Chapter Text
She doesn’t remember much from the beginning. Stars, moss, leaves. Pictures on the walls and comforting wooden floors. They are dreams and dreams have never had much substance. So, unwavering, she moves on.
Quassia gives her a locket, one whose history she reads whenever she needs it, wraps her fingers around the silver chain and lets herself sink into the story.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who walked the beach every morning, right before the suns began to rise. Seven times she walked the seventy feet across the shoreline, marked between a fishing net and a tide pool filled with stars.
Once upon a time, she sang as she let her bare feet make vague impressions in the sand, soon to be washed away by unforgiving tide. There was a yellow ribbon tied around her throat, fluttering in the breeze.
Once upon a time, and Ophelia drinks it into herself, letting her feet feel the grains of sand against their bare soles, soft and gentle.
Hers are callused, her hands are rough, but she lets herself pretend.
She doesn’t know who the woman is, not fully, but she knows that she treasures that moment, her feet in the sand. Yellow ribbon around her neck.
But work is work and they can’t lean on memories forever. She leaves behind her beginnings and disassembles her gun, rebuilds it. Over and over, she can do it in her sleep. Sometimes she wonders if she does.
-
When she first met Anansi, the other girl was fourteen years old and didn’t know how to use a knife, let alone a gun.
Ophelia had known how to use a gun. Most girls at that age should have, but Anansi was special, Anansi was new. Fresh blood, fresh meat, and she’d taken Opheliia’s hand and smiled.
There was sharpness there. It softened in time, but Ophelia never forgot the blood streaked room that she’d read in the skin of her fingertips, the murderer she’d seen in her palm. That would come in time, in a few years that they could stand to forget.
For now though, she remembers the first time that they met. Anansi, with her hair cut short and empty eyes that spoke of a sorrow Ophelia could almost taste. She has an old jacket that doesn’t fit either of them anymore. On the bad days, where her head spins and the world doesn’t exist, she loses herself in those old memories.
“Hello,” she’d said, stepping behind her mother’s robes. She had only been twelve, too shy for her own good.
“Hello,” Anansi had repeated. Mimicry. It had suited her back then. It didn’t now, but they’d both grown past Ophelia’s shyly chosen words and Anansi’s echo chamber.
“You look sad,” she’d whispered and Anansi had shaken her head. She hadn’t been good at drinking people in back then, becoming them, wrapping herself in every thought and bone they had. Except Anansi had been sad. She knew that. There was grief there, but she shook her head.
“I’m not sad. I’m angry.”
Even then, Ophelia had followed her blindly. “Okay.”
“Show me around,” she’d told her and Ophelia had. She’d shown her the blue painted halls and the place where the silver trim broke away to reveal the hollow where she stored nonperishable food and a getaway bag. She’d shown her the quickest escape routes and the best hiding places. She’d drawn her into her world and had never let her go.
Something else had happened before that. Someone else. It had always been them two, making their own little world.
-
In her dreams, she experiences something else. She is someone else, when she runs her fingers across the lines of an old copper coin or burrows her face into knotted yarn of moth nibbled sweaters.
She is floating and there is a corpse in the water.
She is someone else.
(In this case, she becomes.)
In her dreams, the ocean salt tastes blue on his tongue. He wakes on the beach, sand smudged across his body, the waves lapping at his broken arm. His ears are ringing, a sharp shrill chime. He tries to pull himself up. He fails. Down he goes again. The ocean salt tastes blue on his tongue.
Once upon a time, there was a child born from nothing except a mother’s will. This would seem the beginning of a fairytale. It was not.
He lets waves shove against him, claws and teeth, a sharp pain in his arm. It’s not a very good beginning, but these things never are. It isn’t a beginning at the time, just another moment.
Except he isn’t alone.
The dreams always blur a little when it comes to faces. She blames it on all the people that she is, floating through her mind. They can never decide the details.
She may not have a face, but her hands are warm against the cold fury of the ocean’s embrace, a tidal mother clinging to her son. She speaks and his ears ring. So she pulls him up instead and he becomes her, swallowed up in her orbit.
In a moment, he is the red haired woman with a yellow ribbon around her throat.
Ophelia is her and she is him and they blur together until none of them are real. Dreams never last long.
She breathes and she wakes, reaches for the bottled memory of hibiscus wine and vertigo that hangs above her bed, loses herself in the pleasure of forgetting.
-
Anansi makes their decisions and Ophelia falls in line, with a giddy smile. Anansi knows her better than she knows herself in half the ways and Ophelia hardly remembers the other half. So she goes where Anansi says to go and wraps her fingers around chimera skin and breathes, a gasp and a giggle, in every part of her.
They work well together, perfect sync, and Ophelia thinks this must be a mastery of the stars. Their actions are like breathing, their coordination perfection.
Ophelia wraps her fingers around her locket and cuts Anansi’s hair in the same short fluff that the woman had. Anansi gives her a yellow ribbon for her twentieth birthday and she wraps it around her neck like it’ll keep her together.
It doesn’t, but she’s lost half her pieces anyway. She goes to other puzzles and steals them from there.
