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Chapter Text

You wouldn't know the names of her people, or the language their name came from, so there's no point providing them here. They lived in a long, flat stretch of country, in a collection of huts rounded together against the cold wind and the snows.

The snow was sliding off their sloped roofs when the sickness came. They buried the dead in the snow, unable to burn them as their traditions called for.

Their word for afterlife was the same as their word for burning. They believed that fire returned their spirits to the Northern Sun. That was the center of their beliefs, their deepest-held hope. (Think of it like their Jesus.) When their people were worthy enough, the Northern Sun would appear in the sky, drop lower and lower until it touched the earth and walked among them. It would carry gifts for them: plentiful hunting, a crop of fat babies, an end to sickness and death and drought. Everyone had their own idea what it would look like. Some thought it would be dark, like them. Others said it would shine so bright, they wouldn't be able to even glance in its direction.

Our heroine, she always said she knew, but no one listened to her except her younger sisters and brothers. She told them how she had seen the Northern Sun in her dreams, except he looked like a man. He rode a big horse and he spoke funny, but he was so clever and so good.

When the sickness took her family, all of her brothers and sisters in a single week, and her parents too, her sight went with them. The villagers said that her blindness made her a burden. They said she had tried to curse them, and the Northern Sun, in its wisdom, had rebounded her curse back on her.

They had been looking for an excuse for a while. Once her family was gone, our heroine's predictions, about weather, about accidents, even about the disease that almost killed her, were re-cast to be spells. They made her the cause of the bad as opposed to a lighthouse shining out in the dark, trying to warn them off the rocks. Her naturally sunny nature twisted in their telling, too. They spoke of how she laughed when her family died around her, as though she hadn't been mad from fever and dreaming of the day her youngest sister tried to milk their goat for the first time.

Once the snow melted and the disease ran out of victims, the men who remained came into her aunt and uncle's hut. They grabbed her off the floor mat in the damp corner she had been cast into, and they carried her far away. At the edge of mountains, they left her on the ground in her thin hand-made clothes. One, her father's friend, felt badly enough to throw a heavy fur over her after the others had turned their backs. She wrapped her hands in it, settled on the ground to wait until their footsteps faded.

Then she sighed and stood. She found a stick on the ground and began to tap her way forward.

The rain followed the snow in this land, and soon the fur was useless. She kept it around her shoulders for the weight of it, something that felt like a companion, but she could smell it molding from the constant damp. It was always getting stuck to her arms, like her long loose hair did on the back of her neck. She gave up trying to peel them away.

She knew the way back to the village was southwest, but her family was gone and there was something else lying to the North, through these mountains. So she walked and walked toward him, smelling the pungent root he chewed on the wind, even though he was so very away.

Her fingers rummaged for roots and wild-growing herbs and berries, but she never gathered enough. After days of noisy protest, her stomach went silent. It ached constantly, like her eyes, like her legs and her feet. Her body, already thin from the disease, became less and less. Her flesh sank into her bones and disappeared, until she was as insubstantial as a shadow.

Running down a steep mountain slope, she scraped her face on branches, and one raked her blank, open eyes. They burned and wept and crusted over. The clothes bagging out around her body picked up thistles and thorns, so that even when she laid down, some part of her was pricked and bleeding. Her blood attracted crawling and flying bugs, and then she was covered in itches too. She chewed leaves and spit the mashed pulp onto her wounds.

Her feet went wrinkled white in the rain; her toenails fell off, one and then two and then three at a time.

She walked and walked until she was too tired to move, and then she fell to the ground and slept until her own pain woke her.

Sometimes she wanted to cry, but she couldn't, not after her eyes were ruined completely. She huddled in the dirt, her sopping, stinking fur pulled over her head and bugs crawling in her long wet black hair, in her open wounds. She wailed and screamed until the air was gone and she had to pull the fur away and crawl into the damp heavy night, panting.

Her pain was as wide as the sky - she had a sense of it, but she couldn't measure its full dimensions. It seemed endless. She wished for her sisters and her brothers, her mother and father. She wished for him.

She cannot reach him in this withering body. She knew it from the start, but she propped herself up inside the smell of him and the hope. She dreamed of his warmth around her.

This was such a harsh life, and now it was empty and lonely like the landscape around her. The unfairness of it made her want to cut this world apart and jump out of it.

Sometimes, in the seconds before exhaustion overpowered her, she heard her family's voices, so familiar, speaking some flat, muffled words she could never make out. She thought these were memories from another world.

Who can say? Time isn't a line, that's only how we see it. Whenever it wishes, it can loop back in on itself, and we can too, if we know how to follow it. Like those puzzles you did as a kid, when you have to find the right line in the jumble of twisted lines of the page. One leads to a candy cane and one to a skeleton. One led her to this blind trek.

She hoped the next one would lead her somewhere better.

It was for the other worlds that she kept walking. And because it was always her nature to fight against the forces that seemed unbeatable, to grasp the branches and try to pull herself one step further, one day closer.

Gravity was destiny, and it would pull her down soon enough.

He found her at the end of the rains, at the end of a path in a valley between the last two mountains. She walked so far from her people that he had never heard of them.

He swung off his horse and walked to her, lying on her back in the newly emerged sun. He thought she was was a child until he saw her face. Then he thought her dead. (Almost, but not quite.)

She gasped with joy that he had finally come, but it was harsh and heavy and showed her rotted teeth, and he jumped back.

He was just old enough to be vain about his status as a warrior, and he was ashamed a small woman like her had frightened him like that. He was thankful her eyes were blind and that his brothers were too far behind on the path to see.

He looked at her wounds, the bites and blood and the bugs all over her, and then he knelt and took her hand.

Can you see it? Her fingerbones (really, they were nothing but bones by then) against the tough, reddened skin on his palms.

He was fair, from a people that prized being born fair above all other things, in a country where white was right and right was might, and she was dark. Even before the weeks and weeks of living rough, even apart from the dirt the rain had not washed away, she was dark-skinned and dark-haired.

But her face, spare as it was, had a lonely sweetness he had never encountered before. He longed to know the story of her. How did she come to be here? How had she survived like this?

So he cupped her hand in his own and she turned her head toward him.

She never needed eyes to see. She knew he wouldn't understand yet, but still, she tried to tell him.

Their people spoke different tongues. All he knew was that she made sounds, the same one repeated, lilting and low, and then her mouth fell open and her fingers spasmed and went still.

He touched her then, her matted hair, her neck.

"In the next life, my Northern Sun, you can find me in the next life. Try to remember me. Try to see me, Northern Sun. You are my Northern Sun."

When he heard his brothers' horses, he wiped his face and put her hand over her swollen eyes, covering their bloody yellow crusts of pus. His brothers stood far from the creature on the ground. She seemed inhuman to them and they wondered why their youngest brother knelt so close.

At last, one of them made a sound of disgust, or, more kindly interpreted, of curiosity, and it stirred him out of his daze.

"She had to be so powerful," he tried to explain, unable to move his eyes from her face. "They cast her out, her people. To be so small and to be abandoned, she would have been quite powerful. They must have feared her."

He wondered where her power went - to the sky or to the earth? Would the sun bake it down on him, make him as dark as she was? Had it gone to some other place, some world he couldn't touch?

"We should burn her," he said abruptly. (That was part of her power there, that sudden idea. Most of it went on, the way he had wondered about, but a bit of it stayed behind and whispered that idea in his head.) "We will send her back into the sun."

The brothers shrugged and gathered the wood. He was the youngest, but he had a force about it that made people do what he wanted. He always had, and he struggled to know how to use that power. He wanted to use it for good, but in this world, what was good for him was not always good for others.

(White is right and right is might.)

They had burned bodies before, after a battle, but none of the brothers recalled a fire like this one. It gobbled our woman up so quickly, in a roar of blue-white flame, and instead of smelling like burnt hair and fur, blackened meat, and ashes, it smelled like flowers.

He thought he would remember the flowers.

Chapter Text

Do you tote around someone else's voice in your head? Does it ever bring out an old refrain when you're bewildered or terrified, when you feel alone with strangers' eyes all over you?

Julian Aloysius Stafford learned that feeling when he was ten, in 1899. He picked up his first voice then. The second came a year later. By the time the third arrived, he was so numb, he could barely hear it through the chorus rehearsing in his ears.

Julian's parents founded a girls' boarding school in rural Connecticut. They had raised him gently, surrounded by dozens of teenage girls, mostly from progressive, intellectual New England families. He was the school pet, coddled and encouraged by both the students and the faculty.

When he turned ten, his father bent to the will of his wealthy family and sent Julian south, to the military boarding school in Virginia that had turned out decades of strong Stafford men. He arrived with his adventure books and his knowledge of fun parlor games, ready to make friends with boys his age for the first time.

Instead, he found that he was considered a both a brat and a baby since he didn't hunt, couldn't fire a gun. After he talked about how he had grown up, the older girls he had spent his childhood playing with, they revealed the popular conception that girls weren't people, you simply didn't make friends with them. And in contrast to the kind teachers at his parents' school, who always told him how bright he was, his new teachers found only his faults.

Julian was good at math, in the natural-born way that meant he couldn't explain anything, and Captain Hawke, a tall beak-faced man cursed with an unfortunate name, tormented him when he couldn't detail how he reached his answers. "Why can't you explain the solution, Cadet? I thought you understood this material!" He turned to the other boys in the room, shaking his head and including them all in his disgust. "Cadets, does Stafford have these problems in all his classes? Does he ever do anything right?"

He was miserable and defenseless, his soft heart completely unprepared for that kind of cruelty. Maybe he would have learned to laugh it off in time. Maybe it would have made him tough, as the school predicted, but near the end of his first year of school, he received the news that his parents died in a carriage accident.

Julian wasn't sure what would happen to him, or to their school. He called up all the stories he had read and he pictured himself being turned out onto a moor somewhere or working as a pick-pocket in a slum.

But when he arrived home for the funerals, he found his father's father, a longtime widower, and his new bride, moving their things into his parents' bedroom. His grandfather was so old it was frightening to look at him. His step-grandmother, on the other hand, was quite young (younger than Julian's mother had been, in fact) and very beautiful, with cool blue eyes and hair like a banked fire. She sat by his bedside the first night, told him they had come to stay. They would run the school, and care for him.

"It's what your parents would have wanted," she said soothingly. He wiped away his tears as soon as they dropped off his eyelashes because he understood from his old classmates that crying was shameful and he was stupid for doing it. She pushed his sweaty hair away from his forehead and he gave his heart over to her soothing. He trusted her completely; she would take care of him.

Her name was Maria.

Has your mother ever told you not to worry about what people think of, that no one pays you as much mind as you think they do? Have you ever told yourself that, when you walk into a room and everyone goes silent and you duck your head down to make sure you're wearing clothes?

