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Reader: foomatic
Length: 27:49
It was easy, Jamie thought, as her head pounded and temple throbbed.
Well, not so much now, at this moment, with a hangover thundering out a pulse on the timpani of her skull as she clung to the toilet like a lover in the night. Every joint and muscle aches, a combination of sleeping half slumped over in the bathroom, age, and the consequences of booze. She leans back with a groan, back twinging, shoulders popping, and as nausea roils, takes a few deep breaths to settle her stomach. Evidently spending the rest of last night praying to the porcelain god didn’t buy her any grace today.
But in general, it was easier, spending the night chasing the bottom of a pint glass, in a way nothing else was these days. Christ, even breathing was hard. Been hard since the day her lungs fought for surface despite her best intentions. Been burning with it, since, taking in air in a world that Dani Clayton no longer existed in.
The water refused to take her, so she’d found another way to drown.
So yeah. It was easy, sliding into bad habits like a forgotten favorite jacket. A glass of wine became a bottle. What was one or two nights to forget against a million more? A bottle quickly became too slow. Why waste time, Jamie thought, chasing one cup after another? Best to jump straight to the hard stuff, then.
Jamie never beat around the bush before, seemed no point in starting now, her bluntness having been softened over the years by Dani’s love. The very edges of her ebbed into the waters of an ocean that was no longer there. Jamie was parched. She was so thirsty. So she drank.
Wrong kind of love can fuck you up. Right one can, too.
Just as bad, really.
Worse, if you’re lucky.
Love and possession may be opposites, but Jamie had given her heart away a long time ago and she didn’t know how to keep it beating when it was no longer hers. Everything she was had already been given over to Dani. Given eagerly. Freely. Like all things best loved are. And that’s the thing about a freed thing, isn’t it? Doesn't come back just because you want it to. Just because you miss it.
This part of her. It isn’t peaceful, Dani had said. And Jamie had understood.
Understood in blood and bone, in the way something so small and insignificant can snap. Remembers how rage can end with kneeling in a rain-soaked alleyway, groaning from an ass kicking she probably deserved, probably was searching for, blood trickling down from a split eyebrow. Remembered how she grimaced, the twinge in her ribs matching the bitter taste of metal in her mouth, but it’d hurt and there was a sick measure of comfort in that; making part of the world match the brokenness inside her.
So yeah. She knew rage. Recognized it. Hated that something so ugly and angry and raw resided inside of Dani, something that couldn’t possibly exist naturally - there wasn’t an atom of that kind of violence in Dani’s body. She wouldn’t give into the wrath, Jamie knew even then, in the cradle of knowing her. Dani would never. And the unfairness of her having to suffer through the struggle of it anyway made the part of Jamie that resonated in recognition with Viola burn.
It’s you. It’s me. It’s us, the rage said, taunting her through the fissures of Dani’s struggle.
It was all she could do to hold it in that day, her teeth cracking under the weight of it, in the horrible quiet of the room as Dani confessed. As she gave voice to the terrible truth that now resided in her. She’s waiting, Dani had whispered. If standing silently and bearing witness was all Jamie could do, she gladly took the weight of it if it meant one less thing for Dani to carry. Jamie coiled it tight back into herself and created her own waiting, lurking beast.
And Jamie knew from past experience that the only way to control the beast was to let it out of captivity from time to time. To let the monster run wild and exhaust itself so she could wrestle it back into the cage.
The rage festered. Jamie felt it rumbling deep in her chest.
So when Dani finally left the room with a shaky determination (“Better find out what those kids are getting up to,"), Jamie knew she had to let it breathe.
No one would remember where the dent in the wall came from. It was chalked up as an accident, caused by one of the many pieces of furniture having knocked into things on its way out to the moving truck. Jamie had to hold in the scream that broiled inside and searched for a safer place for it to land.
She still had to walk by that fucking lake to get to the greenhouse.
Under cover of the potted sanctum, Jamie let loose the beast. Anger clawed, scratching out her throat. The greenhouse was excellent at absorbing sound, plants and leaves shaking with the echoes of her cries, and if Jamie’s voice seemed a little hoarse, it was easy enough to blame it on something else. Easy enough, to explain away her split knuckles on mis-gauging the distance while bringing one of the heavier boxes outside. Or scraping it against some gravel. Or anything other than slamming her fist into the wall again and again and again.
It was new though, needing to find ways to hide it from Dani. Never had to hide it from anyone before. She used to display her beast proudly, a mark of pride that said ‘don’t fuck with us.’ Didn’t have to hide her beast in prison, either. Everyone had one of their own; it was why they’d all ended up there in the first place. More than a few learned how to deal with it in therapy. Jamie tamed hers in the jungle of a garden.