Some nights, she sits on the rooftop of Quassia’s twisting mirror angled house and blows clouds of steam and glimmer rings into the night sky. Anansi sits beside her, pours herself a drink, and Ophelia lets herself tip over into the memories of a man who had everything in the world, but sat at the edge of the universe and asked only “Why” as his final question; a woman who could eat the stars, with such anger in every one of her breaking bones; a child with fire on their fingertips burning pages of library books, their masked face inescapable; a man with smoke in his lungs and the most addicting hallucinations.
She leans too far and Anansi leans beside her. Mimicry.
She doesn’t remember her name by the time they’re finished and she’s stumbling to bed on a sundazed high. She reaches for Ben and Anansi takes her hand, reminds her that she’s Ophelia.
Except Ophelia is a name that doesn’t mean much to her, when she’s been everyone she’s ever met.
She laughs and laughs until she throws up.
-
Quassia is not her mother. Fact. Except Quassia raised her in a point of view that one could consider halfway neutral. She knows she wouldn’t be alive without her, has read it in every press of her palm, every clear movement.
Quassia has a stash of glimmer hidden in her wardrobe and Ophelia makes liberal use of it, drinks in the memories of its creation and loses herself in bliss.
Coming back to reality always makes her cry, until Anansi wipes her eyes and tells her they have a job to do, more blood to coat their hands with.
Her hands, at least.
Anansi doesn’t kill. Speculation. Except it tastes like a fact. Sometimes she envies that, the innocence that comes from never having taken a life. She’s a selfish creature though and she’ll drink her victims dry. So she kills for her partner and she never complains, even when Anansi leaves the room before the job’s done so she doesn’t have to stain her eyes.
She wonders, on glimmer days, whether Anansi’s staining her heart with Ophelia’s presence. Selfish as always, she wants to dye it black, keep her close, so she’ll never leave. She won’t leave. She’s sick of sisters leaving, and her only sister promises she never will.
But then she meets Clomipramine. Things get worse from there.
-
She’s dreaming again, fingers pressed against her heartbeat, reminding herself that she’s still alive.
In her dreams, as far as he can trace the silver-copper-gold thread of memory back, he is exhausted. He sleeps, he wakes, and he sleeps again, a never ending cycle of spinning fate. He wonders if he would have been a good weaver, making tapestries of the future. Instead, he studies them, deciphers the codes of history. He wonders when he will finally have his own history. His memories are blurred with those that he has studied.
In a moment, he is a woman caring for her silkworms, five feet tall each, wiping the sweat away from her thin brown hair. She has named them all and they will never know, but they care for her despite that.
In a moment, he is a father, singing to his children. A lullaby in a language long forgotten. A father who would not abandon his children, a father with an arrow through his heart. He could hear the warning bells.
He has too many moments, yet not enough to look up at the winged man who stands before him and muster a proper smile. His mother had always told him to mind his manners. He thinks he minds too much.
He remembers more than he would like. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he says, because trust is something he has drained from himself like pus from a wound.
“You need to listen,” says a blurry figure with wings, a man named Abel, a man who has arranged obelisks with strange disinterest, who has experimented for knowledge without caring what that knowledge was. His anger is cruel and fiery. He hasn’t softened yet.
“I can’t,” he whispers. Down, down, down he falls.
He wakes on a couch stained with a thousand memories, with a broken arm and sea water spluttering from his lips.
The woman with the yellow ribbon watches him, concern painted across her face, and he wonders if he should say something. He throws up on her carpet instead.
Somehow, Fate blesses him. She laughs.
Ophelia laughs with her and tastes his relief. Her alarm breaks through anything else, reminding her that time is not, in fact, forever relative.
-
She hates Clo. She knows that she hates him, because Anansi hates him, and Ophelia has been her a thousand times. Mimicry. She hates Clo because Anansi leaves to pursue him. Ophelia follows, as she always does, but this is one mission where she isn’t needed.
“I have to kill them,” Anansi says, looking through the small glass pane of a window into a happy home.
Ophelia leans against the wall and drinks the whispered secrets of the stones into her liver. “I could do it,” she offers, as she always does. She squints and watches the baby wave her little hands. So small.
“They’ll come back,” Anansi tells her, like that matters. Like death isn’t death isn’t death.
“Okay,” she smiles, because she knows that her sister wants assurance. The yellow ribbon she still wears around her neck feels a little tighter, like a noose. “Do you want me to do it?”
Anansi meets her eyes. She can taste stars on fire between her teeth. “Why?”
“Out of the two of us, you have a conscience.” She traded hers away for a partner and a mentor when she was twelve years old.
“Right. It’s my job. I should do it,” and there it is. That independence, cleaving herself away from the split skin that they’ve become.
Ophelia blinks and offers her hand, bare fingerprints up to face her. “I’ll do it, Anansi.”
The baby looks too familiar. The man who walks across the kitchen floor in a baggy sweater looks like someone she dreamed of once. He laughs and there is something sick in her stomach. Work is work.
She looks at her, runs her tongue across dry lips. She looks at her hands. “I’ll do it,” she tells Ophelia, and she steps away.
So yeah, Ophelia hates him. It’s the beginning of something she doesn’t recognize yet. One doesn’t know a beginning when it starts. Just the ending.
-
The next time she dreams, she has that locket tangled in her hair. She never takes it off, keeps that memory close to her. She aches and she loses herself in it all.