It wasn't true that no one was watching him, not Julian, not in the clammy-close world of that all-girls' boarding school in 1905. Every girl paid attention to him. Everywhere he went, their hungry or worshipful or lonely eyes followed him.

He was the only boy their age in the vicinity, so it might have happened regardless, but he was also an enigma to them. No matter how the girls dressed or flirted, he rarely made eye contact. When he came to class, he gave monosyllabic answers bookended by long pauses. They were always correct, but when the teacher waited for him to expand, he would say nothing.

They never knew the reason behind his silence. When he tried to answer a teacher's question, he would hear Captain Hawke's voice again. "Does Stafford ever do anything right?" He would manage to choke out, "Brussels," or "square root of twenty-two" or "Emile Loubet," and then his whole body would seize up and he'd take slow, quiet breaths through his nose while he stared at the floor.

The routines of boarding school were unchanging for Julian. Every day, the same meals in the same rotation, the long parade of talking faces and facts, the cold baths. The same call for lights-out, and afterwards the same girls in the third floor dorms giggling and shushing and fighting in the dark. He can hear them in his tiny room, up on the fourth floor, where the "family quarters" are.

Every night, the same darkness outside his dormer windows. The nights made the days seem short. When he saw the sun dipping toward the horizon, he felt the desperation rise up in himself. His hands spasmed, desperate for something to hold onto, but he had nothing left but his books. He piled them around his bed, so he can always turn to them, after.

The school was built to look like a fancy home. Maria had relaxed the rigorous classes his parents had offered and now the school focused on what she called a "spiritual and practical education." The most noble goal for a woman, she explained in the cloying, little-girl voice she used for company, was to be a caregiver, and that was what their school was designed to prepare its girls for.

Dull classes for dull, gently-bred girls who'd lead dull lives as society matrons and wives and mothers. Maria used her own family as a selling point - who better to educate them than the woman who ran the school while caring for her elderly husband and a grandson who wasn't even her own?

Julian was sixteen now. He asked Maria once if he could go away to college. The classes the school offered now were useless to him and he read books with a new kind of desperation, like they were his last escape. She teared up beautifully at his question. She clutched his hand and pulled it to her heart.

"But I need you, darling. This school, it's your legacy, our family's legacy. I can't run it alone. You would turn your back on me, after everything?" She guided his hand up her throat to the tears spilling down her pink cheeks. "I thought I meant something to you, Julian."

She had told him how much she needed him, how she relied on him, since he had first come home. It had made him feel strong, even if it also made his stomach shake with fear at what all that responsibility meant. He was only a boy, eleven years old, skinny and small for his age, but she said he was stronger than he looked.

He was really the man of the house now, she said, since his grandfather was old and ill. "If you're the man of the house and I'm the woman, do you know that that means?" she had asked, moving her body further into his bed as he scrunched against the wall. He remembered his feet scrabbling in the cool sheets. He was so nervous and he didn't understand why.

His face was pinched as he considered her question. It seemed like a riddle, but was it? "We're a team," he offered at last and she gave him her biggest, most beautiful smile, the one that had flattened his grandfather out the first time he saw it in the brothel where he had met her.

"Yes, Julian. In fact," she said teasingly and the top of her dressing gown gaped open as she leaned over him, "you're practically like my husband. If you think about it."

Her head blocked out the light as she bent down to him.

He sat at the head table at breakfast. They're set up on a level so all the girls can stare up at him. He ignored them completely but it only seemed to make them more determined.

As Maria led the morning prayer, he bowed his head. The rows of girls seated at their long benches in front of their tidy bowls of cooling oatmeal did the same. His grandfather was staring off above their heads, nodding absently to himself.

As Maria blessed their school and their families and her family, starting with her dear husband, Julian thought about the day ahead. The teachers his parents had hired were all gone, of course, and the new ones were both ignorant and lenient, given his standing in the school. They allowed him to escape and read in the library for hours if he was bored.

Today was History, American Literature, Botany, and French. History was a joke. American Literature was always poetry and he detested poetry. Botany was just gardening in the school greenhouse, learning the names of flowers and how to arrange them. He'd read all of The Last of the Mohicans last night because he couldn't sleep, so he'd have to find something else before class--

Maria finally sat down, at his right hand side. She patted his thigh under the table and he fisted his spoon in his hand and began to eat.

"Where is my hat?" his grandfather spoke up, his voice loud enough to draw the attention of the girls at the front of the lines of tables. They glanced at his father and then at Julian, with sympathy. He ignored them.

"I'll get your hat for you once you eat, my dove," Maria smiled. She spooned up some oatmeal and held it to his grandfather's paper-thin lips. "There you are," she cooed. "Oh yes."

Julian scraped his spoon against the side of the bowl, only to irritate her.

He had to give her this - she was a fighter, a woman who had been gifted a steel will and a beautiful face and little else. He had made a study of her for the last five years, he had listened to her stories. He knew how she had been born on a dirt floor in a collapsing shack and she had risen here, to this fine, respected girl's school. She had diamonds on her fingers and the respect of eighty-three schoolgirls and their families, who looked upon her as a virtuous model of womanhood.

Well, eighty-two, he corrected mentally. Without raising his head from his bowl, he scanned the room and picked out this year's goat. In schools like the one Maria ran, like the one Julian went to when he was ten, there always had to be the goat.

The goat was the outcast, the one who always sat at the far end of the table or in the front row of the classroom. The one who got blamed for any missing item in the dorm. Her books were always left lying on the stairs, no matter how carefully she tucked them back into her desk at the end of lessons. Her stockings are always getting ripped and somehow ink was always accidentally tipped onto her pinafore. If there was a whisper when the teacher's back was turned, it was her. Who she was whispering to, since no one ever talked to her, was never explained.

Julian could pick out the goats as soon as he saw them - they were clumsy or eager or whiny, the ones who cried excessively on their first night alone. Sometimes they were the fat girls who could never met anyone's eyes, or the buck-toothed ones with thumbprints on the lenses of their glasses.

This year, they had a new one, a girl his age who had transferred late to their school. He frowned as he watched her, sitting there at the back of the room. When she set down her spoon to take a sip of tea, the girl sitting next to her leaned her elbow over. The goat's spoon flipped to the floor and as she bent to pick it up, the girl across the table grabbed her bowl of oatmeal. It was passed, hand over hand, down the line and the goat sat up to find her place empty. She looked around for a moment and then shrugged. She pulled her legs up to sit Indian-style and he immediately looked away.

Maria wouldn't see the girls stealing her food. She never intervened with the way the goats were tormented. He could hear her words echo in his head - it would teach them how to persevere. She was doing them a favor, really. But when the goat broke a rule, that she always saw. And they were always punished.

Suffering, it was like singing to her. Like the joy she got from watching her jeweled hands move in the firelight or having her rose-gold hair brushed out before bed. The oatmeal thickened in his throat and he had to take a gulp of coffee to force it down.

"Alice Brandon!" Maria's voice snapped out and Julian closed his eyes. "Young ladies, direct your attention to Mademoiselle Brandon at the back of the room." They turned at one and stared at her, even the teachers.

Only three pairs of eyes in the room were not watching her - Julian's twitched behind his lids and his grandfather nodded into his beard, fast asleep.

And the goat? She watched Maria, who had walked around her table and down the three stairs to the floor of the room, and was gracefully stalking toward her.

"Does a lady ever, ever, sit like this at a table?"

The girl, this Alice, still had her legs up on the bench, her feet folded over her knees. She never looked away from Maria.

"No, Madame Whitlock," the students chorused, and the girl across from Alice covered her mouth with her hand.

Maria's hand snapped out and grabbed Alice by the ear and forced her to her feet. "Perhaps if we cane Mademoiselle Brandon again, she will take more care with how she arranges her body in the future."

Julian shoved his chair back from the table and the sharp sound dragged a few girls' attention away from the back of the room. Even Maria glanced over her shoulder at him. She frowned, but then the head girl ran back in with her cane, a finely made object with a mahogany wood shaft and a sterling silver grip.

"I'm sure you know the position by now, Mademoiselle," Maria said, redirecting everyone's view. As Julian stalked out of the room through the front entrance, he saw this tiny girl folding herself over the bench. She barely had anything to hit, she was nothing but bones and big eyes and black braids, but Maria had caned her at least three times a week in the first month of school.

He decided he would skip all his classes today. He can start War and Peace over again. He put himself in that world, trying to blot out this one, but even as he started up the stairs to the library, he can hear the first smack of wood against flesh.

The library was on the second floor, and it was empty when the weather was fine in the afternoons. It was that rich, sunny part of fall, when it almost seemed like summer, so the afternoons were for outdoor socializing, tea parties on the patio, croquet and dance lessons on the lawn.

If he opened the windows, Julian would have heard them laughing, arguing about who he had looked at as he left the dining room that morning. (The answer: the girl's knobby spine as she bent over the hard wood bench and Maria's hands, veins jutting blue against glistening wood.)

The first volume of War and Peace was open, propped against his knees, and he was half-sleeping. He could hear footsteps coming and his mind flipped back to the way he felt in his room at night. The door creaked open and he jumped to a crouched position, his book sliding off his knees and slamming on the floor.

The goat's wide eyes peered at him as she walked in. "What was that?"

He stood quickly, pulling his book into his chest and pressing his arms into the sharp corners of the binding.

She lowered her hands - a fistful of rags in the left and a bucket in the right. He could hear water sloshing as she placed the bucket on the floor. "Ora accused me of copying off her page in French, so I'm supposed to scrub the floor," she said. She was cheerful about it, god knew why. The library was big; to scrub the whole floor on her hands and knees would take her until lights-out and she would miss dinner.

He was surprised at her voice - there was warmth in it, but it was also deeper and more adult than he expected from her appearance. Maria's was still sweet and girly, but this girl, she had the kind of voice you could count on. And she was pretty, in that clear-eyed way the goats almost never were.

Before she knelt down, she grabbed her long skirts and twisted them, tying them in a messy knot around her knees. He gaped at her, but she continued, removing her shoes and white stockings and revealing her short, bony calves and ankles and feet.

"What, you, thi--" He was gasping, his chest heaving under his shirt, buttoned to the very top.

Maria has taken his words. He can no longer speak properly if she's not around. You might think it would be the other way, that he'd feel unburdened outside of her presence. But he was never outside himself, and in that way, she was always with him. At random moments through the day, when he was alone or sitting in class, he would hear something she had told him.

The way she had worked her way in, the way she had broken down his protests bit by bit. He thought now that she wasn't even attracted to him at eleven, when it had started. But she had to start building the bond then, to tie them together, his hands bound to her feet, so he will never escape and he will never stand against her because his back was, is broken. Maria has taken his body from him, too.