Not a single part of her looked in the rear view mirror as they drove away. Would never have stopped the truck if it could’ve kept Dani safe. So she did what little she could do. All the fear, the terror that already threatened to split Dani further in two, the new shell of a person Dani had to live with, Jamie took it from her. Buried it deep within herself, felt it so that Dani wouldn’t have to. Drew out the poison from Dani’s soil and into her own roots.
And then, in her most private moments - few and far between, really, for there was nothing unshared between them - Jamie let out the venom, the resentment, the fury, that she collected. Outrage that the world dared spin, indifferent to the unfairness of it all.
She just wanted to fucking break something. Couldn’t get her hands on the Lady, couldn’t pull her out of Dani, so she had to find the next best thing.
Viola was quiet in her rage. Jamie wasn’t with hers. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She was, for a while, at least.
That first year was full of small moments: the way Dani’s shoulders would never fully relax, tension rarely leaving her body, even in sleep. How she kept looking over her shoulder at rest stops and gas stations, as if the Lady were a drifter, following them on the highways, across states, through the unfolding ribbon of their adventure. Jamie found she could cover up those incidents with the smug satisfaction of having bested the unavoidable for another day. Another week. Another month.
Her demon was dormant for a good long while, in the solace of Dani’s love. Dormant like Viola’s fucking ghost, it turned out. Things were so good for so long, it almost seemed to purr, content in it’s hibernation.
Jamie’s beast woke with a sudden and curious start, after that night in the kitchen after Paris. Started to sniff, hungry for any little scrap. Found too many for comfort - the way Dani started to wake up earlier, as if perhaps she hadn’t slept at all; how it would take her just a moment longer to turn off the water; the times Jamie had to repeat Dani’s name until she jerked, as if suddenly finding herself transported somewhere new - it began pacing in its cage, hungry now, banging on the bars.
Jamie was quiet with her rage for a while, until she was shaking with it. Until it threatened to explode out of her skin like a bomb and she wouldn’t ever - ever - let Dani come close to the shrapnel. Instead she was the steady rock that Dani needed and imploded later, somewhere else, somewhere safe.
She could see how close to the edge Dani was, on some days. How it seemed even the barest breeze would blow her from herself entirely, leaving an empty, unblinking husk behind. It was all Jamie could do to steer her back from the cliff each time.
Jamie had to coax Dani back to the world, breathe life into her lips some mornings as she stared into the ceiling, eyes open and blank; her very own Sleeping Beauty. Each time it felt like a kiss goodbye. Stay with me. Please. Come back to me. A miracle, when she did, even if Dani slipped further and further away each time like a boat on the horizon. Jamie would stroke her face with trembling hands, afraid even the gentlest touch would cause the delicate thing to disintegrate beneath the pads of her fingers.
Dani always came first. Even as Jamie’s own creature grew stronger and louder, she held it in. Found controlled environments to let it run wild.
There was something oddly comforting about the alleyway. There’s a familiar landscape all back alleys share - brick, concrete, dumpster, a car or two, usually a fair amount of scattered garbage, and the near ubiquitous empty, overturned storage crates used by the weary for smoke breaks or breakdowns of all shapes and sizes - an alley was an alley was an alley.
The only thing that marked it as theirs was a few hanging ferns on the corner of the doorway. Something to signal the threshold, announce the life bursting and growing just inside. Something growing in the barren landscape of a back alley. Something to remind a younger Jamie of what could lie on the other side, if she stood long enough to reach up for it.
So she destroyed things in the alleyway. When the cruelty of the matter absolutely broke her - when Jamie had to sew the fraying pieces of Dani back together because Viola was slowly pulling the seams of her apart; when she desperately scooped handfuls of Dani even as she was slipping through her fingers like sand - Jamie would break something else.
Jamie took her rage, and smashed it against the brick or asphalt in a shower of pottery in the alleyway. Pots, planters, saucers, she grabbed damaged items from the shop and broke them even further, until her chest heaved and panted from the effort of it in the shards under her feet. When the alley wasn’t a possibility and her screams of frustration and the clatter of smashing ceramic would would threaten to draw Dani out from the thinning fragility of their life together, Jamie would punch bags of soil in the storage room until they burst, earth pouring to the floor, leaving her standing in a shallow grave of her own making.
Nothing to hide, once Dani is gone.
Easier to get lost in the anger, and Jamie let it consume her like an uncontrolled blaze until nothing but ash remained. Fitting, she thought, for the daughter of a coal miner. It came to claim her, pulling her into itself, not to grow, not to nourish, but to press her into something that burned. And oh, she burned.
It would scare her, she thought, that she hadn’t changed. In all this time, in all these years, underneath the layers of soil and earth, below the roots, the same creature lurked in the dirt of Jamie’s own jungle. A monster that threatened to take her too. That she wished would. A demon of wrath and anger. Of pain and suffering and the shit end of the stick every time.
