Chapter Text
Sometimes Laurel wonders what her father would make of this new world. She thinks he got out, somehow, thinks he used a not insignificant amount of his staggering personal wealth to seek asylum in Cuba, the tables now ironically reversed and all the lazy, capitalist Americans fleeing across the straits to the socialist worker’s paradise. She hopes so. She may not like her father, maybe think he’s about a half step away from a monster, but Laurel loves him nonetheless, still, loves him even more now in the brave new world that somehow sprang up overnight, that crept up on them so slowly she didn’t notice until it was far too late, frogs in the pot.
Still though, she hopes her father made it out. The last she heard he was making a run for it, tried to convince her to come with him. He was always preternaturally good at sensing when the danger was coming, the direction it would come from, slip the noose just as it began to tighten. Laurel never had that skill, always waited that extra beat too long. She was shit at kickboxing, she was shit at getting the hell out of dodge.
But the one thing she’s always been good at, and she’s fairly certain she has her father to thank for that too, is surviving. She may not be able to avoid the hit, may not even have the strength to counterpunch, but she’s a damn good hand at making it out alive, at surviving to fight another day. Sometimes she wonders what her father would say about that, the things she’s had to do to survive this place, this nightmare world.
She imagines sometimes, imagines the kiss he’d place along her temple, imagine his rough whisper in her ear as he did, in Spanish of course, because fuck these gringos who think they’re saving the world, who think they’re serving their lord. I’m proud of you mija, she imagines he’d tell her because he started telling her that as soon as he sensed the first signs of danger, like he could feel in his bones the place where things were headed, sense the rumblings of the earth. I’m proud of you. You have seen all this before, righteous thugs with guns making demands of you. You survived them once, you will survive them again.
She imagines he doesn’t know the truth of course, the horrible truth, that this is far more than the wholesale kidnapping of an entire gender, an entire country. But even in her imaginings she can’t, won’t tell her father the truth. She can barely face it in her own mind. She had thought the kidnapping at sixteen was the worst thing that could happen to her, had just clenched her jaw and prepared for more of the same when the Eyes took her. It hadn’t been the same. She’d been foolish and naïve, underestimating these sniveling, terrified little men, the things they would do in the name of their god, the things they would do to never feel powerless again.
Laurel sometimes wonders if there’s some kind of objectivity to the world, if slavery is always worse than rape, if murdering someone is always worse than mutilating them. She has a lot of time to wonder now, a lot of time to sink down into the dark corners of her mind and contemplate the broken bits, sit there with split fingers and superglue, trying to fit things back together. Once she might’ve bought that line, that some crimes are objectively worse than others. Now she knows the truth, that each is horrible in its own way, each builds upon the last, growing and growing like a snowball, that each crime committed by these tiny, cowardly men with righteousness on their tongues a crime that can never be undone, be rectified.
Some wounds will never be healed.
She’s not sure, even if everything went back to the way it was, even if this was all just some horrible dream, whether she could even go back to life, to something approaching normalcy. Or, well, what normalcy was, once, back before. There’s a new normal now, one that still fits strangely around her shoulders, clothes just a fraction too tight. She’d feel strange now, she thinks, in any color other than red, feel strange to flip the worn edges of the pages of a book through her fingers, feel its old, solid weight in her hands, strange to type out an email, strange to see a coffee shop much less go into one alone. And that’s just the simple things, the little things. She’s not sure the big things would ever come back to her, that they wouldn’t forever feel like sandpaper against her skin, like an itch at the back of her neck she just couldn’t scratch. The idea of fucking anyone ever again, of wanting to, sends a shiver of nausea up her spine, the very thought of going back into a courthouse, of trying to argue the law, trying to argue for something like justice makes her shake with something cold and sharp like grief.
Laurel just doesn’t think she could do it, isn't sure she’d even want to try. Which is fine, because she’s never going to get the chance to find out. She expects some of the others probably think this is all just some strange, brief dream, that it’ll all be over soon, these fanatics ground into dust before everything goes back to the way it was before. The girls who think that, she suspects darkly, are all anglos, all girls who have lived in what was once the States their whole lives, their parents too, and grandparents. They’re all girls who no longer have the institutional, the genetic memory of the terrible things that can happen when men with guns in their hands and faith in their hearts decide they want to make a better world.
All empires fall of course, and this one will be no different, whether in a year or five or fifty or five hundred. All empires fall. Its what comes after for the people who survive the fall that Laurel cares about. She’s survived one fall, she intends to survive another if she can. And she intends to survive what comes after, whatever strange new empire is crafted in the place of this one, god’s glorious kingdom on a hill, if she’s so lucky as to outlast it.
She rather suspects she won’t be, the problem being that Americans, or the people that were Americans before they were told they were citizens of Gilead instead, for all their talk of fierce independence, of rugged individualism and whatever else they got taught in school, secretly trust in institutions, in the people in power who tell them everything is fine, everything is alright.
Yes, they had two civil wars, because technically, Laurel supposes, rebelling against England was a civil war, and now they’ve gone and had a third, and there was some ninety years between the first two and nearly double that before the third and Laurel isn’t too optimistic that this time the union, as it were, will prevail.
And what the hell can they rebel against anyway. They have no fucking weapons, they don’t even have any fucking pencils half of them, aren’t even allowed to socialize outside the watchful eyes of, well, the Eyes, beyond the sight of guards and mistresses and the other handmaids who want nothing more than to show that they’re loyal, that they’re good, that there’s nothing fucking to see here. No one wants to lose a hand, an eye, no one wants to be strung up from city hall and left to rot in the sun and everyone is willing to backstab and betray to avoid it. And Laurel, Laurel’s not so sure anymore it wouldn’t just be easier. Because this, this is no way to live.
But its life, isn’t it, and she’s still not entirely convinced death would be preferable, not entirely convinced its not the coward’s way out and she can still hear her father's voice, low and deadly in her ear telling her that she’s his daughter and she’s strong and she’s a survivor and she’s made it through worse. She tells herself these men are cruel, these men are full of righteousness and their god’s terrible love but they are still just little boys playing soldiers, playing at being king. They are still men just like all other men. And Laurel, well, Laurel’s met men and she’s met true monsters, may even be a monster herself, and she’s survived them, survived them all. She will survive this too.