Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It starts off simple enough, as the nightmares always do: hands. Hands on the soft skin on the inside of her wrist, on her knee, on the small of her back. Kitty is tall with long legs and a waist that cinches in like the curve of an hourglass and that’s where the hands go next, stroking and soothing and touching until she wakes up tangled in the blanket, in the quiet of the night, her own ragged snatches of breath the only sound in her ears.

The first thing that she sees is the curtains. They’re looming, heavy, foreboding things that came with the flat, and have always frightened her. They remind her of the old four-posters, the hanging drapes that swung shut and closed the darkness in on her and whoever else was in that bed. And when they drew the drapes you knew what they were going to do to you.

Kitty rolls over in bed. ‘Lina!’ she whispers, more out of panic than necessity. But Catalina doesn’t answer.

Quickly, she stifles her sobs in the pillow, hoping Catalina really is still asleep. Kitty can tell her anything, but absurdly, not this — there are limits to what one can endure, and looking the witness to your existential crisis in the eye the morning after is certainly not within them. There are just some things you keep to yourself.

Hands. She squeezes her eyes shut.

‘Kitty?’

If she keeps them shut maybe Catalina will think she’s asleep.

‘Kitty.’

Kitty consciously stills herself. A single tear, beading on her eyelashes, makes a break for it and rolls down like an errant pearl onto her pillowcase. She feels the wetness against her cheekbone.

There’s a series of rustling noises that Kitty assumes is confirmation that Catalina is going back to bed, so that she’s again at leisure to think. These aren’t new nightmares. These aren’t even new memories. Most nights Kitty can shrug off the half-formed cobwebs of her bad dreams, pull the duvet over her head and go back to sleep, lulled back to security by Catalina in the bed next to hers, by the sliver of light under her bedroom door that means Cathy is brewing a late-night latte. But tonight the hands are everywhere, Cathy is sleeping, and Catalina — Kitty chokes back a strangled gasp. Catalina is climbing into her bed, crowding her out. The hands are Catalina’s. She’s safe.

‘Are you awake?’ Catalina sounds like she isn’t.

‘Not really.’

‘Go back to sleep.’

Drowsily, Catalina shoves up against Kitty, back-to-back in the bed. She’s so out of it that she doesn’t notice Kitty is about as relaxed as plywood.

‘Kit?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Stop moving.’

‘Sorry.’

It would be nice if Kitty could stop moving, but after her nightmare any touch of skin on hers makes her jump. And there isn’t a whole lot of space in a single bed.

‘Katherine, what’s the matter with you?’

Finally Catalina sits up. Kitty rolls away and presses against the wall, her nose against the cool plaster. ‘Nothing,’ she says to the wall. ‘I’m fine.’

‘If you were fine,’ says Catalina crossly, ‘you can bet I’d be asleep, in my own bed, instead of squeezing over here with you like a couple of canned sardines.’

‘Sorry,’ Kitty croaks. ‘You can go back to your bed.’

‘No, I don’t think I will. Ah — unless —’

And Catalina, with what Kitty can tell is a slightly theatrical degree of shifting and muttering, clambers out of Kitty’s bed and flops back down onto her own. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Better?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You could’ve just said, “Lina, get out of my bed.”’

‘No, I don’t mind you here, it’s just…’

‘What was the dream this time?’

So Catalina does know. Kitty opens her mouth to begin to tell her, but what comes out is a little different from what she imagined. ‘Lina, she says, ‘do you ever feel… passed around?’

Whatever Catalina is expecting, it clearly isn’t this. ‘What are you talking about?’

If Kitty didn’t know any better, she’d have thought Catalina was angry with her for asking. But she knows Catalina through and through, and that’s not it. This anger is white hot righteousness, the kind of fire that warms Kitty, makes her feel loved.

‘I mean because you’ve had two husbands.’

‘Well, one never made it very far.’

‘Still. There were two, and did you ever feel like you were being shared around? Like you were a commodity?’

What Kitty means is, do you dream of hands?

Catalina stares off into the distance — which isn’t very far, considering the curtain. ‘I guess,’ she says slowly. ‘I felt like a pawn.’

