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Most of the time, Sandra Lynn understands her daughter too well or not enough. Right now is one of those too well times, seeing the way her eyes sparkle when she looks at the starry night sky over the Celestine Sea, seeing how badly she wants to sleep beneath the stars. Seeing how scared she is of losing herself to the nightmares again.
“If you want to sleep up here, I can keep an eye on you,” Sandra Lynn promises. She doesn’t need to trance that badly. She can wait until tomorrow morning when the kids are awake. If it keeps that starstruck gleam in Figueroth’s eyes, she can go a night without trancing.
And Fig’s eyes do light up at the offer. “You sure, Mom?” she says. “I know I— I know I already made everybody chase me out to Bastion City and… and Riz…” A shadow falls over her face. Sandra Lynn wishes she could rip it away.
“He’ll be fine,” she says. “He’s a tough kid. You all are.”
Baxter settles near the back of the roof of the van, and Sandra Lynn flops back against him like he’s a big furry couch, extending an arm out for Fig to join her. Together, she and her daughter relax into the gentle rocking of the waves, heads pillowed against Baxter’s furry hide so they can look up at the night sky.
“Thanks, Mom,” Fig says, snuggling into her side.
When Fig offers her a clove cigarette, Sandra Lynn takes it. What the fuck, right? It’s an adventure. In this moment of camaraderie, Sandra Lynn pushes her on her “bad habit” of making out with old guys. And she confesses her own doubt, her own issues— the feeling of vertigo. The feeling of knowing, statistically, that she is going to fuck up more than she is going to get something right.
They talk. They drink a little. Sandra Lynn points out the constellations she recognizes— the lion, the dragon. “That’s you,” she says, pointing to the constellation of the Sylvan trickster goddex Figueroth. “That’s your constellation.”
“Cool,” Fig breathes.
When Sandra Lynn notices Fig start to nod off, she makes sure her cigarette is snubbed out, and she gives her space to get comfortable without going too far.
“Sweet dreams, sweetheart,” she murmurs, smoothing a hand over her hair, running a thumb over the smooth keratin of one of her horns. Sometimes she loves this damn kid so much it feels like it’s going to kill her.
She goes for another sip of whiskey and looks up at the stars.
Trying to suss some sort of direction out of the salt-scatter stars above her head at least takes her mind off all the myriad ways in which she’s let down her daughter and Gilear and Gorthalax. She’s not much of a seafarer. Sandra Lynn is at home among roots and rocks and mushrooms. In the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, she’s out of her element.
The vertigo creeps in, the way it does whenever she’s alone with her thoughts. It’s not lost on her how convenient it is for her personally that the kids invited her on a quest immediately after they moved into Mordred. Living with another man for the first time since Gilear moved out isn’t so scary as long as you cover your eyes and run away from it.
Obviously she’s going to fuck things up with Jawbone.
Ideally, she’ll at least be able to put it off until after the kids have graduated and moved out. Might be nice to give Fig some semblance of a happy home, the kind she tried to give her during her childhood.
The van that is a boat sails on, and the darkness grows the further they get from dry land.
Everything is gray at this time of night— the stars, the sea, Baxter. Her darkvision shows her the world in monochrome, shapes and shadows zigzagging around her.
Sandra Lynn startles when she notices Fig twitching.
Fig’s arms and legs are fidgeting in her sleep. Her lip keeps curling in a snarl, like she’s having a bad dream, and Sandra Lynn crawls over to her to make sure she doesn’t roll herself right off the van and into the water. As soon as she puts a hand on her daughter’s shoulder, Fig’s eyes snap open.
And Figueroth isn’t behind them.
Before Sandra Lynn can even say a word, she feels a sharp pain in her stomach, like she’s been punched. She looks down to find the curved dagger from the Hotel Cavalier buried just south of her ribcage. “Fuck,” she yells, hand flying to the knife on instinct to keep Fig from yanking it back out.
