Work Text:
“i am sorry this world
could not keep you safe
may your journey home
be a soft and peaceful one”
13/11/15 rupi kaur
The first thing Beth registers is stillness.
For once, there is no ringing between her ears, no tremor thrumming beneath her fingertips, no pressure pounding behind her eyes.
She’s completely still.
It’s strange, like floating.
She wonders if this is what birth feels like, this feeling of being in-between, of waiting.
It’s almost as though she’s floating, surrounded by warmth, unaware of which way she’s oriented, like a child in the womb. Vaguely, she remembers the train. The bright lights. The sound of it. The collision.
The girl with her face.
Sarah .
Suddenly, Beth feels herself become righted, and her mind goes from blissful unawareness to something new. An image begins to rapidly materialize before her eyes and it feels like being reborn, but still she’s at peace, alone, in her chest her heart is silent. Still.
Her apartment is as she remembers it, but without the traces of Paul. Happier, in a sense, without him. She traces her hands along the smooth granite of her counters and finds no traces of dust, no signs of abandonment. Hanging over the chair is the scarf her mother knit her as an apology, warm and woolen and an angry red, a splash of color against the otherwise monochromatic landscape.
Beth wonders if her mother cries for her.
She’s walking through a skeleton now, she realizes, and it feels so long since she’s been there, even though she knows it can’t have been more than an hour.
Hadn’t she been there, just a moment ago, standing with Mika, blood splattered across her face, begging her to watch the others, keep them safe where she had failed? Keep herself safe where Beth had failed?
Beth blinks and she can still see the other girl standing there, shaking, lower lip trembling with the weight of Beth’s words.
Watch the others for me .
Mika’s always watching, always has been watching. It seemed like the natural thing to ask.
If anyone could do it, it was Mika.
Beth looks down at her hands, smooth, uncracked, a clear coat of nail polish coating her nails. Her hands, cold, pale, but no longer shaking, because there is no reason left for them to shake, not anymore, not when she is here and she has left everything else behind.
Beth looks down at her hands and thinks about what they have done, where they have gotten her, where she is now , and thinks, maybe it was unfair to ask so much of her. But it’s too late to change, now, Mika has her words, she can either swallow them or spit them out. Beth is just an echo, now, a memory, an annotation of what could have been .
Absentmindedly, Beth wanders to the bathroom, hand tracing along the walls.
She thinks about Paul, wonders if he’ll notice. She’s been absent for so long, melting away in her own body, it was only a matter of time before she sunk completely into the shadows.
He watched as it happened, her path of self-destruction. Watched and never intervened, never helped. Maybe all Beth needed was a hero, a hero for herself, because she couldn’t be the protagonist for every story.
Paul wasn’t a hero.
They never intervened.
Beth wonders if it’s a game to them, watching her suffer, watching her wither away.
She remembers seeing no joy in Paul’s eyes as he watched her, swallowing pill after wretched pill, convulsing late into the night, being haunted by demons not even she could outrun. Then again, she never remembers seeing much of anything in Paul’s eyes, when he bothered to look at her. Never much of anything.
Beth remembers her father’s eyes, though. Bright and shining and so filled with unbridled glee .
She remembers the horror on her psychiatrist’s face the first time she said it, out loud, three months after his death. His ghost loomed over her shoulder and Beth could still see him smiling, teeth sharp, gleaming, and eyes bright, glinting, as though he was waiting to do it again.
They never intervened.
Beth never had any heroes.
She makes it to the bathroom and taps her fingers on the sink before groping underneath for the hidden bag of goodies she stores. Beth stares at it for a long moment before she tucks it back. She doesn’t need that here.
She looks into the mirror and startles.
Staring back at her is the girl with her face, another one of the clones, the girl from the station. Sarah .
Beth watches, blinks, eyes wide, as this woman she had disregarded as not being important enough to bring on board to her little exclusive club paints her hair and squints at her―Beth knows she can’t actually see her, but it still feels like she’s being studied, nevertheless―swallowing Beth’s words and spitting them out, trying to twist her guttural accented tone into Beth’s own.
“ You’re damn right.”
Beth startles when she gets it, and Sarah smirks almost smugly to herself in the mirror. Beth stares at her, and Sarah stares back, whether she knows she is or not, and Beth wonders if maybe this is her rebirth.
There are days where Sarah lives in Beth’s skin for so long she forgets where Sarah ends and Beth begins.
Sometimes the guilt wears on her, because here Sarah is, living the life of a dead girl. Wearing her clothes and sleeping in her bed in her apartment and fucking her boyfriend―though from the surprise upon their initial coupling, Sarah doesn’t think Beth’d particularly mind that last one.
Sometimes Sarah wakes up and she forgets who she’s supposed to be.
She remembers Sarah, the girl she is, the girl she grew up as, the girl from the streets in London who got passed around and caused too much trouble and never seemed to stop being a monumental fuck-up. That’s her, and she remembers Sarah , herself, like she remembers breathing. It’s natural, flows, soothes the ache in her lungs.
