Chapter 1: Romulus
Chapter Text
It’s colder than usual, thinks Simone Abara, eyes unopened and limbs clumsy as her hands rustle thrown-off sheets. The East Coast winter moves slowly, stopping whenever you look, until it’s close enough to slip shards of ice between your collarbones and slide them into the chambers of your heart. Simone fumbles, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table, the window cracked, the sound of a branch scraping against glass indistinguishable from that of dirt-coated fingernails. Moonlight and skyscrapers force their way into the unlit room. Motes of dust float visibly in the air. The sound of mumbling, low and barely detectable, reaches under Simone’s eyes and flutters them open, blinking in the dim, too-early light.
Simone turns around, half-covered by a sheet, the comforter thrown on the ground by someone else’s hands, and sees her wife hunched awkwardly on her reading armchair, staring her dead in the face.
Her eyes are suspicious, confused, violent. Her hair juts in ten directions at once, giving her the appearance of a headdress, of horns, of ears perked at alarm. She tears with manicured nails at the arm of her chair and sways side to side, gaze steady and unflinching. She’s posed like an animal, but a scared one, the difference between predator and prey fuzzing at the edges of her face, her carved jaw, her nose. Moonlight glows on her teeth when she bares them like an ape.
Simone flinches. Gathers the disarrayed sheets around herself, unsure what she’s even afraid of. Taissa is distant. Taissa never talks about high school, about the woods, about anything before she got to Columbia. Taissa can’t go on planes and sometimes throws up after she eats meat and sometimes her hands shake and her eyes go wide when a dog barks at her. Taissa curls up in her arms and cries late at night, unable to speak. Taissa perches on a chair and stares at her like she’s cataloging the places where the seams of her muscles connect, where she could sever them with a sharp knife and pull them apart from one another, glistening, dripping with life.
“Taissa?” She’s having one of her nightmares again. She’s back to the place she won’t tell Simone anything about, the shards of bone and memory she keeps locked inside herself, that only come out when she stares into an open flame and her eyes go out of focus.
“Not my name,” her wife mumbles, voice jagged like a femur split open so the marrow can be sucked out. Her voice is deeper, angrier. Her upper-class New Jersey lilt is gone. Simone blinks, trying to parse out the differences. Her wife doesn’t act like this. Doesn’t say things like this, even in the dreams she won’t talk about afterwards. The ones where she screams another woman’s name, the sound quivering like she’s afraid it will be snuffed out, like she’s already anticipating the darkness and kicking sand over the flame so she won’t have to watch it wither and die. “Not her. ”
“Tai, do you-are you alright? Do you want me to hold you?”
“ Not my name,” her wife snarls, teeth bared and shining, lips pulled, the canines gleaming in between slivers of moonlight. She slinks off the bed, uncoordinated, less like a predator and more like a creature still bearing its egg-tooth, just hatched and unsteady on its feet. “Not her. Don't know who. Who you are.”
Simone shudders, shuffles away from her wife until she teeters on the edge of the bed, bracing one hand against a wall. Taiss is tall and swift, built for running through the woods, though the way she hunches, leaned forward like a sprinter, eyes hungry and wild like she’s more fit for hunting, chasing until she can lock her jaws around an animal’s spine and shake until its brain dies in panic.
Simone holds her hand in front of her like she’s ordering a dog, scrambling out of her–their–bed, eyes flicking between the shadowed, angular form of her wife and the door, cracked open in front of their bed.
Taissa stands still, hunched, her clothes torn off like they were restraints, like she didn’t remember putting them on before she went to sleep. She tilts her head side to side as if she was a wolf investigating an animal to see if it’d be worth the energy to kill.
“Who are you?” she asks, a genuine confusion precluding threat or performance. “Not Van. Don’t like that. Why are you here? Shouldn’t be.”
“I don’t know,” Simone breathes, every little twitch of her legs watched, panic barely suppressed and heart pumping like a rabbit once it notices it’s being stalked. Her muscles flex, her mind trying to guess how fast Taissa could tackle her, if she wanted to. If Simone gave her a reason to.
“Who are you?” Taissa repeats, still jagged and violent but frightened at the same time, uncertain, like someone who’s walked in on something she wasn’t supposed to see.
“You don’t know?” Simone says. Her wife doesn’t answer, just cocks her head and steps closer, until her knees knock into the mattress. Taissa wraps her arms around herself, hands twitching, eyes unblinking but scared and coiling into something desperate and wolfish.
“Not Van,” Taissa mumbles, poking at the spot her body takes up on the bed, an indent in the foam, curled around Simone every night. “That's bad. Should be Van. Not you. Don’t know who you are.”
“Taissa, step–step away, please, you’re scaring me.”
“Not. Her.” The thing growled, reaching over the bed. Simone screamed, loud and shrill like she did during horror movies, the ones Taissa would pick because it meant she got to hold her wife and press kisses to her hair and pretend not to laugh at her timidity. She scrambled away, desperate, moving clumsy, as if trying to move through tar. Pulling the door open, she slammed it shut, the noise resounding through the dark halls of their home. Taissa didn’t chase, didn’t pounce like a wolf on her defenseless deer of a wife. She stood on the other side, still leaning against the bed. The lock clicked. Simone panicked for a chair, pulling a seat from the bedroom that they had planned for a child to inhabit one day and bracing it under the knob.
Simone stumbled down the stairs, tripped onto an old couch in their living room, curled onto her side, and began to cry, the adrenaline or the fear or the terror of a ghost from some shadowy, far-off past who knew Taissa’s old friends possessing her body and using her as a puppet.
From upstairs, the sound of scratching at the door crept into the room and shuddered its way into Simone’s heart, petrifying her spine and dousing her in cold as if she, too, was huddling in a tent in a Canadian winter. Scratching, like a dog trying to get its owner to let it inside the house.
Simone felt her body shaking uncontrollably, from her hands to her knees. She curled around herself, cold and crying on a couch in the middle of the night. The winter slid its spines into her arms and legs, wind billowing against the walls and carrying a chill even through wood and stone and brick.
She panted, her hands quivering as she held them against her face. The tears came uncontrolled, maybe from fear, maybe from a semblance of stolen safety, taken at the cost of her wife locked in their room like an animal in a cage.
“Taissa, Tai, what the fuck–what the fuck?” She warbled to the winter air, not sure who she was asking–the woman she married or the creature which crawled into the cracks she never mended and fitted itself beneath her skin, simmering and writhing. There was no one else in the house, no one she could call–she didn’t even know what time it was–who would get there, who could talk Taissa–whatever she was under the scars and the fear and the pathological need to always make sure she had enough food for the next few days–down from this, whatever it was. She couldn’t call the police on her own wife, let them wrestle her into submission while the creature bit and tore like a wolf with its leg caught in the teeth of a trap.
There was–there was one thing, maybe. Something Taissa would hate her for, the next time she woke up as herself. Something she wasn’t even sure she could survive, if she tried. Simone knew where she kept the safe. Knew what was in it, had seen Taissa updating it every few years, spending hours combing through court documents and census records and online remnants trying to piece together the lives of the people she had come out of hell with. Simone knew some of their names: Shauna and Jackie, from an invitation to a wedding Taissa had sent a gift to and stayed home. Natalie, from the receipts of a rehab that Taissa had paid for without hesitation. Akilah, from the return address of a few packages containing things that Taissa wouldn’t tell her about. Laura Lee, from an occasional letter or two from a convent, mentioning a Lottie who Taissa didn’t talk about, because Taissa didn’t talk about anyone she had known in the past.
And Vanessa Palmer, the name at the top of the list. The one Taissa begged for in her nightmares, whose name she had once moaned during their first, awkward forays. The one off the serrated tongue of the ghost which lived in the hollow pockets of Taissa’s bones.
The list had addresses, for all of them. For Vanessa, it had a phone number, repeatedly crossed out and rewritten.
Simone made her to their basement in something akin to a daze, swaying on her feet and not bothering to turn on the lights. Her feet met the steps as if it were their first time walking on anything but soft grass, stumbling and heavy.
The code to the safe was written on a sticky note slapped on its side, because it was tucked away in a dark corner of downstairs and there was no one who wasn’t Taissa or Simone who would have known to pick it out amongst the boxes of Columbia memorabilia, old clothes and law journals, bloodstained soccer equipment and dog toys.
Simone opened the safe, took out the paper containing all that she knew of her wife’s life before she had met her. Shambled upstairs to find their house phone. Dialed absentmindedly, waited minute after minute before the sound of a line being picked up.
“Tai, if this is anyone other than you, you better have a very fucking good reason for giving out this number,” came the deep, gravelly, slightly feminine voice over the line. Simone had never heard her voice before.
“It’s me,” she said, the words thicker than she had thought, effortful to force past her lips.
“Going to need to get a lot more specific about that, sweetheart.”
“I–I’’m Taissa’s–Taissa’s wife, I’m really, fuck–I’m really sorry for calling, I didn’t know anything else to do, I don’t have anything else to go on, It’s just–”
“Christ, slow down, Turner. Just–It’s three in the morning, what the fuck could you possibly want?”
“Taissa isn't herself,” she choked out, the tears creeping their way back behind her eyes, threatening to loose themselves at the slightest fault or fissure. “I woke up, and she was–was acting weird, talking strangely, I thought–I thought you might know.”
“Wait, talking how? Be–be less vague, Jesus.”
“I don’t know,” Simone whispered, voice beginning to waver from keeping back sobs. “She wasn’t making sense, talking almost like a baby–like she was a different person. She kept saying your name.”
The line crackled as a low-pitched, panicked laugh rolled over her.
“Fucking hell, Turner, I bet you’ve made an absolutely horseshit first impression. I’ll–I can come, If you want. She’s–I can deal with it.”
“Please,” Simone gasped.
“I’m in New York, it’ll be, maybe an hour or so. Do you have any meat?”
“Yes, why? Taissa–Taissa only eats it sometimes.”
“Not important right now. You’re still in the same place I think you are, right?”
“Probably.”
The line switched dead before she finished getting the word out, and Simone shuddered and stopped trying to hold back the sobs. Her lungs quivered in her chest, as if barely able to force enough sorrow and fear and pent-up frustration out of her chest, as if she was a pipeline with a crack in it, pressurized to the point of combustion. She slid down against the door of their fridge, sat on the tiled floor, and cried, the sound of patient, confused scratching inescapable in the air.
An hour and forty-five minutes later–though the time blended together in the cold and the hurt and the sound of scratching at the bedroom door–Simone heard someone in boots stepping up to the porch.
Simone pulled herself up, unsteady, and shuffled towards the door. She heard a sorrowful, almost agonized whine from upstairs, chilling her to a stop and jolting her heart rate for nearly a minute before she began moving again.
The door was pulled open, and a woman a few inches shorter than Taissa stood illuminated in orange porchlight. Her hair was red, curly by nature, cut just below her square jaw. Bags drooped heavy under her eyes, and one side of her face was covered in a pockmarked web of scar tissue which kept her perpetually frowning on one corner of her mouth. She wore a rumpled shirt dotted with work stains, a thick jacket, leather boots.
“Hello,” Simone said, dumbly, because she couldn’t think of anything else. The woman–Vanessa–gently pushed past her and into the house. For a few moments, she stood there, casting her eyes over Simone’s life as if suspicious.
“Nice house,” she finally said. Her voice was rough, but not unkind, like a grandfather who swore and smoked, but who bought you ice cream and ruffled your hair and taught you how to fish. “Where is she?”
“I–I locked her in our bedroom,” Simone mumbled. Vanessa tilted her head ever so slightly, as if impressed.
“Damn, Turner. Alright. You said you had meat, right? Any leftovers?”
“Sure, let me–let me get them.”
Simone stumbled through the house she had lived in for years, suddenly forgetting whether the furniture was, where the carpet ended and tile began. Stir fry from the previous Tuesday, saved in a clear plastic container. She took a fork from a cabinet, walked back on shaking legs, held the two objects out to Vanessa like she was offering her a gun, or a feral animal.
Van gave her an awkward smile, cradling the food in her hands. She gestured her head towards the upstairs, the room with the chair slammed against the door. Simone nodded, and began following her up the stairs.
“Why–why the meat?”
“She gets hungry when she wakes up,” said Van, not looking back towards her as she rounded the top of the steps. “And she’s not that scary, really,” she paused, turning her head. “If she likes you.”
Simone didn’t answer, just curled her arms around herself and followed, dejected and frightened. Van stepped towards the door, hesitating with a shaking hand a few inches from the knob. She swallowed, heavy, breathed hard. Stood up straighter, like she was meeting someone’s parents for the first time.
She kicked the chair away, unlocked the door, and opened it. Simone looked over her shoulder, shielding herself behind her.
“Van?” the ghost said, its low voice shaky, disbelieving. Like it was seeing things. “Van! Van,”
“Hey, Issa,” said Van, a sad, tired smile on the half of her face that could still manage it. “Are you feeling alright, baby?”