‘And how did that make you feel?’

‘Angry.’

Angry isn’t exactly it. Kitty tries again. ‘Angry with…’

‘Angry with my family. Angry with Henry. Angry with the way of the world.’

So, no — Catalina may dream of hands, but she’ll never dream of them the way Kitty does. Because much worse than the hands is the ache of wanting them, the sensation of being touched, the thrills that go up and down her body in the dreams that turn to ice cold dread the moment she opens her eyes.

That’s the nightmare, that even after a lifetime she still can’t get enough.

And Catalina will never understand, because it was never her fault the way it was Kitty’s. She’s still talking, lost in what must be almost five centuries ago. ‘What could I have done?’ she continues, her fingers smoothing and creasing the cover of her duvet. ‘I was sixteen, and as a princess…’

‘You didn’t have a choice.’

‘No, I didn’t have a choice.’

That’s the same way Kitty feels about herself, except of course it’s different. She’s been too blinded by self-pity to see it before. Catalina had had the weight of her country on her shoulders, of the crown on her head — she had been a player in one of the greatest political alliances of her time. The sovereign pawn turned sacrificial queen in a nations’ game of chess. Kitty had been a girl with a too-pretty face and no backbone, who melted at the touch of the first man who made his move on her.

She tells herself that there had always been dangers to saying no, but what’s the worst that could have happened? A slap on the wrist, a dirty look in court. Nothing compared to leaving her country. Being imprisoned for seven years. Marrying the brother of her dead husband, and being replaced by what would eventually turn out to be five other wives.

‘Kitty, I know that look. You’re thinking about something. What is it?’

‘Just my choices.’

‘What choices?’

‘I guess I had a couple.’

‘And I’d like to know exactly what they were,’ Catalina says strongly. ‘When a man in power approaches you — what am I saying? By the simple virtue of being a man he would already have power over you. Do you see what I’m saying, Kitty? Do you think you had a choice? You didn’t have a choice.’

Maybe she would’ve been forced to marry one of those men. Maybe it would’ve been Francis; her step-grandmother might’ve done it, just to appease him. At least she would’ve been the wife of one man earlier on. It might’ve spared her the later ones.

‘I could’ve —’ Kitty is forced to stop. She clears her throat and hoists herself up on one elbow. Catalina is just visible in the near-darkness, a silhouette against the walls, and Kitty is thankful that no one can see her face. She doesn’t want to know what it looks like right now. ‘I could’ve married.’

‘You could’ve married! That’s rich. You did marry.’

‘Long, long after.’

Catalina doesn’t ask long after what. ‘If you think the other ones would’ve married you, you’re crazy. They weren’t looking for a wife. They were looking for a plaything. That’s how sick they were. What were you supposed to have done? Say no?’

Well, really, what’s the worst that could have happened? The four-poster drapes swing shut in Kitty’s mind, and in the darkness, she knows. She knows what they would’ve done to her, that they would’ve done it anyway.

If they had forced themselves on her it would have been better than knowing she willingly went along with it.

‘Katherine, I want you to look at me. Do you honestly think it would have been as easy as saying no?’

That single tear is still soaked on her pillowcase. It will leave a mark there even after it dries. In the same way Kitty’s soul is marked forever, and her punishment is to relive that shame over and over until it’s branded into her that no matter how wrong it was, what happened to her, she’s not in the clear. She will never be.

‘I’m tired,’ she says into the pillow, and means it much more than Catalina knows.

It was a long life for someone who was only nineteen years old.

With a disgusted sound, Catalina throws herself back into bed and pulls the covers over her head. It’s overwhelming agony to feel that Catalina is almost as disappointed in her as Kitty is in herself, but at the same time there’s a bitter relief that for once, someone understands that she’s neither the sinner nor the saint she’s been painted out to be.

It takes a while for Catalina to fall asleep again. Only when her breaths lengthen and even out does Kitty finally allow herself to breathe. Once she does, though, it comes quickly, unsteadily, with the panicked realisation that she can’t get enough air despite the fact that she’s gasping wildly, over and over but all smothered in the duvet so that she doesn’t wake Catalina all over again.

She either blacks out or falls asleep.