Chapter Text
It’s always been dreams, every night.
They play in a rotational clockwork every day of the week, so consistently that she could mark time with their passing. Flashes of things mostly— a million different dresses, a scythe, a jar of buttons, a burlap doll, a knife hewn from stone, a red bicycle, cigarettes. Things she’s owned in her past lives with significance stripped neatly away and only basal memory left. Some of the items she doesn’t have names for, and not even the internet can fill in the gaps.
Sometimes there is more. Sometimes she’s seeing life in a distant form, pantomiming the past without the stabilizing context of time and space.
When she’s twelve she remembers an old fashioned wind-up alarm clock, perched on a bedside table, blaring noise that was not of the world she knew. There were warm blankets wrapped around her and someone was knocking at her door, telling her to get up, get up, you’re going to be late for school again!
At age eight she spends the night splashing on a bright, hot beach with the other children of a little village by the sea. They’re all naked and sunburnt and blighted by sand rash and deliriously happy as they play games— chase and tag and tackle. A woman in an apron comes to the edge of the sand above her and says it’s time to come in love. She remembers what the words meant but she does not recognize the language they are in.
She’s not had to remember a death yet, and she’s grateful, but there is terror sometimes, and pain. These nights are hard. She remembers gaunt and starving. She knows many a wasted and dying little body. She can feel the phantom aches left behind from a paralyzed spine, immobile from the waste down, something incalculably heavy pinned on legs that she can no longer feel. She suffers through a night coughing apart her own lungs and another attempting to extricate her twisted arm from the wreck of some machine she can’t recognize in the morning. She dreams of a chamber packed so tightly with screaming, starved people and stewed so thick with suffering and anguish that she had woken up in a start, thrown up messily over the edge of her bed and choked back tears. She’d had to scrub the floor at three in the morning on a school day so that mom and dad wouldn’t see.
Often, it’s nothing she can put meaning to. Flashes of mundanity, cereal, tests. She was once a nurse, a warrior, a muse for a beautiful artist with equally stunning hands and lips. She doesn’t remember her past lives in detail but she feels the comforting weight of them even in her waking moments.
The best nights are the ones when she remembers love.
These dreams take so many more forms than the ones of torment do (she takes comfort in this, privately).
She’s been tucked in a million times, read to, bathed, sung to when her stomach hurt and she couldn’t go to sleep. She gets flashes of a man, proud, smiling at her as she accepted a diploma. She watches her mother of that lifetime, thin and dirty and tired, secretly slide food off of her own plate onto Lexa’s when she cries that she is still hungry. She remembers the faces of thousands of her friends; some she’s even met again over her existence, in one lifetime and then another. Hugs. Bonfires. Smiling faces. A cat or two sleeping contentedly on her lap.
Of course, she’s dreamed about other types of love, too.
When she’s fourteen she dreams that she’s running her palms tenderly down a warm, panting torso. She dreams that she’s tonguing a nipple and scraping her teeth along the swell of a breast while the girl above her writhes and moans out her name like it’s the answer to all of her prayers. One of her hands is twisted into blonde, sweaty hair, and she shifts her hips up just so and it’s earth-shattering and the girl is making sounds that travel straight through her nerves— until she wakes with a start, flushed and throbbing and new but she understands in the way that she sometimes just understands things, remembers without ever having to have experienced herself.
These dreams become more and more common as the years trudge on, always different situations and positions and outcomes, but there is one steady link. It’s almost always the same girl. She’s seen all of her, but rarely all at once—only parts (a freckle over her lip, three knuckles, the tip of her nose, knees, lower back). She does not know what this means.
At that point she’d started to figure out that she’s most likely completely and overwhelmingly gay, so the dreams are comforting in that aspect— she has been in her past lives, too, exclusively. It’s always girls, she’s always been a girl. She’s always a brunette with green eyes— the other is always a blonde with blue.
It is something essential to her sense of self, a sense of individuality that is sometimes hard for her to reconcile with the collective weight of her existences, and it is incredibly comforting.
And, to be blunt, educational.
