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AJ was sick.
It was the only plausible explanation for the level of…disquiet…she felt. The only excuse for how distracted she had become—how every instruction or command given to her by her captain seemed to reach her ears from many miles away, cryptic and indistinguishable from the whisper of the wind. Sickness was the only justification for laying awake in the dark, for staring up listlessly at the blanket of constellations embroidering the sky—stars she would normally have found pleasure in tracing. AJ loathed to lose something she enjoyed, something which had always been free to her. And she hated the new sense of unease which plagued her when she tried to love it—the way it curdled in her stomach and made her skin feel feverish.
It was as if since leaving the Academy, she had been infected with some protean pathogen. It changed, mutating into whatever could best disrupt her task in that moment. Sometimes it turned her limbs to lead and she would continue to drag herself forwards with the other rebels, certain she was ploughing the soil into trenches behind her. Other times it made her feel lightheaded, as though her body had suddenly become detached at the neck, and she was left teetering, dizzy and unbalanced, until the world righted itself again. The worst and perhaps the most inexplicable effect was the ever-present stench of ink on her hands, no matter how many times she attempted to remove it. Some days her hands were near to bleeding from how aggressively she would attempt to scrub it away. It was a smell she could never habituate to and her head reeled from it.
The letter weighed on her.
It was the whiteness of the final draft, the negative space she'd left behind, that troubled her. AJ knew the words that belonged in that emptiness, all the ones she'd written and crossed out and started anew. But she'd burned the earlier drafts until there was nothing left of them but the ashes she'd simply dumped out the window. The only proof that remained was the final letter, indifferent and bitter, that she'd slipped into the mailbox before leaving. What would Drift read in those blank spaces? And why did it matter to her?
Neither were questions AJ had the constitution to answer as of late. Nor the desire to. In fact, thinking about it seemed to perpetuate her affliction until it was impossible to discern whether it could be symptom or cause. Perhaps it was both, the uncertainty feeding into the discomfort and the resulting unhappiness feeding into the doubt again. It was a snake eating its own tail; an ouroboros of malaise.
Flick had noticed the sickness as well. She did her best to distract AJ from it. She chattered away endlessly, noisy with questions, reminders, jokes, and (sometimes) real conversation. When that ran out, Flick turned to purely nonsensical things: insults, intentionally redundant inquiries, and sometimes utter gibberish cobbled together from random words and even more random sounds. It was both endearing and also extremely irritating at times, though AJ appreciated the sentiment and understood it was coming from a place of love. Occasionally Flick would surprise AJ with a bauble or gems she'd nicked from the other rebels behind their backs. Her antics made AJ laugh which seemed to console Flick as much as it did AJ. It was a comfort to know this malady could not infect her bond with her familiar at least. That much was unchanging.
Aside from Flick, perhaps her only relief came from sleeping. However, even that solution presented its own slew of issues. The most principal of which was of course that not only falling asleep but staying asleep was nigh impossible.
AJ's sleep was plagued incessantly with dreams. Sometimes she dreamed of soaring over the Academy and seeing the towers through Flick's beady eyes. Other times she dreamed of fooling around with Melinks, ducking through secret passages or throwing back a drink. Sometimes she dreamed of antagonizing Ros or Juniper, or visiting the garden and the theater with Megii and Graecie. She dreamed of killing Sausage. She dreamed of being pushed off a cliff edge while someone screamed.
Mostly—irrationally—she dreamed of Drift.
It occurred so often that it was becoming almost embarrassing. It irritated AJ so much that her neck would begin to feel warm when she thought about it. She had started sleeping further away from the rest of the rebels she traveled with, simply for fear of being overhead at night doing something or gods forbid saying something she didn't mean while unconscious. The need to distance herself because of a tendency she couldn't control anymore was aggravating. Worse, the loss of control and the resulting alienation bolstered the sickness, reinforcing the loop. She'd wake up feeling sick, find a distraction in the day and feel marginally well again, then return to sleep, dream of Drift, and feel nauseous once more.
Many of the dreams were memories, replaying like broken records.