She told him she was so lonely, that she was only a girl herself (she was twenty-two at the time) and she wanted to talk to him like boys and girls talked, when they were young. Did he like her? Oh good. She liked him too. Could she lay here in bed with him? Oh thank you, he's so dear.

She took his choices away by inches and then she told him how much he had liked it. She was only a girl, after all. She couldn't make a boy do anything he didn't want to do.

(Do you know her kind? In another age, she would have been the middle school teacher who told her student, "Rape? When I swallow your cum, I'm raping you? You wanted it. You loved every minute of it.")

He had never been kissed before her. He had never touched a girl-- or a woman. He had never touched himself. And then she chopped and chopped away at him until he was a bone bag of neuroses and stories he read to avoid the one he was living.

Maria took everything. And now he heard her voice in his ears, her panting and her sighs, the way she pressed and whined until he admitted he loved her. She made him say it over and over again, every time.

Sometimes he felt her hands like the puppeteer's, grasping the root of his tongue and speaking her words through his throat. When Maria introduced him to visiting parents, he was the charming yet respectful grandson, the kind of boy they wanted their daughters to marry.

But now, when he was alone with a girl his age --

"You'll ge-g-tuh caned if--" he managed to get out at last. He was sweating and red from the effort and he felt that telltale itch at the roof of his mouth that meant he was near tears, from sheer frustration at his own stupidity and helplessness.

"If I get my stockings wet or dirty, I'll get caned for that too," she declared practically. She stopped scrubbing for a moment and stared down at her white pinafore and blue dress. "Really I should be in my petticoats."

"No!" Julian shoved his hands over his face. "Stop--stop--"

There were so many words of advice he wanted to give her, one goat to another: Stop sitting like a boy at breakfast, stop scraping your fork against the plate, stop whistling on the stairs, stop volunteering in class, stop giving plants ridiculous names in botany, you know full well they're called larkspur, not Purple Arches of Delight, or whatever you say.

But all he can say is "Stop--stop--stop." When he opened his eyes to see her reaction, she wasn't even watching him. It made it a little easier somehow, and he continued, "Stop ffff." He took a breath. "Fighting her!"

She looked up at that. "I'll never stop fighting her, Julian. Not ever." She had that queer little smile on her face again, the one that drove Maria and the other girls crazy because it was so self-contained. There was a core to this girl no one could touch.

"I cuh-can't- caught-- I have--" If Maria caught the goat with him like this, she would cane the skin off her back. He wasn't sure what she would do to him. He had never provoked her, tried to make her jealous.

She nodded and looked back down. "You don't have to worry about me, Julian. I have a wretched stepmother of my own, so I understand how it is. She convinced my father this was the only chance they had to turn me into a lady." Alice hooted and crawled forward on her bare knees as she rubbed the rag across the wood. "I know you won't tell, but I intend to be something better than a lady. I want to be an actress. On the stage." She straightened suddenly and threw her head back, flattening her palm over her forehead with a surprising amount of grace. The rag splattered droplets across the floor and hit his shoes. "Can't you just see it?" she asked, her eyes half-closed.

He wanted to nod. Part of him wanted to ask her what plays she liked best, whether she was a Miranda or an Ophelia (he thought a Miranda) and if she would ever play a boy's part and if she ever got nervous talking in front of so many people.

But he was too nervous to even talk in front of her. So instead he left the room, taking War and Peace and all his guilt and regret with him.

The fall semester dragged on and Alice got smaller and paler. She had a bit of muscle on her frame and some color in her cheeks when she came, but now even her freckles were fading. She caught his eye in the hall and quirked her lips at him - not in the flirtatious way most girls did, but in a friendly way, like they shared some private joke.

He always went sweaty and looked away. Now, on top of the guilt he felt for the other things he had done wrong, the things he allowed Maria to do to him (for he must have allowed her, it must have been his fault somehow), he felt guilty for not standing up for Alice, not defending her against Maria and the other girls. When he knew she hadn't eaten, he found himself vomiting his meals into the chamber pot under his bed. (Maria complained about his breath.)

When the teachers or the other girls picked on Alice in class, it made his head throb, to the point he felt his eyes bulge out with pain.

One day in French it was particularly bad. She and another girl had been paired to quiz each other on vocabulary. No one liked being paired with her; Alice always picked bizarre words. Today she started with hippopotamus.

The other girl, whose name Julian didn't know, responded, "Thin." The classroom tittered.

"Maigre," Alice said easily. She thought for a moment, then said, "Hilarious."

It went on like that, with the other girl making Alice translate deceitful, ugly, lazy, idiot, pale, and Alice responding with words like bewildered or denigrate or petty, and finally the other girl said, "whore," and even the teacher had to object to that one.

Alice did the worst possible thing she could have done - she looked at Julian and blushed.

After that, the other girls were relentless with their comments about Alice's ugliness and obvious desperation. It became so bad that Julian stopped eating at meals altogether, stopped speaking in class even when he was asked a direct question. He wanted so badly to reach out to her, to tell her to push the door open and bolt into the world and never come back, but he had no voice and no body. He barely existed anymore.

It was another sunny afternoon when she found him. In the winter, when the library became more crowded, he read on the fourth floor stairs, the ones that led to the widow's walk on the roof. The trapdoor on the roof didn't latch well, and the stairs were kept closed off because they were so drafty. His hands were numb in the winter more often than not, but he couldn't read in his bedroom. (Maria sits in every corner.)

He was re-reading Treasure Island, a book his mother read to him when he had been sick as a child. His face was hot and he pressed it against the rough cold walls of the stairs. Maria had told him something last night. She had pointed it out, really, annoyed that he hadn't noticed sooner.

He heard a rustling at the door and his stomach rioted, thinking it would be Maria, but instead it was her, Alice - he could not think of her as the goat anymore.

She was careful not to lean against the door - she was caned against yesterday at lunch, when she tripped over another girl's outstretched foot and broke a dish, and she had a faded swollen lip and a fresh blue bruise around her eye in addition to the bruises on her backside.

He closed his eyes when he saw her battered face and she doesn't say anything for a long moment, but when he looked at her again, he saw her own eyes were gleaming with tears.

"Sorry," he gasped out, touching his own face in the places she was injured. "I-- sorry."

"No, Julian." She was wearing that blue dress again, the one from the day at the library. "I thought if I came here, I could... All these months, I've been hoping I came in time." She shook her head when he stared at her, confusion written over his face. She crept closer, reached out and put her small hand on his arm, over the sleeve of his sweater.

It had been so long since anyone but Maria had touched him like that, and his skin seemed to ache under the insignificant weight of her. "I'm running away tonight," she whispered urgently. "My aunt sent me enough money to make it to New York, so I can act. Like I told you." She bit her lip and seemed to search his face for reaction. His head was throbbing again and his arm hurt where she was touching him. He felt dizzy and outside himself. "Would you come with me? I could pay your fare," she added quickly. "You would be so much happier once you're away from this place."

Last night Maria had taken his hand and guided it low on her stomach. "You haven't noticed yet, darling, I'm hurt." Her flesh was rounded and a little firmer and his eyes widened. She laughed and asked why he wasn't happy. "You surely worked at this long enough, didn't you think it would happen eventually?" He thought of himself at eleven. The cowlick standing up in his new short haircut and his hairless, concave chest.

"Maria's--" He stopped; words that started with P were almost impossible for him. He reverted to French. "Enceinte."

Julian had seen faces fall but he had never seen one fall apart until hers. Her own pain made his seem more distant somehow. He thought perhaps he was in shock.

She clasped her hands under her chin, like she was praying or pleading. "Oh Julian. Oh no. Damn her. Goddamn her. I swear, she and my stepmother met when they escaped from the depths of Hell. Julian, none of this is your fault. If you want to, you could still leave."

He ran his fingers along the spine of the book, the faded gold lettering. Every child deserved to have someone read to them. They shouldn't lie awake, afraid in their own bed.

"I'm leaving at midnight to catch the last train. At 12:40am." Her voice, that grown-up voice, was thick and quivering and he knew she was crying. Why was she crying? "I'll wait for you on the platform."

That night he stayed awake as Maria drifted to sleep beside him. He crept to the window and stared out. He thought he could see her, so far off in the distance, making her way up the road to the train station. He wished her luck. He wished her a future.

At three o'clock in the morning, he walked up the stairs and opened the latch to the roof. It was so cold it hurt when he inhaled. His fingers were sore and his forearms were scratched. (The bedsheet was wrapped tight around her neck, in his bed.)

He closed his eyes.

He didn't have a voice, he didn't have a body. He didn't have a future.

So he let go.

Chapter Text

Set in June 2005

"The tall brute is the plague of the short woman on the subway," proclaimed his grandmother as she sat next to him. (It sounded better in Mandarin.)

Jasper Wong nodded absently, turning the page in his textbook. He felt his grandmother's eyes burning into his cheek. She didn't repeat herself because she knew she didn't have to.

"Apologies, Grandmother," he said as he stuck his thumb in his book to hold his place. "What were you saying?"

She sniffed and looked away. He followed her gaze down the subway train. At the other end, a blonde frat-boy type had one muscular arm wrapped around a pole and the other around the waist of a small brunette woman. The train was crowded and all the seats were taken but she had inched herself as far away from him as she could manage while still holding on to the pole. Her face was turned away from him, clearly aggravated, while he leaned over her shoulder. He was laughing obliviously, no doubt thinking he was being charming.

Jasper caught her quick eye roll and laughed to himself. His grandmother made a small noise of agreement. "You will go help her," she instructed in Mandarin, nodding at him in her decisive way.

"Grandmother, what I am supposed--"

"Eh eh eh," she chided. "Go help." She pulled one of her tattered romance novels from her purse and began to read. She could speak English as fluently as Mandarin, but she also believed that if she didn't make her grandchildren practice when they spoke to her, they would forget it.

Jasper shoved his book back in his overstuffed backpack and stood up. He would lose his seat immediately, but standing up for the rest of the ride into Manhattan was less of a pain in the ass than his grandmother being annoyed with him.

His grandfather ran the business, and people from the outside thought that made him powerful. But his grandmother, she ran the family and he knew that was where the real power hummed.

He walked down the length of the train, wondering how exactly he should intervene. This guy-- Ryan, Jasper decided, he really looked like a Ryan-- was still hovering over her shoulder, practically whispering into her ear while she hunched down in an attempt to preserve her personal space. As he got closer, Jasper heard him say, "I won't take no for an answer, Mari, you gotta let me take you out dancing tonight. I'm the man who can show you all that the city has to offer, babe." He leered down and Jasper realized this woman was wearing a low-cut dress and Ryan had a bird's eye view down her cleavage.

Asshole.

"Hey, sweetie, I can't believe I didn't see you sooner! I thought you missed the train." He grinned hugely at the strange woman, giving her what he hoped was a significant 'play along, I'm not an asshole' glance.