“ No,” the ghost said, rushing towards Van with a speed Simone had rarely seen before. “Woke up bad. You weren’t there.”
“I know, I know, honey. Issa, are you hungry? I have food.” Van spoke softly, affectionately, less like handling a beast and more like gentling a lover. She had an almost sorrowful, warm expression on her face.
“Always.”
“I know, Hungry One, it’s alright.” Taissa’s body took the food quickly, almost too fast for a reaction, and shuffled onto the bed, hunched over and devouring it as expeditiously as possible, without manner or constraint. When the container was licked clean and its fingers were sticky with sauce and juice, the creature looked up, yearning.
“Van,” it said, sadly. “You weren’t here.”
“I’m sorry, baby, I can’t always be there. Taissa doesn’t have time to spend with me anymore.
“She should,” the creature said sharply, looking back at Simone, guarded, disapproving. “Stay with you. You’re safe. You know her. Us. not like her. She doesn’t know any of it. Can’t protect us.”
“Taissa likes her,” Van said, chiddingly. “She wants to stay with her, you can’t take that away. That would be Bad, Issa. I’m glad you didn’t hurt her.”
“I thought about it,” said the creature, as innocently and casually as if discussing the weather. “But you said no more hurting people. And no more bad food.”
“Good girl, Issa. I want you to apologize to her later, though. You scared her.”
“Deserved it.”
“No one does, Issa.”
“Hmm. Fine, ” the creature said, rolling its eyes, an overdramatic shrug of the shoulders. “If you want,” and then, more pleadingly, “If you stay.”
“I will, Issa. I promise I’ll be there the next time you wake up, alright?”
The creature reached its arms out towards Van, frowned. “Fine. You’re too far away.”
Van sighed, smiled with a warmth and affection that Simone couldn’t find it within herself to understand.
“Alright, Issa. I’ll hold you if you’ll go to sleep, alright? I’ll be here next time.”
The creature nodded, opened its arms more. Van stepped forward and crawled onto the bed, wrapped her arms around Taissa’s body, the wild, feral thing which took her over. She looked so small like that, Simone thought. Scared, almost starved. Not quite like a child, but like a woman who needed to be cared for. Van pressed her lips against Taissa’s hair, and Simone, strangely, found herself almost jealous.
The creature stilled, curled itself so tightly against Van that it was almost difficult to discern where one body ended and the other began. Eventually, with Van carding her callused fingers through its hair, the creature’s eyes fluttered shut, and it seemed to drift off to sleep as easy, as peaceful as a butterfly.
Van kissed its head again, carried it to lay it’s body down on the mattress and pulled the strewn covers over it. Van smiled down at it, kindly and loving, and then turned back towards Simone, leaning nearly shocked still against the door frame.
“She’s asleep,” Van said, stepping out of the room and back onto the wood floor of the upper hallways. “Handled, for now.”
“Are you going to explain any of that?” Simone blurted, unable to keep it in, stunned by the strangeness, the unwarranted, uncanny horror of the entire situation.
“In a fucking minute, maybe.” Van sighed, closed the door, braced herself against the railing. “Do you have alcohol?”
“Yes, it’s–it’s just in the fridge.”
“Jesus, thanks.”
The two of them made a meandering, awkward walk downstairs. Simone got two glasses, poured them both two-thirds full from a bottle of whiskey Taissa had gotten her as a gift the past week. They sat on opposite sides of the couch, sipping in strained silence, neither sure how to bridge the gap of tension that came from both an unbalanced knowledge of Taissa’s past and the mundane discomfort of interacting with your wife’s ex-girlfriend.
“Her name is Issa,” Van said, casually, like she was talking about a mutual friend of theirs–though, perhaps, she was. "She came out in the woods, eventually whenever Tai slept. She’s…blunt, and maybe a bit feral, but she’s just a person. It’s a psychological thing, I’m sure. Something to insulate Tai from what we did, what happened to us. But she exists, and if she’s treated properly, she–she doesn’t impact Tai’s life, even if Tai is uncomfortable with her. She’s honestly quite sweet, if you get to know her.”
“What–what is there to insulate from?” Simone knew it wasn’t her question to ask, knew the answer from the scars across Van’s face, but a deep, morbid part of her wanted to know, no matter how horrible it was. No matter what had happened.
“Jesus, honey, you’d have to get me a lot more drunk for me to start spilling to you about that. Maybe–maybe later. Fuck, Tai’s going to be so pissed at me in the morning.”
“L-later?” Simon stared at her, almost dumbfounded. Van raised an eyebrow, gesturing with her glass.
“Yeah, what did you think I was going to do? Leave her here with you? You locked her up, for Christ’s sake. She’s not unreasonable.”
“She didn’t seem reasonable.”
“She’s confused,” said Van, sitting up, suddenly startlingly serious. “And frightened. She exists in spans of time sometimes months– years , now–apart from each other. She has no control over where she goes, what happens to her. Her only memories are of the woods and then in periods of constant, overwhelming change. She woke up in a room she didn’t recognize in clothes she didn’t recognize with someone she didn’t know and she was scared. Fucking think about it, Turner.”
“Jesus–it’s just–fine,” Simone surrendered, taking a last sip of her whiskey and coiling her arms around her shoulders. “She scared me, too.”
“I know,” Van said, mildly more sympathetic than Simone expected. “She…has difficulties in understanding, being a person. She survives on instinct. The–the first time I met her, she ran up into a tree and got me mauled by wolves so bad Tai and the others tried to cremate me. She’s–she’s never exactly processed that–both of them, really.”
Simone shuddered, but drank in the knowledge–a drop of information, of understanding, perhaps the most concrete thing that she could now say she knew about her wife, about the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
“Why did she ask for you?” Simone said–it was strange, talking about her like a person, not like a creature who stole her wife’s body and stalked in the night.
“I don’t know,” Van said, shrugging. “It’s been a long time, I guess. Her last memory must be of me–me and Tai.” Together was left unsaid. When Taissa loved me, instead of you was left unsaid. Because I understand this part of her, the dark, violent, innocent part which protects the rest with its own sanity, born out of suffering and starvation and incessant hunger, because I know more about her than you ever will, and just because she doesn’t love me, doesn’t mean I don’t still know her was left unsaid.
Simone nodded, lolled her head back against the cushion. “You–you can stay, for now, if–if she’s going to keep coming back. I don’t–I don’t I could have done that.”
“Because you don’t understand her, yet.” Van said, not accusatory, but factual. “She’ll come back. Taissa will wake up in the morning, and we can talk.”
“About this? About what happened?”
Van frowned, looked uncomfortable. Shifted in her seat, took another drink. “You need to know, if you’re going to spend any time with Issa–without me there. It–it’s not pretty. It’s horrible. You’re not going to want to hear it, and you’re going to hate us, and you’re going to hate Taissa. You’re going to think we’re disgusting, because we probably are, and hopefully you can still love her after. Both of them. Someone has to.”
“Is it that bad?”
Van smiled, a charming, handsome, infinitely aching smile. “It’s worse.”
Chapter 2: Remus
Summary:
Van and Taissa argue, Taissa briefly opens up, and omens of things to come.
Notes:
What's up folks, we are so back. I promise I'll get to Dirt-Eater sometime. Hopefully tomorrow. We'll see, though. Just some notes
-Since Simone doesn't get a lot of individual characterization or backstory, I feel justified in making shit up. Also it's fanfiction.
-I don't actually remember what the layout of the Turner house is like, so I'm winging it.
-I see most fics with post-rescue Van focus mostly on the video rental store stuff, and while that's all well and good, personally I think she would go to trade school.
-I'm not sure it's ever stated what university Simone works at, but they live in New Jersey, so I'm just going to pick Rutgers for convenience.
-Is Issa/Other Taissa supposed to be evocative of Dissociative Identity Disorder? I can't really say, honestly. While she does fit some metrics-she appears after an intensely traumatic event and ostensibly exists to insulate Taissa from her trauma, but she's also chock full of woods symbolism and other stuff. While my understanding of DID is fairly rudimentary, I don't believe that alters are usually as dramatically distanced from their core personality as Issa is from Tai. I'm also fairly certain they generally don't act in such a conspicuous fashion as Other Taissa is shown to do in the show. While I could be wrong about my psychological assessments, I do not believe that Other Taissa is meant to be a genuine depiction of DID as it functions in a psychological context, rather a pop-culture understanding of the concept of a split personality, even if that isn't very accurate. My best guess is that she's powered by wilderness magic, and is not a psychiatric phenomenon.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Simone Abara wakes up and experiences a brief, silly rush of relief when she realizes that no one is staring at her like she’s a wounded animal. The two of them are laid out on opposite sides of a couch in her living room, sleeping with throw pillows and old blankets–one of which, rather unfortunately, is decorated with Wiskayok High varsity lettering. When she blinks awake, Vanessa Palmer is still asleep, looking almost peaceful. Both are in their clothes from the previous night–Simone in old college merch pajamas and Van in worn, tough mechanic’s clothes. The leather work boots have been graciously placed on the floor next to them, at least.
Without the panic of the wild, hungry thing– Issa– appearing in her wife’s body clouding her perception and judgement, Simone finds herself staring at the woman sleeping across the room from her. The scars on her face are rough and jagged–the half that isn’t displaying old burns is marred by a wound which must have nearly torn her cheek to pieces. They’re old now, and lesser marks would have faded, but hers seem to have clung to her features almost angrily, desperately. Her hair curls itself into tight ringlets, falling just above her shoulders. The parts of her lips not broken by scar tissue look full, perhaps even soft, if she were to be poetic about it, but they’re chapped and clearly not well taken care of. Her clothes–thick pants, a dark hoodie with Palmer Auto Repairs emblazoned on the breast. A jacket, left on the armrest for comfort. For a short moment, Simone thinks about what her wife must have seen in her, fifteen years ago. What her life was like, stuck in a small town, trying to keep herself a secret, even after a plane crash.
She pulls herself away from the thought and considers the profound, spectacular absurdity of her situation–she has slept next to her wife’s ex-girlfriend after calling her to her house at three in the morning because the woman she married developed some sort of psychological split when she was lost in the woods, never told her about it, and apparently suppressed it for a decade and a half until something broke. It is positively the strangest, most unpleasant thing to have ever happened to her. Yet, she has learned more about Taissa Turner in the past few hours of time spent with Vanessa and the ghost from the woods than from four years of being married to her.
Spiraling faster now, she paces around the room quietly, trying not to wake the sleeping woman beside her. It’s monday. It’s ten in the morning on a monday. Her first class started half an hour ago. She hasn’t missed a day of work in two years. She does not have a teaching assistant to cover for her. The rest of her department probably thinks she’s dead. There is absolutely no way she can explain any of this to her students or her colleagues. She panics for approximately five minutes–keeping extremely close watch on the time now–before she builds up enough anxiety to half-run to her office and send an email to her students. Family emergency , she explains. She’ll need a few days to get things sorted out. She cancels all of her classes for the week and sends a second, much more apologetic and equally vague message to her faculty chair asking for leniency. Citing mental health reasons severe enough to warrant sympathy but unclear enough to not draw much attention. At least she has tenure.
Simone closes her computer and once again remembers it’s ten in the morning on a monday. Walks to the kitchen and tries to busy herself with making some sort of breakfast for the two–now apparently three–of them. Academia and normal housework–these are things she knows how to do, things she shares with her wife. She wonders, morbidly, if she’s ever going to be able to look at Taissa again without questioning who it is underneath her skin.
Manually stops thinking about it. Fries eggs in a pan, cooks toast with the bread they made together last week, cuts apples and peaches into slices. As she prepares the coffee, somehow managing to get Taissa’s needlessly fancy espresso machine to work, she hears a soft groan coming from the living room behind her. Vanessa Palmer sits up, rubs her eyes unceremoniously. Blinks a few times, perhaps processing where she is, before her eyes move to Simone.
“Good morning,” Simone says, because she isn’t sure what else to do. Van sleepily lifts herself off the couch and laces her boots on.
“Morning,” she replies. Her voice is rough, warm, and edged with sleep. “Shit, is any of that for me?”
“Well, yes–I mean, you are in my house,” Simone sputters. Jolts a little when she almost drops the pan she’s holding. “Did you think I was just going to kick you out?”
“Well, kind of.” Van shrugs, moving around the couch and sitting at the island in the middle of the kitchen. She slumps onto her hands slightly, leaning forward. “Do you want help?”
“No, just–just sit.”
Van nods her head, sits there and waits patiently while Simone cooks. She doesn’t say anything, just watches out of the corner of her eye. For several minutes, they exist in silence, carefully darting around each other, like two parallel streams that will at some point converge at the same point of connection.
“Aren’t you a professor?” Van says casually. She spins a steak knife in her fingers and looks up at Simone, waiting for a response. Simone feels the sort of anxiety she gets when talking to more experienced academics than her–like she’s being sized up, analyzed for any flaw in character or credentials, except this is less like an uncomfortable convention networking talk and more like having slices of herself cut away so Vanessa can look at what’s inside.