She watches in grayscale as light flares in Fig’s hollow eyes, as she raises a fist and claws at the air. A moment later, Sandra Lynn feels the Hexblade Curse hit her. It tastes like clove cigarettes and smells like ozone and burning hair, curling-iron flash of pain.
This is the same shit as before, right? The Nightmare King crawling inside Fig’s head and making her a puppet. Fuck this. She bangs on the roof of the van, hoping to jar Adaine out of trance or wake Kristen, anyone who can help to snap Fig out of this.
She surges forward and tries to clamp a hand over Fig’s mouth, mind racing to remember which spells Fig can cast without speaking. It doesn’t matter. Fig shoves out of her grasp, wrenching away and digging an elbow into Sandra Lynn’s chest for good measure. “Fig!” she coughs out, bleeding and cursed and useless. “Cut this shit out, alright? This isn’t you. You don’t have to do this.”
Her only thought is that she cannot allow her daughter to harm her, because the guilt would destroy Fig. She’s already seen what trapping Gorthalax and endangering Riz did to her. I feel dirty, she said at the Swan’s Little Parade.
And Sandra Lynn knows well enough that Fig doesn’t love her as much as she loves her father and Riz, but she ranks somewhere up there. If Fig injures her— kills her— Fig will never be able to forgive herself.
She draws on her magic, which usually sits like a strained muscle beneath her skin, and a grasping vine sprouts from the surface of the water and wraps around Fig, tangling her in sticky seaweed. It pins her to the roof of the van, immobilizing her.
“Fig, wake up,” Sandra Lynn says, bizarrely feeling like they could be back in that house on the side of the highway, and she’s just trying to get Fig awake for another day at Oakshield Middle.
Fig twists in the confines of the vines, thrashing mindlessly like someone having a nightmare might, wrapped up in bedsheets. Sandra Lynn stomps her foot on the roof of the van, because she can’t fucking do this shit, she’s not a wizard, she’s not a cleric. She can’t save Fig from what’s happening inside her own head.
It’s pointless. The moon haven is designed to protect against the strongest of magical forces. Her banging on the roof isn’t gonna do a damn thing.
It occurs to her that she could maybe try a greater restoration— if she had any diamond dust. Fuck this. She’s built to heal poison oak and fix spider bites. She’s not enough to help Fig. She never has been. “Kiddo, if anyone can shake this off, it’s you,” she says, applying pressure to the stab wound in her abdomen and inching closer to Fig. Baxter, who’s perched on the roof of the van, prepares to take off as soon as she calls for it.
But she’s not leaving Fig.
“Snap out of it. Sweetie, please,” Sandra Lynn says, because Fig has always been stronger and steadier than her, and if she can’t save her daughter then she needs her daughter to save herself. She needs to trust that Fig is tough enough and angry enough to overcome the nightmare choking her mind.
She watches as Fig twists against the seaweed bonds holding her, finally snapping them and breaking free. She surges to her feet, furiously puppeted forward by some greater force.
Sandra Lynn tries again to throw her arms around Fig and hold her, to keep a hand on her mouth and stop her from casting any curses. (And she thinks, stupidly, about something her mother once said about how you can’t take back words said in anger. For Figueroth, the adage is all too literal.)
Her wiry muscles manage to overpower Fig’s sleepwalking, and Sandra Lynn gets a grip on her. “Come on, wake up,” she pleads.
Beneath them, she hears the van door slide open, and she spies a familiar head, thinning hair silver-gray in the lack of light.
“Gilear!” she yells. “Help!”
She watches him turn, stare wide-eyed at Sandra Lynn restraining Fig, and then duck back inside the van to wake one of the girls. When he emerges with a bleary-eyed Adaine, Sandra Lynn wants to weep with relief.
“She’s— she’s possessed,” Sandra Lynn says, straining to keep her hold on Fig. “Fucker got her again.”