And the woman with the yellow ribbon lets him stay on that couch until his arm is healed. She doesn’t even mention how it only takes a week.
He pays her back in stories and food, handmade dinners and spreads of breakfast.
She likes his food. She likes his stories even more and he wonders, watching her grin, whether this is what happiness feels like.
It isn’t, not yet, but it’s close. They make a deal. Roommates, because she can’t quite meet rent and he suddenly needs more of her presence, more of her laugh. He blames it on the years and years of sleep still heavy in his mind, of the fight that had happened Before.
He is immortal. She does not know this, but he does, and he knows that love is not for people like him. His mother loved and it ruined her. He can not love. Except he begins to separate his days into Before and After. He doesn’t know what to do about that, so he doesn’t.
He gets a job at a local library and stops by the tattoo parlor where she apprentices with pastries every morning. She shows him her practice sketches and he convinces her to hang some of his favorites on the kitchen wall, by the stack of books he hasn’t finished reading yet.
She tells him one month in that he’s the best roommate she’s had and she’s had eight in the year of living there. He promises her, as solemn as he can manage while he’s loading their leaky dishwasher, that he will do his best to stay that way. She warns him it’s a hard task, but he’s stared down the eater of worlds and made her fold laundry. He can manage.
He laughs too much these days. It has been centuries since he’s let himself settle down and he swears it is only because of what happened Before, but he finds no reason to leave just yet. He says the library books are interesting. He’s lying. Except her name is Lenore and she makes him laugh.
He is immortal, but sometimes he forgets.
She forgets too, as she drifts. She can taste apple turnovers on her tongue when she wakes and they taste like magic. She picks at her breakfast that morning and Anansi ignores her in favor of texting Clo.
-
They sit in the dirt of a lemon orchard and Anansi sharpens her knife while Ophelia drinks in the wonders of growing, crutches sat three feet away from her in the dirt. She would have made a good tree, she thinks, on those days when she has nothing but roots to other creatures in her mind. But she has never been stable enough to grow strong and tall. She would have died a seedling, drowned in hope.
She repeats to herself as she wraps tendrils of the woman who tended the groves through her mind. Stooped back and crows nest eyes.
“i killed a plant once because i gave
it too much water. lord, i worry
that love is violence.”
Anansi looks up at her, a frown already springing from her teeth. “You’re mumbling again,” she sighs. “What’s up.”
“Nothing much,” she hums, peeling the lemon’s skin back, feeling its curd settle underneath her fingernails. “Just thinking.”
“I’m thinking too,” she admits. “He killed me two days ago. I fell from the roof and he killed me.”
Ophelia knows this. She felt it happen that night, when Anansi stumbled back in smelling of smoke and gunpowder, her lipstick smeared. She’d felt the impact, the neck snap. She’d felt his kiss on her cheek and she could taste all of Anansi’s blurry confusion. They hadn’t known he could do that. He killed her sister and he saved her life with a kiss of all things and she hates him.
She doesn’t say that though. She takes a bite of the lemon and wraps its seedling moments into her mind. “You talk too much, Anansi. Take things too seriously.”
“You’re touched in the head,” she sighs. “Didn’t you hear? He killed me.”
“You don’t look dead.”
“Well, obviously I came back. He saved me.” There is that frown. “He saved me,” she repeats.
“I don’t care,” Ophelia tells her, but she does. In some way, this would be a Beginning. Except she’s always hated those. “Work is work,” she reminds her. “It’s just a job.”
He killed all you knew, she does not scream. Think of how he hurt you. Do not care for him now.
Anansi shrugs and Ophelia chews on lemon flesh and lets the juice drip down her cheek. It puddles against the yellow ribbon around her neck. It might even stain. They do not say much after that.
-
“I want a mission,” she tells her mentor, wiping stardust from underneath her eyes. It seems she cries it consistently now, all sobs and aches. “I want a mission on my own while Anansi is busy.”
“What sort of mission?” Quassia asks instead of denial.
“Anything,” she says and she knows it is signing away something deep and dark. Except her fingertips dig into the wood of her mentor’s desk and she can taste the blood of the last skull that was dashed against it. She traded her innocence for her sister long ago and hollowed away her conscience when she was a child. There is not much left to sign away.
“Fine,” she tells her. She has the urge to hug the secretary on her way outt.
The next day the sullen man who just began at the office and does not yet have the scars of sun and stars hands her paperwork for somewhere new. Some new death.
Her fingers brush against his and she knows he hates himself more than he could ever know. She knows that he is waiting for someone and she knows that he will never die. He pulls away with a snarl and she can’t stop sobbing for twenty minutes after that.
Anansi is gone when she leaves, off fighting on a rooftop or outside an old restaurant with greasy food and cheap neon. She dies and Ophelia knows, for it seems nowadays she will always come back with his kiss.
So she bundles herself up and picks out her two favorite guns, with the keychains that swing like clock pendulums, and she goes without a message to her partner. Work is work and she has grown up on it.
-
She tosses and turns in the cheap motel room one block from a shop that needs to open one week from now. It takes her a long time to dream this time. But she does.
Somedays, when they’re both done with work, Lenore takes all the pillows from all around the apartment and piles them on the couch. They make a nest or maybe a fort and they both hide away in there. She teaches him to needle felt and he admires the way that she designs.