“Yes,” she says, trying to keep the nervousness from pushing itself out of her mouth. “English literature. Rutgers. How did you know?”
“I got an invitation to your wedding a few years ago,” Van says, spearing a piece of peach with her knife and eating it off the point. “It had a little biography on it.”
Simone makes a superhuman effort to not falter visibly and fails on all counts. She hadn’t gone, both of them know. A vague memory of a few of Taissa’s old friends making it resurfaces–a woman with brown hair and intimidating eyes, a blond woman dressed like she lived in a convent being dragged along by a tall, dark-eyed woman in a suit, a man a few years older than Taissa with a prosthetic leg under his dress pants. No Vanessa Palmer. Simone hadn’t even realized she’d been invited, nor did she send anything.
The two of them both jolt their heads in the direction of upstairs when the creak of a bedroom door opening sounds throughout the room. Taissa Turner, pajamas and hair rumpled and unkempt, steps out and down the stairs, rubbing her eyes. “Honey?” She asks, blinking the sleep away. Her voice is soft and drowsy and beautiful and unmistakably her, and Simone nearly swoons. “Where are y-”
Her gaze slides past Simone and onto the figure of Van sitting at her counter and eating slices of peach, and she stumbles so hard she falls the rest of the way down the stairs.
Simone rushes to her side, taking her by the shoulders and lifting her up, aiding her to stand. Taissa looks at her warmly for all of a second before her eyes lock onto Vanessa, dumbstruck.
“Van?” She asks. “What are you doing? Why are you– what?”
“Oh, nothing,” Van says. She eats enough peach, but her spine has gone rigid and her eyes wide, and she looks just about as lost and rudderless as Taissa. Her voice has gone hard and guarded, carefully sharpened over years and years. “Just dealing with the consequences of your actions.”
“Vanessa Palmer, if you do not tell me why you are in my fucking house , I swear to God I will–”
“Your wife called me, Turner. Don’t fucking call me that, Tai.”
“That is not an explanation–”
“Issa woke up,” Van says with cold finality. Her hands are nearly shaking, incensed, though Simone would be hard pressed to say if it’s on Issa’s behalf or hers. “Tai, you never fucking told her about this? I thought you were smarter than that.”
“You do not know me, Vanessa.”
“I do, actually.” Van is audibly furious now, slipping out of her seat and waving her hands wildly. “I just thought you weren’t such a fucking stubborn idiot anymore–”
“That is rich coming from you, Palmer.”
“Taissa, do not start with me, you’re in deep enough shit already–”
“Van, would you please put the knife down?” Simone breaks in, entirely unsure of what to do. She’s stepped away from her wife, standing behind the island and watching the two of them stare each other in the eyes, tension thick in the air, waiting to be cut, like the throat of a deer’s corpse.
Or that of a human being.
Van flicks her eyes toward her, grimaces apologetically, and sets the knife onto the counter.
“Fine. Fine,” She says, eyes not wavering from Taissa. “I’m leaving. I can’t fucking believe you, Tai, honestly. Communicate for once in your damn life. Shauna could do better than this.”
The two of them stand and watch as Van swivels around, marches to the door, and pulls it open roughly. “I have a business to run,” she says, and then, looking at Simone, “Call me when you need me.”
She slips out the front door and slams it shut, and is gone.
It only takes a moment after for Taissa to burst into tears.
Simone puts an arm around her wife’s shoulders, gently guides her to sit on the couch. Taissa’s body is wracked with heaving, thick sobs, her entire form shaking with each hacking breath. Simone pulls her into her arms, holds her tight, rocks her back and forth. She’s never seen her like this before once in all their life together–Taissa barely even cries, most of the time. This is something much more intense–a pent-up, deep-set anguish that overtakes her entirely like another vengeful ghost from the past. She clings to Simone as if she’s the only thing keeping her from falling over the edge of a cliff, lost in the mist to be turned into a bloody splatter on the rocks. Everything inside her breaks to see her wife like this: completely shattered by pain a decade old, wounds closed over but never healed. Taissa cries for what feels like hours, until her voice goes hoarse from sobbing and all that she can let out is painful, haggard whimpers. Simone holds her to her chest as closely as she can manage, cards her fingers softly through her hair. She leaves Taissa only for half a minute, filling a glass with water and gently tipping it against her lips for her to drink. Taissa gulps it down like she’s dying of thirst, and for a moment it reminds Simone of a wolf licking rapidly at a bleeding wound.
Taissa eventually goes silent in her arms, and Simone leans back against the cushions, keeping her in an embrace for a long period of time. She seems so small, so vulnerable and breakable, almost as shy and porcelain as the previous night. They aren’t so dissimilar to one another, and the thought scares Simone.
“I’m sorry,” says Taissa, in a hoarse, tired whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Tai, no, sweetheart, it’s okay. You’re okay, I promise.”
Taissa buries her face deeper into Simone’s shoulder, and though she has run out of tears, her body still shakes slightly.
“My fault,” she continues, weak and apologetic. “All of this is my fault.”
“Honey, look at me? I promise it’s going to be alright.”
Taissa extricates herself and looks up, and it’s the worst Simone has ever seen her. Her hair is unkempt beyond intense effort, her face is puffy and streaked with tears. She looks lost, unmoored, her leg caught in the teeth of a trap.
“Did I hurt you?” Taissa whispers, shrinking in on herself. Simone is unsure whether she seems ashamed or terrified or self-loathing, though she can gather it may be all three.
“No, no, baby. You weren’t even scary, I promise.” She doesn’t know why she lies other than to comfort her, and she knows that if Taissa thought she was dangerous to her, she would go to extremes to prevent that from happening.
“I’m sorry,” Taissa repeats, slumping against her. “I don’t know why I never told you–I’m sorry.”
“I understand, honey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” She doesn’t, honestly, though she thinks Taissa might think so little of herself to believe that the whole of her isn’t capable or worthy of being loved, that for others to care for her she must shear away parts of herself until she is tolerable and easy to get along with and bleeding from a hundred deep, old wounds. That she really is a monster, like she thinks she is.
“It’s not,” Taissa quivers in her arms. “It’s not. It’s not. She could’ve–I could’ve done anything–she doesn’t like strangers, I–we–get scared so easily, and she wouldn’t think to talk first, she’s not complicated or experienced enough for that, she would do whatever comes to her–us–first, she–she could’ve killed you.” Taissa babbles, her chest shaking as if she’s about to begin crying again. Simone pulls her close once more, kisses the top of her head.
“She didn’t.” Simone talks just in the hope of calming her down, giving her the smallest drop of comfort. “She didn’t, you didn't, you're okay. You’re okay. Taissa, I love you, I love you so very much, and I will not let this hurt me or you or any of us more than it has. You aren’t dangerous. You aren’t going to hurt me. Please, Tai, just talk to me. We need to talk. You–you can’t keep things like this from me, even if they’re going to hurt or be hard to say. I can’t–I can’t not know these things about my own wife, baby.”
“I’m sorry,” Taissa murmurs again. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, honey. It’s okay. I get it. You’re scared and traumatized and I have things from my childhood that I don’t like to talk about, and I’ve never been in a plane crash. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. You just need to talk, and baby, I can’t help you with anything I don’t know about.”
Taissa nods into her shoulder. She sighs, going quiet, and for a few minutes they sit there on the couch, and Simone listens to the shaky breaths of her wife, the beat of her heart in her chest. She wraps her arms around Taissa’s shoulders and clutches her tight, strokes her head. Taissa closes her eyes, and Simone briefly thinks she’s going to fall asleep, before she starts talking.
“After me and Van– separated, the times between her visits slowed down, until she was barely awake for a few minutes every six months or so. She used to wake up sporadically between years and destroy some of my things–I think she was angry with me–and she stopped appearing entirely relatively shortly after I met you. I thought I had maybe– recovered or something, that whatever caused her to split had faded. I don’t know, the psychologists I went to were never able to tell me anything conclusive. I think I was relieved when I went a few years without waking up somewhere else–I think I hated her, resented how she took my body and did whatever she wanted with it. But she’s not malicious like that, she’s just–animalistic. She nearly got Van killed in the woods. We would tie ourselves together so she couldn’t run when she woke up at night. And Van loved her, somehow. She would stay up all night to talk to her. She named her, coaxed her to treat my–our–body more carefully than she would have thought to. Van hates me because she loved Issa as much as she loved me, and I–I kept Issa from her. I was glad when she stopped appearing. I didn’t want to think she was part of me. I thought she wasn’t. I didn’t–I didn’t realize she could come back.”
Simone sits and holds Taissa in her arms, absorbing more information about her past in a few minutes than throughout their entire relationship. She kisses Taissa’s forehead, then her cheek, then, softly, takes her chin between her thumb and finger and tilts it upward so she can kiss her lips. She stays there, feels her wife sigh and melt a little more against her. Allows Taissa to lay her head atop her chest and keeps her there, a small smile on her face.
“I’m glad,” she says, warm and earnest. “I’m glad you talked to me. I hope you’ll do it more, in the future. We can talk about this more later, okay? If–if this isn’t a one-time thing, we’re going to need to figure some things out. But it’s okay, Tai, alright? I love you. I’m not going to go anywhere.”
“Okay.” Taissa closes her eyes, leans against her.
“Let’s go take a bath and get you out of those pajamas, alright? I’ll wash your hair.”
Taissa doesn’t say anything, just acquiesces and allows herself to be taken by the hand and led up the stairs, into their room and bathroom. Simone runs a warm bath, and the two of them undress from yesterday’s nightclothes unhurriedly, with only a few quiet words exchanged. Slipping in, Simone pulls her wife against her in the water, pressing her face into her bare shoulder and squeezing her tight.
“I’m sorry for calling her,” she mumbles quietly, watching Taissa run a bar of handmade soap over her arms and legs. “It was the only thing I could think of. I panicked. I know what you keep in that safe.”
Taissa briefly tenses, but her body relaxes after a second and she turns slightly to the side, cupping Simone’s jaw in her palm and gently stroking her cheek with her thumb.
“It’s okay,” she says softly, and Simone can feel that she means it. There’s sadness in her voice, still ragged from crying, but she doesn’t sound as torn apart as she had, nor as angry and shellshocked as she did arguing with Van in the kitchen. “It was probably the best thing you could have done.”
“Still,” Simone mumbles, leaning in to kiss her lips again, sweet and apologetic. “You shouldn’t have to see her, if you don’t want to. Not like that, certainly.”
Taissa sighs awkwardly, looks away, leans back against Simone and fidgets with her fingers under the water.
It’s…complicated,” Taissa quivers ever so slightly, turning her head in Simone’s arms and pointedly not meeting her eyes. “Our separation was…one-sided, probably. She was in love with me and I was scared and traumatized and I was going to leave for college and it was 1998 and I thought my life would be over if people knew that I was a lesbian, everything else notwithstanding. So I was cruel to her, and she–she barely even argued, and I didn’t want to do it but I thought I had to and it was horrible, and it didn’t go away until I met you. But I should–I should be able to be in the same room with her without breaking down.”
Simone briefly wonders if, like all the other things Taissa has forced down into the deepest reaches of herself over the years, it ever really did go away. She doubts it, has never seen her both so angry and so sad as she is when interacting with Vanessa Palmer. She realizes that she should perhaps be upset that her wife might still harbor a love for another woman, but she can’t bring herself to gather enough anger for that, to take issue with Taissa, of all people, over something so petty.
Simone kisses the top of her head, lets her talk as much as she likes. Washes her hair, working the knots out of it and tying it into a bun. The two of them stay in the bath for an hour or so, until it’s the afternoon and neither of them have really had anything to eat, and the breakfast Simone made has gone either cold or burned.
They order shitty Chinese takeout and eat it on the floor of their living room, Taissa resting her head on Simone’s shoulder and allowing her to feed her bits of tofu and chicken–one of the few meats that Taissa can keep down. Taissa puts on an old movie she says she used to watch in high school and the two of them don’t pay too much attention to it.
In the late evening, Taissa jolts away from Simone with a sudden, sharp movement and begins pacing back and forth, eyes wide with a sudden, frantic realization.
“Shit,” she mutters to herself. Simone jumps up, concerned and puzzled. Taissa doesn’t look at her, hands behind her back, clearly worried. “ Shit . I can’t believe I forgot.”
“Tai, what is it? Is–is everything alright?”
“It is, it is, it’s just–” Taissa turns to look at her, and her eyes are sad and pleading and she’s almost looking past her, staring into the shadows of the house at something that’s not physically there. “It’s the 21st. It’s September. Laura Lee’s birthday is in two days–I promised her to visit. And I–I have no idea what to say to her. And nothing to bring.”
Notes:
Thank you all for reading and for all your wonderful comments! I appreciate any feedback, and commenting is the best way to peer-pressure me into writing more of this in an expeditious fashion so there aren't like two months between chapter updates. Just a few things
-"Was" in love with you. Yeah girl think really hard about that past tense right there
-Next chapter will be split between Van having a breakdown over all of this bullshit and Tai and Simone having a nice birthday reunion with Laura Lee (and Lottie). Finally a chance to write a Lottie that actually has her shit together! Can't wait.
