Chapter Text
Rose leaned back and sighed at the little blinking cursor at the top of her open word document. Thoughts were similarly blinking in her head, meshing wordlessly into a story without linearity or coherence, one which she felt, one which she knew to be good, but didn’t exactly have a setting, plot, or character to insert in it. The google chrome icon on her taskbar teased her, begging her to dive into the wormhole of the internet rather than focus on her short story, which she visibly was not in a state to write. But she wanted to write it. She had wanted to write it ever since her English teacher had mentioned a short story contest on the first week of school. She wanted to submit something to that contest, something which could blow the socks off the jury, and perhaps in the process get her to win her a reputation which she still lacked.
She already had a reputation, in some ways. It didn’t take much more than a glance at the way she wore her uniform to tell, between the socks she always wore knee-high, her wrinkled shirt with rolled up sleeves and her black lipstick. The way she began hanging out with the infamous “d*kes” of her school almost immediately after the beginning of the year spoke volumes, too. The thing was, neither of those brought her much respect over her character, which was quite unacceptable. Yes, she was defiant of the establishment, no, it didn’t mean there lacked rhyme or reason in her actions.
She opened her documents, seeking to browse her previous work for inspiration. She looked at the titles of things she wrote recently, but none of it quite inspired her. She clicked on an old folder, and opened in front of her a bunch of old stuff she’d written years ago.
Her curiosity was piqued.
She clicked on a word doc she couldn’t remember, simply titled “Alice”.
It began something like this:
There must have been a dozen people waiting. Parents and their teens, sat on their luggage or shifting awkwardly their weight from one leg to the other. Many were on their phone, texting or playing games. A few adults with a self-important air were spitting business nonsense into Bluetooth earpieces. My mom was among them. I belonged to the first group, sat on my luggage. I was hungry. The hour was reaching noon and I hadn’t eaten anything all day, my stomach twisted by the bother of having to come here.
After the first paragraph, it all came back to Rose. This was something she had written in eighth grade, the story of a girl being dumped at a mysterious boarding school by her aloof single mother, and having to deal with supernatural occurrences all the while dealing with her teenage problems of not fitting in despite being amazing in every possible way. There was a bland and non-threatening love interest guy, several pointless references to Alice and Wonderland, and in total about five thousand words of meandering plotlessness, but hey, for a thirteen or fourteen-year-old, it was honestly not that bad. Cliché? Yes. Self-indulgent? Yes. But at least it was mostly coherent and stylistically decent.
The second document she opened, she had a vague memory of what it was. One of her first stories, a fantasy narrative about the daughter of a merchant being exiled and raised in a recluse monastery along with the disgraced imperial heiress after a foreign invasion, and their eventual return to society afterwards, where the imperial heiress joins a rebel faction wanting to overthrow the invaders, but instead getting captured and compromising by marrying the new king. There was magic involved in all of this, though Rose didn’t exactly remember how. It was one of the stories she had gotten the furthest in, about 20 000 words, but she had lost the document at some point, and tried to re-write it many times, but never found again quite the lore she had created, and deleted everything almost immediately after writing it. The one remaining version of this story was merely a page long, a page of weak writing defined by a lack of patience to establish the rules of a world which just sounded and felt so much better in her head than on paper. She shook her head in a nostalgic dismissal, and moved on to something else.
The third document she opened…God, oh God, this was from her edgy phase. Granted, she never truly outgrew her edgy phase, but this was peak purple prose and talk of philosophical bullshit, a Lovecraftian pastiche quoting Nietzsche level of dramatic. It was called “Complacency of the Learned”.
As the best learned and the most ignorant among you will know, the world is layered and centered, with a space for each thing and a thing for each space in the Universe. Greatness is derived from thorough knowledge of this hierarchy, and one day, a Great man or woman is bound to absolve all chaos hitherto. A realist—one who lives sanely under conditions of absolute reality: In other words, a being perfect enough to kill and replace God.
We have certainty of this being, because we have certainty of worth: we know that some things, by divine nature, are better than others. If better exists, then so must perfect. If any order at all is able to exist, then absolute order is but what has to come eventually. Rest assured in that, dearest reader, the void is a frail thing, too powerful for mere Mensch, but weak enough against our reasons and our wits.
Is this the tale which these pages contain? No, certainly not. There is no victory at the end of this tale, for its hero is forsaken: they will go from greatness to greatness as well as from failure to failure, emulating in front of your very eyes both Aristotelian tragedies and Hollywoodian epics, not killing and embodying God, but efficiently killing and embodying a Prophet. They will not achieve absolute reality nor absolute sanity: Calmasis, the puppetmaster, will play for you the song of the uroboros, the ultimate Beast. Their voice shall echo your heart and its flaws, their melody shall direct your gaze upwards.