He teaches her the constellation names from centuries ago and she doesn’t ask how he knows them. She just leans on his shoulder and calls him a history nerd with a laugh. He braids her hair into a flower the way his sister taught him and she tells him how she traces the history of her family with the pictures on her sides. She has made herself a tapestry and he has always fallen for the finest artwork.
She tells him she hates history and he tells her that she treasures it far too much to ever hate it. She nods and tells him he’s right and he is not history, he is Levi, but he wonders if she would treasure him too.
They have been roommates for a year and a half and it is hardly any time at all, but for some reason it feels as important as a century.
It takes him too long to realize that he has a friend.
Centuries and centuries of raising his siblings and calming his mother and he finally has a friend.
It takes another two years before she presses a kiss to his forehead and asks him to dinner. Then it’s friendship with something else intertwined, and he can hardly breathe for wonder.
He has been a thousand lives and a thousand loves, but this is singularly his own.
Immortals are not meant to love. But he forgets. Oh, as always, he forgets.
Maybe she does too, tangled up in thin sheets and a scratchy blanket. Her prosthetics feel extra heavy the next day. She wonders when she’s done weeping.
-
The mission is simple, achingly so. She wonders at times whether Quassia underestimates her, but of course she wouldn’t. She’s trained her, she knows how well Ophelia works.
Maybe that’s why she isn’t surprised when a Complication arrives in the form of a woman with dark void eyes and long brown hair. Her canine beasts leer with sharp eyes and sharp teeth as they circle her, a thousand infinities, a single circle. Ophelia can’t help the giggle that escapes her.
“You are immortal,” the woman tells her, smoothing a thick fold of muslin. “Spawn of immortal.”
She wonders, sometimes, whether she’s right. Except time is a lie and she has never tasted ichor and millennia more than once. She is no immortal, for time still tracks its heavy lines against her stomach. Immortal solely through the stories lived and nothing more. “You have the wrong guy, lady,” she tells her instead.
One of the dogs bites at her heels. It growls at the prosthetic’s flickering light.
She doesn’t flinch.
“You are immortal,” the woman repeats and Ophelia finds that she can take no steps back. Once again, another bite at the prosthetic. She grits her teeth, fingers tightening around her crutches, resting on the switch to activate their blades.
“Listen, lady, I don’t know who you are, but I don’t got time for this.”
“You’ll have time,” the woman tells her. Suddenly, the circle of dogs is tighter, drawing against her, growls in their throats.
Ophelia giggles before they attack, giggles over and over, even as they lunge for her throat. They tear the ribbon and she finally screams.
In the moment, she can’t help but think that having some life saving kiss would be real lucky right about then. Except that’s Anansi’s whole game, not hers, and she knows how to defend herself.
She stumbles back to her hotel room bloody, bites up her side and claw marks on her back, her ribbon tattered shreds, but the woman retreated, so she’s safe for now. Safe as she can be, at least.
Ben would think she was an idiot, getting herself this hurt. Ben would bandage her up. It’s a shame she isn’t real.
She bandages her wounds and goes to find someone’s memories to drink. She doesn’t feel like being herself.
-
Still high on memories of the receptionist, who divorced three times and taught ballroom dancing on the side, it takes her a long time to get to bed. When she does, it’s with the covers pulled over her head, to hide her from something or nothing at all. The locket feels like a noose around her neck.
She asks him on a date after they’ve known each other for three years and he knows her too well but he also feels like they’re moving so utterly fast. He gets vertigo and she holds his hand.
“You’re delightful,” she tells him, when he gasps that he feels like they’re moving at light speed, when he gasps that he is dizzy from how much she cares. “You’re delightful, but you move so slowly, Levi. I’ve been waiting years for this.”
He tells her that his life is filled with history pages and three years is barely anything, but she reminds him that empires fall in the span of days and a life can be brought in or ended in mere hours, minutes. Time is shorter than he has ever given account to and he is spending those precious minutes holding her hand.
He doesn’t mind. He can’t find another way he’d want to spend that time.
She tells him she loves him with words on a page and he can’t say them back, but she holds his hand and she knows he loves her despite it.
He can taste the first time that she ran away, curling across his palm, pressed securely into his collarbone, and she grins so brightly that he wonders if it’s a sun of its own.
Surely, it must be, for he’s caught in her orbit and he won’t let go.
They go to dinner at some cheap waffle place. She pours strawberry syrup all over hers and he does his best to focus on her leaving sticky fingerprints on the table, instead of the break up that happened two weeks ago in that booth.
Somehow, it’s easier with her there.
He walks her home, because it’s their home, and she makes a grand show of pretending to drop him off. She kisses his cheek and he sweeps into a bow and asks her to go to dinner with him again the next day. She agrees, which he knew she would, and he ignores the relief he feels.
They go to dinner the next day and watch a movie the day after and they plan a picnic after that and suddenly he’s looking forward to every night.
She wakes with a smile on her face and tears in her eyes, so she blearily reaches for her prosthetics, stumbles out, and calls for transport. Quassia doesn’t even look up when she shows back up. She didn’t expect her to.
-
The secretary speaks in riddles that make her brain tick. She giggles when she speaks, even though she’s just supposed to be delivering paperwork. “You wear your mask everywhere,” she whispers, leaning against the desk as if she knows a secret.
