Work Text:
Hennessy’s brain goes into self-destruct mode sometimes.
Most of the time.
It’d be generous to call her a slow car crash. She’s a high-speed train barreling past the end of the tracks into a station full of people. She’s a plane crash into the ocean, twenty people dead, or a tornado blowing through a small town, leaving wreckage in its wake.
She’s her own brand of disaster.
She knows this. Her loved ones know it, too. Or, loved one. Because it’s just Jordan. She had her other girls, but now it’s just Jordan, and she fucked that up, too.
Hennessy can’t help herself. She has a small set of skills, and one of them is dousing her entire life in gasoline. Dreaming the Lace? She’s good at it. Shredding any relationship that matters to her? A specialty. Looking around and seeing that maybe, for one second, things aren’t completely awful, and finding the way to ruin it? Her superpower.
She’s just never been quite this rock bottom before.
Jordan was happy without her, so Hennessy torched things. Even Bryde and Ronan can’t teach her to dream about anything other than the Lace. It’s scarier now than ever. Hennessy brought out a piece of the Lace, but she can feel that the ley lines are getting stronger, that it’s only a matter of time before she wakes up with the whole goddamn thing.
So she leaves.
She uses the excuse of her sword. She uses the excuse of the Lace. She uses any excuse that doesn’t make her admit that there’s terror clawing its way up her throat, that doesn’t make her admit that she doesn’t want the same things as Bryde and Ronan anymore.
She wants Jordan to have her own life, but a world of going to sleep and waking up with the Lace every morning isn’t a world she wants to live in.
She stands there, staring down the moderators. Carmen and Liliana, she’ll learn, because she’s probably heard it before, but she’s shit at names until they matter.
The older one, Liliana, grabs her hands and looks at her fondly. “We all finally found each other,” she says, like things are suddenly right with the world.
It’s reassuring and awful at the same time. Hennessy almost wants to interrupt her, wants to set her straight right fucking there. Hennessy isn’t worth finding. Hennessy happens to other people, takes a straightforward life and makes it a mess. Other than painting, it’s what she’s best at.
But Carmen and Liliana don’t seem to notice, so she doesn’t tell them.
It’ll only be a matter of time before they figure it out themselves. So sue her if she wants a moment to be someone worth wanting around.
Hennessy has a standard procedure by now.
She isn’t great at living her life, but she sure as shit knows how to survive it. She didn’t miss doing things this way, constant twenty-minute alarms that jolt her awake the second she starts to doze. But it’s necessary. She knows that by now, and she knows the consequences for doing it differently.
Everyone she knows is used to it.
Carmen and Liliana aren’t.
Hennessy thinks this may be one of those frog boiling moments. She’s been sitting in that pot for so fucking long, and no one ever told her to her face that it’s not normal. Or, if they did, it was in the form of god you’re fucked up.
That isn’t Carmen and Liliana’s approach.
She doesn’t know how to deal with them, at first. They aren’t with the other Moderators, and when she, in a sudden fit of paranoia at 7 AM, asks if they’re going to hand her over, Carmen looks shocked. There’s certainty in Carmen’s words and calmness in Liliana’s, and it should fuck with her head, a bit, should make her feel feral. She’d normally have a rant on the tip of her tongue, vivid and blunt and off-putting. Just to make sure they know what they’re dealing with.
She doesn’t, though. Carmen and Liliana feel… steadying.
Liliana is old, right now, and more maternal than anyone Hennessy knows. That should especially chafe at Hennessy, and she can’t explain why it doesn’t. Maybe it’s that Carmen says she isn’t always that way.
(It does explain the obvious way Carmen looks at Liliana, and the way Liliana looks back. Some people like MILFs, but Carmen doesn’t strike Hennessy as the type who’d go for women quite that old.)
They don’t give her time to feel itchy or excluded, at first. They seem so focused on her, on putting her in the middle, holding her close and soothing her with their words, that she could cry. They tell her the way she exists isn’t fair. They tell her that Bryde and Ronan didn’t take her problems seriously. They tell her all these things that she never would’ve thought for herself, or that she only would’ve thought in the back of her head, the part of her she knows is jealous and needy and starved for attention.
