Work Text:
“I can’t reach her,” Fitz said, frustrated, retreating from the side of Sophie’s cot, where she still lay unconscious. “It’s like she’s blocking me, or something.”
“She’s probably not doing it intentionally,” Keefe pointed out. “She’s unconscious, and she was built to block without thinking.”
“Yeah, but… I thought she trusted me.”
“What part of ‘not doing it intentionally’—”
“Don’t do this,” Biana exclaimed, her eyes still screwed shut from an attempt not to let tears fall down her face. “Just don’t. Not today.”
Dex’s death had hit all of them hard, but Biana was taking it worst of all. Fitz still remembered holding her as she cried the day it happened. The way she held onto his shirt as confessions spilled from her lips, and then, “And you’re not the one I should be confessing any of this to, but I guess I’ll always be too late now.” After that, she was silent.
Fitz could only imagine what it was like to be Keefe. Keefe had known, of course, all of Dex’s feelings and all of Biana’s. He must have been waiting with even more anxious breath than Fitz was for it to finally happen. And now this.
Would they do a second planting or a memorial around the first?
In addition to mourning Dex, having never told him she loved him, she was just as worried as anyone that Sophie wasn’t going to wake up.
It had been a hard few days.
Keefe gasped suddenly, shocking Biana into letting go of Sophie’s hand. He stumbled back into one of Elwin’s counters, wincing in pain.
“I think… she just transmitted to me.”
“To you?!”
“Will you two cut it out?!” Biana snapped. “If she transmitted, that’s a good thing.”
Fitz still looked wounded, which Keefe understood. He was her cognate, after all. In his shoes, Keefe would have felt the same way. But he wasn’t in Fitz’s shoes. He was in his own.
And his mind just kept replaying, I can’t ever go back. I can’t ever go back. I can’t ever go back.
She must not have known she transmitted it, because it didn’t sound like it was for him. He wondered what made her think of him with those words.
(He knew exactly what made her think of him, but pretended he didn’t.)
“What did she say?” Fitz asked.
For some reason, Keefe felt like he shouldn’t say. “She just… I don’t know that it was decipherable…”
“You’re a horrible liar.”
Before Keefe could answer, his entire mind was dragged to a whole other reality. This time, he didn’t suddenly appear back in the healing center.
This time, it all suddenly felt very real. The room, the chair, the click-clacking sound of… something? Keefe didn’t know what.
Paper was all over the ground. Keefe tentatively picked up one, squinting at the odd lettering. He was grateful for his polyglot abilities as he deciphered what was written: It was my fault. It was my fault. It was my fault.
The same words over and over again.
Eventually it turned to, I can’t ever go back. I can’t ever go back.
He followed the paper trail until his eyes found Sophie, typing away furiously.
Keefe searched for the right words. It wasn’t your fault? Come back to us? “What are you wearing?” he suddenly exclaimed.
That… was the wrong thing to say.
Sophie froze, turning to him slowly. “What?”
“Sorry! Sorry? Is it a human dress or something?”
“How are you here?” Sophie stood suddenly. “I thought I was in my own mind. Am I going insane?”
“You will if you keep letting yourself feel this guilty,” Keefe said, gesturing to the paper on the floor. “It is not your fault. And we want you back.”
Sophie shook her head furiously. “I’m making this up, I’m conjuring you with my mind… you can’t be in my mind. You’re not a telepath.”
Keefe surveyed his surroundings, thinking of it as Sophie’s own mind for the first time. “Huh. Yeah, I’m not. But I don’t think I’m reading your mind. I think you’re projecting all of this into mine.”
Sophie looked around, as though she was realizing they weren’t in a very brain-shaped place to begin with. “Whoa. I created all this?” Sophie looked down at her dress, her eyes widening. “Oh. It’s the Katherine costume.”
“The what?”
“That explains the typewriter,” Sophie mumbled. “Since she was a journalist and all. I didn’t just transform into her, did I?” She pulled her hair in front of her face, like she was checking something. “Nope. Still me.” Her eyes wandered back over to Keefe. “...And you’re dressed like Jack.”
“Like who?!”
“What the hell are we doing in—”
“Will you explain what’s going on?”
“I don’t even know! Why are you dressed like a newsie?!”