Sometimes you had to say a lot in a glance, and this time, it worked.

"Oh my gosh, there you are!" She beamed back at him and threw her arms around his shoulders in a quick embrace. He hugged her back, his palms touching the skin revealed by the open back of her dress, and he was momentarily carried away by her subtle floral scent and the smoothest skin he had ever felt. She glanced back at Ryan. "My boyfriend, I told you I had one," she said pointedly.

Jasper glanced at frat boy Ryan and his white-knuckled grip on the pole. "Sorry, dude, do you mind letting me stand with my girl?"

Ryan gave him a once-over, obviously unimpressed by Jasper's faded sweatshirt and his 5'5" frame. "Yeah, whatever," he sneered and pushed his way through the crowd to another subway car.

The woman watched until he was gone and then turned to Jasper and exhaled loudly. Her wide dark eyes were even bigger and filled with relief. "Thank you. You're a lifesaver. He's been hanging over me since I got on the train." She held out her hand. "Marialicia," she said as they shook, pronouncing Alicia with a soft c.

Damn, Jasper thought, even her name has to be gorgeous. She had dark curls piled on top of her head and olive skin with a sort of glow that had nothing to do with make-up and everything to do with her smile. She was a knock-out who had probably been described as "cute" most of her life because she was so short.

She was also very obviously artsy, from her nose ring and neck tattoo to the colorful pattern on her long dress and the floaty scarfs tied around her tiny wrists. Definitely not the kind of girl he usually dated (he preferred the shy, brilliant type, the women who read on the subway like he did).

"Jasper," he replied, careful to angle himself away from her. He definitely didn't want to come across like a Ryan-style creep. "Should I apologize on behalf of all men for that loser?"

She shook her head, her plethora of earrings tinkling against her neck like tiny wind chimes. "Nah, he's just like the frat boy assholes I grew up with."

Jasper laughed. "Yeah, exactly." He found the space to slide his backpack around and pull out his book. Now that he had done his good deed, he could go back to his reading.

"Wow, An Introduction to Classical Econometric Theory," Marialicia recited from the cover. "I... have no idea what that even means! Are you some kind of science genius or something?"

Jasper chuckled again. He fit his side against the pole while he flipped through the book with both hands. He wondered why she was still talking to him. Doing a good deed for a stranger in New York was a brief bubble of time and when the bubble closed, both parties went back to politely pretending the other was invisible. She must be a tourist. And one of those pathologically friendly types to boot, he decided as he glanced over at her bright, smiling face.

"I'm working on a master's in economics, but definitely not a genius. Just a guy with too much time on his hands, probably." It had been drilled into him since he was a kid never to brag about anything, so he reduced his Ph.D. to a master's and hoped she would change the subject.

They announced the next stop and she frowned, watching people exit and enter, searching hopelessly for seats.

"I have to switch sometime to get to 30 Rockefeller Center, right?" she asked nervously. "I still don't understand the subway very well."

"Yeah. You have a while to go though." As he gave her a brief explanation of the route she'd need to take, a thought occurred to him. "Are you an actress or something?" That would make perfect sense with her artsy persona.

She laughed, loudly, the kind of laugh that demanded attention. "No, I'm a designer. I used to work for my dad, designing jewelry. I increased his store's sales over a hundred percent in 18 months. But my real dream is fashion." She looked around them and took a step closer, until they were almost pressed together.

He looked at their feet and hoped he wouldn't step on her fancy looking sandals. Then he took a deep breath of her flower smell and glanced back up, watching the reflection of the ugly fluorescent lights shining in her dark eyes.

She whispered, "I start filming this reality show competition next week. I'm going to 30 Rock to do some pre-show interviews. I don't know, maybe you saw the first season last year? It was kind of a big thing. We're going to show our final collections at Fashion Week," she explained, imbuing the words "Fashion Week" with the same beautiful gravity that his grandmother used when she talked about Danielle Steel novels.

"Oh, yeah," he lied. "Wow, that's impressive. You must be really talented."

"I work hard at it but I love creating. And I really, really love New York. Did you grow up here?" He nodded and she continued, "I just got here last week and I wander the streets literally all day every day. It's so inspiring!"

"What have you seen so far?" Jasper listened with his knowledgeable ear to her list and then threw in, "The Cloisters at the Met? You would probably love them."

"I've heard of those, but I'm not exactly sure how to get to them," she admitted with a touch of shyness.

"It's not hard. I can draw you a map. Or just take a cab up there. You start filming next week?"

"Yeah, and then it's non-stop work until after the finale. And, hopefully, non-stop work after that, assuming the judges agree."

"Those shows are pretty cut-throat, aren't they? Are you prepared?"

She raised one beautifully arched eyebrow at him and managed to put her hand on her hip without elbowing anyone crowded around them, which was pretty impressive. "To cut a throat? Always."

"Are you from..." He thought about the cadence of her voice and tried to place it. Being a born and bred New Yorker, he was great with accents. "New Orleans?"

"Yes!" Marialicia beamed even brighter. "I was born in Biloxi but we moved to New Orleans when I was a kid. That's impressive. When most people ask me that, I know they're expecting me to say, like, Mexico or whatever."

He nodded immediately. "Yeah, I know, me too. I always want to tell them, I'm as American as they are, deal with it." Once, when Jasper went on a job interview in high school, dressed up in his cleanest-cut clothes, the owner asked him if he'd been adopted as a baby. Because he spoke English so well, Jasper figured, and how the fuck was he supposed to respond to that?

"So what do you do with an economics degree once you get it? Teach?"

"Ah..." This was another question he wasn't sure how to respond to. People who knew him or his family well didn't ask.

Jasper's grandparents had started with a tiny dry cleaning business in Staten Island in the 1970s. His grandmother ran it alone while his grandfather spent his nights cleaning office buildings with a crew of other immigrants and his days studying local real estate listings for a good deal. From those humble beginnings, they now owned a chain of dry cleaners in the tri-state area, seven storage facilities in Jersey, and a hefty chunk of real estate, along with a property management company to run it.

That was his grandfather's real passion - property. Apartment buildings and storefronts and offices. "Things change. Typewriters? Gone! Places to live? Always, always a good investment." A few years ago, the New York Times had called him "The Chinese Donald Trump." (Because of course, his success always had to be qualified by comparing it to a white man.)

As the oldest grandson, Jasper would take over his family's business empire as soon as he finished his PhD, but that wasn't the kind of thing he could explain. His family had taught him modesty before they taught him right from left.

"My family owns a few businesses, so I'm actually going to run those. Some dry cleaners and things like that."

"Oh." Marialicia looked like she suspected there was more to the story, but she shrugged. "That's cool. We'll sort of be in the same field," she laughed, pointing to her dress.

"Did you design that?" he reached out his hand to touch her hip and dropped it away just as quickly. "It's pretty. Not that I know anything about clothes, but I like it," he finished as she laughed. "Sorry, is that a bad attempt at a compliment?"

"No, that was honest. Honest is always good. Thanks." She fiddled with her scarves and adjusted the chains around her neck. "This is a sleeveless open-backed tiered maxi dress with a print inspired by Kandinsky's Squares with Concentric Circles. I do another version with ruffles but it's a little much for someone as short as me. This is going to be a cornerstone of my retail line."

Damn, okay. This was clearly not a girl afraid to boast about her accomplishments. She would never fit into his family, not that it mattered.

They have crossed from Brooklyn into Manhattan and now they were approaching his stop. He and his grandmother are meeting with their stockbrokers today to go over their portfolio. He glanced back and saw his grandmother stuffing her book back in her massive purse.

She had enough money to take a cab-- hell, she had enough money to rent a limo, but she loved the subway. People-watching, like Marialicia had said.

"This is my stop," he said and, like his grandmother, he stuffed his neglected textbook back into his bag. "I'll watch for you on TV."

"Hey, you were going to give me directions to the Cloisters? Or, if you have time, maybe you might want to come with me? You are the only person I know in the city, except for all the other folks whose throats I'll have to cut," Marialicia added.

"Here, give me your phone." They could be friends at least, he told himself. It wasn't like she really wanted anything more than that anyway.

He typed his number in and passed it back to her and when their fingers brushed, she caught his eye and it was like all the people around them fell away, even the two-year old digging in his nose while balanced precariously on his mother's lap.

"I'll call you," Marialicia told him with a smile and he nodded. He grinned back at her and pushed his shaggy dark hair out of his eyes, hoping it looked casual and not contrived.

"I'll be waiting for it." He glanced back at his grandmother who was standing resolutely in front of the doors. "I gotta go," he said as they announced the station. "You know how to get to 30 Rock, right?"

"Thanks to you. 'Bye Jasper."

"Goodbye, Marialicia."

As he took his grandmother's arm and guided her off the train and through the crowded station, she was suspiciously quiet. "Butterflies do not have a word for loyalty," she said at last. (It sounded better in Mandarin.)

"Yes, Grandmother." As if that couldn't be more obvious. It was her fault he was even in this situation and he knew if he tried to bring a woman like this to meet his family-- she was too much. Too artsy, too out there, too confident. And reality TV? That went against everything his family had taught him.

So he told himself it was a good thing that she never called him, though for her part, Marialicia really had planned to. For all her skills, she wasn't great at keeping track of dates, and filming actually started the very next morning. The production staff confiscated their cell phones and by the time she got it back six weeks later, she felt too awkward to call. She figured after Fashion Week, after she won, she would invite Jasper out somewhere to celebrate. But by then, she found he had changed his number and the teenage girl who answered the phone had no idea who he was.

Jasper watched every episode, laughing as she became the camera's darling with her quick sassy reactions to the drama in the workroom and her utter focus on the fabrics and forms in front of her. He chewed his lip as she broke down right before the finale when they told her she had to make another dress for her collection, and then he grinned as she blew it out of the water. The models who walked down the runway in her final collection were a collection of races and ages and sizes, but they each had that Marialicia sparkle, that confidence that made women want to buy her clothes to try and borrow a shred of it.

She won the show, of course, easily, and she threw out her arms in her sparkly jumpsuit to scream, "Thank you, New Orleans and thank you, New York!" He was so proud of her, he kept the episode on his Tivo for months.

He thought, in the back of his mind, he might see her one day, on the street or on the subway, but of course, she became famous and wildly successful. What did he expect? It was one day, one conversation. She didn't remember him. And self-effacing economists didn't end up with amazing, beautiful fashion designers. He started dating a friend of his sister's, a woman with a PhD in Robotics. She was undeniably brilliant, but she was modest and not artistic. She had average-sized wrists and she never wore scarves on them.