Despite the years, despite the love and relative calm that settled over her life - since gardening, since Dani - she was still the same enraged, lost, thing. Every living thing comes from every dying thing and it’s natural and she knows that but what she didn’t understand is how to keep living when the core of you is already dead; how was it possible for these two things to co-exist at once. The impossibility of the thing. The decaying mortality. This unholy living. Feels unnatural.
Jamie couldn’t breathe. She couldn't, she couldn’t-
And there, there it was. Specks of dried toothpaste on the mirror. It shouldn’t have been the thing to undo her. After all, it could’ve been hers or Dani’s. But it could have been. Dani’s. Such a casual, mundane thing - a flick of the wrist, rinsing off the toothbrush, spitting into the drain - leaving behind a stain. A mark. Something to be thoughtlessly wiped off and cleaned later, leaving no sign it had once been there. No indication someone had been there at all. No impression of a life built together, their hips casually leaning against one another while flossing, or the yelp of surprise at the shock of cold water after flushing the toilet while the other is in the shower. The apology that came after, sliding through the shower curtain to make it up to them, a tongue sliding into the folds of their ear, hands slipping down to the folds of thighs, into slicks of wet and warm. The absolute mess on the floor afterwards of errant water sloshing out the tub.
The tub.
The floor.
The water that had taken them both. The water that refused to take Jamie.
Not the water, she corrected. Dani. Dani, who refused to take Jamie along on one last adventure. Do you want company? She had asked, all those years ago. Can I walk by your side? Will you take me with you?
And there it was - her beast - clawing up her spine, smashing with a roar into the mocking mirror pane. Again she roared, again she cried, until a dozen fractured shards were all that was left of the toothpaste, left of Jamie’s broken heart, all that was left of Dani. Again and again she struck the mirror until the pain from her bleeding knuckles pulled her out of it and she sank, depleted, sobbing on the floor.
So she drank.
And got into more than a few fights while she was at it. Needed a better opponent than flower pots and dirt, though - she’d already destroyed a decent part of the shop. She needed something to twist her fists into, something that would punch back, something that would make her hurt.
When she drove home, she’d try to ignore the voice in her head that sounded so much like Dani (“You could kill somebody, Jamie, Jesus!”) she almost veered off the road looking at the passenger’s side.
Left the fucking mirror in the bathroom where it was, a broken and half empty self-portrait. Tossed the glass in the bin and swept it away where the edges of a life that no longer existed wouldn’t cut her. Pleased there was nothing to look at getting ready in the mornings, nothing to catch her eye stepping out of the shower, nothing to reflect. Nothing to look at. Nothing at all.
And so it stayed as the weeks wore on. The medicine cabinet pulled open for badly needed aspirin after a particularly rough night or tougher morning, band-aids for the cuts on her knuckles, no mirror on the outside to mock the bruises on her cheek or the split eyebrow from what might have been a night of bad choices but were the only ones that seem to make sense anymore.
The only thing that helped ease the ever-throbbing, dull ache from every corner of her heart was to press the hurt. A walking bruise, Jamie desperately sought solace to cauterize the bleeding wound of loss.
The less Jamie had to look herself in the eye for it, the better.
Which left her here: waking up on the bathroom floor, slouched over the toilet, curls of hair plastered on her cheek from a substance she can only assume to be last night’s dried vomit.
Left here, on the bathroom floor, as empty and hollow as Dani had been in what turned out to be her final few days.
Left here, left behind.
If Jamie squints, she can almost see the glimmer of Dani, twinkling like fairy lights on the tile.
But the longer Jamie sits there, legs growing numb from her cramped position, the sparkle doesn’t go away. Matter of fact, it starts to get annoying. She swats at it, trying to suffer her grief and hangover in peace.
She pulls her hand back with a hiss. The light has an edge to it. It bites.
A piece of the shattered mirror. Must’ve been there for weeks now, having fallen behind the toilet, forgotten. Jamie holds it carefully, staring at the broken reflection of her face for a long time. Stares until it stares back. Until the beast, she realizes finally, the one who has stalked her her whole life, has quietly slinked away. She listens for it - the telltale heat of it simmering just under her skin. But she doesn’t feel anything.
The unfairness of it all remains. But there’s something else in the emptiness, she realizes.
Dani.
There’s a chance - far fucking fetched, she knows - but a chance that maybe, just maybe, the emptiness will stare back. And it will look like someone she loved. Loves, she corrects. Loving Dani will always be in the present. Jamie, crumpled on the floor, bleeding from an aching heart, will always be surrounded by the ghost of Dani. Haunted by a life built and shared and grown. A life taken. Cut short. A leafling, snipped from the vine at the most beautiful stage of maturation. Haunted, sure. But not alone. Something to be said for the chance that Dani will appear.