“Yes, you do,” the secretary lies, head bobbing. Her hair is long, feathered wings made of dark brown strands. “Do I need something?”
“I had a dream about you,” she confesses. “You made the best sweets in the world.”
“You do bake.”
“Yeah, I know.” She traces a spiral on the surface of the desk, before looking back up at her. She has to blink away the memory of the old man, the new sun’s most recent irritation before she can bring the woman into focus. “Bake for me?”
The secretary hesitates.
“I’ll pay,” she adds, because this is a universe where she does that sort of thing. This is a universe where she has to ask. “Please, Xihe?” That name feels right on her tongue, like Truth where she can only spit out lies.
The hesitation melts away. “Okay. You’ll leave a form for me to fill out with some feedback.”
For some reason, that seems about right. She grins and she goes and it’s almost something like a Good Day.
-
Anansi comes back two nights later and asks Arrasene for coins, as many as she can have. She tells Ophelia that she’s come up with a new ritual for her game of cat and mouse with the assassin who killed all she knew. Coins on the eyes, passage for the dead.
“I’ll call myself Chiron,” she tells her, flipping the coin across her knuckles. “I’ll use a glamour and he’ll never know.”
“I thought this was supposed to be simple,” Ophelia mutters, shifting. Back and forth. She feels too tight in her own skin.
“Well, that’s the thing about him. He needs a game. A challenge. He’d never listen otherwise.”
She speaks with an air of finality. Ophelia isn’t so sure. “I thought this was supposed to be simple,” she repeats, like some broken record player, skipping over the final lines. Over and over, such a broken thing.
“I know what I’m doing. This is my mission.” She jabs one glittery blue nail at her, curved into a sharp point. “Don’t interfere.”
She opens her mouth and shuts it, one and two, over and over. “Okay,” she finally sighs. “Then tell me about it.”
It feels like giving up, but she wraps her fingers around Asphodel’s mug that she stole from the breakroom and tastes rotting fruit and flesh on her tongue. A sour bile but she swallows it down and focuses on Anansi’s face.
Her master plan is complicated. Frivolous. She’s toying too much with him, getting too close, but she’d never take that criticism. She’ll have two identities and she’ll build them both up, a coin collector and an assassin, different faces and different names. Different people for him to fall for.
Death suits Anansi too well, Ophelia doesn’t say. Something in her chest hurts at the thought of the blood on her sister-partner’s hands. She ignores it. She couldn’t protect her forever and it isn’t worth protecting, blood on one’s hands is just how life works.
She thinks back to the last memory she stole, of a bloody office and sliced open skin, and she nods in time to Anansi’s words. Blood is life and life has never been kind. So she dips into the life of the tiles underneath her feet and idly wiggles her toes. Her neck feels bare. Anansi doesn’t mention it.
She is nothing. She is everything. She is, in most ways, alive.
Anansi won’t shut up.
-
That night, Anansi’s gone again, doesn’t bother to sleep in their room. By now, Ophelia is used to sleeping alone, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting. She wraps the locket around her fingers and pretends, for just a little bit, that life is okay.
And really, it is, most days. It’s suddenly their fifth year anniversary and they’ve gone on more dates than he can count and he has said “I love you,” and he means it.
It took him far too long but he managed. It’s Truth, which is far more than his siblings have ever managed.
Somehow, Lenore never minded.
She finds out that he’s immortal through an accident that should have gone far too wrong and they take a break for a month as she processes. He tells her everything before she goes. About his powers, about his mother, about the Accident. She holds his hand and then she goes and tells him she won’t leave forever. She just needs time.
Out of anyone, he can understand that.
He hates how time creeps so slowly, but adores the fact that he can feel its passing. He resists the urge to take a nap.
Instead, he heals from the wounds and he finds himself a small apartment a few blocks away, and he learns how to play the mandolin.
When she comes back, it is with honesty. She tells him that she won’t leave, that she loves him despite, and she grins against his lips and chirps that she never thought she’d date an immortal.
Which means they’re still dating and that means that three years later she winds a blue string around both their wrists and asks him to marry her.
He looks through her eyes as he stammers out a yes.
She leans into that feeling of having someone for a little too long when she wakes, running the locket’s memory over and over, letting that warm sensation of a hand in hers linger. Anansi would think her a fool.
Anansi isn’t there.
-
Sometimes, on those strange days where she thinks in Elvish and her head pounds and her vision swims, she aches for something more. Every lie tastes bitter on her tongue and her ears ring whenever someone lies to her. She asked Anansi about it once and got nothing but a strange look.
Those days are strange, not quite good and not quite bad. She’s off balance and something in her lungs is begging to be let out.
Maybe that’s why she’s so on edge when she meets The Woman. It’s her seventh mission by herself, no Anansi in sight, and she hates how little she’s seen her partner recently.
Work is work, she tells herself, and it tastes bitter, poison dragged across cracked lips.
She hates how empty she feels without Anansi, as if she’s nothing, as if she’ll fade away without her existence confirmed by the one she always fights beside.
Sister, sister, sister, she tells herself and that tastes sweet as honey. The knowledge that Anansi will never feel the same tastes like ash and she’s choking. Sisters feels like a heart attack.