Marialicia got mobbed on the subway so she couldn't take it anymore, but she always dropped her clothes at the dry cleaner herself. She rotated through every one in the city, always hoping to see him, but she never did. Her manager told her she needed to date some famous to raise her profile, so after a few months, she hooked up with an actor, and when that ended, a musician. They were artsy, like her, but neither of them were the type to rescue a strange woman on the subway. She never wound up visiting the Cloisters.

Chapter Text

"Oi! Mary, it's ten after," is her greeting when she shows up for her night shift.

"Bus was late again. Bad evening, Jess?" she asks, unwinding her scarf from around her neck.

Jess is one of the younger nurses who works the mid-day shift, and she watches Mary's comings and goings like a hawk. She's always eager to get off to a dance or a party or a late show. Today, she immediately pulls her skirt up to her knees and starts drawing lines down the back of her legs (imitation nylons). "Only four more soldiers, American ones, delivered this morning!"

Mary's mouth drops open. "Where did they fit them all?" she gasps. Their ward on the hospital is cram-jam-full already.

"Freddy and one of the Irish twins died," Jess tells her, pulling off her sensible nurse shoes and putting on her prized heels. Such an indulgence, shoes like these. Even with what the hospital pays them, only a nurse like Jess, from a rich family, could afford them.

(Not that Mary needed heels anyway - what a laugh that would be.)

"Ah." Mary is washing her hands at the sink, taking care to scrub under her nails, down to her wrists, between her fingers. "Anything else I need to know?"

"Mmm," Jess frowns into her compact as she examines herself, "there's a codger in bed three, he'll pinch your bum anytime your back is turned."

Mary nods, keeping her face serious as she wipes her hands dry. A codger to Jess is anyone over 30, and Mary, even though she is only just 28, would surely qualify. (She was engaged once, but never married, and thus still qualifies as an old maid.) Of course, she was 5'10" at 13 so people started thinking of her as grown when she was a girlchild with beanpole legs.

"Ooh, and bed nine? Lost his leg at the knee, nasty wound, but he's a dream-- and a charmer."

"Not a bum pincher?" Mary asks wryly.

Jess pulls a pout. "Unfortunately not. Irene is half-convinced he'll be her next fiance."

They both wince in unison and Mary shakes her head. "Certainly hope not, for his sake."

Irene is legendary among the nurses - she's been engaged to four of their patients over the years, and every one of them has died, either in the hospital or after returning to the field. She bears it all with a long-suffering glaze in her eyes, looking off into the distance like Greer Garson practicing for her close-up.

"Any of them awake?" Mary asks, a little impatient now for actual news. Jess would be off kissing and dancing all night while Mary worked the ward alone until 6am when the morning shift drooped in.

"Nah, I dosed the bad ones up on morph, so tonight should be a doddle for you." Jess has decorated her face with the cosmetics she always manages to scrounge up from somewhere. She looks bright and fresh, even after an eight-hour shift on a crowded ward, and Mary chokes back her sigh. "Tata!" Jess waves and bounces away.

A doddle - fifteen patients on a ward designed for eight, and her on it alone with Dr. Wilson aka Dr. Pissed'n because he was constantly drunk. He was one of the retirees called back into service at the beginning of the war, and they stuck him on nights because he was better than nothing. Marginally.

Mary had worked nights from the start. It made for a strange life, never being out in the day. She had lost most of her friends - not that she had time to keep them anyway, working six nights a week.

She lifts her head as she pushes the ward door open and strides through, straightens her back and puts a calm expression on her face. Nowadays she does this without thinking, but in the beginning, it was a conscious effort.

Act like you know what you're doing, she instructed herself every day for her first year as a nurse. Her knees would knock and her stomach would turn flips; she was sure all her patients would be able to tell that she had no idea what she was doing. As time went on, she feels most grown-up people are playing a part. Even their great Churchill must feel so inadequate sometimes, like a child dropped into a grown-up body with no idea how to maneuver around in it.

She studies the chart for bed fourteen first - she doesn't approve of the treatment for his injuries. "They're going to give him too much, his lungs are wet," she says to herself, leaning over him and watching his chest heave. She adjusts the flow of his IV, shakes her head.

This is why Mary prefers nights, because there are fewer people around giving orders, and she can do as she pleases. She figures she knows better than most doctors at this point. "Certainly better than Dr. Pissed'n," she murmurs as she reviews the next chart.

She tries to see her patients as they would be out of the bed, climbing stairs and laughing and eating Sunday dinners. They look so small and pale under her care, and so young. Almost all of them are younger than her.

Her mother insists the war is almost over, but she has said the same since 1940 and still it goes on. Mary thinks it won't end until they run out of boys to stuff down the barrels of guns. (That's assuming they don't start on the girls after that.)

She is checking the dressing on a leg wound when the patient stirs.

"Sammy?" Or it might be "Tommy?" His voice is muffled and slow, so it's hard to tell.

Has no idea what he's saying, she thinks without looking up at him. "He's fine, it's all right now."

They do this a lot - call out for their men, or their mums. The man in the adjoining bed has been moaning, low and long, since she came on shift. It makes her think of the wind, how it must sound so high up in a Swordfish, like the one Edward and Matthew flew.

"Sam?" he says, more clearly this time, and Mary sighs and glances up at him, folding the blankets back over his missing leg.

She blinks and blushes automatically, then slaps her foolish thoughts away. This must be bed number nine, he is handsome. Hair the same light shade as sand on a sunny day at the beach, and a strong masculine beauty. His face is slack from the drugs Jess gave him for his leg, but he is fighting against them now.

His eyes slit open and he looks up at her with glazed wonder. "Are you an angel?" he slurs, and she cannot stop herself from smiling.

"No, only a nurse, I'm afraid. Lieutenant..." she glances back at his chart. "Whitlock? Are you in any pain? How do you feel?"

He stares at her for a long moment. "Like I got blown up," he replies at last. The man next to him moans again. It takes Whitlock a minute, but then his brow furrows and he frowns. "He all right? Black?"

His words still come out slow and she realizes it's his accent. She's taken care of Southern soldiers before. They have a droopy drawl, always losing their g's and making their Es and Is sound the same (it took her multiple tries to realize a patient wanted a "pen" and not a "pin.") It makes her voice sound even more clipped and proper in comparison.

"Private Black is on quite a lot of medication at the moment." She follows Whitlock's gaze to the other man. She and Whitlock are both frowning. Black's injuries on the whole aren't as bad as Whitlock's but something about him feels off to her. He's receiving painkillers, but she feels he has some kind of deeper pain that the drugs cannot reach.

She has feelings like these sometimes, about which nights she has to stay alert and wait for the air raid sirens to go off, about who will defy the doctor's worries and who will take a sudden turn for the worse. She doesn't see Black ever leaving that bed.

But there's no reason to worry a patient, she tells herself firmly. "He's getting the very best care. Now please try to go back to sleep."

"Mmm," he murmurs. "You're worried, Nurse Angel." He's still watching Black intently. He tries to sit up a little and she pushes him back down - he moves like his whole body aches.

"Are you in pain, Lieutenant?"

"There's no F in that," he says, his voice going tighter. "Never made sense to me."

She picks up his wrist and takes his pulse, an excuse to stay near him. It's not as slow as it should be with the amount of drugs he's been given. "Please--"

"Shh!" He shushes her! A patient! "You're making it hard to pick him out, there are so many people--" He closes his eyes and the tension comes into his face again. Something changes in the room - she can't quite...

She feels, suddenly, a wave of peace. It pulls her shoulders down, wipes the lines from her forehead. "Oh," she says, in quiet awe, and he opens his eyes again, watches her. His eyes are dark, like his straight slashing eyebrows, a strange contrast with his light hair.

The last time she can remember feeling this way was the last time she saw Edward, her brother, and Matthew, her fiance. Their day at the beach - running barefoot through the cold surf, eating oranges Edward had smuggled back for them, rivulets of juice drawing lines in the sand crusting their palms. Laughing in the sun.

But then she remembers the way the pair of them had laughed into each other's faces before Matthew turned back to include her. She had a sneaking suspicion that weekend, but she told herself she was silly.

And then, a few months later, they were both gone.

"Why are you blue again?" he asks, baffled and still loose-jawed, his mouth gaping open a bit. It's a sign the drugs are having an effect on him after all, even though he should be out on his back asleep, not conversing.

"What on earth are you talking about?" Mary responds, and then she realizes Black hasn't moaned since that strange current of peace floated into the room. She glances at him in fear and waits until she sees his chest rise. He's sleeping soundly, the pain momentarily vanquished.

She stares down at Whitlock, his dark fathomless eyes like the ocean that swallowed her brother and Matthew up, along with their plane. "What are you about?"

He flashes her a quick dirty grin. "I asked you first, Nurse Angel. Why are you blue? If you were my girl," he tilts his head and darts his eyes down to her mouth, "you wouldn't be." (She does have a nice mouth, she's always suspected. She keeps it firmly pursed at work, but it fits her face well.)

"You're mad with drugs," Mary says, but there's a teasing note in her voice.

He shakes his head and twists his wrist around to grab her fingers - she has been holding onto his hand, "taking his pulse," this whole time.

"I've never seen an angel as beautiful as you close-up," he tells her, pulling her hand closer like he wants to examine her skin. She winces when she sees that her hand is almost as big as his. (Jess, with her delicate hands and petite dancer's build, told her once what big, capable hands she has.) But he doesn't seem to notice, likely because his pupils are pinpoints from the drugs.

"I told you, Lieutenant, I'm a nurse, not an angel."

"You might as well call me Lefty," he says, cradling her hand in his own. He jerks his chin down at his legs - the left one is the one that's gone, blown off at the knee. "Everyone else will."

His cheer makes her want to laugh but the touch of his skin makes her want to fall against him--oh, bloody hell. She's 28 and she feels like she's 13 again, on the verge of a storm of giggles merely from a cute boy holding her hand. Not that any boys did, when she was 13, being at least a head taller than most of them, and gawky with it.

"Who's Sammy?" she asks impulsively, wanting to throw him off balance for a change.

He gave her an astonished look. "How do you know about Sam?"

"You asked for him earlier, when you woke up. Is he the one you were looking for?"

He laughs a little. "Sam's my brother. Or he was." He examines her nails closely - short and unpainted and neat, hospital rules. His breath caresses her fingertips like sunlight and she wants to move them forward, just a bit, until she can feel the stubble above his top lip. Or even, she imagines with a blast of heat, his lips themselves. "If you knew him, I'd know for sure you were an angel."

Ah, dead then. Like her brother and her fiance, and so many of the boys she knew growing up, and the ones she cared for in this room.

"My sympathies," she says, softer than she means to. Like a personal grief, rather than a meaningless expression to make him feel better.

Their eyes meet again, and Whitlock moves her hand up to his mouth, rubbing his bottom lip over her first two knuckles teasingly. She feels her neck turning scarlet over the white collar of her uniform and he grins. "You do like that," he whispers, in a knowing, teasing way.