Lexa has almost primarily been taught about straight sex and, even that had been just rudimental. How babies are made, how to stop boys from making one with you. She didn’t really know how two girls could be together, that they could have sex like men and women could. Her parents, she knew, found the whole idea disgusting and disagreeable and she would never even entertain the idea of asking them about anything sex-related, god forbid queer (she would like to be able to stay in her house until she finishes high school). She clears her cookies and search history with the devout intensity of someone hiding war secrets and since middle school has made up crushes on boys in her classes, but she lives for many years with the itching paranoia of being discovered every day.
It’s even harder, she thinks, having the knowledge that it has almost always been like this. There are only a handful of romances throughout her countless lives that have not ended in tragedy or heartbreak. She’s been institutionalized five times, jailed four, and has been left behind by her girl more times than she can remember. She has married many men, even, either out of fear or necessity, trying to shield herself from deeper wounds.
She’s been a coward so many times, forgoing truth for safety, saving lives by hardening her soul and preserving the parts of her that she cannot keep from staying soft. She’s learned these survivalist tactics over a thousand years of experience and it is hard to let go of them now.
This age is bright and new and hopeful, and people like her are safer than ever before, but she has not had the good fortune of being born into a family that believes in acceptance, into a town where she is not a pariah or a caricature. She lives in the United States, in the deep, emphysemic South, and she would never admit it but she is scared and restless. Here, she is just a teenage girl who loves flowers and walks and being able to be silent for entire days at a time.
Her confidence and bravery and leadership ability are not desirable traits and she learns from frequent tannings in elementary school to mute them as much as she can, to become softer, more invisible. A girl who remembers her place. Crosses her ankles and lets the boys run discussions, has a mouth that’s never known curses, hands that can cook and clean.
On good weeks she was able to go days at at time communicating with her parents through nothing other than polite smiles and nods, yes ma’am and no sir. If she’s lucky she can get through days of school with little more than hand gestures and smiles.
Speaking was unsafe— she was sure that they could tell there was something wrong with her, could sense her disdain and her sorrow, and she formed words as little as was possible.
She almost never answered questions in class though she had perfect grades, and she kept to herself as much as possible. The other kids are usually kind to her because she’s beautiful and unassuming and they think that this means she has a lack of confidence.
She doesn’t— she’s brave, powerful, intelligent, incredibly loyal. She’s strong. Not that it matters much. She has to store these things away, until they’re useful.
She knows that this would be different if she came out. They would not let her borrow pencils in class. They would not let her change in gym. She would not get asked to join groups in science. Her parents would punish her severely if she was lucky, consider her as good as dead if she wasn’t.
Lexa is lonely, isolated and sad, but this is not the worst. She is clean and rested and eats three meals a day. Her parents are hard on her, and their love feels fickle at best, but they don’t see her very often now that she’s busy with school. Most days can breathe.
She’s lived a majority of her lives with less than that, and she will not allow herself to suffer if she does not have to (she is not scared of pain, but she is not naive enough to take it’s absence for granted).
For this moment, in this lifetime, this is the Lexa she will be. Culled by swamp heat, soft as magnolia, a newspaper columnist, the quietest girl on the soccer team, pining for escape to college, screaming only into a pillow and shedding fugitive tears only under the pummeling heat of the shower stream.
/ / / / / / / / / / / / /
She’s so careful, so delicate in all action. It comes as a complete shock that she’s been found out.
That day Lexa comes in from the bus stop and she can feel the voided absence that’s been vacuumed into the heart of her home. The television (permanently on for as long as she can remember) is muted and cold. The indifference it’s screen projects, a wavered and distorted shape of Lexa across the blank screen, coats the bottom of her stomach in icy panic.
She doesn’t want to go looking for them but this all feels terribly beyond her control, like she’s just an actress running through a scene she’s already memorized. She knows where they’re going to be, where her family has always handled potentially devastating news, but she still feels the need to mechanically check each room as she walks past. Maybe in one of her hundreds of other realities this has gone differently, and they were out watching a movie. Or buying groceries. Getting the oil changed in the car.
She knows this isn’t true even as she goes through the motions. She’d resigned herself to the doomed nature of this lifetime many years ago.
Her parents are waiting for her, of course, at the dining room table, appearing calm as ever when she pokes her head in. They ask her to sit down and have a talk with them.
More specifically, her mother requests that ‘Alexandria’ come and speak with them. It makes her throat constrict in on itself, hard enough to ache and itch. She’s never been called that a day in her life. She’s always been Lexa to her parents, usually ‘darling’ or ‘honey’ in conversation. Alexandria is a new girl, a girl they seemed to have just met and are not very pleased with.