-New Dirt-Eater coming soon! Hopefully tomorrow. We'll see.
-The Yellowjackets at Taissa and Simone's wedding were Shauna, Laura Lee, Lottie, and Coach Ben, if that isn't obvious.
-For those of you who enjoy my non-Yellowjackets writing, you may see some of my original works be locked behind an Archive membership. This is both to prevent scraping for AI and because I am dissatisfied with the writing quality of a good portion of some of my work. Most importantly, the current edition of Mockingbird will not be receiving any more updates, and may be deleted, because I am going to rewrite the story in its entirety to get it up to my standards. Yes, the entire 15,000 words and more. Yes, this will probably take a long time. Yes, the old version will still be up for those who were fond of it.
-My next long-term original work project, a medical drama/romance called Birds of a Feather (you won't believe how many bird references I can think of for naming things) is currently in development. Look out for the first chapter of that soon! It will feature the two characters from Caged Hawk, which proved quite popular.
-All of my writing is 100% human produced by yours truly, one deranged lesbian with too much time for writing on her hands. Generative AI is poison to the arts and I vow that it will never be used in the production of my work. Because AI writing is ass. Thank you all very much.
Chapter 3: Lamb of God
Summary:
A look into the life of Vanessa Palmer, and a Perfectly Normal Birthday Party.
Notes:
Hello! Thank you all for reading. A few things:
-Y'know, you get to figure out who the chapter name is about. Have fun with that.
-Shauna can be a little deranged. As a treat. For enrichment, yknow, or she'll start stabbing people or whatever.
-While the vast majority of this story is from Simone's perspective because she deserved better, Van doesn't really have anything to do in the Perfectly Normal Birthday Party section of this chapter, so she gets a POV segment!
-For those wondering, the Abbey of Regina Laudis is a real convent in Connecticut. They have a website (it hasn't been updated since like, 2013, but still) and they sell artisan cheese and beef and stuff. In case you wanted any of that.
-The drug that Lottie is shown to take in the show is named "loxipene". While this does not exist, an antipsychotic medication named loxapine, used to treat schizophrenia, does. Based on Lottie's symptoms, general depiction, and backstory, it is my understanding that she is meant to be read as someone who struggles with schizophrenia, especially hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. Furthermore, it is heavily implied that the Lottie we see in the future (2021) is not receiving medical or psychiatric care to manage her symptoms (her therapist, who she speaks to several times, is a hallucination). While being locked in a sanitarium in Switzerland (I think) is likely an incredibly unpleasant and violating experience, as is institutionalization in general, compassionate, informed psychiatric and medical care is useful and effective. The Lottie depicted here is receiving care for her condition.
-Laura Lee's faith is important to her, and I would imagine that she would remain Catholic after returning home, if she had survived. While in this fic she has eased up about some things (namely kissing women) she is generally shown to be devout, genuinely religious, and kind. Laura Lee's conception and rationalization of committing acts of survival cannibalism is based on information I received from my Catholicism expert consultant/pseudo-sensitivity reader about Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, or the Andes Mountains plane crash. I am not Catholic, and while I generally believe the Catholic Church kind of sucks as an organization, I do my best to be compassionate and understanding. If you find any part of this fic offensive, I would like to apologize. Feedback is always appreciated.
-I'm not entirely sure how long a psychotic episode can last. However, episodes related to schizophrenia can cause memory loss/time gaps, as normal cognitive function is disrupted. Upper estimates seem to be pretty high, So Lottie's condition could have either caused one very long episode or several overlapping shorter ones. Either works for the purpose of this fic, so we'll call it artistic license. Also, I don't know any psychologists.
-Don't drink and drive, kids.
-I'm not entirely sure what Laura Lee's full name is. I've always thought that in canon, it's a Brian David Gilbert situation, and her first name is Laura and her last name is Lee, and as such characters normally use both because it flow better. However, I have seen people give her a further last name, implying that either Lee is her middle name or that she has two first names. Since I can do whatever I want, I've decided that her full name is Laura Lee, no middle name, unless that's canonically incorrect.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Van Palmer slams the door shut and slumps down on her ex-girlfriend’s porch. The street isn’t as busy as it could have been on a Monday morning, and she allows herself to groan and bury her face in her hands. “ Fuck,” she curses, hoping that with luck, neither Taissa nor Simone nor an easily-offended passerby would hear. “Goddamnit.” She gets up to pace, making short laps of the porch over and over and not particularly caring about whether someone will see her and find it odd.
Van Palmer considers herself, with some pride, to be a generally disciplined, collected woman. Always on top of things, always calm. Always making it through. She’s never wanted to seem vulnerable, never wanted to need help. That’s something for other people, who have had lives comfortable enough to have room for emotions like sorrow and anxiety and discomfort.
It’s almost a shame, then, that Issa seems to be her only weakness. It’s been a decade, she thinks. She has no business in Taissa’s life, and a week ago there was very little that could have possessed her to drive an hour to her house in the middle of the night at the drop of a hat.
But Issa, but Issa. For her, she knows, there is even less that could keep Van from her. God forbid, she would get on a plane again–she hasn’t since–and fly halfway across the world ten times over. Anything. Anything .
With some disdain, she knows that anything includes driving to Taissa’s house in the middle of the night. Talking to Taissa’s wife. Seeing her again. Yelling at her and brandishing a knife in her kitchen. Storming out, somehow a part of her expecting to be back again soon.
For a moment, she’s frustrated, as if she expected that meeting Tai again after so long would have gone even a little smoother. Then she decides she knows herself better than that. Tai has always brought out sides of herself that she can’t quite reach, and unhinged fury, thick and suffocating and dripping, is apparently one of those.
Van sighs again and ignores the teenagers walking by her and awkwardly avoiding looking in her direction. There’s something she can salvage of this situation, certainly. Some part of herself she can plug up before the holes number too many, too quickly, too much rushing in to hold her fragile normalcy together. She paces. She thinks for a few minutes before she remembers she’s on her married ex-girlfriend’s front porch, and decides that before anything else, if she wants to keep her mental state stable, she really does need to get the fuck out of here. Car. Right. Yes. That's something she can accomplish.
The movements she makes are pure muscle-memory, piloting her from the back of her mind like how she figures it must work for Issa. Putting on her seatbelt. Turning the keys until the engine, rigorously maintained by her own hands, purrs to life with the easy glide of a plane landing. Pulls up the map on her phone because she’s never actually driven here and she’s not entirely certain how to get back from what she’s gotten herself into.
The sudden spike of her ringtone shocks her out of her fugue so abruptly she jumps an inch off of her seat. The number isn’t saved, but she knows exactly who it is. Van sighs, knows they’re not going to stop calling until she answers. Presses the green phone on the screen.
Shauna, of course, does not even bother to say hello.
“ Van Palmer ,” she says, and Van truly is getting tired of this. Her voice is stern, and somehow it summons up the feeling of being scolded by a parent, except in this case the parent is a deranged almost-stranger who won’t leave you alone. Van supposes there’s little difference. “Please explain to me why you spent a night at Taissa’s fucking house before I have to manage some sort of disaster. Again.”
“Shauna, may I remind you that you have no right to my business–wait, what the fuck, Shipman, are you stalking me?”
“Of course I am,” says Shauna with a hint of indignation in her tone, like that’s an entirely reasonable position to be taking. “Apparently you need me to, and if you two are involved, it’s not your business, it’s Yellowjacket business .”
“Great fucking excuse, Shauna. God, you know this is why Nat takes the GPS chips out of all of her devices, don’t you?”
“Well, she shouldn’t be,” says Shauna, and it’s so genuine that Van doesn’t doubt she’s serious.
“She can do whatever she likes, Shipman. And I didn’t sleep with her, if you really wanted to know. It’s–it’s more complicated than that.”
“God, how could whatever you two have going on be any more complicated?”
“Like I said, it’s none of your fucking business. Go back to being horribly codependent with your wife, Shipman, and if you show up at my house again, I will shoot you.”
“You won’t,” she says confidently, as if she’s certain, as if she’s already seen it play out in a bloody glimpse of the future, like Lottie used to mumble about in her pile of blankets on the cabin floor.
“You don’t know me, Shauna,” Van says, and hangs up, pressing on her number to block her for the fifth time.
It’ll probably be only another few weeks before she gets another burner and Van has to do all of this over again, but at least for now she can pretend like she’s the only person like her in the world, the comfort of false solitude stewed for so long that it’s almost rancid to the touch. In another world, there are no other Yellowjackets, no one else irrevocably shredded and marred by twenty months in cold and dark and endless woods, snapping awake at every rustle outside of the cabin and seeking the absence of pain in any way that’s available, even if that means avoiding everyone she knows. There’s no one like her, no one with eyes keen enough to see the hollowness behind her face, the slow ache of mundanity eating away at everything she thought she was, might once have been.
In this world, there is no Issa, and Van regrets the thought the moment it crosses her mind. A part of her can’t bear to be leaving. That part of her is the sliver she left behind in the woods, in the moments immediately after Taissa left. The part that loves the wild, innocent, desperate thing that Taissa became as much as she did her, who sees Issa and sees someone in need, someone who needs to be cared for. Issa isn’t naive, isn’t childlike, but she is dependent, whether on Taissa for what her shared body does and where it goes the vast majority of her time, or on Van, the first person she ever met, the only one who really could get through to her, for human connection and kindness and love. She fundamentally cannot exist on her own–she is the image in a mirror, the half-self in the edgeshine of a knife. If she does not have Van, then she will have no one at all. And Van, at the very core of her being, does not want Issa to be alone.
She can’t think of her, right now, can’t bear the weight of it. She knows she’s abandoning her again, knows she’s going to wake up confused and unsettled, her only companion a woman who, even well-meaning and sweet and good enough for Taissa, doesn’t know the first thing about her. If she lets herself feel the pull of wanting Issa–to care for her, to have her safe in her arms like they’re still huddled in the cabin attic together for their own safety–she’ll just find herself back at the door of a nice house she has no place in again, and she won’t have enough strength left to make it back to the surface.
Still, she knows she’s swam too deep even now, that going through this will drown her. She can’t keep herself from it.
Van drives in silence, barely paying enough attention to follow the map on her phone and avoid the other cars on the road at the same time. It’s only an hour, she knows. Then she can get back to her life, if only for a moment.
The business runs itself smoothly without her, most days. A solid chunk of her plane crash lawsuit fund went towards it, after trade school. The rest, along with the business, is enough to live quite comfortably, and she’s never been one for bombast or excess. She little she has is hers to keep, and she’s content keeping it.
Still, the business is an escape, problems she can solve, things she can deal with without spiraling into emotion locked behind a decade of aloofness and avoidance, broken open at the first pinprick. Cars are things she can fix, things she can put back together.
She works until everyone who works for her has left, and then a few hours after that, until her arms are stained to the shoulder with oil and engine grease, and her hands are stiff and aching from the same movements repeated over and over.
Van drives home without so much as wiping herself with a towel and spends an amount of time in the shower she’s not sure of, until the stains are long gone and the only thing there with her are her thoughts, and the memory of Issa, warm and familiar pressed against her. She allows herself to hold the sensation in her mind perhaps longer than she should, and it’s just numbness again, something she doesn’t have and has no right to.
In the mirror, the wounds on her face are raw and gushing, lines of red dripping down her chin and neck. They pool at her feet, staining her skin slippery-crimson, and she can faintly, faintly feel the jaws of a wolf close around her head.
They do, eventually, manage to pick out a gift that’s both heartfelt and as remote from anything reminiscent of the only shared experience the Yellowjackets really have as possible. Simone requests leave, and Taissa spends most of their day out together fretting and worrying, but it’s nice nonetheless. They land on a cardigan, the kind which Taissa says Laura Lee–Simone remembers her name from the list of guests at the wedding–likes to wear. It’s soft cashmere, baby blue, with patterned stitching. Simone manages to talk Taissa into being satisfied with it, and they pack it into a leftover box with blue-and-yellow wrapping paper.
The next afternoon, Simone puts on one of her nicer dresses–one she normally wears to important university events–and gets in the car with her wife to go visit some of her old friends. There’s a nervousness in the air that she can’t seem to shake, thrumming through her body and leaving her unsteady and fidgeting. For some reason, it feels just like an important university event–she’s going to have to spend a significant period of time interacting with people who she’s never spoken to and who understand her wife on a level that she, at this moment, cannot possibly equal. She doesn’t quite know how to handle herself. Taissa hasn’t told her much about the two–Lottie and Laura Lee–but Simone wasn’t particularly expecting her to. They were both in the crash, both survived twenty months in the wilderness with her wife and came out unscathed enough to live relatively normal lives doing–well, Simone doesn’t actually know what they do. The one thing that she’s certain of, however, is that they are on the road to Connecticut, to go to a convent.