Jamie will be haunted by Dani for the rest of her days regardless, she knows, phantom or no. Might as well wait, Jamie thinks wryly, got a lot to tell her off for.
She spent more than a few years living with ghosts, anyway. Only difference is, this time she’ll be aware of it. Besides, no one else she’d rather be haunted by. It was Dani forever. Said as much herself that day in the shop. I’ve got a problem, Poppins. Dani would always be it for her. And some problems can’t be fixed. Can only sit and learn to live with them like old friends.
So Jamie scrapes herself off the floor. She shuffles to the kitchen to grab the broom and sweeps the broken pieces of the last few broken months into the bin, cautious of the edges this time.
She gets dressed. Puts away the bottles. Collects the half-eaten take out containers and napkins that litter the apartment. Takes out the trash. Waters the plants. Prunes the dead leaves. Repots herself and let her roots overcome the shock of replanting, remembering the work of living.
Drives to the hardware store and buys a replacement panel for the bathroom. Mounts it in the frame, reverently touching the mirror’s edges. Because if there’s a chance, even a single chance - weeks, months, years from now - that Jamie’s personal ghost will come back to haunt her, she doesn’t want to miss a second of it. Doesn’t want to risk being too drunk, face down in a toilet somewhere, too angry to remember seeing Dani’s face. Doesn’t want Dani seeing that.
Doesn’t want it all to be for nothing, hiding her secret beast for all those years. Having worked so hard to make sure Dani never saw that part of her, the one who went wild and feral, hissing and clawing at the world and it’s indifference. Never wanted to let her beast get close to Dani, close enough to scratch. Not Dani, who struggled so hard to keep tame her own demons.
She’d be a rather shit wife if she started now. Just because Dani was gone doesn’t mean Dani wouldn’t see.
Doesn’t mean it’s easy though, either. It’s hard. Hardest fucking thing she’s ever done, since pulling herself out of that lake when all she had wanted to do was drown in it. That wasn’t difficult, that was instinct. This will be a choice. Every day, for the rest of her life, will be a choice. One she has to make again and again.
Jamie longingly traces the pair of earrings lazily forgotten, left out on top of the dresser, in a bygone act of normalcy to be left now in memoriam, and pulls out one of Dani’s favorite shirts from the drawer, that awful slinky pink one that snagged on every last thorn and branch in the shop. Pretty in love with you, it turns out. Inhaled. Breathed in every last atom of Dani until her lungs were trembling with her. She slid the shirt on like armor and prayed the delicate fabric would be strong enough to help withstand the weight of the world ahead.
She took a few steps to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and did battle with the first night of the rest of her life. Let the sink fill, stared at the water, and took a deep breath.
It took years for Dani to see the Lady. They were grateful for it then - relieved, actually, that they managed to get so much time. But now, all Jamie wants is for the haunting to come quickly. Do you want company?
For a long time, all Jamie Taylor wanted to do was forget. Forget Lancashire, forget the taunts, the sound of banging, of Louise’s girlish flirting, Mikey’s crying. Forget the whirl of sirens, the creak of a door opening in the dead of night, a weight dipping on the bed next to her. Forget London, forget prison, forget her , forget all of it. Forget Bly, forget the Lady, forget Viola was ever a dark spot to stain the bright garden of their life. She drank thirstily, fought desperately, all to forget the pain, forget that Dani was gone, was never coming back, and that she doesn’t remember how to be Jamie without Dani by her side.
Except now, she realized, on the off-chance Dani’s face would stare back in the mirror or from beneath the water, she wanted to see every last line, every curve of her face. If that meant suffering the empty, aching, endless days to do so, then so be it.
It’s you. It’s me. It’s us, she’d screamed to the Lady, to the hatred inside both of them, the fury that stormed stronger than death.
But after the flames expunge and the coals cool, Jamie remembers now, there’s more than just rage in the quiet parts. There’s patience. Love. Kindness. That things grow with just a little bit of water. A little, instead of all at once.
Water can give life, not just take it away.
It was easy to forget that small truth when the waves crashed and swept her below, unable to gain footing before another came crashing down and pulled her under. She did it once, on her own, in her youth and loneliness. She can learn how to do it again; to exist in stillness and quiet without Dani. A little, instead of all at once.
She lets loving Dani warm instead of burn. Like a comforting hearth beckoning the weary home.
She ran her fingers along the cool porcelain of the sink, reverently, as if it were Dani’s skin she was touching; Dani’s face she was caressing; Dani, she was loving.
Jamie takes a deep, shuddering breath, and looks up. Squares her shoulders, baring all of herself to the mirror, forces herself to look.
She’ll wait forever if she has to.
But first, just one night.
Beautiful things worth loving and tending to can bloom at night; under the blanket of darkness, there’s still life. And if she keeps pouring all her love and effort into it, maybe one day it’ll all make sense. She can see where it goes.