But she goes on her mission and she pops three pills for her head, which makes her even dizzier but she’s used to that, she’s fine, and at least the headache isn’t buzzing around as much.
The mission is weird, but most missions are. This one is dropping this squirmy kid with too empty eyes and way too expensive of a coat for all that dirt under his fingernails off at this orphanage. The one with the creaky door that sends her into the life of thirteen ghosts and one human who couldn’t use magic at all.
She looks at the woman who opens the door, wings buzzing back and forth, flitting about. Not nervous, curious, golden eyes watching her.
The squirmy kid tries to wrestle his way out of her grip again. He called the air around her left shoulder an idiot earlier and she thinks he might be, poor kid, a little out of it. She holds him tight and shakes him a little. “Food delivery,” she tells the woman, remembering to smile and show every single one of her teeth. She can’t. She tries anyway.
A flitting memory of the little boy’s first resurrection throws itself into her eye sockets and she lets the image pass. “Food delivery,” she repeats. For some reason, she’s the only one giggling.
“Dionne,” the woman says, her long mouth curving into a long frown. Like a crescent moon swirling upside down. “You can’t leave here without permission.”
Ophelia personally thinks Squirmy is better than Dionne, but she doesn’t say a word. Instead, she lets go of the kid and he jerks forward, snarling at the woman. She can’t even make out the words in all that mumble.
“Thank you for delivering him back,” the woman tells her. Her golden eyes look her up and down, poking like knitting needles in and out of her brain. “What’s your name, dear?”
Dear doesn’t sound quite right on her lips. Yet it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Ophelia,” she tells her and the woman’s crescent moon shifts into a gasp.
“Ophelia?”
“Yeah.” She shifts uncomfortably. Her head is buzzing. “What’s yours?”
Her raised eyebrows are personal, Ophelia can taste it. She had misstepped in some way. “Monarch.”
The name offers a familiar ring of the ears. “Not quite.”
“Monarchy, then.” At least that name rings true. “Monarchy Vice.”
A Vice. She feels like she should recognize that. “Interesting!”
That earns her another look, another examination. Squirmy has already tugged away, tumbling somewhere into the house. Monarchy does not even bother to look back. Instead, she focuses on her. “Why have you come, Ophelia?”
“Just returning the kid.” Her ribcage flutters and threatens to expand with the sudden flight response, the eager rushing need to flee. She has fought a hundred battles and now she is a trapped butterfly, thrashing itself to death underneath an unforgiving pin. “I’ll get goin’ now.”
“Will you?”
“Yes. Good to meet you, ma’am.” It wasn’t and the lie curls up like a dead moth on her tongue. “Have a nice day.”
“Perhaps,” the woman says and Ophelia flees. She knows she can never go back. There is something wrong with the Vice, something she knows from dreams and memories long forgotten, and her ears ring until they bleed.
She curls up in her bed for three hours, prosthetics off and a cold washcloth on her eyes, before she drags herself up and forces herself to go talk to Quassia, fill out the mission report. Her head aches for three days later. She never goes back.
-
She wipes away her tears and wraps the locket around her neck, demanding a dream, a better dream than the day she’s had.
And it is a wonderful day, because they’re getting married. He’s getting married and he never thought he would. Rationally, he knows immortals aren’t meant to do this, aren’t meant to get attached so deeply. Except he has and he wouldn’t give it up for anything.
He stands at the makeshift altar that they set up by the beach with the help of three of her friends, fiddling with the moss embroidered gloves. Neither of them have family to invite. Maybe it’s better that way. He can’t imagine the stir if a Vice showed up to a wedding. Any of them would be a horrible choice, even if it meant he would have someone to stand beside him while he waited to bind his life to the woman he was so entirely in love with.
Anathema would have rolled his eyes. Abomination was too young to care. Basilisk would make rude jokes. Charybdis would drag him back, with no care for the situation, for the fact that she was the one to cast him out. Monarchy wouldn’t have come.
No. It was best to have no family at the ceremony. He wished he had a friend, something to fill that empty gap, but it was alright. He was no stranger to standing alone.
The music begins to play, the rise and fall of the music brought by the cheerful flute that Lenore’s friend had been playing since she was sixteen and first stumbled into a music shop to buy something for a school project. She’d fallen in love with the instruments and then the messy haired cashier that was two months older than her, who had taught her how to play the drums.
He brushed against the flutist’s shoulder when they’d been setting up and had collected her story, gently folded it away onto the bookshelf in his mind. The blessing of immortality, a thousand stories were easy to contain.
He had the stories of every one of their guests filed away, bound in some mental book with crisp pages, fresh and sharp. They would age over time, as he would find new chapters to add, scenes to blot out. But, for now, they were newly alive.
As the flute plays, he takes a breath. He savors the moment. Air fills his lungs and he releases it. She enters.
She enters.
He loves her.
Her veil is decorated with flowers and herbs that they dried together, seashells that they found on their walks along the beach. The yellow ribbon around her neck has a thin coral strand wound over it, strung with pearl beads.
He loves her.
She removes her veil and he does his best not to lose himself in the shifting colors of her eyes, the way the light catches. However, he falters at her hair, no longer tumbling down her shoulders, now cut to the curve of her chin. It’s unexpected, a surprise, something he didn’t predict.