But, in an odd way, she’s beginning to remember Beth, too.
In little flashes.
There’s darkness, and fear, and the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. Sometimes when she sleeps she hears nothing but the methodical drip drip drip of coffee landing in a pot, so loud it drives her mad, but when she gets up to investigate the machine is turned off. Paul rolls to his side and asks her what’s the matter, and Sarah tells him it’s nothing and he grunts and goes back to sleep.
Some days she thinks she’s going mad. That maybe Beth is haunting her for doing this, stealing her life, picking up where she left off.
Other days she thinks maybe this is Beth’s way of trying to help her, trying to give her the tools she needs to figure this whole mess out. With Paul, with the others, with Leekie… none of it makes any sense.
On those days Sarah has to remind herself that Beth is dead and the dead don’t speak, let alone to girls who steal their faces.
Sarah lives as Beth but she realizes that she’ll never get a chance to know her, not like Cosima and Alison have, and the realization stings. It’s a bitter thought, to realize that for Sarah’s journey to begin Beth’s had to end, and she finds herself wishing most nights that she might have reached out, that night on the platform, the night it all changed.
There are pieces of Beth that she picks up, though, that Sarah treasures.
Hanging gently on one of the chairs is a soft woolen scarf, dark red and sensory heaven dragging against Sarah’s skin. She thinks that must be why Beth liked it so much.
It smells vaguely like the cologne Beth stores in her bathroom―not Paul’s, Beth just preferred to wear cologne over perfume, Sarah learned―and even more vaguely like mothballs, something musky, something homely . It’s clearly handmade, and Sarah wonders if Beth has a mother out there waiting for a reply to an apology she’s never going to receive.
Beth seems like the stubborn sort.
Sarah relates to that.
Paul watches her rub her hands in repetitive motions over the comforting fabric and says nothing, like he always does. His eyes are clinical, searching, diagnostic, and Sarah ignores him, as she’s learning to. She understands now how his and Beth’s relationship came so close to crumbling.
He isn’t very good at hiding his intention, and Sarah’s spent her whole life staring at people who want something from her.
Beth had, too, but Beth hid underneath covers and ran as fast as her legs could carry her.
Sarah’s style is more confrontational, but wearing Beth’s close, assuming Beth’s skin, she has to learn to hide, to make herself small, let Paul think that he’s winning. It makes her skin crawl and she seethes at the injustice of it because this is no way for a person to live, and Beth deserves better , deserved better, then this man who never loved her.
The world was not gentle to Beth Childs so she took a train to nowhere, and Sarah Manning is determined to avenge her, in one way or another, to finish what she started so that they can all have peace, so that Beth won’t have died for nothing.
Until then, Sarah straightens her hair and pins on a badge and straps a gun to her hip and smiles at Paul, all sharp teeth and glinting eyes, and she pushes on.
After everything is over, they have a proper funeral.
Beth had watched Felix’s celebration of life for Sarah who was actually her, had smiled at it, laughed, but after everything is over, they have a proper funeral.
They’re tired of grieving, but maybe it’s deserved.
Sarah stands next to Cosima and Alison and Helena and Art loiters a little ways away, choked with emotion until Helena beckons him closer. His eyes are shiny and Beth smiles remembering them, remembering the way he used to look at her, like she was worth something.
He always was a dipshit.
Krystal is there too, a little out of place. They only met once, after all, but Krystal remembers her, remembered her name, softly requested that she be allowed to join the others for the vigil.
They take turns speaking about her and Beth feels herself grow warm at the memory of it all. Her heart has long stopped beating but she still loves them, all of them, so desperately, wishes she could have done better by them, been the hero they deserved.
She looks at Sarah, standing front and Sarah, hair wild and curly and eyes bright, and thinks that Sarah was the hero they all needed.
“ I never knew Beth,” Sarah begins, and the others quell, Art especially, his hands tucked into his pockets, pensive, “ but she’s a part of me, now, and I can’t help but think that I’m a part of her, too, in a way.” Sarah looks down and then back up, shakes her head a little before continuing. “ I never knew her, but somehow, I know her, know how brave she was, and strong, and I know that she gave me the strength I needed to continue on when I was close to giving up.” She smiles.
“ It’s like Helena said, this story began the day I stepped off a train and met myself, and I think we all owe everything to Beth.”
“To Beth!”
Someone walks up besides her, and Beth smiles softly.
“You came to see them?”
“You did tell me to watch the others for you.” Mika’s voice is soft and drifts over Beth’s ears like chimes. “We can do it together now.” She looks down to where Sarah is standing and smiles. “She’s a real force of nature.”
“I’m lucky to have met her,” Beth murmurs, and Sarah looks in their direction for a moment, almost as if she can sense them. Mika reaches for Beth’s hand, and the two of them walk away, and for the first time since her heart stopped beating, Beth’s soul is completely at rest.