Adaine sets her jaw, determination in her gaze. She clambers up onto the roof of the van, holds her hand out and casts Dispel Magic on Fig once again.
And Sandra Lynn feels her only daughter slump in her arms, the fight bleeding out of her.
“No,” Fig mumbles. “No.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” Sandra Lynn says, sweeping the hair out of her face. “You’re okay.”
“No,” Fig moans out, devastated and small in a way that cracks Sandra Lynn’s heart into pieces. She holds a hand toward the knife still embedded in Sandra Lynn’s belly, the beginnings of a Cure Wounds dancing at her fingertips.
“No, baby, don’t heal it while the knife is still in,” Sandra Lynn says quickly, grabbing at her hands. “Don’t heal it around the blade, hang on.” She presses her hand against the gash, presses as hard as she can and then slides the blade free. “Okay, now.”
Fig lets out a sob and heals the stab wound, and Sandra Lynn can feel the hot flash of pain that gradually fades away to an antiseptic numbness as the flesh knits back together.
“It’s all good,” Sandra Lynn says, sagging back against Baxter’s hide. “It’s all good now.”
“No,” Fig cries, arms wrapping around herself. Adaine and Gilear both step toward her at the same time, and she flinches inward, uneasy and suspicious and probably still half-dreaming. “No.”
“It’s okay,” Sandra Lynn says, balancing most of her weight back against Baxter. She holds a hand out toward Fig, and when Fig doesn’t react to it, she latches onto Fig’s hand. “That was really scary, but we’re all okay now. Okay?”
“None of you should trust me,” Fig says, horrified tears spilling down her face. “You should have left me behind in Bastion City.”
Sandra Lynn wants to argue, but Adaine beats her to it. “No, come on, that’s bullshit,” she says, shrugging her jacket off to drape it around Fig’s shoulders. “We’re literally fighting against nightmares. Any one of us could have flipped out and attacked the rest. I think— I think you just need to sleep in the van, is all.”
“I hate this,” Fig coughs out.
“I’ve got you,” Adaine says. She glances over at Gilear and Sandra Lynn. “I’ve got her.”
“Yes,” Gilear says. “Good.”
Sandra Lynn doesn’t say anything.
She talked a big game about being able to protect Fig outside of the moon haven, and she didn’t deliver. And now Fig has that on her conscience. She watches Adaine lead Fig back inside the van, and then she picks up the dagger and hurls it into the ocean.
“Are you alright?” Gilear says a moment later, and he’s somehow both a total stranger and the person who knows her better than anybody else in the world.
“No,” she admits. “But I don’t need to be. I just need Fig to be okay.”
“Agreed,” he says.
They’re quiet for a moment, a mutual understanding that they need to get their bearings, that it’s a complicated period of time where they can’t really help their child and they can’t really help each other, and everything just is what it is, and it kind of sucks.
“Do you want to trance up here?” Sandra Lynn asks, immediately feeling stupid for it. “We can— you know. Head to foot.”
Gilear looks at her, and she thinks about how many nights the two of them shared a marital bed, and she thinks about what a colossal mess she’s made of their lives and Fig’s life. And her abdominal muscles hurt where the knife went in.
“Alright,” Gilear agrees, sitting down on the roof of the Hangvan.
Baxter lays back down, tense, mirroring her own emotions. Sandra Lynn sinks down to a seat and tips back against his furry, feathery hide, pulling out her flask for another nip of whiskey in an attempt to soothe her frayed nerves.
She watches Gilear watching her.
Finally, he flops back against the van roof, peering up at the stars. She pockets her flask and tilts back to do the same.
Fig is okay. Adaine can do more for her than Sandra Lynn ever could.
She blinks, letting the stars above start to fuzz out, letting trance begin to overtake her.
She’s jerked out of it at the last moment by Gilear, softly, saying, “Look,” his finger pointing up. “It’s Figueroth.”
Sandra Lynn looks up at the constellation and blinks back tears. “Yeah,” she says. “There she is.”