She realizes he must be a kind of empath, someone who can pick up on what other people are feeling. Perhaps even-- she looks at Black, still sound asleep-- affect their feelings. She should be frightened, but it seems quite wonderful to her. "You're a wizard," she whispers and she hears the childishness of her statement and hopes he won't laugh at her.

He doesn't. "An illusionist, maybe," he allows, turning her hand over and pressing his lips to the center of her palm. She smells like hospital, soap and medicines, but he doesn't seem to mind. His lips are softer than she would have imagined. "My mother called me her bee-charmer."

"I like that. Whitlock, I--" She has no idea what she will say, and then the man in bed 7 calls out for a bedpan. He reluctantly lets her go, and after that, Dr. Wilson has appeared to make his rounds and she has to guide him until he makes the recommendations she agrees with, and then she has to change number 11's dressings, and when she finally looks back at Whitlock, he's fallen asleep again. His cheek is turned against the pillow, his hands curled against his chest.

She wants to place her head on that broad chest, press her lips against his pulse instead of her fingers. When Irene comes in at 6am, Mary can't help but smile when she sees her glance at Whitlock (Jasper) with a look of longing. He's for me, she wants to declare, but there's time enough for that.

She's 28 and the war may never end and she's in love for the first time. There's time enough for everything.

Early that morning, going home on the bus, a boy spits a bomb out of a plane. She feels disoriented for a minute before the impact, but it happens so fast that she never knows why.

Whitlock asks about her that evening, wondering when she'll come on shift. "The night nurse, the tall one," he calls her, embarrassed to realize he never learned her name.

Nurse Jessup (Jessica Jessup - what a name) tells him Nurse Brandon died in a bombing that morning, right after she left the hospital. He tells her he's in a lot of pain so she'll give him more drugs and he sleeps the days away, until he feels his duty calling him. Even if he can't fight, he can go home to his family.

So he does.

(Black does not. She was right about that.)

For the rest of his life, Whitlock's haunted by the sense that there is always something he forgot to do or say. He walks into rooms and then turns and walks back out of them, trying to place it, but it never goes away.

Chapter Text

Dear Sydney,

You know almost no one runs in the park anymore?

Do you remember when outdoor exercise was a thing? Parks used to be full of joggers and people walking their dogs and moms pushing babies in strollers. It stopped back when we all closed ourselves up in our houses and locked the dirty, diseased world outside.

The ROPN transmission rates are still pretty high here, and it's against the law to go out in public without a N-212 or SP-3 mask. And of course, those masks are so expensive that if you're poor, you have no choice but to risk the fine. I still have the good one I bought when I left, and Mama somehow found a box of extra filters and got them to me for Christmas.

I know they would freak if they knew I was using the filters for anything other than necessities, like going to the hospital for screenings or waiting in line for the food allocations. But sometimes I get so sick of this apartment and Jacob, I feel psychological hives breaking out. I know I'm going to start screaming or breaking things if I don't have a fucking minute to myself.

I guess I shouldn't blame Jacob for that, but... I hate seeing his fingerprints on the glasses he always leaves on the coffee table. I resent the sounds he makes when he eats. I don't even like the way he smells.

Because I'm too much of a coward to leave for good, twice a week I drive to the park downtown and I run. It takes 90 minutes for me to jog around the lake, up to the treeline and back. I've only seen one other guy there running, but he's always there at the same time as me.

I guess he's why I'm writing. He looks so familiar to me, Syd, and I can't figure out where I know him from. You know how I always remember the rhythm of quotes and not the actual words? I'll say, like, "Wait, where is this from? Someone said something and then someone else looked up and asked, 'NAME?' But I can't remember what name it was. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's from somewhere!" And you fall over yourself laughing, asking how you were supposed to figure it out from that?

That tip of my tongue feeling, that's how I feel around him. He always laps me; he passes me up and then turns and runs to the trees and back before I'm halfway around the lake. I stare at him so hard, I'm sure he thinks I'm trying to come onto him.

Honestly, he is so fucking hot, the thought has occurred to me.

I know - Jacob. Jacob. Jacob.

But this guy- I've named him Gray because he wears gray running shorts and a white t-shirt every single week - there's something about him I can't get out of my head. From the minute I get to the park, I'm waiting to hear his footsteps running up behind me.

Maybe he looks like somebody famous. Maybe that's why I think I know him. Plus he's tall. You know I love the tall ones - you used to get mad at me because you said I should leave them for you. You were only 5'5" so you weren't even that tall, it's only that I'm so short.

Fuck.

Why do I always end up writing these messages in past tense?

I miss you, Syd. I know it's been so long - you've been gone eight years tomorrow. But I miss you like it's my hobby. I miss you all the time.

Our lives are so shrunken down and small; there are only online friends now and it's not the same. I remember the weight of your feet thrown across my legs when we'd fall asleep on the couch streaming some old TV show. I remember our hugs when Mama and Daddy were fighting.

(I'm sure they still do, but you know Mama, she puts on her pretty, happy face and acts like everything's okay and I can't really tell from video-visits.)

You know why I can't leave Jacob? One of the reasons, anyway, is this: as bad as we hurt when you died (so bad, Syd, so fucking bad), there were families who suffered even worse from Nipah. Jacob lost his mom and both his sisters, and now he and his dad are alone. And I LOVE his dad. (Honestly, I'd rather live with Billy than Jacob, I think.) And Jacob LOVES me. So how can I untangle our lives and take the cat away and leave him here in the city alone?

And who would I really be doing it for anyway - me or some guy who doesn't even know my name?

I'm so pathetic, Syd. You would roll your eyes if you could see the sappy shit I do to try and keep you close. I put the grocery delivery number under your name, so when they text me the order's on its way up, I see

Sydney: "On my way."

It makes me grin, that message, and I pretend, for a second, that the past didn't happen the way it did.

Looking back, everyone was so frustrated and angry in 2020, but now it seems like a piece of paradise. So does 2021, 2022, all the way up until the day Nipah started, in 2023.
I would give anything to go back to those years now. Back to any time before you were gone.

If you can look down on me, take a gander at Gray, will you, and find me in a dream and tell me where I know him from?

Til later chickadee,

Allison

(After while, busy bee.)

Dear Syd,

A few months ago I started chatting with other guys online. Chatting-chatting, like flirting. Okay, like sexting. And maybe I sent and received photos.

I figured I'd say that right up top because that's the only way I can make you understand what happened today with Gray.

If you were here, I wonder if you'd understand, or if you'd judge me for cheating on Jacob. I feel more claustrophobic with him in this apartment than I do on the rare occasions I'm alone.

When we met in college, I thought he was everything I wanted. He was a good writer-- when you fall in love online, you have to be-- and he was attentive and funny. And, maybe best of all, he wanted to move to the city with me and I had to get away from Daddy and that house.

I know it killed Mama to let me go, since you were already gone, but you understand, don't you? A few years after you died, I painted portraits of your face, black on white canvas, but the black lines were microscopic calligraphy that spelled out all the things I wanted to tell you. It was my final studio art project and I was sure this was going to get me into grad school, so I could get an MFA in New York, the way we had always dreamed of. You at Julliard, the second coming of Amy Adams, and me the toast of the art world.

Then Daddy got drunk one night and he destroyed you. Every single portrait. He smashed your face into the walls and he put his foot through it. Your sweet face-- I tried to paint you with that look you used to give me when you wanted to laugh but couldn't, like when we were sitting in our living room, pretending we were in video-church.

I think he did it because of the grief (Daddy always liked you best, remember I used to tell you that?), but it hurt so fucking bad. I haven't been able to do any work on a canvas since.

Thank god for graphic design. Though sometimes I wish I had stayed with painting-- at least I could rent a studio and I'd have an excuse to get out of this apartment more than twice a week. But my running gives me sex fantasies and masturbation material, so--

Wait, I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.

The dating profile started as a way to distract myself during the day. Jacob angled his desk so he can see me from the section of the living room that's his "office," and randomly throughout the day, I'll look over from my "office" and he's grinning at me. Then he'll mouth "I love you," and I'm like... Get. OFF. Me.

So one day when I wanted to imagine what my life would be like without him, I went on one of those matchmaking sites (where absolutely everybody meets everybody, since no one goes out anymore) and created a profile of myself. I used this photo of myself I took one night when Jacob was talking to his dad in the other room - my N-212 mask on, a hat pulled low over my eyes, big dangly silver hoop earrings, topless with one arm draped over both boobs and a white ballet skirt. No face, barely any boob. Jake never sees me wear the skirt or the earrings because we don't go anywhere and he prefers me in sweats and t-shirts.

Then, whenever I felt itchy and too close to him, I'd go look at my profile, respond to random messages. You can imagine the kind of people who messaged me after that. Most of the responses I got made me laugh; some guys are so lame, I swear. They can't even figure out how to photograph their dicks to make them look halfway attractive. (There is such a thing as an attractive dick, by the way, I know we used to debate this back before when we could barely say the word without giggling. They're just few and far between.)

Those messages made me realize it was a miracle the human race has survived as long as it has. (I credit alcohol. From what I can tell from old books and movies, people used to meet in bars. Bars don't exist anymore, of course, though supposedly there are some underground. I'm not cool enough to even know where to find one.)

But the other things those messages made me realize was how dead I felt most of the time. Taking stealth pictures of my ass or my boobs, and sending them out, getting a well-lit dick shot or jerking off video in response-- it made me feel dirty and illicit and evil, but I also felt alive. Like my life could be something more than this apartment and masks and video meetings and this guy I've spent the last three years with, who sometimes I feel like I barely know.

My dirty little secret, it distracted me from reality, and I guess that was what I needed most. But it was all fantasy fuel, Sydney, I swear.

One random night, a user called SevenOneThreeLoseMe liked my profile, so I visited his to check him out. He didn't have a full-face photo, just a shot showing his strong jaw and really good mouth. He had one of those careless half-smiles I'm a sucker for, and I could tell he was outdoors, 'cause I could see a slice of blue sky and green grass in the background.

When he saw me looking at his picture, he messaged me:

"Strange and enchanted?"

My profile name was "Therewasagirl". Sometimes people start with a variant of that question, before we move into innuendos and picture exchanges, but with him... I don't know.
It was what I imagined an actual first date would be like, maybe? He asked me about my hobbies and we talked about the old shows we streamed. He was into some old one I'd never heard of, Mcgyver? He teased me for still watching Saved by the Bell, even though it's still the greatest sitcom of all time, but he didn't tease in an annoying, misogynistic way, like his show was so much cooler than mine because it was a guy show. Then I played a guessing game with his username, until I finally figured out that 713 was his area code, and he was from Houston.