“We’re going to pick them up at the abbey,” Taissa is saying from the drivers’ seat, and Simone snaps back into focus after realizing she’s missed the first few words of the sentence. “Then we’ll take them to dinner, and spend the evening at Lottie’s house. We won’t be too late, don’t worry.”
“Great,” Simone says, absentmindedly. She knows that the conversation will likely be mostly mundane–catching up, celebrating, trying to avoid bad memories. Yet, part of her wants to delve deeper than might be appropriate, to know what happened out there , so that maybe she could know her own wife as intimately as Vanessa does, as Issa must. It’s not that she has no idea–she’s a diligent woman, and she couldn’t help but hear some things in the aftermath and in the process of meeting Taissa and falling in love with her. She knows that far more people got onto that plane than the few that were airlifted to a hospital nearly two years later. There was a large, highly scrutinized and awkwardly media-analyzed funeral for a not-insignificant number of empty caskets buried in the name of the teenaged girls or plane-crew members who would have occupied them. Most of the bodies were unrecoverable, either from decay or simply not being found, as it went for most of the girls who didn’t come home. Simone doesn’t know how they survived, even if she might guess, but there are things you don’t speak aloud, truth notwithstanding.
It’s not that she wants the details, wants the causes of death and the unprovided testimony recited out–she’s not some sort of true-crime personality, picking through the tragedy with cold, distant hands to find a comfortable, if bleak, story to tell. She wants to bridge the gap between her and Taissa, to see her, to love her because of the things she’s been through, things she’s done, not despite them. There’s a connection there, between the remaining Yellowjackets, that Simone would do anything to find herself included in. Maybe she’s never really known Taissa, and the thought scares her. Still, she thinks, one has to start somewhere. Somewhere might as well be now. There is not a part of Taissa that she cannot find it within herself to love, if she reaches deep enough. Even Issa, perhaps, she can manage. But Tai is beside her now, and they’re getting closer to Connecticut by the minute.
The drive is uneventful, really, and quiet. A few short hours of East Coast mid-winter, leafless trees and dirty snow in haphazard piles on the ground. They listen to Taissa’s 90's music playlist on the way up, and spend most of their time simply sitting together, silence eventually falling over them like a comfortable, hand-knitted blanket.
There are two figures waiting for them in the parking lot of the Abbey of Regina Laudis, and Taissa pulls up close to them and waves out the window, shouting their names at a respectful volume. The shorter of the two, whom Simone assumes is probably Laura Lee, is blonde and blue-eyed and sweet-looking, carrying a small suitcase which Taissa encourages her to stow in the back of the car. She’s dressed plainly and modestly, long skirt and blouse and winter coat, with a small wooden cross pendant on a beaded string around her neck. The other, Lottie, is darker-skinned than her companion but lighter than Simone or Taissa, and wears jeans and a long, flowy shirt under her jacket. She leans down to fit herself inside the car, and Taissa greets them both affectionately. Simone offers a smile, but nervousness riles inside her, and she’s reminded of Issa watching her from across the room, scrutinizing and judging.
The restaurant they’ve managed a reservation for is nice, and Italian, and they’re seated in a mid-room booth with red leather cushions and a thick wooden table that’s old-fashioned but well-maintained. The dinner is–dinner. It’s dinner, and Simone does not panic or fret, not once, not at all. Laura Lee says it’s so nice to meet you, Tai talks about you often , and it’s genuine enough for Simone to believe her. She learns that Lottie–Charlotte, Simone knows her full name, but she also knows that no one calls her anything but Lottie–writes books, psychology or something of the sort. They talk about academia quite animatedly for most of the dinner, and Lottie stares into the distance at something once or twice, but she’s gently nudged out of it by Laura Lee each time. Neither of them eat meat–Lottie says something about having lost the taste for it after having nothing else for such a long time and Laura Lee nods and mentions penance and a man named Benjamin Lay, who apparently has very nice ideas, even if he was Protestant . She lets Lottie feed her pasta and Simone remembers how little she was told about the two of them and decides not to question the nature of their relationship until later.
Most of the time, though, she watches Taissa. It’s a new experience for her, seeing Taissa interact with people from her past, at least in a non-antagonistic manner. She’s rarely seen her wife as comfortable as this, she thinks. Taissa is almost constantly on edge, always guarded and restrained. With these two, she seems calm, relaxed, even. It sparks a strange feeling within Simone, close to jealousy but not the same. Like watching a conversation through a window, staring from outside the room. A sense of exclusivity, not quite like she didn’t belong, but that the others around the table knew something she didn’t. She supposed that such a reading was probably correct. Still, it was enough, to see Taissa like this, to catch this glimpse.
It’s the evening. They finish up dinner–Taissa pays, shooing off Laura Lee when she tries–and drives the four of them to Lottie’s house, which is red-brick and somewhat tastefully covered in vines. Lottie leads them into her living room, where she pours glasses of wine and Taissa brings her present from the car. Laura Lee hugs both Taissa and Simone when she opens the sweater, putting it on and wearing it the rest of the evening. Lottie’s gift, they learn, is a tear-shaped turquoise pendant, and Laura Lee squeals and kisses her sweetly, pulling her close on the couch they share. Simone audibly chokes on her wine, and both pairs of eyes turn on her as she fumbles.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, realizing she’s entirely misread the situation she’s in, “I just–I thought you were a nun,” and the last few words are sputtery, awkward. Both Laura Lee and Lottie burst out laughing, and Simone hopes that she’s not committed some sort of awful lesbian-to-lesbian faux pas.
“I’m, ah, not a nun,” chokes out Laura Lee, trying to stop herself from laughing while Lottie rubs her shoulders. “I just live there, most of my time. The quiet is good for me. I’ve–I’ve committed quite a few sins in my life, but I’ve never believed that loving Lottie was one of them,” she says, looking quite affectionately at her, teardrop pendant around her neck.
“Wow, Tai,” says Lottie, eyes a little mischievous, teasing. “Threw her into the deep end, didn’t you.”
“You know I’m not–open, about most of these things, and I know I should’ve, it’s just–hard, it’s hard.”
“I know,” Simone says, leaning in her direction against the wall of her chair. “I know.”
“So,” Lottie asks, one hand under her chin, leaning forward with the other gracefully holding a glass of wine. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” she answers, genuine. She knows so little about what happened out there–anything, at this point, would be a wealth of knowledge compared to what she has now. “Whatever you want to tell me,”
Lottie sighs, takes a sip. “Alright, alright. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest, I’m not helpful. If you want to know how long a psychotic break can last, the answer is apparently nineteen months.”
She doesn’t elaborate, and Simone assumes this is something that the rest of the people around the coffee table already know about. Another sliver of truth about the past, ever so slightly out of reach.
“If you want details,” Laura Lee says, smiling openly, “Tai, you should talk to her. But I spent quite a bit of time in a confession booth after we got home, so everything I’ll tell you is already between me and God.” She sets her glass down and rearranges herself to lean against Lottie, who puts an arm around her. “We crashed. Scrounged for a few days and found shelter. We lived out there for almost two years, and watched most of our friends die, may their souls rest in Heaven. We did things–I’m sure we’re not proud of, but we survived, in part, only because of those who did not.” She looks around the room, at the other two, perhaps gauging their reaction. “I always thought about it like communion,” she finishes, and Lottie gently pulls her closer. “It helped.”
“Thank you,” blurts Simone, both excited at the rush of information and feeling conflicted about bringing up likely the worst events of their lives at a birthday party. “For having me in your house. And that. And everything else.”
Laura Lee smiles somewhat sadly at her, and the conversation moves on. They spend the rest of the evening talking about publishing, university drama, the things the nuns apparently get up to when they’re not supervised, and so on and so forth. Eventually, Simone and Taissa are thanked profusely, forced into accepting leftovers, and ushered out the door with hugs and goodbyes.
Their car ride home is, again, mostly quiet, and somehow a bit lonely. They’re both tired, and Simone slumps against her wife’s shoulder and sighs affectionately.
“Thanks for bringing me,” she says casually, warmly. “It’s nice to meet your friends.”
“Of course,” Taissa says, keeping her eyes on the slush-covered road, but moving one of her hands to intertwine her fingers with Simone’s and squeeze her palm gently. “And I’m–I’m sorry, for being so closed off about the past, about Canada. Sometimes I feel like–I feel like everyone’s done a better job of coping than me, and I still see wolves out of the corners of my eyes when it’s dark, and now everything’s just gotten worse. And you–you don’t deserve that, love. You deserve to know me, and I’ll–I’ll try, to be more honest. Is that alright?”
Simone smiles up at her, leans sideways to kiss her cheek. “You’re sweet,” she says. “I understand why you don’t talk about it, you know. And I don’t–I don’t want to make you tell me things just because you feel like you have to, to appease me. I just want you to know that I love you, and I want you to be able to tell me things because you know it won’t change that. I’m by your side, right? So I’m–I’m glad you want to tell me more, and I’ll listen to as much as you’re willing to give. Love you, Tai.”
“Love you, Simone.”
Taissa looks at her softly, and there’s pain in her eyes, and something like guilt, or shame. It flickers, featherlight and candle-soft, and when it's gone, what remains is a deep, steady affection, an intimate understanding brought on only by the peeling back of layers.
Taissa curls around her in bed after they get home, pulls her close. Simone sighs contentedly, and lets herself be clung to, enveloped.
Notes:
Thank you all for reading! The best way to encourage regular chapter updates is to comment (therefore providing me with hits of dopamine.) Just a few things:
-Those of you who read my original works may notice that I have locked the majority of them (including all of the more recent ones) behind archive membership. This is due, on a case-by-case basis, either to general dissatisfaction with the writing quality or removal for canon revision. I am currently working through and redoing a lot of my canon to make it better, more internally consistent, and aligned with a central theme upon which I can write better and more complex stories, so expect changes in continuity and canon between my past works and my new projects. As of now, nothing is canon unless I say it is. My new original project, Birds of a Feather, will be by first experiment with new worldbuilding and canon revisions, so it will be different! However, it will be both mechanically and thematically better because I actually have some education in writing now. It will be fun.
-I think this chapter is very funny because canonically while Tai and Simone are in the middle of their intense emotional discussion Van is crashing out like twenty feet away on their front porch.
-While it's generally unimportant for the story, in this AU there was no cabin fire.
-I am very fond of my A Memory Called Empire references. It's a a very good book. This chapter is somewhat dedicated to Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, Ezuazuacat to His Brilliance Six Direction, the Edgeshine of a Knife. That image and epithet has clawed its way so deeply in my brain that I use it as much as possible because it's just so incredibly precise and impactful. AnnaLinden Weller I would kill to talk to you.
-Yes I am proud of myself for that last Van POV image. What about it.
-Please go watch Atun-Shei's video about Benjamin Lay, who was a British Quaker who lived in New England the seventeenth century, and was a committed vegan/vegetarian, animal and women's rights activist, and probably the first publicly known white abolitionist in the history of chattel slavery. Coolest guy ever, really.
Chapter 4: Wolfdog
Summary:
Van, Taissa, and Simone talk about the Wilderness. Van struggles. Issa craves.
Notes:
Hello folks! We are so back! Welcome, new and old readers, back to the Messy Sad Lesbian Cannibal(s) Show (tm). This time with extra mess! Notes:
-Since Issa is powered by Wilderness magic and is not the result of mental illness, as we have determined for the purposes of this fic, how does she like, work? Most importantly, for writing and consent purposes, how old is Issa? Since in the show, of course, we never really spend any time with Other Tai as a character, that aspect of her possession-type beat is left completely without explanation. Granted, so are most things about her! For convenience, we shall assume that Issa, cognitively, is however old that Taissa is. This makes the most sense to me. However, we also have to consider that Issa hasn't like. had a lot of life experience. Again, how does she work? I really have no idea. Please, dear reader, kindly employ that most instrumental technique of artistic enjoyment, suspension of disbelief, and maintain the assumption that Issa, at least within the internal canon of Timidity of Wolves, is an adult woman.
-Haha, you're going to be so mad at me for this.
-Comments are encouraged! If you enjoy my work, dear reader, please kindly repay me by verbalizing that. This provides me increased motivation to write more. Also, I just love to yap!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Unlit, the Turner house is somewhat like wilderness–surrounded on all sides by monolithic, mountain-high structures, draped in shadow, not a sound to be heard. In the wilderness, there is the glare of the moon, the conspiring whisper of wind through the trees, the far-off howl of wolves. The city is much the same–the only difference, Taissa once told her, is the density of human life, and the strange, nostalgic hollowness of civilization.
Eight days later, when Simone rolls over in bed and finds empty space instead of her wife’s warm, sleep-soft body, her first instinct is no longer to panic, but to roll in the opposite direction, fumble for her phone, and blindly dial Vanessa Palmer’s phone number, somehow expecting–not hoping–that she will not only be awake, but also receptive.
