Archive of Our Own

It’s one of those nights, Morrigan realizes, staring up at the ceiling.

Her blankets are kicked back and twisted in ropes, in danger of falling off the narrow, hard mattress that is her bed tonight. They’re itchy, thin things and she’s glad to be rid of them, what with the way her thin shirt and leggings cling to her, sticky and sweaty.

She’s been lying here for–hours, probably. She’d stayed up reading and doodling and just–wasting time, all through telling herself again and again that it was time for bed and not listening.

She’d finally dragged herself to bed sometime around two, berating herself for not going to bed earlier, for not doing the coursework she’d promised herself she would finish tonight, for not doing something .

She’s been in a mood since morning, yelling at the walls of her room when she’d tripped over the shoe rack it had left beside her bed. It was the weekend but everyone was busy, so she’d–done nothing, really. Read and tried to take a nap and honestly just sat and done nothing for hours and the most frustrating part is that she doesn’t know why .

And now her bed is the cotton equivalent of a rock slab–not even, that would at least be cooler–she’s sweltering and sweaty and hates herself for not measuring up to the ideals in her head.

The voices in her head–her father’s frigid tones, the alternatingly frightened and hateful voices of her revolving doors of governesses, Ivy’s dismissive attitudes–are starting to encroach. Most days, she can ignore them, hold them back because she knows they’re stupid and untrue, but. In the oppressive, dark silence of five in the morning they seem to almost echo off the walls; distorted recollections of all her failures sinking back into her skin.

Something that sounds like her own voice joins them, in equal turns twisted and cruel and whiningly cajoling.

Wouldn’t it be better if Jupiter had been… oh, just a little late? the Morrigan in the walls asks. It would have saved everyone all this trouble. You’re such a bother, you know. You can’t even write a fucking essay, you useless little baby. Can’t do anything else either, can you? You just sit there–

She sits up, swinging her legs off the side of the bed and clapping her hands over her ears, as if that will do anything. Her feet dangle in the air, and her heel hits against the stupid metal bar holding the rickety bedstead together from underneath. It’s enough .

Before she can really process what she’s doing, she hits the floor, jolting her ankles painfully, and walks over to the corner where the shoe rack is sulking. It fights her for her sneakers but she wins, pulling them on and finishing the last half of the glass of water sitting on the raggedly carpeted floor next to her bed (her nightstand has disappeared and the entire main section of the room is covered with dusty shag in a horrible shade of wine stain).

She grabs the portable music player and headphones that Hawthorne had gotten her last year for Yuletide as an afterthought, slipping them around her neck and tucking the little box into the pocket of her leggings.

The door shuts behind her with a rusty click that makes her wince from how it echoes in the empty hall. There’s no one awake at this hour. The fourth floor doesn’t have many temporary residents, and the few permanent ones will still be well asleep at this hour. 

By all rights her footsteps should echo like the door shutting but she’d trained herself to be silent when she was very young and her father would still lash out at anything that moved too loudly when he was in a bad mood, which was nearly all of the time. He hadn’t hit her much and never hard enough to do more than bruise for a few days before she’d taught herself to avoid him, and anyways she didn’t bruise easily, so it didn’t matter much.

She has the distant, disconnected thought that that’s not quite right, that if she were thinking properly she’d disagree, but she ignores it in favor of pulling the headphones on and turning the music up high enough that she checks twice to make sure it can’t be overheard.

The volume hurts a little bit and viciously, she thinks good, starting to roll her shoulders and stretch on her way down to the lobby.

The Deucalion has several ball courts of various denominations, a swimming pool and a running track. Morrigan doesn’t go to any of these. She slips down to the back entrance, and with the help of the exciting skills she’s learnt recently in Advanced Breaking and Entering 301 she jimmies the rusty old locks on the ratty door and slips out into the alley.

She knows better than this, is the thing. She knows Jupiter will kill her if he finds out she’s left the hotel, knows first hand the numerous and horrifying dangers that there are to be encountered on the streets of Nevermoor, especially during the dark hours of the morning.

She can’t bring herself to care, despite the little bit of rationality still screaming inside her skull. It’s hard to feel uneasy in the thick, nearly opaque light of the full moon–difficult to make herself remember the various ways she might die horribly in a back alley when her skin is crawling and her spine is itching and running won’t solve it but she might as well try.

This time her footsteps are loud in the moonlit, trash-littered street but she can’t hear them above the blaring music in her ears.


She doesn’t stop running until her sides hurt and she can’t breathe. The pounding in her head and the sandpaper rasp of her tongue quiet the voices a little, if only because she’s listing on her feet as she lets herself back into the hotel, the slowly lightening sky at her back.

It’s not enough, so she rides the elevator back up to her room and does pushups until her arms are quivering before turning over and doing sit ups until her abdominal muscles give out.

And then she just lies there on the floor and cries because the back of her mouth tastes like dust and sourness and she can feel the specks of dirt clinging to the film of sweat on her forearms and everything is just–just–

“Breathe, Mog,” Jupiter says, a hand on her shoulder.