“Do you think we deserve your trust, Alexandria?” Her mother opens after a few terse moments of silence.
“Yes ma’am.” She replies, head lowered in what she hopes is a sign of submission. She feels like she’s going to throw up. A light sheen of sweat is popping up over her forehead and her upper lip but she can’t risk moving and betraying it’s existence. Nerves mean guilt. Guilt means swift retribution. Godlike wrath. Punishment the like of Sodom and Gomorra.
“Funny you think that. I used to, until I found out you’ve been a disgusting liar.” Her mother’s face is cold, stiff and emotionless like a set of nose and lips fashioned out of lunchmeat. Her father won’t even look at her.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
In that moment, before she can pass out from how lightheaded and sick she feels, Lexa experiences a strange and completely engulfing detachment. All of her dread, the queasiness in her stomach, the tremble in her lip and fingers, ceases. She feels like her body (a body that is hers, but at the same time is not) is thick and heavy and she thinks about moving it in an abstract way, like she’s feeling the contraction of someone else’s chest underneath her ear.
In a moment of breathless clarity, Lexa focuses over her own shoulder on the dust particles she can see swirling around her mother’s head, hit by the rays of light through the half-closed kitchen blinds. They tumble and dance around the still, unfeeling face.
As her mother starts to scream Lexa hears everything through her body’s ears and then through her own, slightly muted as though the sound was passing through glass. Her mother’s mouth moved wetly as she grew angrier and red. Lexa tried to tune into the words.
“—those nasty websites, completely unnatural, completely against God and everything we hold sacred. You just don’t have any shame, do you? How would you like it if I showed your father the sites you were on? Or the girls in your class? You think they’d like to know how you think of them like some pervert? You really fucked over your chances of having friends now, huh? Who wants to be around a sicko? How are you gonna get recommendations from your teachers next year once they know you’re sick, huh? Miss university big shot right? Well, you can bet your ass your father and I won’t be paying a fucking dime for you to run off to the city and throw it around to every dyke you come across, that’s for damn sure. I—“
She tunes out when she starts to feel her chest again, though she wishes she didn’t. It feels choked and hot, a furry disgusting animal settled comfortably onto her sternum. She flexes her fingers and feels the push of her fingernails into her palms. She knows that her head turns and her father is yelling now, too, and gesturing with a small black notebook. There is a name scrawled inside the front cover as he starts to flip through it and—ah, it belongs to Lexa Woods. She knows that’s her diary, the one she kept hidden inside her mattress because between it’s pages had been the only place in her life where she could safeguard her truth, her heart.
The same heart now being splayed out across the table, dissected messily, contents seeping out onto the neatly pressed table cloth.
She’s filtering back into her body slowly and sways a little on the spot at the intensity of her nausea, at the rabbit-like patter of her heart, the way her eyes are struggling to focus.
“—grounded indefinitely. You’re lucky we don’t put your ass on the curb for this, but your father still wants to spoil you even more. You start therapy on Saturday, and on Wednesdays and Fridays you’re going to youth group. We’re shutting off all data on your phone so calls only from this point on, and only to us.” Her mom paused, regarding Lexa full on for a moment. Her face was there but all traces of recognition were gone. Her eyes were flat.
“God, I can’t even look at you. Go upstairs, don’t come down until we’ve gone to bed.” She said, waving her hand dismissively.
Her father reached over and held his wife’s hands, comforting her. They leave without looking back.
Lexa’s stomach gives a lurch that sends her scrambling for the upstairs toilet. She messily empties herself out, tears and bile and way too much emotional pain to stuff down in twenty minutes. If she’s sobbing, hiccuping and stuttering when she isn’t breathing enough, she can’t hear it. She feels the pounding pressure in her head and temples as her body mourns. She’s crying but can’t feel tears on the softness of her overheated face.
She lays down on the cool tile floor and tries to remember one of her stories, strokes at her own hair and wraps herself up into her own arms (her mother hasn’t hugged her in years) until she can feel the embrace of her blonde girl everywhere and the pain subsides until it doesn’t, again and again.
