poisoned it.”

His aghast expression might have been funny under other circumstances. “And...do they?” he said faintly.

“About one in three cups, yeah. There are other things too.”

Chatoya didn’t specify, despite his urging. Dwelling on them did no good: the sinister phonecalls from a voice whispering in another language. The bloody handprint on her car seat one morning. Those nasty little spells scattered about her office.

“Do you think this is an answer?” he said slowly. “Isn’t that like admitting they’re winning?”

His words were an uncanny echo of Blue, and they startled her. It was too easy to forget that Jepar had grown up in the Nightworld and understood its workings more than he let on.

Looking at his familiar face, virtually unchanged from the boy she had first met, Chatoya felt tired and weak and fearful – and the words slipped out, unbidden.

“I think they are.”

“Don’t let them,” he whispered, and it was anger quaking in his words. “Blue Malefici couldn’t beat you. Why the hell should these idiots?”

“You’re right,” she told him. “I know you are. I just don’t know where to start. I feel like...I feel like I’m losing myself.”

He smiled, and it was full of sadness and bitter wisdom. “So go find yourself. I know who you are, Toya. We all do. It’s just you who’s forgotten. You’re not happy unless you’re...” Realisation dawned in him, but of what, she had no idea. He left the tantalising thought unfinished.

“Unless I’m what?”

Jepar eyed her, mouth twisted down. “Being a good friend sucks,” he muttered, more to himself.

“What?”

“Who did you make that will for? Do you really think we need to hear any of that? Do you think we don’t already know?” He grinned. “Come on. Even Cougar, the Amazing Emotional Retard, can figure it out. We don’t need it written down. So tell me, Toya, who was it you wanted to think really, really hard about life without you?”

~*~

So she went back to the bluebells and their quiet, sultry heat, but only after she had stopped at her lawyer’s office and put in one last request.

She didn’t have long to wait, sat there repairing the flowers she had so carelessly broken on her flight. With her magic threading through the earth, they bloomed more lushly before, bright voluptuous splashes of colour to break the green hues of the dell.

“So you changed your mind,” he said, another blot of blue against the verdant scenery, but utterly alien where the flowers were natural: he so stark and pale, his smile full of satisfaction and sin.

She glanced up. “No. I just haven’t written any of it down.”

“Dwell on death if you must,” he said, careless. “We all live with it. But don’t make the mistake of living for it. That, my witch, would displease me.”

“I think I’ve been too concerned with your pleasure and displeasure, Blue.” She made her voice cool, almost icy with indifference. “You taken so much from me – and I let you. But that changes now. If you want my time, you’ll have to fight for it, same as everyone else. Until you can treat me with respect, until you treat me as your equal in every regard, until you aren’t ashamed of me...until you can love me in daylight instead of darkness, then I have no time for you.”

His eyes flared, swelling with that bright, fiery gold.

“And if necessary,” she said quietly, “I will make no time for you until the day I die at an exceedingly advanced age – and the closest you will ever get to me is when you bury me here, and wish you had been less proud.”

She got to her feet, careful not to tread on a single stem, and with a crook of her fingers, the flowers parted to leave her a path away from here and him.

It was a gamble, a massive, frightening gamble. This dell might as easily become the tomb of their relationship if she was wrong, if she did not hope that all his words a year ago were still as true now as they had been then.

She was at the edge of the grove, she was leaving, head high-

“An interesting point,” he said, calm, imperious.

She turned, slow. Her heart was hammering – and she knew it was hopeless, this love of theirs, and still she hoped, still she found some dark delight in it despite every iota of her common sense telling her it was folly.

“And one I concede.” His mouth curled into an ironic smile. “Under daylight, no less.”

And as she walked back to him, seduction in her gentle sway, in the jungles that spun out in her eyes, in the mystery of how she could win against him once more, Chatoya knew what she had meant when she spoke of bluebells.

Bury me not in flowers or damp earth, but in this: your mouth with all its devotion given in silence and warmth and motion, your arms that are that fraction too tight (though you never know), in your ardour and your need and this curious, wondrous thing that is your love.

Bury me in you.