She’s not sure when he’d gotten here or how long he’s been sitting next to her on the floor, but she tries to listen, inhaling in shaky bursts and sobbing the air out until she can crack her tired eyes open enough to see a blurry outline of him through the tears.

“C’mere,” he says, and hauls all sticky, dusty, sweaty five feet of her into his side, twists until he can wrap both his arms around her shoulders. She turns her face into his shoulder and just. Breathes in the scent of him, lemon and lavender and safety. The first place she’d ever stopped looking over her shoulder was here in this room with him–the dusty morning he’d sat her down and explained the history of a teapot to her instead of answering any of her questions.

She’d been annoyed then, not to mention a little uneasy, but for the first time she could remember she’d forgotten to look over her shoulder, forgotten to be expecting the mistake she’d make. Of course, bad habits don’t die so quickly, but there was something about being next to Jupiter that made it easy to forget she was cursed.

“You’re not cursed,” Jupiter says, pulling her closed.

Did she say that out loud?

“No, but you get these little–” he breaks off, making little popping gestures with his fingers, “Around your head whenever you’re thinking it. You’re not cursed, Morrigan.”

“Maybe not the way that they meant but I can’t–I can’t fucking–Jupiter, I can’t ,” she says, fingers clenching around the hem of her t-shirt.

“Can’t what?” he asks patiently, not letting go of her despite the sudden, rigid set of her shoulders.

“Things,” she says, after a long struggle. “I can’t make myself do things, even when I want to. I just sit around, wasting time, being useless –”

“And?” he interrupts.

She stares at him for a long second, baffled. “And?”

“So you didn’t do some things today. What happens?” he asks, turning to meet her eyes.

“I-I didn’t get it done,” she says again, slower. “So it’s not done, so I’ll have to do it later.”

“Okay,” he says. “So?”

“What do you mean, so? ” she demands. “That’s bad! I can’t do it all at once!”

“So why are you expecting yourself to?” he asks, leaning back enough that he can pull his arm off her shoulders and use it to grab her hands, pulling her fingers away from her palms. They leave behind red crescents. “You can’t do it all at once. Don’t try. So you didn’t get everything done today. Big deal.”

“What, just forget about it?” she asks, close to tears again.

“No, but what good is it going to do keeping yourself awake and castigating yourself about it?” he asks. “It didn’t get done. Why are you using this as an excuse to punish yourself? What did you do to deserve being run ragged like this?”

She jerks back as if he’s pushed her, tugging her hands out of his and breaking eye contact. “I’m not–I didn’t–”

“There’s nothing wrong with trying to tire yourself out, Morrigan,” he says tiredly, dropping his gaze and moving farther away from her. “And if you can tell me that you went out in the back alleys of Nevermoor to go running , a thing you notoriously hate doing, and then came back up here and worked yourself until you cried in order to help you fall asleep, I’ll leave it.”

There’s a long moment of silence. Morrigan can hear the birds waking up outside the window. 

“No,” she says at last in a very small voice. “That’s not why. Or, well, that’s not only why.”

“Yeah,” Jupiter sighs, leaning back. “Look, I get it. I was your age once, you know. A million years ago, but it did happen.”

That gets him something that, under a microscope, might pass for a smile.

“I hated the fact that I could see other people’s secrets, that I knew things that could hurt them or that they didn’t want anyone to know. Those are real people, with real lives and fears and weaknesses and I felt like a horrible person for finding all of those things out,” he continues, shutting his eyes and tilting his head back up at the ceiling. “There was a while where I thought if I just. Never used my Sight, then I could be normal. I didn’t have to know all of those secrets. Anyone who found out and told me I was awful for seeing everything couldn’t be right if I was doing my best not to see it.”

Morrigan makes a noncommittal sound that he seems to take as encouragement to continue. 

“And then one day, there was this little girl,” he says. “On the train. She’d gotten lost and she couldn’t talk. Maybe she was too upset, maybe she was too young, I don’t know. No one could calm her down, no one knew what to do. So I pulled off my eyepatch and beneath the fear and the worry I could see her favorite song, dancing around her ears. I started humming it and that calmed her down enough to sit there with me until her dads found her.”

“Okay,” Morrigan says, but her tears have dried up and she’s curled around her knees, leaning into Jupiter’s side again.

“It got a little away from me, but my point is that they’re wrong , Mog,” Jupiter says, wrapping his arm back around her shoulders. “All the voices in your head. You are an incredible, smart, talented kid. Sometimes you need to rest. Sometimes you forget to do that and your body tries to force you to and neither really works and you end up not doing much of anything. That’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. You’ll learn from it. You’ll do better next time, or the time after that. You don’t deserve to get beaten up about one little mistake.”

She turns that over in her head for a bit and then sighs. “I guess you’re. Not wrong.”

He laughs, tired but genuine. “High praise. C’mon, let’s get some breakfast and then you can catch a nap before class. Early bedtime tonight, and don’t let me catch you beating yourself up over any of this either. You didn’t know, or maybe you did and just needed a reminder. That’s okay .”

“That’s okay,” Morrigan repeats, and pushes herself up off the floor.