/////////////////////////
She’s running her fingertips over your ribs so, so gently you’re scared your heart will shatter through them. Through her touch you can feel everything that has had to go unsaid between the two of you. You can feel all her love and intention with the light scrape of a fingernail along your scapula. The soft promise of ardor and affection when the tip of her pinky weaves between the notches of your spine. You make a small sound of contentment in the back of your throat and bury face further into her neck.
“You feel so thin. When’s the last time you ate a full meal, huh?” She breathes into your skin. You turn slightly and place a gentle kiss to the subtle divot of her chin.
“I’m eating fine, Clarke.”
“How often?”
“…”
“Lexa. How often?”
“Whenever I can,” you answer honestly. She frowns, tightening her grip around you as if the thought of empty plates threatens the soft, blank quiet the two of you had made sure was to be undisturbed tonight. You’re wrapped together in a pile of sheets and pillows pilfered from the rest of the house into her attic, a wood-grey and often drafty vaulted room bigger than your entire dorm at the orphanage.
You’ve known Clarke for little over a year now and you’ve never questioned the sincerity of her generousness. You don’t much like to dwell on where you would be and what you would be doing if Clarke hadn’t helped you one of the countless times she has in the past. Inviting you over for dinner as many times as could be appropriate in a week, sleepovers as frequently as possible, some of her nicest dresses passed into your hands because “It doesn’t fit right on me” or “I have so many already,” school supplies magically appearing in your bag whenever you thought you might be on the verge of going without, a pair of new shoes on every birthday. Even something as little as sneaking a bundle of sandwiches away from her cook when neither you or your friends had managed to eat lunch caught your heart in your throat as you struggled with the immensity of your affection.
You know from all of those times, and from ones like this, that you are in deeply in love with Clarke. You know from your dreams and your senses and the feeling in the back of your throat and in your blood that you have always been deeply in love with Clarke, as far back as things may go. As long as there have been people at the very least, and probably longer. You know she loves you too, though the two of you dare not speak the words unless privacy is assured.
It makes it more special, you think, the lack of words. When you say them they feel infinitely powerful, weighted down with the gravity of two pairs of hands, two spines, two beating hearts.
You don’t have to babble to each other like the other lovesick teenage couples you see, you don’t have to make eyes at one another in school or carry Clarke’s books or lend her your coat to let her know that you love her. The world wasn’t ready for your love— you know what happens to people like you if they get caught, you’ve seen what happens to people who get sent to asylums, and it haunts every kiss. The world wasn’t ready but that did not prevent you from being in love, hadn’t prevented the two of you from being together for a hundred lifetimes before this one.
For now this is enough. This swirling peace, the soothing weight of her naked from pressed into you, her soft breath against the delicate swirl of your collarbones. Tonight it can’t matter that you might be a bit too thin because you keep passing off your lunches and breakfasts to younger children. It doesn’t matter that you have no family, or that her father is only a few weeks buried in the ground. It doesn’t matter that the consequences of the door coming unlocked and someone walking in on the inexcusable state of your sated bodies would likely end the both of your lives as you know them and certainly end the time you would have to spend together in this life.
Tonight, Clarke’s nice dress and underthings are mixed together with your dingy secondhand ones across the floor. Tonight her mother is nursing her grief at some socialite function in midtown and is not expected home until early the next morning at earliest. Tonight her breath is the only thing you will be looking out for, her hand tangled in yours the greatest tether you feel.
//////////////////////
The therapy, if you can really call it that, is the hardest part for her. She constructed a sturdy and efficient wall of routine and caution surrounding this Saturday morning ritual.
Up at least two hours before her parents so that she could shower and change without the threat of meeting one of them in the hallway. She would put her usually untamed hair into a neat french braid, change into one of the tops her mother used to buy her for Christmas that she hated, pull on her most conservative pair of shorts or skirt, quietly find a book to read down in the loveseat while her parents moved about the house. They don’t speak to her unless it’s absolutely necessary anymore, and that is usually on Saturday mornings as they pack into the car for their drive to Lake Charles, for Lexa’s conversion therapy sessions.
She sits in the backseat with her hands folded politely in her lap, earbuds out because if her mother had to repeat herself Lexa might as well consider herself grounded from listening to music or reading anyways. Her mom will ask her if she’s keeping her grades up (she always is), if she’s made much progress in therapy (she never has but she always lies and says that the doctor thinks she is certainly working towards recovery).