“A what?”
“Like in the musical. The musical Newsies,” Sophie explained impatiently. “You’re a figment of my imagination, how do you not know what Newsies is? I had the craziest phrase right after my Hamilton one…”
“I’m not a figment of your imagination,” Keefe insisted. “You must be projecting. It’s the only explanation.”
“How do I stop?” Sophie suddenly started backing away. “How do I leave? I want to leave…” Sophie started running into the abyss of her own mind, and Keefe tried to chase her, wondering if she’d retreat into her own mind and send him catapulting back into the harsh reality, wondering what just happened. Instead, he followed her into another scene. This time, he didn’t even try to figure out what was going on around him.
Clearly, her mind was in chaos.
“You’re blaming yourself for what happened, aren’t you?” Keefe called after her as he finally caught up. She was kneeling on the ground, holding a large, ancient book in her hands. She had two of the pages balled up in her fists.
She did not look okay.
“Aren’t you?” Keefe repeated.
Sophie didn’t respond, but she chucked one of the torn out pages at him. Keefe slowly unfolded it, unsurprised to find the words It’s my fault it’s my fault it’s my fault I can never go back I can never go back I can never go back written over and over again in different languages. “Sophie, it wasn’t—”
“Why am I doing this?!” Sophie asked, her voice breaking. “Why would I bring you here with me? You’re just going to stand there and tell me it’s not my fault. All of you know it’s my fault.”
“Sophie, it isn’t,” Keefe said urgently. “Foster. Look at me.”
“No,” Sophie whispered, fidgeting with the sleeves of her elaborate black dress. “I don’t want to see who you are in this one.”
“In this what? I still don’t know what’s going on.”
“You’re not my Fiyero.”
“Your what now?”
“This hat is stupid.” Sophie took off the hat (which kind of was stupid, though Keefe wasn’t about to say so in a moment like this) and threw it, triggering wind that knocked everything down, blowing everything including furniture through the shattered window, but somehow leaving the two of them.
“Where are we?”
“This was before Hamilton, I think,” Sophie said, which still didn’t make any sense. “But it’s the most right. This is my fault,” she muttered. “My fault, my fault, my—”
“No.” Keefe knelt in front of her, grabbing her hands and forcing her to look at him. “He made a sacrifice, Sophie.”
“He shouldn’t have had to. If I had—”
“No one was going to see this coming, okay? It’s the kind of impossible, nightmarish scenario that would come up in a dark ‘would you rather,’ not happen in real life. It’s not your fault. And Dex—”
Saying his name was a mistake, though, because suddenly she wasn’t kneeling before him, but instead they were sitting in the middle of some… contraption, moving so fast Keefe suddenly felt like he was going to vomit. He lurched into some kind of panel, groaning as it hit him in the side. Sophie was sitting at some kind of control booth, somehow looking completely calm as she said, “We’re going to crash.”
“Crash what?!”
“The Invisible Hand.”
“The huh?!”
“The spaceship. It’s fitting, anyway. Why am I piloting?” she asked, staring with fascination as the front of the “spaceship” continued heating up. “We’re going to crash on that planet,” she said, pointing out the window. “And I can’t pilot, so we’re dead. That’s fine.”
Keefe had to remind himself that all of this was in her mind as he said, “I don’t want us to die. I want us to live.”
“He didn’t get to live!” Sophie exploded, the sides of her chair. “And it was—”
“Not your fault.”
“Why am I Anakin Skywalker?” she asked, muttering. “Why am I piloting?”
“Who?” Keefe asked, once again at a loss.
“It’s fitting, in a way. Everything that happened was my fault.”
“Stop saying it’s your fault.”
“Stop saying it isn’t!” she snapped. “You know full well I’m the one who trapped us in there. We were supposed to be able to escape.”
“We didn’t know there would be a cost.”
“I should have been more careful. I should have looked for whatever fine print I was missing. I should have known what I was getting us into, but no, I was careless and reckless and DEX IS DEAD.”
“No one knew what we were getting ourselves into, least of all you,” Keefe said, his tone begging, pleading with her to realize that none of them could have done any better.
“I can’t land this thing. We’re going to die.”