He is History itself, but she has surprised him, and he loves her for it.
“You look beautiful,” he whispers. He is a cloud spinning spider silk lines across an open sky to coat the meadows in gentle shade. He is a pigeon knowing exactly where home is, even in all the chaos of the world around him. She is his homing signal and he is a mountain peak being slowly carved into paths by the loving travelers around him.
“You like it?” she asks, as if he could ever not. “Good. Felt like a bit of a change.”
It’s awe inspiring, how quickly she changes. “No, it suits you. Really.” It’s terrifying, in all its beauty, but he embraces it. He takes her hand as she wraps the ribbons around both their wrists, and he repeats his vows with a gleeful finality.
He loves her, immortality scorned.
He loves her. That is all.
Ophelia wakes up with a soft sigh and the taste of wedding cake still heavy in her throat. She can almost taste what it’s like being in love. She could choke on it if only she remembered to breathe.
-
“I miss you,” she holds the phone close to her mouth, as if she can pull her through the speaker and have her sister there. As if she could have her in the first place.
“I’ll be back eventually,” Anansi sighs. Irritation bleeding through, cherry wine on a seasick parchment. “You can find something else to do, okay? Ask Quassia if she has some training.”
She doesn’t want to do training. She wants to drop out of existence, spiral into absolutely nothing. She’s never been good at being nothing, only everything, so she curls into herself and pulls the blanket around her. “Okay,” she whispers. “I miss you,” she repeats.
She can hear her sister’s frown. “Do you want me to come visit?” There is something bitter there. Something ugly and cruel wrapping around her words. Anansi does not want to come visit and Ophelia could drown in the resentment colored bile yellow if she only lets go of the phone.
“No. I’m okay.”
“Alright. Take care of yourself, okay?” As if it is as easy as agreeing. Her sister has always expected miracles so simply, has always expected her to make more of herself than she is. Except her sister is a fool without blood on her hands and Ophelia is nothing but a liar.
“Okay,” she agrees. “I’ll be fine. Good luck with your mission.” Good luck with the man who fascinates Anansi somehow, who has wrapped her around his fault lined fingertips as if he wasn’t the one to kill everyone she loved in another world.
It took her too long to learn that, because they had both been so young and Ophelia had been wretched at drinking people in, but she learned. She grew up hating him with every bone in her furious body, as her own corpse lay three feet away, fingers intertwined with her sister’s. She learned to hate him like breathing, so it isn’t fair that suddenly Anansi changes her tune. Still, she bites back her poison and hums. “Good luck,” she repeats.
“Goodbye, Ophelia,” Anansi sighs again and hangs up. She feels like she’s falling, clinging to that phone, as if she could drink in just a few more strands of her sister’s voice.
-
Sometimes, her bed feels a little too big to fit her. It is a sea stretching out, rolling waves of blanket folds, and she is a small boat dashed to pieces, lonely. She lies in it and clamps the fabric of the sheets in one fist and tightens the locket chain with her other.
She falls, she drowns, and he wakes up some nights with nightmares of ocean waves. Nightmares of drowning, his arms bashed against the sandy floor, an eel carving its way through his skull.
He tangles the blankets and wakes Lenore with his gasps. She places his hand on her heart, calms his heaving lungs with a memory of their first time swimming. Him trusting her enough to sink down, her holding his hand. Together in the water, until the chlorine burnt his eyes.
She’d laughed at him when he’d pulled himself out, soggy, drenched, and squinting at the world. But she’d rinsed his eyes, pressed a kiss to his forehead, and they’d gotten lemonades afterwards.
Now, it serves as a memory where the water doesn’t fill his lungs and sting; where he is a husband more than he is a son, more than he is a brother. “I think I’m dying,” he wheezes, trying to focus on the hum of her heart, on the saltwater taffy of the underwater kiss that they’d tried and so poorly failed.
“You’re not dying. You’re right here, right here with me, okay?”
“It doesn’t feel real.” He is planets away, his sister holding him down underwater. He is galaxies away, pouring a glass of poison for his little brother. He is universes away, where he is a bomb of nuclear waste that doesn’t remember his own name. “I’m not real.”
“I want to get a cat,” she says suddenly.
Every thought skids to a stop, a tornado flung out in a thousand directions before it freezes, as he stares at her. “What?”
“A cat. It’ll be good practice for us, don’t you think?” She keeps his hand pressed to her chest, looking up at him with a grin. Her hair is a mess, flung in every direction.
“Good practice?”
“For when we have a kid.”
He stares at her, traces every line of her face. “You want to have a kid?”
“Well, yeah,” she says, as if it’s obvious. As if it is always something that was going to happen. As if he isn’t the worst possible person to be raising a child, other than a mother that he aches for and a woman with green eyes that he hasn’t met yet. “Would you want to?”
He wants to say no. He wants to disagree, bring up every fault, bring up the way that he’s tried to kill Anathema, bring up how Basilisk hates him, bring up how the only mother he’s known let his sister lock him in a freezer for four months on a whim. Except she smiles at him like she could trust him with a life in his hands. With a baby. “I wouldn’t be any good,” he mumbles.