She dreamed of meeting Drift for the first time in the Academy's foyer. The way she could catch Drift off-guard so easily with her teasing, before she'd learned to expect it and keep up. How Drift had leaned towards AJ instinctively to hear her speak—flooding her senses with black hemlock and violet—then bridled and tilted her chin up when she inevitably disapproved of what AJ said. She dreamed of the way Drift had so obviously hated how AJ could get under her skin after only just meeting her. And how much it made her want to do it again.
AJ dreamed of their expedition to the rebel cave near the Academy, discovering for the first time that Drift didn't know how to swim. She remembered leading Drift into the water, holding her hand in hers and feeling the pinch of Drift's nails digging into the skin of her wrists and the fat of her thumbs—the thin red crescents it left behind. In her dreams she revisited the panic in Drift's eyes when she led her to deeper water and the startling, unhesitating need to soothe it.
She dreamed of confessing her rebel secret to Drift. How she had chewed the inside of her cheek raw before the words could escape her, how she'd dreaded Drift's response and how the fear had nearly stopped her. In her dreams, in the silence that followed the confession, AJ wondered if maybe it should have.
But then Drift's brow had furrowed and she'd raised her chin in that indefatigable, bulldog way she had a habit of whenever she'd made up her mind. And she'd assured AJ that she thought no less of her, that she supported her position and was ready to stick with her, in spite of the obvious risk. And AJ dreamed of how she couldn't help but laugh in disbelief at this woman who could run so readily into danger to prove her mettle. And how she couldn't believe she was the same woman who had held onto her with such unguarded fear in the water only a few weeks prior.
She dreamed of a tent, nestled in the thicket, just past the bridge to the Academy. She dreamed of warm breath ghosting over the bridge of her nose, of lazy whispers in the dark, and the feeling of her heart stuttering haphazardly beneath her smug nerve. AJ remembered a tentative first kiss in the shade of the woods, remembered picturing the grace of moth wings as they dance towards the glow of a lantern. In her dreams, her fingers itched again for a pen, her heart swollen with a hundred feelings she longed to put down on paper but knew she never would. In her dreams, they gratefully spent the rest of the night in relieved laughter.
AJ dreamed of a first date, of her hand brushing against Drift's next to her as they walked. She dreamed of teasing and banter and painless play. She dreamed of Drift opening up first, of deftly redirecting AJ's disorder into something constructive. She dreamed of opening up about menial things at first, of revealing the littlest pieces of who she was—the parts so small they were often overlooked. She remembered them being received wholeheartedly and feeling like she was finally beginning to be seen.
She dreamed of a second kiss under the flaxen glow of the moon. Of Icarus plummeting to the ground and trusting that Atlas would be there, holding up the world to catch him.
The rest of AJ's dreams were just fantasy.
They were dreams cloaked in shadows. Dreams of giggling together in the dark, of wet lips on hot skin, and memorizing the topography of another body—every plateau and valley and mountain she could find. AJ dreamed of her fingers climbing over Drift's hips. She dreamed of her hands slipping around the curve of her waist and the tension of the muscle underneath, and settling them in the spaces she liked to pretend were made for her. They were dreams of pride at every swallowed sound and gasp—a melody of electrifying novelty and anesthetic familiarity that always left AJ's head spinning.
They were dreams of sunshine. Dreams of standing together unashamedly, of being permitted to cast light without retribution—of quelling the rumors she knew were weighing on Drift and becoming impossible to deny. AJ dreamed of not needing to lie or pretend when Drift was around, of not being each other's secret in a school drowning in gossip and accusations. She dreamed of a perfect world without the need for rebels, without oppression from the Crown.
She dreamed of the sickness she was harboring, twisting her gut into knots and leaving her lungs ragged and breathless.
She dreamed of lovesickness.
It jolted her awake in the middle of the night and threw her into full-body chills. The accompanying vertigo left her dizzy and distracted, stumbling to her backpack to get a cigarette. It tainted the taste of the smoke, flooded her sinuses with a heady mix of hemlock and violet.
On such nights, AJ often found her gaze drawn back to the stars, to the moon, head tilted back with exhaustion. She searched the vastness of the sky, the intimacy of her ultimate inconsequence the only comfort that could lull her back to sleep. And though she'd be fighting the sickness again the next morning, at least for a few hours she could pretend to find peace.