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Jess finally leaves the Nevernever behind and makes her way back to her apartment, feeling tired in a way she can’t quite describe. It’s not the physical exhaustion - well, it’s not just the physical exhaustion. She probably shouldn’t ignore the way her legs are shaking underneath her. Would it be this bad if she were a wizard, or one of the Paranet folks who was born with this bullshit? Maybe it’s just because she’s painfully new to this; she doesn’t know, but she’s bone-tired.
The thing that’s really turning her stomach, though, is the memory of feeling something flow out of her and watching everything react like - like she’s something special. Like she’s part of this insane, irrational magical world instead of a mortal who made a stupid damn decision.
Her stomach roils, and she lunges into the bathroom. It’s not likely she’ll actually throw up, but why tempt fate (again)? She lets herself slump down on the dirty linoleum floor just close enough to the toilet, and stares at her hands. A couple hours ago, she ran them over bark and leaves and stems and watched the plants knit themselves back together, which is impossible. She’s turning into something she can’t understand, a channel for something she can’t control, and she’s not sure whether she’s more disgusted or terrified. Is this what Sybella feels like when Pythia comes knocking? Like her self isn’t her own anymore, and she’s sitting in the passenger seat, just a tool for some unimaginable power?
Her eyes slip closed and her head thunks back against the door. There’s a kind of security in the aggressive mundanity of her bathroom. An occasional drip from the leaky faucet hits the sink and slides down, like halfhearted water torture. The warring smells of mold and bleach weave through the air. She rubs her fingertips against the cold, gritty floor and just breathes. Here, everything that happened today seems far away and impossible. Here, she’s just herself - not a unicorn or an emissary or whatever the fuck she’s supposed to be.
She ends up sleeping there, half-slumped over. When she wakes up, there’s a crick in her neck and her back doesn’t feel quite right, but the world has become something she can face. And maybe she’s a little less inhuman than she thought.
Later, she’s holding a wriggling four-year-old as she very seriously tries to explain why we do not attempt to pull the wings off pixies, ever . She hands his parents copies of “Living with the Wee Folk,” makes sure the Little Folk know where to reach her in case the Screaming Tyrant doesn’t get the message, and thinks: this might not be so bad.
Later, she’s sitting at her desk typing up incident reports and a wave of exhaustion washes over her. She looks up and realizes that the ficus sitting next to her desk looks unusually perky for something that’s been dying for longer than she’s been alive. There’s something closing around her, and she has the urge to run - somewhere, anywhere, doesn’t matter. She stays put.
Later, she manages to shut up a gaggle of third graders just by walking past them on the sidewalk. They gape at her like they’re not quite sure what to think. Jess isn’t either.
Her newfound abnormality is, somehow, always there in the background, like her former neighbor who used to watch Jeopardy all the time with the volume barely loud enough to be audible. She’s able to ignore it, until she’s not. Until she gets another vision, or the ficus looks perkier, or she finds herself craving green space. Sometimes she’s just sitting at home watching the Cubs get pummeled (there are so few pleasures in her life, she has to take advantage when she can) when the realization that everything has changed irrevocably. Her entire life will always be divided into before the mantle of the Unicorn and after the mantle of the Unicorn.
She tries saying it out loud, like that’ll map everything onto reality in some kind of way she can deal with. “I have the mantle of the Unicorn.” Nope. There’s definitely someone out there who could pull that line off, but it’s not Jess. It sounds like she’s telling a really bad joke.
She sighs and returns to the paperwork she had to bring home. Now that she’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off following these crazy dreams, there’s not nearly as much time in the day for her to actually do her job. Well. The Unicorn stuff isn’t unrelated to her job, she supposes. Pretty much everything she steps into was destined to be an incident report sooner or later. It’s just… more. She thinks she’s covering well enough, but she knows she can’t keep it up forever. She’ll fall behind, eventually, and then - does she stop listening to the visions and let innocent people fall into harm’s way? Does she quit - no, no, she can’t. She’s not going to think about that now. She’s just going to keep typing.
It’s raining like she’s gonna have to build an ark. Her pants are soaked up to the hip and muddy; a teenage selkie had somehow managed to get stuck in the rocks along the lake shore, which meant Jess had to go wriggle him out, which meant another pair of pants ruined. She pulls out of her crappy parallel park and starts heading home.
She’s not tired. She should be tired, but something about the storm has adrenaline humming along her bones, wrapping around the core of her. If it weren’t raining cats and dogs, she’d throw on her workout clothes and run her legs off. The roads are crap to drive on, though, and she doubts they’ll be any better for running. She’s got to do something. Staying in the house like this isn’t an option.
So she changes into jeans and pulls a flannel over one of her t-shirts from college, worn until it’s soft. She pulls her hair out of the drenched mess it’s become and binds it back into a bun. (Should she cut it short again? It’s been ten years or longer.) She slides her wallet and keys into her back pocket and grabs her battered black umbrella as she heads out the door.
The buzz is high in her veins as she pulls into the bar’s parking lot. It’s the opposite of alcohol, winding her up, making her mind work too fast. She doesn’t want to think tonight.
She orders her usual draft and scouts the bar as she enjoys it, letting it slow her down. Half a dozen prospects turn into one as she catches dark brown eyes. She inclines her head, and he comes over to join her. Good. This’ll be easy. She doesn’t want to work tonight.
He’s a couple years her senior, works in an auto shop, she doesn’t care but she’ll at least pretend to be polite. Two drinks later, they’re playing pool and he lets his hand linger on her hip. She sinks her last ball and gets his address.
She fucks him like she hates herself, but he’s just fine with that. They’ll both have bruises for the next couple of days. Her fingers brush the budding marks as she pulls her clothes back on. The little throbs of pain and the memory of pleasure help her remember that this is her body and she’s still some kind of human. He leaves the covers thrown back on the other side of the bed, but she doesn’t bother to stay.
(That kind of solution only works sometimes, though. Sometimes she just lies in bed and watches the moon and wonders what the hell is happening to her. Her mind is carefully blank, but her body wants to curl around something warm, wants to be held and vulnerable, wants to be the kind of soft that she can’t afford.
Her body is an idiot. If she’s lucky, it’ll get her killed.)