"i thought they had the mask mandates down there?" I typed into my phone. I was taking a long soak in the bathtub while Jake played this online quest game he's been doing with the same group of friends for, like, ten years. It was, and is, so ungodly boring and I hoped this guy would keep chatting with me until he finished.

"They do. Why?"

"ur photo," I reminded him, clicking out of the chat for a minute to stare at that photo again. He really had the perfect mouth.

I stretched out my legs and snapped a photo of the water beaded on my thighs. I wondered how he would react if I sent him that. (The best thing about being short is how much room you have in tiny apartment bathrooms. Jacob can't even lay flat in our tub.)

"Right, I forgot. I take it off sometimes when I run," he answered before I could decide.

"run from what?"

He sent me an "LOL" when I typed that and I laughed too, just because I couldn't remember the last time someone had used that abbreviation.

"Run, like for exercise. Remember people used to do that outdoors?"

"oh k k. y, i remember that."

We were both silent for a moment, and then he replied, "Do you remember kites?"

I frowned. I hadn't thought about kites in years. "y, people used to fly them in parks and stuff. bright colors. like beautiful big birds hovering against the blue."

"Exactly. I tried to explain them to a guy I work with and he had no idea what I was talking about. He'd never seen one."

Fuck, there was something about the sweetness of that memory that killed me.

"i miss art museums. and outdoor playgrounds." I hesitated, but then I typed the phrase everyone used after Nipah. "how many did you lose?"

I was afraid that would scare him off, but almost immediately I received his reply, "Both my parents. You?"

"my sister. my g'parents." I never say "only" my sister or "just" my sister, Syd, even though other people act that way when I tell them. You were so much more than that. I told myself not to type the next thing, but I couldn't resist: "do you ever wonder whether they were the lucky ones?"

Jake came into the bathroom then, interrupting me, but not before I saw his reply: "Fuck yes."

This was a few months ago and Jacob and I, we went through a really good patch right after. His dad got a special license to come visit in person for the weekend and we did a virtual tour of the museum together. So I deleted my profile on the site, and I told myself it was for good this time.

And then I started running for exercise and an excuse to get out of the house, and I saw Gray. GRAY. That's how I think of him, all in caps, bold and beautiful. Sometimes I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

Today is a Thursday and as usual, I was looking forward to seeing him all day. The way he moves his body drives me crazy. When I watch him run, it's like he's standing still and the ground is moving of its own accord. His dirty blond waves in the wind and his long even stride, so rhythmic I could set my heartbeat to it. I've spent way too much time imagining what his face looks like behind his mask.

But today, I made it all the way around the lake without seeing him. I felt so upset I gave up and started walking. (My gait, you will be happy to know, is still ridiculous. Remember how you said I was supposed to walk heel to toe but I walked "toe to more toe"?) And then, halfway up to the treeline, I saw him.

Gray, sitting on the curb of the running path, folded over, his elbows resting on his knees and his head bent into the crook of his arms.

I wasn't sure if I should pretend I didn't see him, like everyone does now. It seems like anytime you leave the house, you see it-- there's so much grief with no place to go, and people get overcome. They forget how to move and sometimes they'll lean against buildings, with tears running down their faces - or even worse, that crater of grief in their eyes.
(I used to do it too, after you were gone. I'd go down to get the mail at Mama and Daddy's house, and I'd just stand there until dusk, and when I came to, my legs were covered in mosquito bites and my little sister was gone. You were gone.)

But even though we see grief all the time, no one knows what to do with it, so we just look away like you do when you catch someone with their shirt misbuttoned and their belly sticking out.

But as I approached him, he looked up and saw me. His face was pale and he had his mask pulled off. His mouth was beautiful. So tender I couldn't stand it. And I knew him: SevenOneThreeLoseMe, the one with the perfect mouth. The one who missed kites.

We both stared at each other for a long time and I felt this ache in my throat, almost like a hunger pain, and I ran over to him and threw myself into his lap and our arms wrapped around each other. My hands locked against his back and I felt his hands clench against me, like we were trying to imprison the other.

And that was it, Syd. We sat like that, holding each other, until my phone started to buzz in my fanny pack. (Jacob worries and he expects me back at the same time, so if I'm late, he checks in. Of course.)

I didn't want to move, but I said I had to go, and he opened his arms and I got up and ran back to my car and drove home. The whole time, and all through dinner, and even now, all I can think about is--

The way his arms shook a little, because he was holding me so tight. It was like being wrapped inside a flame, there was so much warmth in him, and the longer it lasted, the more I wanted to immolate myself inside him. The way he smelled, like nighttime on the ocean - that by itself made me ache, and then to have his chest pressed against mine, his shoulder cuddled under my chin? I haven't been so turned on in my life, not while having actual sex with Jacob, than I have sitting on Gray's lap, fully clothed and without even kissing him. And the way we were sitting, I could feel him harden beneath me and I had to stop myself from wriggling closer, from touching him through his shorts.

Oh hell, Syd. What am I going to do? I don't even know his name. Why do I feel like I know him?

Dear Sydney,

It's a Sunday. I don't run on Sundays, but Mama and I had our biweekly call that turned into our monthly fight. I hate fighting with her. I'm constantly resolving not to do it and immediately breaking it the very next month. I sat in front of the screen with this sick feeling in my chest, ignoring the tightness in my throat that meant I was going to cry.

And then Jacob gave me that goddamn look again. He turned away when he saw me notice it, but I could still see the edge of his face, the line of his chin. He was frowning, his eyebrows knit together. He thinks I'm too hard on my parents. He thinks I should be sweeter and kinder and cherish every moment and all that shit people say we're supposed to do.

They say it's our responsibility to be happy, positive-- FRUITFUL, for Christ's sake! We're supposed to repopulate the earth! There's a whole campaign built around it, posters and billboards and ads all engineered to get the population back up. Every one features kids and babies with dimpled grins, light reflecting in their big eyes. Eating chocolate chip cookies, coloring, doing a goofy loose-limbed dance. (The art design is sound, even if the idea is shitty.)

Jacob's bought into it a hundred percent. He completely plans on getting me knocked up in a couple years. I think he believes it might make me more into the woman he wants me to buy, like a wave of breast milk coming in will wash away the anger and the sadness that still burns away inside me.

The idea of bringing a child onto this world makes me want to puke. I don't think I have anything to give. I imagine my baby coming out the size of a pencil, gnarled and hard and stiff. Hell, maybe it will be a pencil. Or a lump of hair and teeth.

How can I give enough to a baby when I'm a lying cheat who can't go a month without fighting with her mother?

This fight was about Daddy again, if you want to know. (If I want to tell you, and I guess I do.) Do you know Daddy and I haven't talked since the fight we had after he ruined my paintings of you? Sometimes, like today, I see him walking around in the background when I'm chatting with Mama, and I think he might at least go over to her screen and say "hi," but he never does.

Today I said, "Daddy's still as mature as ever," under my breath. I was half hoping she wouldn't hear me, or would let it go by, and half-hoping, maybe, she would agree.
But instead she prickled immediately. She glared through the screen (she looks so old since you died, Syd, she doesn't dye her hair anymore and I'm a piece of shit for doing this to her) and said, "Allison, it takes two to make an argument."

"Mama, I'm 26 and he's 57!"

And we were off to the races from there.

When I saw that look on Jacob's face, I stomped to our room and threw on my prettiest running outfit: a bold red tank top with a sapphire blue sports bra and matching shorts. I had that itch in my blood that made me want to do illicit things, that made me want to hurt people, to take and grasp and scream, and I knew I couldn't stay there.

You don't need three guesses for what I did, right?

I told myself I might not even see him. I told myself that, even if I did, our hug was probably a one-off and this week we would run by and eat each other up with our eyes and that would be it.

And then I heard his particular gait coming up behind me and I felt his eyes on me, that prickle of heat that makes my knees shake. He ran past me, his mask firmly in place, not even a nod. Just like he always does, but as soon as he was out of sight around the curve, I stopped running. And, Jesus, Syd, if you can believe it, I ran to the parking lot and pulled down his flatbed (he drives a black pick-up truck) and sat on the edge.

I did it because I HAD to. Because I couldn't stand the thought that I was never going to be held again the way he'd held me last week. I mean, let's face it, Jacob and I have been together for three years and if he hasn't made me feel like that by now, he probably never will, right? After three freaking years, it's not like we're going to wake up one day and have chemistry so intense I have to shove my hand down my running shorts and get myself off in the car before I can drive home, like I do twice a week after seeing Gray.

When he saw me waiting for him, he stopped, like I had last week. I had spent my time looking around, admiring the scenery. People used to do that, just sit outside on their lunch breaks and watch the birds and the squirrels and the plants. Eat shitty hot dogs from a cart in the park, throw the crumbs to pigeons.

He stared at me as he walked over to his truck, running his eyes all over me, and I got up on my knees on his flatbed, so we were exactly the same height. Watching him walk toward me, it was the most delicious anticipation, like Christmas and my birthday and the best orgasm of my life. I could feel my whole body living, so alive, tingling, throbbing, trembling.

When he was within arm's reach, I pulled my mask on and dropped it, and so did he. His beautiful mouth came into view again, and I wanted to stare at it forever.

I realized that since I was 13 in 2020, I've only seen four people close-up, not over a screen, without their masks on. You and Mama and Daddy and Jake. He was the fifth. And no offense, because I love your faces-- I even love Jake's face, he has great cheekbones, probably a key reason I started up with him-- but my Gray blows the rest of you out of the water.

His eyes stayed on me, his chest rising and falling under his damp t-shirt as he cooled down from his run. He has great eyes too, dark and intense, set under thick eyebrows that I wanted to scrape my fingers along.

Right before he touched me, he muttered, "I think about you all the time," and then he buried his face against my throat.

His tailgate was high enough that we were the same height and I could touch more of him, I could feel all of him against me. I pushed my hands up under his shirt, and his muscles were so hard it was like touching rain-slick marble, and he groaned against my earlobe and then he lifted his face to mine and we were kissing.

Fuck, it wasn't kissing, or what my idea of kissing used to be - this was pure hunger. Devouring each other, nails digging into skin, the salty rich taste of his spit and the rough thrust of his tongue, both of us shoving and biting and licking, and his curly hair tangled in my fingers. In a second, we were dry-humping, my leg looped around his hip, his dick so hard and hot I could feel it through my clothes and his. His hand cupped most of my ass and I bit his tongue and he squeezed, pulled me harder against him and then--

A fucking COP drove into the parking lot, which has never happened once in all the months I've been running there, ever. We didn't even notice until he honked his little horn (they ride around in these motorized giant hamster-ball type things, with filters that supposedly clean the air of any Nipah and ROPN and YFV molecules), and told us if we left in five minutes he wouldn't ticket us for unsafe exposure in a public area for taking our masks off.