They’re kind to each other, and they’re kind to her, and she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It doesn’t, at first. She thinks maybe she wants to feel safe, and it’s a new situation to navigate.
She knows she’s going to lash out, though, to say the wrong thing, to ruin everything. She doesn’t deal well with stability. Liliana has a quiet patience, a steady understanding of the way the world should be, that makes things feel more true. And Carmen has more empathy than Hennessy ever would’ve guessed for someone so buttoned up, so competent that Hennessy’s a bit hot for it.
But Hennessy can’t not be herself. A couple days into not sleeping, her brain gets stuck on the part where they spent months following her, trying to kill her.
She realizes that’s still the obvious option. The real reason they’re trying to earn her trust. They aren’t going to hand her over, they’re going for a mercy kill.
She lives with the certainty of it, lets it sit for a few hours, before she mentions it out loud. She lets the feeling sink into her bones, the clarity of her imminent death. The only thing she worries about is Jordan. The rest, she can understand. Because they keep talking a big game about how things are unfair, but they can’t actually fix her. People have tried, and she’s unfixable.
They’re pretty, at least, she thinks. She knows exactly how she’d mix the color of Carmen’s lips, or the gorgeous brown of her eyes. And they’re kind. It wouldn’t be the worst way to die, under Carmen’s hands.
She lays out her point of view, and they give her lines, about her having value, about there being another way. She dismisses them, but then Liliana’s talking about love for herself, and she’s fighting back tears again, trying not to fall apart.
(They’re alarmed when she explains to them, later, what was going through her head. And once again, Hennessy is baffled.
Liliana’s younger, rosy cheeks do pink up, though. And by that point, it’s clear what that means.)
The ley line goes down, and Hennessy is drowning.
She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know what to fucking do. She has Ronan’s words still echoing in her ears. The feeling of the nothingness, the absence of power, of the orb still lingers on the skin of her palms, her fingers. She took down the ley line, and she doesn’t know where Jordan is, and she doesn’t know what this means other than that her lungs feel so tight she can’t breathe.
It’s not a panic attack. She’s had those. It’s the feeling of the bullshit Bryde always said, this world is not for you. She squeezes her eyes shut. She tries to ignore the pressure building behind her eyes, like the beginning of a migraine that won’t end. She tries to orient herself in this new world, this world without the energy thrumming beneath the earth, sustaining the part of her that lives to dream. She keeps waiting for the nightwash.
“Breathe,” comes a soft voice in her ear. Carmen, her brain registers, and then there are arms around her, the skin soft and the pressure reassuring.
“Breathe,” Carmen says again, more firmly this time, and Hennessy had forgotten she wasn’t, and she starts again. She takes a deep, ragged breath, and then another, and then another.
Older, wrinkled hands hold hers, and she tries not to cling to the feeling, but she can’t help it. Her nails dig in, but Liliana never pulls away, and Carmen tells her to breathe until her lungs start to function on their own.
She doesn’t know when they’ll give up on her, now that she’s done what they wanted. But she’s not gonna be the one to raise the issue. There’s something painfully soothing about the way they treat her. She isn’t used to it, but she’d kill someone to keep it. She doesn’t want to think too hard about it.
She just wants to feel it. She just wants to get to feel it while she has it, before it gets yanked away from her.
Before she fucks it up.
They both talk to her, but the words don’t sink in. They tell her she’s clever, they tell her she did it, they tell her she’s worth so much more than the way she’s been treated, than the way she treats herself.
She knows she should fight with them about it, set them straight. She knows she always lets people down. She needs to start out with the lowest expectations, the bar on the ground. She’s so tired of disappointing people, and Carmen and Liliana keep talking like they aren’t surprised she didn’t disappoint them this time.
But it feels so good that she keeps her mouth shut, for once in her life.
