Work Text:
Touch is strange, for Marcy.
Before… everything happened, before the world fell apart from the shattering cracks opened in the throne room that horrible night, she so often clung to Anne’s hands without a second thought: gentle, friendly, a love language of what was claimed and protected.
But then, when fire plunged through her flesh and she was left dying alone on the floor, cold darkness crept in, numb and soft. In the last throes of consciousness, she was aware of being carried away, arms around her as she grew closer and closer to death. And then water flooded her senses, cold and heavy, and she was left to slip away to sleep.
She wasn’t sure how long she floated in that darkness, drifting numbly through the burning pain that gripped her far away, but in her pained unconsciousness, she dreamed of them, held in their arms although she might never see them again.
The next time she woke up, things were different. Her head was fuzzy, vision blurry as she reached out for her rescuers despite the stabbing pains along her arms. Was it them? Had they come to save her…? The answer came sharply to her cheek, jolted a bit more awake as Yunan tried to shake her back into her head. Her thoughts were racing too quickly to comprehend her rescue, but suddenly there was a warm cup of tea in her hands and a soft towel around her shoulders.
They didn’t succeed. They couldn’t get her out, couldn’t save her from Andrias.
She remembers screaming until her mind went numb, though the pain did not cease.
It was a long time before she could even imagine the hope of comfort again.
But finally, after several torturous weeks forced into submission in the back of her mind, she was saved.
When she woke up in the Newtopian hospital after the war, she didn’t talk for a full week. She heard Olivia trying to talk to the others when they seemed to think she was sleeping, explaining the pain she’d been forced through. Things were hard for a while. It was a long time before she could move on her own at all, though the feeling never fully returned to her legs, after the damage to her spine, left unhealed by the tank.
But, three years later, she likes to think that she’s doing better.
She’s learned to hide her thoughts from those around her on bad days, and manages to keep it all in.
She’s not alone anymore, it’s true. She doesn’t have to bear this on her own. She has Yunan and Olivia at her side at all times, living in the middle of nowhere far away from what she went through. She’s finally started to believe Sasha and Anne when they tell her that they’ve forgiven her for bringing them to this world, and they’ll pick up the phone in a single ring if she calls them in the early hours of the morning after waking from a nightmare.
It doesn’t mean she’s always good at asking for the comfort she needs.
Sometimes--almost constantly --she knows that if she were to let Olivia or Yunan hold her close, whisper comforting words in her ear that she’s safe, that Andrias is never going to hurt her again, she would just break. So she… doesn’t. She ignores the opportunity for catharsis, letting it build up, build up, and holding it in all the while.
Something has to give.
The nightly dreams of fear and pain that had tormented her early on, that had finally become a weekly occurrence, start to return, those memories plaguing her every waking thought.
One night, she stumbles through the small cottage they share, shaken awake by a nightmare she’s already forgotten. Bearing her weight on the cane Yunan had carved for her fifteenth birthday, she finds her way into the room her mothers share. “Olivia?” she asks tentatively into the quiet night air. Olivia is alone in the bed she usually shares with Yunan; the other newt is off on some rambunctious adventure with Grime for the weekend. Marcy rubs her fingers over the whittled carvings along her cane, fidgeting. The hilts of Sasha’s swords, without depiction of their blades; vines circling around star-shaped flowers, tangled with mementos of a brighter past; a tree detailed with the initials of her and her friends. “Olivia?” she says again, forcing her voice not to break. After a moment, the newt sits up bleary-eyed.
“Marcy? Are you alright?”
She sighs.
“Mom… I--”
“Come here, darling, what’s wrong?”
At the sight of her open arms, Marcy for once cannot hesitate. Ensuring that her cane will not clatter to the ground from where she lets it fall against the bedside table, she lets Olivia pull her in, gentle and close to her small body. The instant that she’s in Olivia’s arms, she breaks. All that emotion she keeps inside, only letting the necessary minimum out to the world, it spills loose in a flood like some dam inside her has burst.
“I--I just needed a hug,” Marcy forces out between sobs.
“Hush, my child,” soothes Olivia. Marcy’s full weight hanging from her arms and shoulders now that the poor girl is crying and crying into her nightshirt, she gently rocks her back and forth. “Shhhhh.”
“Mom…” Marcy whines quietly, unable to do much more than that in her current emotional state.
“How long have you been bottling it up this time?” Olivia asks, quietly.
“Dunno. A few months,” chokes Marcy, her tears slowed to mostly breathy gasps.
With surprising strength for her stature, Olivia lifts Marcy onto the disheveled bed.
“Marcy,” she says, “I don’t mind seeing you like this, alright? That’s what Yunan and I are here for. It’s not healthy to keep this inside. Your pain is not yours to carry alone, Marcy.”
“I already bother Anne and Sasha enough,” she mumbles.
“Marcy. Yes, my darling, look at me, that’s right. You are not a burden. They stuck with you through the war and recovery because they love you so deeply. That doesn’t come about through falsehoods. If you still don’t believe their words, I believe their actions speak for themselves. The same stands for me and Yunan. We took you in, not because we had to, because we wanted to. We wanted to be the ones to help you heal, to help you bear this weight. So if you need to come to me and talk, or just cry, or just need a hug, you don’t even need to ask.”
“I--it wasn’t even that. I just… I know, I can feel it all the time, that if I were to give in to wanting a hug or something, I wouldn’t be able to stay collected. I’d just cave in, like--like I just did. That’s why I avoid it. It’s like--every moment of my life, there’s that feeling. Reminding me that at the slightest thing, that wall will crack, and it’ll all come out. I don’t want that to happen. I want to keep acting like everything is fine. But it’s not. It never is. It--it’s been years since things were actually okay, since I didn’t feel constantly terrified that you’d leave me, or that I’d lose control again, because what if it isn’t really gone? Do you get it, Mom? Do you get why I can’t ever let this show?”
Olivia can only stare. “Marcy…”
“Heh, yeah…” she responds, trying to laugh away that sudden flood of truth.
“We can talk about this in the morning, how about that?” Olivia says, smiling gently. “And… if you don’t want to have to walk back to your room… Yunan isn’t here, you can sleep in her place. If you need another hug… just wake me up.”
Olivia helps Marcy the rest of the way into bed, into a comfortable position when her legs don’t cooperate the way they used to. She gives a relaxed sigh as she settles in.
And no nightmares wake her for the rest of the night.
Mom, I'll be quiet
It would be just to sleep at night
And I'll leave once I figure out
How to pay for my own life too