She is, in fact–at least the former, if maybe not the latter. Vanessa grumbles and tells her two and a half hours , and hangs up saying she’s going to go cook, or something. Simone gives her a noncommittal noise of affirmation, and for about a minute or so, she sits upright in her bed, and thinks. On Taissa’s side, the sheets are rustled and unkempt, pooled and flowing like blood. A hand-stitched blanket, given to them at their wedding, is thrown haphazardly on the floor. Issa, she thinks, wouldn’t care about that. She wouldn’t know what it was, even.
A certain point has been reached that it no longer holds any meaning or impact to meander on the strangeness of this. In a few minutes, she will walk downstairs, and there will be another person’s mind, or a ghost of something similar, inside her wife’s body. This is a reality she simply has to accept, really. Her wife is two people. Her wife is haunted by a phantom that dug its claws into her soul in the primal, tartarian darkness and cold of the Canadian wilderness. The phantom likes home cooking and speaks in broken english and is, as far as she knows, madly in love with a woman her wife left after high school.
There is no purpose in contemplating what this means for them, for their relationship, two or three or four. Not this night, really.
Simone sighs, and decides that she can only run away from so many of her problems at once. The wolves are always faster.
She pushes herself off the bed, and walks, half-conscious, out the open door. It’s somehow colder, out here. She can almost feel the crunch of ice-crusted snow under her feet, the smell of pine sap, the closing grip of cold. She walks down the stairs.
Issa, the woman who is probably not her wife, is curled up on their couch in a pile of throw pillows. She holds in her hands, tossing and spinning it with the tips of her fingers, an old, Wiskayok-High soccer ball. It is dirty and shoe-bruised, the white rubber long tarnished by grass stains and hundreds of hours of practice. She stares at the ball like she’s trying to catalog every single atom.
Simone pauses, looking from across the room, and wonders what that ball means to her. Love, maybe. Connection to the past, perhaps. A life that is not hers, conceivably.
Issa pauses, and her head swivels hunting-quick. She catches the ball absentmindedly, bracing it with two fingers, a reflex that Taissa drilled into the hands she wears. Her eyes narrow, head cocked. Simone does not speak, barely breathes.
A few seconds pass, and Issa turns her head back, continues playing with the ball, and Taissa thinks that maybe she’s fidgeting because she needs to, but because those are not her hands, and perhaps as such, they act almost without her.
Simone tenses every muscle in her body, takes a few hasty, nerve-avoidant steps, and sits down on the couch across from her. There are no lights in the room, but Issa’s eyes seem, somehow, like they glint with the light of passing cars. Reflective, like a wolf in the treeline.
She takes up as little space as possibly, body alert, and allows herself, in the silence, to simply look at Issa. This woman does not share her voice, but really, shrouded in shadow, she hardly seems to share her appearance either.
Perhaps she holds herself differently, perhaps her facial expressions are slightly off, perhaps she churns with the frenetic, desperate want for survival that permeates her entire being. Perhaps she’s simply seeing things.
When calm, Issa looks somewhat like Taissa’s younger sister, or a strangely doppelganger-esque cousin. Her hair is an unbrushed, tangled beadhed, but it looks fascinatingly natural on her. She’s pulled on an old Columbia hoodie, and it makes her look so small, swaddled, edges rounded and sharp teeth filed down.
Simone tries to ignore how Issa glances across every other minute, looks at her so oddly, unreadably.
“Van says she’ll be here in two hours,” she says, and Issa’s eyes visibly widen, but otherwise she doesn’t react. “Do you just want to sit here, until she comes?”
For a moment, Issa doesn’t respond, and neither do her eyes move away. She’s curled up, and so she has to angle her head upward to meet Simone’s eyes, gaze unfazed and observant. Her mouth opens, then closes.
“What?” Simone blurts, and instantly she feels silly–it’s an almost petulant, schoolyard tone, and yet she has no idea what else to say.
“I’m trying to see,” Issa says, her voice rough, earnest. “Why she likes you so much. Why you’re better.”
Simone considers it, and decides that she, too, should be honest.
“I don’t know,” she says, and her voice shakes just slightly. “I really don’t know.”
“She loves you,” Issa keeps forward, unperturbed. Her fingers tap on the ball, restless. “I can feel it. She does. Don’t know why I don’t.”
“Do you?” Simone asks. Perhaps this is a line of questioning she doesn’t want to reach the end of. Maybe she’ll regret it, but maybe Issa regrets this, too. But if Simone lies, it is only to herself. “Love someone?”
Issa flinches, curls further in on herself.
“I don’t like it,” she mumbles, and her voice has perhaps too little breath. A rasp, rubbed off of her tongue with sandpaper. “You and her. She chose you, she loves you. I didn’t, I didn’t get to choose. If I did–” the ball slips out of her fingers, bounces and rolls until it hits the fireplace. “If I did, wouldn’t matter. Taissa chooses. I come along.”
Simone finds herself taken aback, just a little bit, strangely, her chest twinges with self-admonition, an odd guilt for not considering this woman’s place in her relationship. Would she have gone through with it the same way, if she knew about Issa before? Would she have tried to love the both of them, like Van? She doesn’t know. She hopes that her heart would have been flexible enough. But she struggles to imagine how she would have made it work.
“I’m sorry,” is all she can say. She hopes that Issa hasn’t heard it so much that it’s lost its meaning. “I’m sorry–I’m sorry that it has to be like this. I’m sorry–”
I’m sorry that I’m not Vanessa Palmer is perhaps not something that she can say so easily. The words are too thick, too heavy, to fit past her throat.
“You’re nice,” Issa says, and it feels like she means it. “I don’t hate you. I know–Van tells me that I scare people.”
Simone feels an impulse to comfort this woman, to assure her that she isn’t frightening, in the same way that she feels it for Taissa.
“It’s okay,” and she hopes that it’s not a lie, hopes that she means it. “You were frightened. I shouldn’t–have locked you in that room.”
Issa doesn’t smile, is something she learns over the next two hours, but she does bob her head and blink like a wolf puppy when she’s confused or warmed or flustered. If she had fluffy, soft ears, Simone thinks, they would twitch.
She has that thought perhaps an hour later, when they’re closer on the couch, watching a teen drama that Simone indulges in to relax after particularly long, meeting-filled days. Issa is curled up small like she has a tail to wrap around herself, and Simone is slowly, somewhat absentmindedly, stroking her hair. If someone asked, she wouldn’t be able to tell them how they got there. But it’s something she does often with Taissa, and so she slips into it easily. Simone is an affectionate person, and, considering the general time-frame–as much as she knows of it–Issa has not felt much human affection in nearly a decade. It feels easy to offer her touch like this, something soft, easily retractable. But Issa simply accepts it, leans her head into it perhaps out of reflex. If she were a few degrees sillier or perhaps a little drunk, Simone might expect her to purr.
Vanessa Palmer knocks on her door twenty minutes into an episode, and Issa jumps practically six inches off the couch right as the masked, trenchcoated assailant tries to stab the annoying brunette on the television. She’s halfway to the door before Simone can really process it, and Van pauses when the door opens, as if expecting Simone. She’s wearing a winter coat, boots, a red scarf wrapped around her neck. In mitten-covered hands she holds a plexiglass container of beef stew. Her cheeks are honeycrisp-pink, almost the same shade as her hair. Her eyes light up at the sight of Issa, and stay glinting as they move to Simone, watching her get up and walk over to greet her.
A breathless oomf pushes from her lips as Issa wraps her arms around her, and she fumbles without much dexterity to safeguard the stew. Simone catches it for her when it falls.
“Hi,” Vanessa Palmer says, looking down at the stew in her hands and Issa ‘s arms tight around her and unravels the scarf from her burn-marred neck. “I hope–I hope I’m not late–hey, Issa, miss me?” The tone of her voice is warm, welcomed, a little teasing.
Simone looks down at her wife’s body’s arms around Van, and Issa pulls away from her a half-second later. The glass is slightly cold and adhesive to her palms.
“Thank you–I’ll warm this up. You two–talk, or something.”
Simone turns around, trying not to feel like a guest in her own house, and busies herself with peeling the sticky plastic covering off of the bowl and situating it in the microwave.
The three of them mull awkwardly around the kitchen counter while they wait for the two-minute timer to tick down. None of them speak. Issa stands with a closeness to Van that might be uncouth if they were in any other situation, and Van won’t meet Simone’s eyes for anything more than a few seconds, staring apologetically at the marble countertop. Simone turns on several lamps, and the three of them blink away the darkness and the cold.
The stew is warm and viscous and obviously homemade. Large chunks of tender beef and potato, glistening carrots and celery, caramelized onion and pepper and homey, hand-molded comfort. Simone finds herself wanting to dip her fingers into it and take a bite, but Issa has so very little, and so she gathers a silver fork and spoon from a cabinet and presses the collection into her hands.
Issa takes long looks at the both of them, and then turns and stalks towards Simone and Taissa’s bedroom.
Simone and Van are left staring at each other from across a kitchen island, Van still unable to meet her gaze.
“You can go eat with her,” Simone finds herself saying. She doesn’t know if she wants that, or if she thinks Issa does, or Van. This is a relationship she has precious little experience for navigating, nor does she have precedent. “I’m sure she wants to talk to you.”
“Fuck, Turner,” Van says, hand moving in a tic to caress the spiderweb-warped burns on her face, the faded scars which range from the bottom of her eye to her shoulderblade. “Fuck I–I don’t really know how to do this, really. I don’t–don’t want you think I’m being–adulterous, or something, I would never–”
Simone laughs, as perhaps the absurdity has reached its peak. Her wife’s ex is worried that she’ll think her wife’s ridealong ghost is cheating on her. Her wife’s ex is apologetic to her about this.
To be honest, she doesn’t know how angry she could manage to be. Taissa is hers in her mind, wholly, and the thought otherwise is preposterous. Issa she doubts she feels the same way towards, but still–but still.
Van is looking at her, down at her because she’s a little taller, with such a conflicted desperate expression on her face that it takes her aback.
“Shit, Vaness-Van,” she says, the last laughs leaving her throat. “I don’t know either. Go eat with her. I’ll talk to Taissa in the morning.”
Van grabs her hand, holds it for just a moment. The pads of her fingers and the breadth of her palm extend past Simone’s own on all sides, and they’re warm and rough, like the gentlest caress of porous rock on skin. Stable, grounding.
Van releases her hand, dips her head, and follows Issa up.
Simone, uncertain about anything, really, sighs and sits down to watch the shitty, shitty show she left on, and almost finds herself missing the feeling of soft hair against her fingertips.
Vanessa Palmer finds Issa waiting patiently, legs criss-crossed on Taissa and Simone’s bed. Issa looks up, and holds her hand out, offering her the fork.
Van settles against the headboard with her, a glass bowl of beef stew, handmade the day before for no one but herself, settled between them. There is less than a foot between them. The last time they were here, Van had held her, and yet tonight, like this, she has not felt closer to Issa Turner in nearly a decade.
Issa is wearing one of Taissa’s old Columbia hoodies and not much underneath it. Taissa had bought it, two sizes too large, on accident, trying to navigate the frankly primitive online merch store in the months before they both went to their separate colleges. It arrived perhaps three weeks before Taissa left her.
Issa’s body is warm, and she looks small and soft and vulnerable like this, easily breakable, like Van could take her nymph-slender arm and snap it between her fingers, watch tears pool at the corner of her eyes and hurt warblings slip between her drawn-bow lips. She doesn’t want to hurt her, but she does want to make her feel , as deeply as Van feels. Even a small sliver of it, a brief lance of pain, might be enough to chip into the space between them.
Issa looks and acts like a predator, but to Vanessa, she has always been willing and malleable, a sweet-hearted lamb led around by her shepherd.
The two of them eat the stew, and it is the best thing that Van has ever tasted. Beef does not sit right with her stomach anymore, reminds her of the feeling of teenage girl-meat melting on her tongue, but anything, anything for Issa. They eat slow, and it is indulgent, as carnal as the feasts in the woods ever were. Being around Issa is like being devoured, Van thinks, and she has been on a pyre before, and if it would make Issa warm and happy and full, sate her hunger, she would climb back on and let flames lap kitten-tongued against her flesh until they melted away her skin, until she was nothing but food. She thinks she would make a good stew.
The food is gone, and Issa licks the gravy from her spoon and then from Van’s fork, taking her by the wrist and bringing it to her lips. Her eyes are wide, and she curls closer, the front of her body pressing against Van’s side.
“Issa?”
“Van, missed you,” she says, and her eyes close just a bit. Maybe she’s full, maybe she’s sleepy.
“I know, baby,” she says, reaches back to stroke her bed-messy hair. “I know. Was Simone not kind to you?”
“She’s nice,” Issa says, and her teeth look sharp in the lamplight. Her face is moonlike and open, filling up the space of Van’s vision. “But not you. Van, can’t handle it. She’s nice, I can’t take it, can’t hate her, can’t take Tai away from her,”
Van clutches Issa’s hand, squeezes it with enough strength that she hopes it feels less like pain and more like love.
“Slow down, baby, slow down.”