She lets them talk. She lets them hold her. She lets them tell her that she was meant to find them, that they were meant to find her. Liliana gives her chamomile tea in a dainty teacup and tells her that she can rest now. It brings the burn of tears to Hennessy’s eyes all over again, because she’s so, so tired. She’s always been tired.
“I’ll lay down with you,” Carmen says. “I’ll wake you up if I need to. My brother was a Zed.”
Hennessy should tell her to fuck off. Hennessy should set a timer. Hennessy shouldn’t break from her normal patterns, because when reality sets in, when Carmen and Liliana realize the clusterfuck they’re dealing with and the ley line comes back online, it’s going to be so much harder to go back to normal.
“Sleep, sweetheart,” Liliana says. “You’ll be okay.”
There’s a certainty in her words from being a Visionary and an old woman. But Hennessy also thinks there’s a certainty that comes from Liliana herself, from the way she holds herself and the way that she seems determined to see the world as good and full of possibility.
The way she seems determined to see Hennessy as good and full of possibility.
Hennessy sleeps. Carmen lies with her, as promised, but never wakes her up. Hennessy sleeps for fourteen hours and doesn’t dream, not in the way a dreamer does and not in a way she remembers when she slowly peels her eyes open.
When she wakes up, Carmen is awake, and still there.
Hennessy still feels the absence of the ley line in a way that aches, but she also feels something else.
It’s a tiny seed in her chest, a tiny bubble of warmth that she thinks resembles hope.
They self-isolate for a week. Liliana and Carmen leave when Liliana feels a vision coming on, and Liliana comes back looking closer to Carmen and Hennessy’s age.
Liliana glows, and Hennessy can’t keep her eyes off her, or the way Carmen looks at Liliana. It was there before, but now that Hennessy has a few nights of good sleep, more nights of good sleep in a row than she’s ever had before, it’s impossible to ignore.
She sees Carmen and Liliana kissing in the bathroom before bed. It looks new, still, not practiced or routine, still a little awkward, but it clearly isn’t the first time. It feels too intimate to observe. Carmen’s not perfectly put together, for once, when Liliana pulls away. She’s flustered and warm and breathless. Liliana looks pleased with herself, but mostly she looks in love, like she knows where she needs to be and it’s with Carmen.
Watching feels voyeuristic. Watching feels like too much. Hennessy digs her thumb into the part of her brain that she expects to get upset about it. It’s been too many days since she had a proper meltdown.
But where she expected resentment, or bitterness, or envy (images of Jordan and Declan flashing through her head, Jordan unbearably happy without her), all she comes up with is longing.
The three of them share one bed that night. Hennessy tries to sleep on the side, to let them do their thing, or whatever. But Liliana nudges her towards the middle, and they bracket her in, warm bodies and kind eyes surrounding her.
“You don’t know how important you are to us yet,” Liliana says. Her nightgown is very soft and very pink against her long, bright red hair. Hennessy wants to paint the clashing contrast, her fingers itching for a brush to dot in freckles, to create the kinked waves in Liliana’s hair from taking out her red braid. “We’re going to have to earn it. But we will. I just hope you try, too. It’s easier if you’re trying to trust us, although I know that’s difficult for you.”
There are moments when Liliana says something that cuts Hennessy to the core, that shows that she knows Hennessy more intimately than she should. It’s always jarring for Hennessy, and it should get her hackles up. No one’s ever made sense of her before, and she tells anyone who thinks they can to fuck off.
But it doesn’t feel like a threat, from Liliana.
It feels like a promise. It feels like a reassurance. It feels like Liliana telling her that she already knows the nightmare that is Hennessy’s brain, and that she wants Hennessy anyway.
“I’m shit at trusting,” Hennessy finally replies, “and shit at trying.” It’s half the words she needs to say, half the warnings she should give. If not for Liliana, then at least for Carmen.
But Liliana only smiles.
“You have time to learn, and we’ll help you,” she says.
She kisses Hennessy’s forehead goodnight, and that feels like a promise, too.