Work Text:
You wake up. You’re in a chemise. You peel satin and lace from yourself again, again, again, a pile of coarse leaves on the rug. Your spit is minty. Has your body been somewhere? The calendar on the wall is moot—months off. Shower, blue scrubs, rev the engine, go to work.
The fog outside is like the fog brimming from your brain all the way down to the far reaches of your body—it’s always a lug, getting used to you once more. You ease the gas to feel where you end. What all did the child psych say twenty years prior? Swallow an ice cube. Stop lying. He craves attention, are you giving him attention? Your eyes sting but do not stray from the road.
The houses of Sunnydale pass by like specters. At the four-way stop two blocks from the hospital, she’s abruptly back too soon—too soon, too soon, so soon recently, so—to take your body. She feels like spit, creeping up the inside back of your skull to encompass your brain. She feels like blood soaking through all of your innards, escaping capillaries and veins and arteries and seeping, and then you’re away.
And then you wake up. The apartment’s chaise. An elaborate robe of burgundy and black. The disgusting sycophants of “minions” chatter from another room, and there’s an ache in your arms like you’ve been lifting jugs of gasoline—but no sign of a fire.
It’s worse now that she’s on the hunt for the key, like a prim beagle. You’ve had hour-long patches of amnesia once upon a time, you’ve plowed through childhood, adolescence, and nursing school blipping here and there and finding yourself places that are incorrect, fucking incorrect. Wrong, bad, uncanny. But recently, it’s gotten extensive. Days, weeks. Bread molding, the sun setting earlier. She’s taking you for joy rides, she’s taking advantage of the rent you pay, she’s filling your closet and every empty drawer with expensive trinkets from God knows where.
And, almost as bad, Glory’s minions, the things that have watched you since you were so little that their empty black eyes still had you wetting the bed, they’re back. Here, your damn apartment. Giving you looks, working around you, organizing something with the you that emerges when “Ben” sinks under.
You’re a blot to them, to her, the void that licks up you like flame. You’re nothingness. You’re a mistake in the process of being erased from the test. You make breakfast, and the milk is, once again, expired. You notice it’s three in the afternoon. You rip through her clothes and sit on the tile with your back against a cabinet. Your voicemail blinks hungrily from the table. Where did you go, Ben? Where did you go?
You wake up. A cigarette burns in your fingers, a pair of heels shooting you up a few extra inches. You kick them off, away from the loading dock, onto the concrete below. The hospital—not good. If Glory is wandering around, you’re not working. You’re committing time theft, or you’re lollygagging early, or late. You deserve to care about these things, to care that you have a job, that you have an income, that you have coworkers you joke with, but everything is so easily fed through you into her like a silk rope. The sting in your lungs rebels into a cough. You throw the cigarette down. She’s left your scrubs on as if you’re her doll, half-assed. Your clogs are by the door back in, emergency exit only.
Ben, where did you go? Where did you go? Why can’t you tell us? Ben, why are you afraid? Where did you go? We love you. What’s the matter? Where did you go? You really don’t remember anything? You don’t remember this photo? Are you lying? What’s wrong with him, where did he go?
It always happens like this: she takes and takes and takes and you can do nothing to stop her. From your youngest years, dissociative fugue, diagnoses from adults with clipboards who don’t know, who won’t listen, who can’t understand.
Because nobody but you remembers the swap for more than the length of a blink. This deep, visceral feeling of being reduced to clay, then in less than a heartbeat’s time, hardened into a pinch pot. If they believed you, it wouldn’t have to do with Glory. The slippery existence that she is.
Shrinks, medicine, a slow and cautious voice saying Ben you’ve been gone. Gone how? Gone how? The act of transition does not hurt so much as reckoning with the aftermath of a vile and vain god.
In your childhood home, there are hundreds of Bens who are not you staring at you from photographs with your face, eyes dull and lifeless.
You wake up, middle of a clearing. It’s sunrise-light outside, your head pounds, the grass scratches at your calves. She seems to have grown tired of facing the world without the immediate gratification of the key. She’s given it back for you to navigate. The fabric of a skirt constricts your legs, a low cut blouse unflattering on your flat chest. You want to cover up, you feel the ever so slight elation at the concept of your body having breasts, but for now what you do is pull the shirt over your head and shed the mess by a tree. The skirt will have to do, what’s under is not appropriate to sport on the way home.
Someone weaves unsteadily through the trees towards the road in the distance, and your heart slips down to the pit that makes you as you clock the posture, the gestures.
The psych ward is filling with endless shells of your doing. The slayer is somewhere, mourning endlessly. Why has Glory left you here? A field that you navigate with stocking feet. Does she think the key is an anthill, a bug? Your arms itch—mosquitos. She may not like that.
Or she may not care. You’ve never met her. Often, you ask yourself if this is better. Once, long ago, you bled yourself into the bathroom sink. Yourselves. Your “you” and her “you” in the life you share, the body you both meld. You took a razor to your arms to see if she’d do it back, but the marks were gone the next time you remembered. A new fat orange prescription on your nightstand, Benjamin Wilkinson. No Glorificus. A squat figure peeking through the kitchen window while you sort through university acceptance letters. A late night walk back to the dorm from the library accompanied by bushes rustling. You used to be so, so afraid. Have you stopped? Have the meds worked? At all?
It’s hard. It’s her. It’s you. And you want to live, as yourself. But are you anyone without her? A voice nibbles at your being. Where will you go? Without her, where will you go?
The final time they wake up, they’re not entirely Ben, not entirely Glory. They’re another you, and their memories flutter, difficult to grasp. The slayer has let them live, them in a battered body, lying on their back and watching the sky above, stars doubling, tripling in their unsteady vision. Was it terrible to summon the Quell? Was it terrible to use Ben just to see if the spell would work, to see if his human family would notice? Was it terrible to fight back? The older British man squats in front of them, a soothing face, and when he smothers them there’s a split moment when they’ve finally balanced, before the oxygen takes the two of them away.