Work Text:
you will learn words for what you know. you will know trill, you will know tenara, you will know herd, migration, taiga and tundra. you will know snowdeer. you will know symbiont.
you will learn these words a hundred bodies from now. what this body knows, now, is to run.
to run, to know yourself in running—to run warm and many through the jagged frightening places, the broken places where many-bodied you tears into many smaller bodies and other bodies wait sharp and silent to tear the parts of you that limp or stumble or fall behind. to run, this body, and stumble and run and when you cannot run to pause, panting, and tear the bitter green out of the cold and run again and run until many-bodied you breaks into the wide open safer, the wide white where your eyes are long and the sharp and silent bodies that hide in the jagged blue are afraid to follow. to run, this body, to the edge of the safer open. and then to stumble. to limp, panting, behind the many bodies of you, and when you cannot run to pause and tremble pawing the cold on the edge of the blue dark, waiting—
you and the weight in your belly that is and is not you, waiting.
to wait. to know yourself in waiting. to smell the heat of the sharp and silent body behind you and to think, run—to think, run—and not to run. to think, frightened, and be not afraid. to remember what it means when your body will not run and has no fear left for you to borrow.
to remember, as your eyes go out and the weight of the belly that was and is not you presses you into the cold, what it means to be many-bodied and to think no and to know without thinking
live
—
to live
to open your eyes. new eyes. sharp in the dark.
to hunt. to know yourself in hunting. to know, now, mine. this scratching surface, mine. this one, mine. this one, mine. to smell mine all through the dark. the dark, too, mine. mine for hunting. to smell mine on this, this open body at the edge of the wide bright not-mine—
to remember this body. its belly open. to think, was mine.
to think no. to know, now, another body. a new weight, mine and not mine. a new belly, mine and not mine. you becoming mine. joining, clinging in wet warm dark. joining, new chemicals to borrow. fear, first, to borrow. fear of this body that is becoming you. and then, out of this new body, others. joining chemicals. chemicals of drawing-in, of finding a mark not yours on a scratching surface marked mine and recognizing the smell of you, me, to join, to make another—
you think, no. you think, no. you already know, yes.
you already chose what you chose.
you, many-bodied you, chose to wait. you waited, clinging, inside this body that was and is not you. and you crouched, this sharp and silent body, and tore the open belly of you and tasted the wet warm heart of you and you—this small body trembling in the wide white where your memory is long and your once-joined bodies cannot follow—you chose to be taken in.
you chose without thinking.
you lived
—
you will live
you will open your eyes, again, knowing words for the way you live. you will know symbiont. you will know parasite. you will know that you can think, and that because you can think you can choose, and that it is right for you to choose symbiont and not parasite, to choose bodies with words and long memories and not wordless bodies that know only chemicals, and you will know this even as you, this new body, will remember that thinking is never either/or—that all bodies think chemicals and that words and chemicals are always joined—and you’ll remember this even as you’ll recognize that this kind of thinking is your way of running from chemicals, that long before you learned words like hyperverbal and cognitive avoidance your body learned to think words, many words, to make your words run and run and run and run and run because if you stumble, if you pause, you’ll remember—
you will remember, now, a body. an altar.
you will think, was mine.
you will think, no.
you'll remember saying yes to this new weight in your belly. you’ll remember saying yes and yes again as you signed ezri tigan over and over in blue on white paper. and you will remember, too, your once-joined body saying yes. you will remember saying yes and yes again as you stared into the white light while someone whose hands still moved signed jadzia idaris for you. and you will remember—you, this small body stripped of every name but dax—that you chose, again, to be taken in.
you said yes. you meant yes. you will think, now, three times, no.
you will feel like you cannot breathe. you, this body, will recognize your symptoms as psychogenic dyspnea. knowing this won’t make it easier to breathe.
you, this body fighting to breathe, will start running through the questions you missed on your last neurology field exam, and you’ll recognize that this, too, is a maladaptive coping mechanism, that running through mistakes won’t make your hippocampus stop hunting you, but knowing this won’t make it easier to stop running and now—worse—the mistakes aren’t even your mistakes, they’re someone else’s mistakes, they’re if i’d waited, if i’d waited an hour, half an hour, ten minutes, if i’d never gone up to the temple—
you will think, now, frightened. thrice-borrowed fear. fear of remembering what you know, even as you fight, this body, to remember.
a chemical imperative. to remember.
to remember. to know yourself in remembering. to remember, a hundred bodies before, knowing only chemicals. to remember, before trill and tenara and taiga and tundra, knowing only the jagged blue and the wide white. to remember, before symbiont and parasite, knowing only you, me, to join, to make another.
to remember crouching in the cold with your heart in your teeth and knowing—before the weight of what you know is pressed from your memory—the wild, strange, fearful delight of being at once the given-to and the giver and the gift.
you will remember, now, what it means to be many-bodied.
you will breathe again, many-bodied you. you will meet your own eyes. blue eyes. like your old eyes.
you will think without words, be not afraid.
you will know without thinking
you live