“No,” Issa says, nearly ecstatic. “I want–want you. Tai didn’t want you, didn’t let me have you. I won’t–I won’t do that. Won’t take Tai from her like she did you. Would be easier, if I would hate her. But–but I can’t, and it hurts, and I can’t have you. Need you. Need you, Van.”
“Shh, shh.” Van pulls her closer, presses her sweet mouth against her shoulder, her soft hair brushing against the burns on her cheek.
“You have me, baby, you have me, need you, too. Tai, Tai loves her, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry it has to be like this. I can’t have you, I wish I could, I’ll take care of you, I’ll hold you and feed you, but you can’t be mine. I won’t–I won’t be between them.”
Issa cries, and Van holds her and lets her weep. It’s only a few minutes, but it feels so good to hold her like this, to wrap a sweet, crying girl in her arms and comfort her. She misses it, she knows. Misses it to the very core of her being.
Issa looks up at her, raises her head, and they are so very close to each other, and Issa is wearing so little underneath that hoodie, and she’s practically bundled on her lap, and Issa’s hands brace against her shoulders, fingers splayed out, and Van can feel how soft her breasts are, and this is perhaps the worst situation she’s ever been in.
“ Issa, ” she says, and it’s almost a keen–her voice is shaking, raspy and dry, and her arms are around Issa’s waist, a jacket and a hoodie between her and Issa’s bare skin. “Tai, Tai won’t like this.”
“Tai never likes anything I do,” Issa growls, serrated and cutting, and she surges forward, and kisses Van like she needs her air to live.
Issa is ravenous in everything she does, and she kisses, too like she does everything else–with restlessness and focused strength and a bone-deep, winter-starved hunger. Her lips are soft and warm and giving and chasing and taking, needy and longing, so intense she pushes Van back against her headboard from her lap and bites, and Van sits stunned and lets her take and take and take, she would let Issa bite her, gnaw on her until she was bones and gristle, was nothing.
Van gives up all hope of getting out of this intact, and pulls Issa chest to chest against her, and kisses her back like she hasn’t kissed another person in a decade.
Van doesn’t know how long it is, until Issa pulls away from her, breathing heavy, cheeks flushed dark and eyes wide and wanton and she’s looking at her with an emaciated sort of lust that Van can’t bear to feel directed toward her, like the direct fury of a sun. Her thighs are parted on either side of Van’s and she’s so close, so close, so close, and if Van had a little less control of herself she knows that she would, with the door not even locked and Taissa’s wife a floor down.
But Van still has some instinct to pull away underneath all of her self-destruction, even though all she wants to do is cling , to pull the hoodie over Issa’s head and never look back when it ruins them both.
Van slides Issa slowly off of her, and kisses her softly, softly on the forehead.
“Issa,” she says, staring at her kiss-bitten, open-wound lips, “Go to sleep.”
“Van,” Issa says, and it’s halfway to a moan.
“Issa,” and no, if anything is going to ruin her it’s this, pulling away from her, denying herself, for both their sakes. “ Go to sleep.”
Issa whines, but she lets the body go limp, and slowly slips dreamily into the night.
Van’s entire body shudders, and she thinks like she’s going to cry, but she can’t, Simone is still here, and oh fuck, oh fuck, what the fuck does she think she’s doing, she just made out with her wife on their bed.
This will ruin her, Van thinks, and she gets off the bed and washes her face in water as cold as she can make it, tries to disguise her sweet, sweet treachery the best as she can.
She tucks Issa in and leans over the railing to look down at Simone.
“She’s asleep,” Van says, still shaking. “Do you–do you want me to leave?”
“You shouldn’t drive this late,” says Simone, voice raw and teary but not suspicious. “Use the guest room. I said we’ll talk in the morning.”
Van swallows, and obeys.
In the Morning, Taissa wakes Van up while Simone turns on appliances and gathers ingredients, and they cook together.
Breakfast is bacon and scones and blueberry waffles, and Van puts whipped cream on hers and eats it with her hands. The three of them sit on the couch, Simone wedged between the two of them at a distance of a few feet.
They had discussed over breakfast, in vague terms, the Wilderness, and the rest of the Yellowjackets that survived. Simone watched their eyes grow uneasy and haunted, and both of them sit unsteady, Van fidgeting and Taissa curled in on herself.
“So,” she says, prompting nothing in particular.
“So,” says Taissa, looking everywhere on her face but her eyes.
“Do you want to explain,” Van says, biting into the last of the bacon, or me?”
Taissa shoots her a look that Simone isn’t Yellowjacket enough to understand, and Van cowers ever-so-slightly, and seems to let Taissa take the floor. Her wife looks like she’s about to cry, fidgeting with her hands, her nails digging into her skin.
“Quite a few people died out there–several in the first few days, but mostly over a long, long time–we went through two winters.” she pauses. And her voice shakes more than Simone has ever heard before, and she looks down, eyes empty. “And we ate five of them. The first–the first was–”
“Her name was Elizabeth,” Van says, looking across at Taissa with genuine concern and care, matching Taissa’s own expression. Simone grabs her wife’s hand and holds it tight.
“She was–we didn’t really know her that well, to be honest. It was so cold, and we had been eating bark for weeks, and she found an edible plant, and she was so excited, we cooked it into a soup–and she took a bit and she started suffocating–”
“Anaphylactic shock,” Taissa said. “It happened too fast. We tried to cremate her, we didn’t do very well–and Lottie suggested it, and normally we didn’t listen to the things she said like that, but we were so hungry, and–”
Taissa begins to cry, and Simone pulls her close, onto her lap, tucks her head against her shoulder. She stares at Van, wide-eyed, and Van shuffles uncomfortably.
“This is going to sound very bad,” she says. “But it–you might understand, when you’re starving, and you haven’t had anything substantial in your stomach for weeks, and all of a sudden you have meat, it was–it was the worst thing any of us ever did to one another. But we–once we knew we were capable of it, it became–it became a lot harder not to, when we had nothing else.”
She shudders, whole-body, like she’s still feeling the cold.
“Mari died next,” and her voice is much quieter now, but she’s still talking. “She had something–we could never figure out what it was, but she coughed up blood and mucus for weeks, and we cooked her body. A stag rammed an antler through Robin’s chest while we were hunting it, and we ate both of them. Travis–Travis walked outside of the cabin, and we found him frozen over in the morning, he was never the same after–after Javi fell through the ice on the lake a month earlier. And Gen.” She looks into Simone’s eyes, and then back to the floor. “I always thought Misty killed Gen. there was Mellie, too, but–”
“Don’t fucking talk about Mel, Van,” snarled Taissa, voice raw and sharp, pulling herself just a little away from Simone.
“Don’t play nice,” Van shot back, more abrasive than anything Simone had ever heard from her. “We voted for that, you voted for that, need I fucking remind you–”
“Please fucking stop arguing and explain,” Simone said, authoritative, the way she talked to snap unruly students to attention.
Taissa shifts off of her lap, still holding tight to Simone’s hand. She doesn’t look her in the face.
“We didn’t eat her,” she clarifies, her words hard, forced. “It was–it was summer, and she tripped and cut a gash onto her leg, and she got tetanus, and–we couldn’t save her, and for most of a week we watched her wither and suffer, and eventually, it got so bad that we–we held a vote, her included. And we decided–”
“We decided that she should die as painlessly as possible,” Van said, and she had moved closer to the two of them, maybe out of reflex, maybe out of some unacknowledged need for comfort. “We blindfolded her, and gave her all of the painkillers we had left, and then Shauna slit her wrists and held her while she died, and we watched.”
None of them spoke, for a few minutes afterward. Simone pulled Taissa back against her and held her close, and Van sat awkwardly a foot away from them.
Simone sat, and thought about what this meant to her. She had guessed something like this, or could have, if she had thought hard about it. The way Taissa never talked, the way none of them had ever given a proper interview or wrote a tell-all book. The way Taissa threw up most meat after she ate it and got nauseous in the vicinity of butcher shops and refused to watch anything with even mild gore.
There is no part of Taissa she cannot love, she thinks, maybe not even this part. She can take this, can fold this knowledge against her chest and keep her love of Taissa Turner at the same time.
Her wife is a cannibal. So is the woman she’s been inviting into her house for weeks. A woman whose wedding she went to killed another teenage girl in cold blood once. These are all things that somehow, in comparison to everything else, seem rather uncomplicated.
Simone kisses her wife on the forehead, and Van leans back on the couch and watches.
“Taissa,” Van says, voice almost consumed with dread. “We need to talk.”
The two of them stand side-by-side on the Turner’s second-floor balcony and do not look at one another. Van wrings her hands, and Taissa stares dead-eyed at the skyscrapers.
“I’m sorry,” Van says, and the words do not come easy, more so they force their way past her lips. “For yelling at you, and for–y’know, brandishing a knife at you. That was–not very productive of me, in front of your wife.”
“It’s okay,” Taissa says, gaze unmoving. “I probably deserved it, and I–I can’t say I was very reasonable, it’s just–seeing you caught me off guard, and I lost control of myself. I shouldn’t have. You were–you were doing nothing but trying to help me, to help Simone. You didn’t have to–god, I know I fucking wouldn’t, if I were you. And you’re–I trust you around her, more than anyone else. I’m glad–I’m glad she called you.”
“You shouldn’t,” Van said, wrapping her arms around herself. “You shouldn’t trust me like that–you barely know me. I could have done anything. You need–you need to talk to her, Tai, if Issa is going to keep coming back, Simone needs to know how to take care of her, of you–I can’t always be around. I shouldn’t be around you.”
“I don’t want to argue, Van–really, I hate arguing with you, I hate hating you, and I, Van, I love her so much, more than anything else. But I miss you sometimes–I know you won’t like it, but I–but I do.”
“It’s too late to miss me,” Van snapped. “You had your chance, Tai, Tai I can’t do this, I can’t be in your life every two weeks or few months to sweet-talk Issa so she doesn’t try to run away with your body, you can’t do this to me, you can’t use me like this, this is your problem, you made it clear that I’m not yours anymore, and so–if you mean it, you have to let me go, Taissa, I can’t do this, Tai, she kissed me, Tai , and I can’t–I can’t fucking–”
She doesn’t quite register when Taissa hits her, and so she doesn’t avoid it–a whiplike slap, red on her burned cheek. Van stumbles back, and Taissa follows, pushing her into the wall.
“You–you took advantage–”
“I didn’t do shit to you, Turner–” she pushes her away, stronger, and she’s angry , now, whether it’s on her behalf or Issa’s, she doesn’t know. “I kissed her, and she’s not a pet, Tai, she’s not an animal , she’s a person, and if you would get that through your fucking thick stubborn skull–fuck, Tai, I know better, I shouldn’t–I shouldn’t have done it, but don’t fucking pretend like it’s your offense to take.”
“Get out,” says Taissa, cold and sharp, cutting like the edge of deep winter. “Get out of my fucking house. Now.”
Van glares back at her and slams the balcony door open and shut, stomped toward the center of the house, where Simone was cleaning up from their breakfast, washing the dishes and tables.
Van paced until she found a pencil and paper, and, with angular, aggressive lettering, wrote out her address and forced the note into Simone’s hands, looking her straight in the eyes.
“You’re going to come over this weekend,” she said, almost a snarl. “And I’m going to tell you everything you need to know about Issa, and then I never have to see either of you again.”
Notes:
Thank you all for reading, and don't get too mad at me for the messy part of the Messy Sad part of the Messy Sad Lesbian Cannibal Show. Please have faith in our three disasters to get it together at some point. Comments are appreciated!!!
-Birds of a Feather, my upcoming original scifi/fantasy romantic medical drama, coming soon! Hopefully!
-Other Tai, in the show, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Issa, mine and AlexiHollis's, is characterized more, in my opinion, like a sheep in wolf's clothing. Or, at least, like a really wet-cat, pathetic wolf.
-Simone and Issa are watching Pretty Little Liars together.
-Elizabeth, for convenience, is what I've named the black-haired background Yellowjacket who appears weirdly center-frame in the funeral scene and then like barely anything afterwards. Rest in peace unnamed Yellowjacket, since she doesn't have a name and as far as I'm aware really hasn't appeared in a significant fashion since. I like to believe that she survived, and no one thought to involve her in anything that happened because they just like. don't know her personally. She's just chilling.
-You'll have to wait next time for the insanely complex slightly adulterous butch/femme Simone/Van part of the Simone/Taissa/Issa/Van part of this relationship. Hopefully y'all can find it within yourselves to forgive me.
Chapter 5: Bloody Jaw
Summary:
Simone and Van discuss the Wilderness, and get to know one another.