“I want us to live,” Keefe said again frantically, even though he knew this was all in her mind. “Together,” he added, something about the fake life-threatening situation really getting to his head. “Don’t you want us to live together?” he asked, realizing he was going to regret this as soon as they shifted to a calmer scenario.
Sophie’s eyes widened, and their scene shifted to something a lot calmer and less life-threatening. Around them was what seemed like a force field, although more malleable. When he noticed they were underwater, it felt a lot like being in Atlantis, but on a much, much smaller scale.
A small, personal Atlantis, just big enough for him and Sophie.
Barely big enough. He was standing so close to her he could feel her breath on his cheeks. So close to her he could barely focus.
You need to be keeping her from going insane from guilt in this fantasy-land of hers, Keefe chided himself, not getting all mixed up over this ridiculous unrequited crush.
“What is this?” Sophie asked, looking around her. “What are we…” she looked down at her clothing, and then at Keefe’s, like it would give her some kind of answer. Keefe looked too, though their orange shirts didn’t tell him anything. Then she looked at her surroundings. “Ugh!” she shouted. “No! Not this! What is going on?!”
“Good question!” Keefe agreed. “What is going on?” Why were they trapped in a small underwater bubble?
“You’re not my Percy either!” Sophie shouted. “I don’t understand what’s happening!”
“Well, that’s concerning,” Keefe remarked, though he spoke softly due to his proximity to her. “This is your mind. You’re the one conjuring all of this. I thought I was the one who didn’t understand.”
“This is the stupid… ugh… it’s the freaking underwater kissing scene.”
Keefe’s brain stopped working at the word “kiss” coming out of Sophie’s mouth.
“I’m not Annabeth,” she muttered. “I’m not. She’s a hero. What am I doing here?”
Keefe didn’t know who Annabeth was, or why Sophie was talking about kissing (which made him hope with all his heart that she wasn’t reading his mind, though he doubted she was), but he knew one thing: “You are a hero, Sophie. You saved almost everyone. What Dex did was brave. Both of you saved all of us.”
“Except him.”
“Like I said, it was brave.”
“Why can’t I change all this?” Sophie asked, frustrated as she surveyed their surroundings. “This is my brain, right? Why can’t I change what I’m projecting?”
“I have no idea,” Keefe said honestly. “You could always tell me who Jack and Katherine and Newsie and… uh, Free Arrow—”
“Fiyero.”
“—and the Invisible Hand and something Sky-walker and Percy and Annabelle and—”
“I think I have to kiss you,” Sophie said thoughtfully.
Keefe’s brain went blank again, and he couldn’t think of any other strange words or names Sophie had said since she’d dragged him down with her into this ever-changing mental world. “Kiss me?” he repeated dumbly.
“I don’t have any other ideas. This is supposed to be a kiss scene. I remember it very well.”
Keefe still didn’t understand what was happening.
“Or you have to kiss me. Hang on. It was like…” her eyebrows furrowed. “‘I made an air bubble at the bottom of the lake’—that’s this… ‘when you’re the son of Posseidon, you don’t have to hurry,’ and then it’s just… ‘best underwater kiss of all time.’ Yeah, I don’t know who kissed who.”
“Who’s Poseidon and why are we talking about kissing?”
“Screw it.” In a split second, Sophie pulled him against her and pressed her lips to his. It was over in only a few seconds, but when she pulled back, he was too dizzy to even speak. He hadn’t thought Sophie would ever think about him that way, and he still wasn’t sure she did, but for some reason she’d just kissed him—not a tiny peck, like she was trying to avoid the whole thing, but a real, substantial kiss—and recovering his ability to think and speak and even breathe was taking a concerningly long amount of time.
“Hm. I thought that would work,” she said. “Maybe you have to kiss me.”
Keefe stared at her for a moment, dumbly.
“Well?!” she said impatiently.
Keefe kissed her.
His lips were still pressed softly against hers, warm and perfect and setting off fireworks in his stomach, when the world around them shifted again. Suddenly, just within moments, she was no longer warm and pressed against him, but separated from him, and instead of being surrounded by a pocket of air, Keefe was immersed in water, clinging to some kind of wooden pole for dear life.