It was kind of sarcastically written, but still. Rose had no idea what the fuck she meant with that text. Yet, oddly enough, it was also one of her favorites. Go figure. She closed the document.
Wait, was that all which this folder contained? Where was the rest? She knew she wrote a bible’s worth of unfinished stories, and that there were more than this that remained on her computer.
She shuffled around, looking through the many, loosely organized folders of her computer. The school projects, the pictures, the music.
Ah-ha. Bingo. Buried inside of an unnamed folder inside last year’s school folder was about a dozen more stories, as well as another folder named “fanfiction”. Old fanfiction. She didn’t dare open that one. Rather, she looked at the other document titles before her, forgotten memories flowing back like through a broken dam. One especially caught her attention. It was called “New Elite” and it began like this:
There was an appreciable quantity of dust that rose in the air with each of my step. I must say the dirt track on which I was running was especially susceptible to do that. Entirely focused on my task, it did not prevent me, however, to notice that I had taken much advance on my classmates. I was panting from exhaustion but it did not prevent me to keep up my speed. In a few meters I would achieve to get to the finish line, officially swooping once again the title of the fastest girl in the class.
Running was such a relief to me. Between the never ending expectations of performance in class and all the competition for this or that title, at least in that field I could keep a distance ahead. Not that I was any bad in other disciplines: only, other girls were, too. And in this world, having others be as good as you were wasn’t a particularly good thing. Of all the demands: of all the classes and trainings and selections, the only thing I could not comply to or feign was discipline. An awfully ill-mannered, impetuous, non-obedient young woman I was with no doubt. And though I knew it could harm me, my family, my honour and my future, I could not resign to take orders easily.
Oh, I was eager to please, to receive honours and respect from my instructors and approbation from my country, but there was also this little bit of rebellion, this boyish, immature side I couldn’t contain. As I arrived at the finish line, and leaned forward to catch my breath, I could feel the dubious look of my teachers looking upon me. I was a source of unease. And something was wrong.
The plot was something about a fascist government trying to implement a new aristocracy by raising “superior” men and women, rank them, give them titles accordingly and have them marry each other. It was a bit of a cheesy prompt, but she could run with it. The writing was good, or at the very least okay, but it wasn’t what struck Rose. It wasn’t what got her to exhale softly in a fond grin, nor to keep reading the dozen of pages that followed. No, what kept her doing that was the way these characters were so oddly better than in any other of her stories, so oddly more compelling and motivated, and also happened to be the first lesbians she ever wrote.
She didn’t do it as an attempt to represent homosexuality because it touched her personally, at the time, the very idea that she could have been attracted to women was quickly dismissed in her mind, brushed off by the way even her friends would rather use the topic as the punchline of a joke than a real possibility, yet at the same time the dramatically romantic epic that was gay relationships called to her imagination, and without thinking much about it, merely wanting to “be a good ally” she wrote this story. The plot was still flimsy and directionless, but for once, the interactions between the characters didn’t feel forced. The conflict of a main, Claire, being at once unable to conform and wanting to be admired, the friendship with a much more restrained best friend the romance with whom remains ambiguous for the longest time, the problematic and ambitious disaster of a friend with whom Claire ends up exploring her sexuality, it just was so much more…relevant than any other romances Rose had previously written. Well, except for all the gay fanfiction she wrote in the following years, but, y’know, this story had started it all, and it was not about men.
In fact, none of these old stories were about men. At most, they were about androgynous or genderfluid characters. As opposed to most of the stories she wrote in the last year-and-a-half, which were almost exclusively centered around guys. She kind of missed that former ease she had writing women.
Especially since she now knew she wasn’t straight.
She didn’t know exactly when she found out, she had suspicions even before she had transferred to Marianopolis and befriended the school’s self-identified “d*ke club”, but even then, she hadn’t been entirely convinced. She still wasn’t convinced of what label she should put on herself. Somewhere, maybe even just reading these stories helped put the final nail in her conviction that she was genuinely attracted to girls, and not faking it for attention.
The thought made her want to put her face in her hands, much more confused and uncomfortable than she should ever be. She brushed away the feeling, with a deep breath, and tried instead to focus on the fondness and candor which had inspired that tale long ago.
Rose decided that she was finally going to get back to her short story. She now knew both what she wanted to write and how.