“We have a group session after your individual, so don’t make yourself too comfortable,” her mother says to her this time. Their eyes catch in the rear-view mirror and she has to look away.
“Yes ma’am.”
“I expect to hear you’ve been making progress, like you’ve said. Because if the doctor says that you haven’t then that would be another lie on your part, Alexandria.”
“Yes ma’am,” Lexa says as she shifts her eyes into her lap, stomach flipping uncomfortably. She knows for a fact that she has not been making progress in her sessions with the good doctor. Every time so far has been the same; recounting some ‘deeply buried’ childhood trauma, discussing why she viewed boys in a sexually negative manner (“Did a young man reject you in middle school, Alexandria?”), dissecting her ‘unhealthy dependency’ on her mother from which stems her confusion in sexual attachment (“Do you feel that you have a focus on breasts?”). She answers honestly each time she is asked, because she cannot find it within her to lie after hundreds of lifetimes of dishonesty. No consequence seems worth it, in the long scheme of things.
It’s the right thing to do, but that doesn’t make today easier, and it won’t make tomorrow easier, or the day after that. It is hard. Her mother looks at her like a thing she desperately wants gone, like a roach or mold. Her father hasn’t spoken more than a few words to her, held prolonged eye contact with her, since the day they found out.
It’s hard.
Her session that day is long and Dr. Glass spends most of it attempting to explain ways through which she can learn to sever her unnatural psychological urges. Focusing on the positive qualities of the boys she knows. Attempting to connect her feelings for feminine traits to masculine ones. She tries her hardest and, as always, answers as honestly as possible, but every note the good doctor scribbles down feels like getting docked points on a project she didn’t have a rubric for.
“So, Lexa, let me switch direction here for a bit. How would you say your progress in therapy has been so far?”
She shifts in her seat a little, uncomfortable by this direct line of inquiry.
“Well, sir, I feel like I have been making progress every session.”
“Do you really?” His voice is smug on the edges, and it cuts at her.
“I…I do, I—“
It’s at that moment when her parents choose (though, really, this was probably set up long before) to make their entrance. They sit in the two chairs on either side of her, closing her in. The gesture is far from comforting, and she starts to feel the first tinges of panic settle onto her
breastbone.
“Lexa, your parents and I are concerned about the lack of success I’ve been observing throughout our time together. You seem, psychologically, resistant to all the methods of therapy that we know to work well in an outpatient setting. Now, I’ve been discussing some alternate treatments with your parents, and the three of us have come to the conclusion that cases like yours are best dealt with in an inpatient, intensive therapeutic environment.” He states pedantically, pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up his nose every few seconds in a sort of tic. She stares back at the expectant gazes on her for a few seconds.
“I don’t understand. Am I being committed to a hospital?”
“Not in a technical sense. It’s more of a…camp. You’ll get to have fun, make friends, relax a little, but you’ll also be benefitting from a few hours of therapy a day, on top of group sessions and camp exercises. The success rates of this camp are very high, and the facilities are top-notch. After spending your summer here I feel the benefits will be enormous. You could very feasibly walk away from this completely cured, or at the very least well on your way to a full recovery.”
Her parents are nodding seriously, after the doctor finishes speaking, and she’s geared up to ask more questions (because what the fuck does any of that even mean?) before her dad jumps in and starts asking about some discount that they’d been promised. Lexa, leaning back in her chair and disconnecting from the sounds around her a bit, realizes in an instant that she isn’t being asked if she wants to go— she’s just being given the information on where she will be going, as a sort of courtesy.
She doesn’t have time to process much.
It feels like she is still sitting down in that faux-leather office chair when she breathes and realizes she is already in the backseat of her father’s truck. He’s playing the gospel station so loudly you couldn’t speak over it if you tried. He’s having a quiet discussion with her mother in the front.
The drive home takes less than her few measured blinks (she’s watching them from outside again, breathes over the delicate freckles that dust her eyelids) and when they’ve pulled up into the driveway her mother turns half-way to tell her to start packing her bags, because she’s leaving tomorrow afternoon.
She sits on her bed for a long, long while, until there isn’t any sunlight left and her room is lit only by the streetlamp across the street, thinking nothing. She focuses on evening out her breathing until she’s lulled by the rhythmic stutter.
For the first time in her life Lexa falls into dreamless slumber.