“Whoa!” Keefe exclaimed, tightening his grip as he took in his surroundings. “WHAT?! Where are we now?” Eventually he found Sophie, sitting on some kind of small human boat contraption, very much not about to drown. “Why do you get to be on a boat?” he complained.
“Are we…” Sophie looked around, taking in the world. “Is this… huh? Anne of Green Gables? Hang on. Why am I Gilbert?? That’s backwards!”
“I don’t know what you’re saying! Can you just help me get on that thing?”
“Oh! Yeah. That’s… what I’m supposed to do, I guess. Because you’re Anne, for some reason.”
Keefe shivered slightly from the cold as Sophie helped him up onto her boat. “This is the second time you’ve mentioned this Anne person.”
“No, the other one was Annabeth. Right now you’re Anne, like Anne of Green Gables.” Sophie giggled slightly, and Keefe was torn between being elated that she finally wasn’t depressed and beating herself up and being confused as to what was so funny. “You’re wearing nineteenth century women’s clothing.”
Oh. Yeah, that was worth giggling about.
“I still don’t understand why I’m not Anne,” she mumbled.
“Well, I don’t know who Anne is, so I can’t explain that.”
“I mean, you fit the whole bill for Gilbert Blythe. Handsome and annoying!” she said matter-of-factly, as though it was the most normal thing in the world to casually call him handsome (though she’d called him annoying plenty of times).
“So you’re admitting I’m good looking, then?” Keefe asked with a smirk, hoping she’d flirt back accidentally like she frequently did.
“Well, yeah,” Sophie said, skipping past that quickly, though he didn’t fail to notice the slight blush on her cheeks. “So why am I the one saving you?”
“Well, I don’t know who Anne or Gillard is—”
“Gilbert. Respect the Anne of Green Gables names.”
“...Right. I don’t know what’s going on, but don’t you think there might be a reason your silly fantasy you can’t really control is having you save me?” Keefe suggested. “Perhaps because you saved all of us?”
Sophie’s smile fell, as though she’d just remembered why she’d retreated into her mind in the first place. “I didn’t save anyone. Dex is dead.”
“Just because you couldn’t save Dex doesn’t mean you didn’t save anyone.”
“Don’t say couldn’t. That makes it sound like it isn’t my fault.”
“It isn’t!” Keefe insisted. And from the mix of the emotions he was feeling (likely from her real body, which was still in a coma) and the fact that she’d just mentally saved him from drowning, he had a feeling she was starting to realize it.
“That’s not going to keep me from feeling guilty,” Sophie muttered.
“If you shatter, that’s it,” Keefe said, the thought coming to him in a sudden panic. “Nobody can save you. You’re the only one who could. I would lose you forever, Foster. Sophie.” As natural as it felt to call her by her last name, which had become to him almost an endearing nickname, he needed her to know he was completely serious.
It seemed to slap her in the face just as hard as it slapped him. “I didn’t think about that,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to always be the strong one, saving everyone else. But you can and you do. That’s why we’re here right now. That’s why you’re the ‘handsome and annoying’ one instead of me—though I readily identify with both adjectives, in case you weren’t aware.”
“Oh, I was.” She looked down at her reflection in the murky water. “Wow. So… I guess I’m—”
She was cut off by the sudden change in scene once again. This time, they were in the middle of some kind of forest, just the two of them, in unfamiliar clothing that clearly hadn’t been washed in a while. Sophie recognized the scene immediately, though she was once again confused. “My brain is doing a horrible job of picking these scenes,” she muttered.
“Why?”
“You’d think we’d at least be elves in this one!”
“Where are we?”
“Lord of the Rings.” Sophie looked between them, then around them, then at the bag that lay to the side. “And we’re hobbits. Even though there are literal elves in this universe.” Sophie looked down at the strange necklace she was wearing. It looked like a silver chain around her neck with a gold ring hanging in the center. Then she rolled her eyes and collapsed backward. “Looks like I really am supposed to be the hero again. Lucky me.”
“It’s a difficult thing to be,” Keefe said, knowing it was true even though he had no clue what the significance of the ring necklace or this forest was or even who this Lord of Rings was. “And I’m sorry that it’s you. But you’re amazing at it, even if it takes its toll. You save everyone you can. You saved everyone you could.”
She fidgeted with the small ring. “What am I trying to tell myself with this, of all things?”