We both blushed and then Gray grabbed me around the waist and lifted me down. I wasn't sure what to say, so I just sort of stumbled over to my car, and unlocked the door. I felt him standing behind me, the heat of him, the particular width and height of his figure behind mind, and all I wanted was to pull him inside and fuck him in the backseat.

But instead I said, "I think about you all the time too." And then I got in the car and drove back to Jacob.

Every time I leave him, I wonder why I do. I DON'T EVEN KNOW HIS NAME.

I swear I'm going crazy.

Dear Syd,

I told myself I wasn't going to go back this week. Jake was so sweet all weekend and I was swamped with these new designs for work-- turns out it's hard to make people buy products, no matter how well the packaging is designed, when everyone thinks the world's going to end - who knew?

There have been more reports about this pediatric onset COVID in Europe (Remember COVID? That was the thing that kicked all this off. I hadn't thought about it in years and then I heard that word and I was like, "Oh yeah. That again.") Supposedly it's killed so many babies and children over there that they're calling it "la fin du futur," the end of the future.
Of course, Jacob wants to have kids one day (ugh) so he's freaking out about this. I just wanted to ignore it and hope they manage to keep it in Europe this time. Now that the airlines are all under government control, it should be easy, though supposedly millionaires still have their private planes and they do whatever they want, without worrying about the travel restrictions.

It was definitely too dangerous to go back and risk seeing him again-- we shouldn't be taking our masks off and we shouldn't be exchanging fluids, for pete's sake. Jacob and I both got full health screens and vaccine boosters before we ever met each other in person, and I don't even know this guy's name, much less his health status. And I knew if I did go back there, I wouldn't be able to resist, but I also knew if I didn't go, Jacob would ask me why not and that would open another can of worms.

So I decided I would just get in my car and drive around for 90 minutes, past all my favorite places in the city.

The empty elementary school down on Woodrow, the roof covered with moss and on the verge of collapsing. There used to be a big swing set on the playground, but people stole the metal chains that held the swings up and then they stole the metal frame and now the playground looks a like a dusty abandoned lot. You would never know what it used to be.

The art museum that we toured when Billy came to visit. They offer detailed and personalize-able virtual tours, where they take you up really close to the art-- if you have 3DTV it's almost like being there! (I tell myself that because I'll never be able to pay the exorbitant cost to visit in person. Only the rich see art in person now.)

The beautiful burnished gold memorial to the victims of Nipah, the 120 million people like you who died in 2025 and 2026 and 2027, too many to bury so they had to incinerate you in batches.

Mama didn't tell me that until much later, but I sort of like the idea of it. Your elements floating back up to the sky, hitching a ride on a meteor to some better galaxy.

If the reports coming out of Europe are true, that's what they must be doing with their children's bodies there. At least you were fifteen when Nipah took you. At least you got to have a little bit of a life, before the first COVID came.

I've thought of the day they took you away so many times, praying you weren't scared at the end. Did you hear me screaming when the hazmat-suited army crew loaded you in the medical transport? They took Mrs. Masen and her son from next door too. You were pretty out of it by then and I was screaming that I wanted to go with you.

I thought they were taking you to a hospital to get treatment. I found out much later that the hospitals that weren't abandoned were overrun. There were so few doctors and nurses left. And the "containment facilities" the government talked about were only warehouses filled with piles of bodies and that's why they never let anyone look inside them.

So I was driving around thinking about all of that, about you and those babies overseas, and also NOT wondering if Gray would miss me and what he would think, and then, I
swear Sydney, like a fucking sign from god, I saw him come out of an apartment building and walk up to the parking garage on the corner, his keys shining in his hand.

He was wearing fatigues and a military issue mask, not the smaller one he wears when he runs, but I would know him anywhere.

It made sense when I thought about it - his body and that capable air about him, of course he would be in the military.

He looked over and saw me and did a classic double-take and I was so afraid he'd think I was stalking him that I actually ducked down in my seat so he wouldn't see me.

(I can hear you laughing, Sydney, I know I'm the lamest person in the world.)

I knelt there for maybe five seconds and then I thought, this is ridiculous, Allie, and I sat up and of course he was standing outside my passenger door, bending his head down to peer in at me.

I closed my eyes and then had to open them to click the unlock button. He got in carefully, leaving his hand on the top of the door frame until he'd settled himself in the seat. I guess when you're that tall, you have to sort of insert yourself places, because you can't throw yourself around like I do.

Then I closed my eyes again and breathed in his smell. I thought about how nice it would be to have a sample of it in my car. Was there any way to preserve it?

"I'm not stalking you," I blurted out.

"I didn't think you were," he said, in a drily amused voice, and I opened my eyes again. "Hello, strange enchanted girl," he said, studying me with those dark eyes. "Little Neon."

I gave him a weird look and he smiled. "That's how I always think of you - your neon running outfits and those fancy purple shoes. I thought about buying you arch supports. You walk on your toes, you know."

"I always call you Gray, for your shorts. How long have you recognized me?"

"From the first time," he said, his smile turning into a grin. "That first day I saw you at the park."

I rolled my eyes. "You could have said something to me!"

"Yeah, didn't seem like a good idea to walk up to a woman in a deserted park and tell her I used to jerk off to her photo online."

Those words, it was like he grabbed me and pulled me against him again. I felt my body rev like an engine, wondered if he could hear my heart start racing. His eyes were as hot as I felt, and then he looked away, stared out the windshield. He swallowed hard.

"Have you heard about this new COVID strain in Europe?" he asked and I saw something in his eyes - not like fear, but knowing. Like the thing he'd been waiting for had come around at last.

I nodded. "Yeah, the one the kids get."

"It's bad. It takes the kids first, but then later--" He turned his head away, looked out the window. "They say it's maybe as bad as Nipah."

In poorer countries with no healthcare infrastructure, Nipah killed up to eighty percent of their population.

I looked out the windshield at the empty storefronts, all boarded up. Remember malls? Huge air-conditioned buildings full of everything you could imagine, all the things you could ever want to buy. We used to just walk into them, like it was normal.

"You're going to Europe then?" I asked him.

"We ship out at 1700 hours. We're the first containment wave," Gray said in a flat voice, giving me a small crooked smile. "Lucky us." He hesitated. "Keep locked up in your house, Little Neon." He brushed my bangs off my forehead, pressed his thumb to the center of my lips. "Stockpile food and essentials and oxygen tanks. Fill up your gas cans."

He might have kept giving me advice, but I parted my lips and bit down hard on his thumb, until his eyes focused on my mouth, and then I let go and rubbed my tongue over my teeth marks left in his flesh.

"Can we, before you go?" I heard my hungry voice ask and he was panting when he replied, "Yeah. Yes, please," in this gravelly voice. He shoved his seat back as far as it could go and I scrambled on top of him.

It was quick and messy, I was so wet I sank down on him all at once, even though he was bigger than Jacob, and we both made the same sound, this grasping breath, like our hearts were clasping each other the way our bodies and our arms were.

Gray pushed his hips up once and then he came, his hips jerking, his head tilting back.

I kept finding tiny perfect places to kiss, like the corner of his temple, where his skin was so soft, and the side of his nose, and the top curve of his ear. He rubbed his face into my throat, like he already knew how much I love that, how it makes me shudder all over when someone kisses me there.

He muttered, "I'm sorry, I've thought about you for so long and you're so beautiful, and you're so tight, Little Neon, fuck--"

"I told you, I think about you all the time too," I whispered against his skin, and I mouthed the stubble on his cheeks and disordered his eyebrows with my fingers. We kissed and touched until he hardened again and then he licked his thumb and rubbed my clit until I let go of everything. All my sadness, my pain: there was only him. Even when I closed my eyes, he was all I could see. His face glowed in my mind like the sun falling from the sky.

He held onto my waist and moved me up and down, fucking me slow and watching me, my dress shoved down around my waist and his other hand spread wide over my breasts. When I came again, deeper this time, it was like he was resetting some bone that I had broken years ago.

"Fuck, fuck," he was saying while I pulled his hair, and his eyes were memorizing me, raking over my face. "Neon. Neon, you have the best soul I've ever felt. Did you know that?"

"The best soul? Is that what you were feeling?"

We both started giggling and he cupped my cheek and held me still.

"Soul," he told me. "I felt your soul the first time I saw you. It felt like home. You felt like a miracle."

I could feel his heart thrumming in his chest, at the base of his throat. Such a little precious thing, that chugging train beat keeping him alive. I wanted to kiss every artery, every vein, following the paths back to his strong heart.

"Is there going to be a miracle?" I asked, and he went still.

"I didn't think so." He kissed my mouth and both my cheeks, soft, and whispered, "But it turns out I got one after all."

I got teary-eyed then and he cursed and pulled me into him. "Shh, shh. Baby. It'll be all right. Of course there will be. This will pass. You're going to be fine." I could tell by his voice that he was crying too, so I said, "No, I know. I'm okay. Don't be worried about me."

I climbed off of him and he wiped his eyes, quickly, and rebuckled his pants and I pulled my dress down and back up over my chest.

"Will you tell me your name, Gray? Your real name? In case I can find you later."

He opened the door and put one leg out on the street. "Captain Jasper Whitlock, at your service, ma'am."

He looked at me one last time and I could see everything in his eyes, everything that they are showing on the news now. How bad it is over there.

Jasper closed the door with a soft click and he kissed his fingers and pressed them to the glass. Then he walked away without looking back.

I started this last letter the next day, Syd, but I couldn't bear to finish it.

Today it's been two weeks since he left.

The new strain is here now. There are bodies laying in the street outside our windows. The power went off yesterday. I'm down to 22 percent on this phone and I'm writing in the bathroom with the door closed. Jacob would be annoyed if he knew I was using the rest of my phone life for this. I wonder where it will go when my phone dies for the last time.

(Strange, some things can die over and over again. I feel like a phone, like I've been doing this for a while.)

I don't know what's happening with Mama and Daddy. She hasn't responded to any of my texts, and it's been over a week since she answered when I chatted her. I wonder if Daddy regrets not talking to me, not ever saying "hi."

I do. Hi, Daddy.

I love you, Mama.

Jake wants to leave, to go stay with his dad at the reservation. Billy is still alive - or he was, two days ago. He said he was buckled down with his deep freezer and his generator and his pistols. I swear that man could rebuild the world single-handed.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do yet.

I like the idea of seeing you again.

I want to go back to that art museum and break in, look at all the art. I want to paint a portrait of you on the walls, so one day a survivor might find your face and know how beautiful you were. I want to someone to hold my hand when I'm dying, like I hope someone held yours.

I want to look up in the sky and see hundreds of kites flying. I want to jog down the path from the lake up to the woods, to watch the treetops sway in the wind, because the wind and the trees don't care if any of us live or die, and I want to hear his footsteps coming up behind me.