She cups his face in her hands, presses her fingertips behind his ears, and breathes. He can see them walking through the little farmer’s market, where a kid had lost their father and he’d spent an hour helping keep them distracted as they searched. When they went on a stroll through the park and he’d ended up pushing swings for ages while she talked to some of the parents. When they’d found a wounded bird and nursed it back to life. When she was sick and he’d made soup, cleaned, took care of her every way he knew how. “You aren’t her,” she tells him and he doesn’t know if he remembers how to breathe.
“We can wait on kids though,” he mumbles and she laughs.
“Yeah. We can wait. Someday though? I want to have them, if you’re up for it.”
“That’s a little terrifying.” There’s a thousand ways he could mess up. He could kill them somehow, they could be some botched mess of half immortality, they could hate him, he could hurt them. He could look down at them with cold sharp teeth and tell them that they mean nothing, that they will never be anything, before waving one long clawed hand and telling him to run along and play with his sister, because she’s busy with other things.
“Aren’t most things in life?”
He smiles back and pulls her close. He still can taste salt water on his lips, but he can smell her lavender conditioner too. There is still phantom seaweed clamped around his throat, but her arm cast around his chest is a far gentler feeling. “Maybe you’re right.”
For a moment, she’s comforted. For a moment, there’s an arm around her, an arm that doesn’t exist. Except she wakes up, tangled in a bed that’s too big for her, and she stumbles to the mirror to scream.
-
The secretary offers her a set of cannolis the next time she stumbles to the top offices. The feedback form is neatly printed, utterly exact. She takes it almost reverently, spearmint precision and three hours of design heavy on her tongue.
“Thanks,” she grins, leaning forward too close. “They look great.” She can’t remember the name of the man that she should be giving these too, something with a B or a Q, so she figures that they’re probably for her. “Did you see Ben’s training today? I think she’s getting better.”
“Who?” There’s that long pause, like she’s said something wrong. She pauses, drawing back, pulling herself away from the desk and the memory of the last shift falling asleep on the job.
This isn’t the right universe, she knows so suddenly. She isn’t meant to be here. She’s supposed to have a sister, three sisters, even if she can’t remember their names. She squints at her and can’t remember what she’s ttalking about. “Nothin’. These look delicious.” She holds up the box and the form with a little giggle. “Thank you, thank you! How much do I owe you?”
She can hardly focus on the price. She overpays, she knows she does, but it’s not like she spends much money anyway. Her heart is pounding. Someone is dead. “Thanks, Xihe,” she mumbles.
The secretary hesitates. Her shoulders shift, as if she’s prepared to say something else. She doesn’t. Instead she nods and Ophelia stumbles away.
She feels like she’s always walking away.
-
It’s hard to remember everything that she knows she should know. It’s hard to remember when everything is tipsy topsy turvy. She can’t remember her name, but she remembers stories that she can spit out like fleas hopping over a dog’s back. She can scream out once upon a times like they are nothing.
Once upon a time, Anansi came back and they were fine, they had a great time and nothing ever hurt again. Once upon a time, Quassia loved her, or maybe she loved someone else, or maybe no one loved anyone at all.
Once upon a time, there was a woman with a ribbon wrapped around her neck. Hot pink and a little stained. Once upon a time, she lay on the floor of the apartment and spun around in circles until the world remembered what it was supposed to be.
Once upon a time, she had sisters, except she didn’t. She hates dreaming. She’s a thousand people and she’s no one at all. Once upon a time, she presses a kiss to her mirror and pretends it was someone else.
When Anansi calls her again, it’s an ending that she doesn’t know yet. But she knows it’s a beginning, so she starts with that.
“Hey, Ophelia,” she calls. “I’m going to be home a little later than I’d planned.”
“Okay,” she hums. She wonders if she’s upset or not. Something in her collarbone is beating, trying to claw its way out of her skin with a hundred tiny talons. “That’s alright.”
“Alright, good. Just wanted to let you know.” She wonders if her sister remembers her name anymore. “Well, I’ll be going then.”
She wants to scream. “Wait!” A gasp that she didn’t mean to release. A caged storm finally unlatched, a thousand angry butterflies flinging themselves out.
“What?” Anansi’s irritation tastes sour, like limes and pepper.
She doesn’t know what to say. An apology? A plea? “How’s your mission?” she asks instead.
“It’s fine. It’s going well, I’ve got him confused.”
“That’s good,” she mumbles. It’s not enough.
“Alright, well, goodbye.”
She hangs up before Ophelia can mumble a slurred, “goodbye.” The word sits on her tongue instead, waiting, exhausted.
She looks at herself in the mirror. Her reflection looks back. Mimicry. It’s not enough to sate her. She pulls at her hair, tries to wrangle her hair into something like wings.
She lasts only fifteen more minutes before sneaking into Quassia’s room to steal some glimmer. Solomon’s coat is hanging in the wardrobe. She makes sure not to touch it as she digs. Anansi’s gloves with the little star bows work well, the memories wrapped in them far more comfortable, far more familiar. She pushes aside the jewelry box, the orange leather boots decorated with comets, and grins when she finally finds it.
She makes it back to her room without detection. That was Quassia’s fault, teaching children who could sneak past her.
The glimmer makes her head ache. It doesn’t even feel good.
She wonders if that’s enough to count as the End.