“I have no idea.”
“This is stupid. I don’t want… I mean… okay, I sort of get it?”
“I don’t think it’ll make sense even if you explain it to me.”
Sophie took the chain off her neck and chucked the ring as far from her as she possibly could. She had a surprisingly strong arm, and Keefe couldn’t even see where it landed. “I don’t have obligations. Not here. Not inside my own mind. Or…” she looked back over at Keefe. “Or yours, I guess. Since I’m apparently projecting.” She cracked a small smile. “It would be really funny if we kissed in this one. The fans would be happy.”
“The fans of what?” Keefe asked, trying to focus on anything that wasn’t the mention of kissing again. He still hadn’t forgotten that he’d mentally kissed her twice now.
“Nothing. It’s a joke that I get.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I cannot possibly begin to think how I’d explain it.” She pressed her lips together thoughtfully. “We’re friends here, though. Really good friends. The kind that help each other through absolutely everything. The kind that always stay together.” She tilted her head to the side. “I guess we were those kinds of friends on the Invisible Hand, too, if you pretend the betrayal never happens. All the others…” she blushed.
“All the others what?”
She mumbled something he couldn’t quite decipher, though the phrase “romantic couples” definitely caught his attention.
“What I’m hearing is you’re secretly in love with me,” Keefe joked.
He expected her to immediately yell “Ew!” or “No!” or “Shut up” or “Ugh, stop that,” or at least roll her eyes. But instead, she just muttered thoughtfully, “Maybe.”
That might have short-circuited his brain even more than their two earlier kisses.
“Well,” Keefe said quietly and very, very boldly, “it’s not any secret that I’m in love with you.”
The scene abruptly ended, and Keefe was thrown violently back into his real body, blinking in surprise when he realized where he was. “Oh, I’m here again,” he said, shaking his head to clear it as he adjusted to the new lighting and the reality that he was back, just as quickly as he’d been yanked into Sophie’s mind. “How long was I… not present?” He hadn’t been keeping track of the time, and wasn’t sure if it had been passing at the same rate as reality.
“Eleven minutes,” Elwin said, checking the time.
“What did she say?” Fitz asked reluctantly, clearly still miffed that he wasn’t the one she’d reached out to.
“Um, guys?” Biana said, drawing their attention to where Sophie was laying. “I think she blinked.”
Elwin immediately rushed to her side, thoughtfully flashing a few lights over her head. Her eyelids fluttered under the light. “She’s definitely conscious,” he said. “Sophie? Can you hear us?”
Sophie’s eyes opened, and she blinked a few times groggily, adjusting to the light. “Where are we now?”
“The Healing Center,” Keefe answered. She looked over at him, still laying down. “We’re back.”
“Oh, great,” Sophie said. “Another universe where we’re…” she trailed off. “Wait.”
Keefe decided to believe, because it made him giddy inside, that the end of that sentence was in love, though he supposed it could have been a lot of things. “We’re in reality.”
Sophie up a little too quickly, groaned, and layed back down. “Not too fast, now,” Elwin warned. “Little by little you can adjust to being upright.”
“Or I could just lay here forever,” she suggested.
“That’s not really living together, is it?” Keefe asked, referencing what he’d said while they were rapidly crashing towards a planet’s surface.
“What’s he talking about?” Fitz asked.
“It wasn’t my fault?” Sophie asked, like it was a question.
“Of course it wasn’t,” Biana jumped in, suddenly realizing why she’d willingly kept herself unconscious for so long. “You mean about…?”
Sophie nodded.
“It was… he…” Biana’s eyes brimmed with tears, but she blinked them back. “It’s… sad. It’s really hard. For all of us, including you, of course. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was his own stupid bravery.” Biana wiped away her tears before they could fall and spoil her makeup. “You did everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“Then nothing would have been.”
Sophie and Keefe locked eyes again, words both previously said and still unsaid floating between them, and Keefe wondered when he’d have the opportunity to just be alone with her, in reality this time. Maybe she could finally explain to him what a Newsie was or why they had to kiss in the underwater bubble.
Maybe he could kiss her for real.
“Can I talk to Keefe?” Sophie said suddenly. “Alone?”
He supposed that time would be now.