Notes:
Haha! You thought I wouldn't come back with another chapter update! Well, you were RIGHT! I've come back with TWO chapter updates! Chapter six, Girl-Eater, coming monday! Welcome back, everyone, to the Messy Sad Lesbian Show, this time with a new formular: 35% more mess! Comments are highly encouraged and highly appreciated! If you would like me to finish this story in any reasonable time frame, please kindly write me a comment!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Simone drives alone down ice-streaked streets, trying to ignore a piece of meat that’s been stuck in her teeth since morning. The days have been slowly bleeding into December, the weather shifting from the playful pinch of early winter to sheer, biting cold. This time of year always leaves Taissa jumpy and unsettled. She wears too many layers and her stockpiling habits become worse. It’s something she notices every year, but this time, after everything with Issa and the woman she’s currently driving to meet, the knowledge carries a strange melancholy to it. She knows now why Taissa gets sick when she eats meat, why the only variety she can reliably keep down is fish. The horror of it, the inhumanity, isn’t so shocking to Simone as simply how much she understands Taissa keeping it from her. Sometimes, when she wakes up early and watches Taissa sleep, she thinks about what it would have been like to be in that situation. What it might feel like to go crazy where no one can help you, do the worst thing you could do to someone over and over, and then come home and go through law school like nothing ever happened. Once, she read an old interview, the only one anyone ever got out of the Yellowjackets, a year and a half after they were airlifted to a Canadian hospital, just to see how they talked about it. Their answers, she remembers, seemed shockingly unemotional–rote, almost practiced explanations of sleeping in an old cabin, hunting to survive, being found by hikers. Back in the day, everyone who read simply accepted that the girls had come out not whole, and were still in shock from the horror of it all. Now, she knows: their answers were practiced, probably agreed on beforehand, designed to obfuscate a much more sensational, harrowing truth. Driving down slush-slick roads and switching radio channels until she finds one that isn’t country, she wonders why they did it. Shame, of course. Avoidance of prosecution? Maybe, but the legal grounds would be dubious at best–Taissa would have understood that eventually. Perhaps they simply didn’t want the attention. Either way, for a decade and a half the truth has been buried like a body under ice-hard earth.
Taissa had been adamant that she should not have gone. She said it wasn’t worth it, but Simone had a slight suspicion that she simply didn’t want her around Van. An unfounded one, really, but she would let her keep to it, for the time being. Simone wasn’t much of a prideful person, really, but something in her said that Taissa couldn’t be made aware of just how desperate she was for any sort of help. Simone had, over the span of her academic career, accrued a great deal of experience in navigating complex, ethically contentious situations–conflicts of interest, highly inappropriate fellow professors, students doing entirely too much and refusing any sort of alternative path–but apparently little of that experience was applicable to being married to a woman with a girl inside her head.
Van, though, Van knew Tai–and especially Issa–inside and out. Generally she tried not to think about just how thoroughly that applied, but it sometimes slipped into her mind anyways. Simone thought about Van quite a bit, had been thinking about her often since she first met her. The woman was a conundrum: extremely caring while simultaneously standoffish and rude, highly competent and seemingly something of a disaster, a veritable hermit who lived alone, yet fully willing to drive hours in the middle of the night to solve her ex-girlfriend’s problems. Handsome, with a face mostly covered by scarring. Some part of Simone was trepidatious, and that was the part she generally preferred to identify with, but another part, unfortunately larger, more emotional, and with a great deal less inhibition, felt excited at the idea of seeing her.
It was mid-day. Van lived in a relatively small town, somewhat rural, and so the roads she had been going down for the past hour were generally thin, isolated, and with perhaps only an eighty-percent chance of being paved. Dirt-flecked snow piled on the sides, giving the impression of being walled in. Some places either had yet to be plowed or weren’t regularly, and the snow-tires Simone had pressured her wife into getting early were serving their purpose. A sheet of solid gray clouds covered the sky, as was normal for New England. After October, one didn’t hope to often see the sun until about the middle of June. Simone didn’t mind very much–she had always liked the cold. It was one of the things about her which Taissa simply could not bring her mind to understand.
Simone had managed not to lose the paper containing Van’s address in the past few days since the–seemingly intense and argumentative–events which ended in Van storming her way out of her and Taissa’s house and only at the last moment avoiding slamming the door, no matter how much Taissa tried, rather pettily, to lose it for her. She had engaged in a brief argument with her wife, and shouted at her–which at this point she was feeling somewhat pathetic about–that if Taissa refused to seek any sort of help for what was going on, she would do it for her. She had then taken her keys, similarly avoided slamming the door, and jumped in her car, fuming as she pulled into the city and onto the highway towards the path the GPS told her to take.
It was about an hour until she found herself pulling into the town Van had said her home was, and only then did she realize that while Van had instructed her to arrive on this particular day–or at least this weekend–she hadn’t actually given her any sort of notification that she really was doing it. Briefly, she thought about calling her, but quickly identified several problematic elements: firstly that she wasn’t entirely sure she remembered her phone number, secondly that she didn’t if Van was home, nor if she even had a cell phone, and thirdly, whether or not she would even pick up. As the streets slid by and she got closer and closer to Van’s home, Simone resigned herself to simply hoping that Van would let her in her house, and she wouldn’t have to crawl, thwarted and dejected, back to Taissa.
Simone let her car sidle up to the edge of the road, right next to a beat-up truck she thought was Van’s, from the brief glimpses she had seen of it and the fact that Palmer Auto Mechanics was written on the side. She checked the address twice with the numbers written in metal on the side of the house, and briefly hesitated before forcing herself out of her car.
Van’s house was a one-story brick affair, relatively small, with square windows, a well-kept garden bordering the walls, and a small fenced porch adorned with two cushioned chairs and a table that one might theoretically use to play cards. It looked, she thought somewhat amusingly, like how a child might depict a house in a pencil drawing, but made in brick and mortar. There was a cobblestone path leading from the side of the road to the porch. It was strangely charming.
Simone fixed the collar of her black winter overcoat, sticking her hands into the pockets as she stepped forward onto the path. The yard had in it a bush, a medium-sized oak, and a tree which looked like it might have been bursting with apples a few months ago. The porch creaked slightly underneath her feet, but it felt stable. Simone stood in front of the door for several minutes as she psyched herself up to open it, but eventually only managed to lift up and let fall the door-knocker, which was shaped, perhaps a little disconcertingly, like a wolf in profile.
After a good few seconds and the patter of footsteps from the inside, Vanessa Palmer opened the door, mumbling, “If you’re here for the Girl Scouts, I’ve already bought a box–oh.”
“Hi,” blurted Simone, because she wasn’t sure what else to say. She wrung her hands, and for a moment was frozen simply staring at Van. One side of her mouth, the side that presumably carried the wolf-bite, was permanently swept down in a small expression of disdain. The other side, licked by flames, wasn’t quite as emotive as it used to be, but it flicked upward in a warm, if slightly uncertain smile. Her eyes stared back, scanning, perhaps, her gaze moving across Simone’s face slowly, like something watching from the treeline. Her cheeks were slightly pink from the touch of cold air, almost the same color as the apples which might have come from her tree.
“I–I’m here,” Simone said, looking just a bit downwards to meet Van’s gaze.
“I see,” Van responded. She stepped to the side, giving just enough space for her to pass. The doorframe was quite narrow. “Do–would you like to come in?”
“I–yes,” Simone said. Her eyes snapped downwards, angled so as to not meet Van’s gaze. She stepped through the entrance and into Van’s foyer. The point of her elbow brushed lightly against Van’s chest as she moved, sending a small, frightened shock through Simone’s body. A little perturbed, if not uncomfortable, she let Van close the door and lead her through a short hall into a space which contained a small kitchen, a little circular dinner table surrounded by four chairs, and a small, parlor with a couch, a cushy chair, a television, and a bookshelf. The floors were wooden, and the interior walls were a combination of lumber and brick. Along the way, Van pointed out a few things to her: The corner where her bedroom was, the door that led to the small basement, the restroom. As if Simone was a guest. Van guided her into what might charitably be her small dining room–in practice just an extension of her kitchen–and pulled out a chair for her. Simone unbuttoned her coat and slung it over the backrest. Van’s eyes briefly dropped to her hands, but quickly leapt elsewhere, back onto her face and the surrounding walls.
Van turned and took a few steps into the kitchen gathering a kettle and a few small cups. “I’m going to put on some tea,” she said. Her voice was gruff, but warm. Simone imagined it was good at jokes. “It’s too late for coffee. Do you like black tea?”
“Sure,” Simone said, fidgeting a bit in her seat. She picked with painted nails at the end of her sleeve.
Van set the kettle on a gas burner and leaned against the brick of her kitchen wall, like she was a boy in a movie making an effort to look cool and aloof. Simone suspected she didn’t have a hard time of it.
Simone flinched slightly when the kettle–an old, black metal affair–whined loudly. With swift, steady hands that bore very light burn scars, she swept it up and quickly poured steaming water into each cup. Gingerly, she slipped bags of tea into both of them. The leaves bloomed into the water, painting it a dark, rich color. Van lifted the teacups with her fingers, placing one in front of Simone and the other at the chair across from her. She returned to the kitchen, gathered up a small dish of powdered sugar, and in a few moments was sitting across from Simone, gently pouring sugar into her tea with a tiny spoon.
Feeling a little like an intruder, Simone took a sip of her tea. It was warm and deep, evidently from high-quality leaves. For a minute or so, the two of them sat there, drinking tea. The gesture was sweet, really, hospitable, and she appreciated it, felt a little desperate for anything which brought her to ease.
Van set her cup down with a clink, having finished her tea. A little above her head and to the side, Simone could see a framed photo of the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets, seemingly engaged in celebration. At the front was a blond teenage girl holding aloft a small bronze trophy, which, barely legible, had the words Regionals 1996 written on the front. Standing next to her was a younger Taissa Turner, curly hair tied up, one arm around the shoulders of a beaming red-haired girl Simone quickly identified as Vanessa Palmer. It was strange, seeing her like that, face tan and pristine, at the top of the world. She realized she was staring, and quickly diverted her eyes. Van, evidently chivalrous, didn’t mention it.
Van cleared her throat, drawing Simone’s gaze sharply back to her. She fidgeted with the handle of her teacup, rocking it back and forth on top of its small, matching disk.
“I’m going to tell you what me and Taissa fought about,” she said, eyes pointed in Simone’s direction but not meeting hers. “Because I think you deserve to know, and I’m generally inclined to be less obtuse than Taissa. I don’t expect you to be particularly ecstatic about it, but hopefully you won’t also decide to hit me.”
“I’d hope not,” Simone said, leaning back in her chair. She clutched her forearm with her hand, hoping to appear comfortable. It didn’t seem particularly effective.
“I’ve spent a great deal of time with Issa over the years I've known Taissa. Over that time, I’ve come to the understanding, or at least the belief, that her and Tai, in basically every sense except their physical forms, are different people. I don’t actually know how it works–we all saw psychologists quite religiously after the crash, doctor’s orders, and as far as I’m aware, Issa’s existence isn’t particularly consistent with the criteria of any dissociative or identity disorders.”
“So,” Van continued, “Since Tai refused to have further research done on her and Issa was never around at convenient times for therapists to see her, she was simply deemed to have an abnormal or exceedingly rare presentation of an identity disorder, and since Issa’s appearances fell in frequency over time, there was never a need to explore it further.”
“But don’t get me wrong,” Van said, “When she’s awake, Issa is a different person than Tai. They think and act in fundamentally different ways. It’s quite easy to tell who’s who, when you spend any significant portion of time around her.”
Van shifted in her seat. She looked away from Simone, clutching her empty teacup in her hands. Her expression grew solemn, but her cheeks became slightly pink, like she was a little sheepish, or trepidatious, even if she was trying not to look like it.
“The last time I was in your house, when you called me the second time, Issa kissed me. I kissed her back, and we did nothing else. I got her to sleep, and then in the morning I told Taissa about it, and we fought. I’m sorry we did that in your house, I would have liked us to be civil, but me and Tai were never good at that.”
“However,” Van says, and this time her eyes lock onto Simone’s. Her back is straight, and she speaks like she’s delivering an ultimatum. Her voice is hard like winter ground. “I am not sorry that I kissed her. I did not come to help you with the intention to do what I did, and I am aware this is complicating for our relationship–whatever it is, really–but I care very, very deeply for Issa, and that has not and will not change. I am not going to apologize for loving her, or for doing something to her with her consent, because she is a person, and she should have a right to choose what she does. I hope you understand that.”
Simone thought about it. Embarrassingly, she had thought about it quite a bit that night, when she had curled up in bed with Taissa and wrapped her arms around her body. She knew that Van and Taissa had been girlfriends, and that such an arrangement probably included a great deal of kissing, among other things. She had imagined it briefly, but had shut the thought out of her head, feeling slimy and voyeuristic. She, however, had not been successful, and had spent the next few days imagining it whenever she had laid her eyes on Taissa for any significant period of time, which, as they were married, was often.
She paused, took a sip of her tea, and gathered herself. The part of her brain that rationalized was already running–Issa, when she had spoken to her, firmly expressed that she, unlike Taissa, did not feel anything remotely romantic for her. Van, as far as she was aware, was not seeing anyone, and if she was right and Issa was in a literal sense her own person, then, on the iron rock of technicality, really no one was in the wrong. The fact that Issa and Tai shared the same physical form was technically irrelevant. Firmly. Simone had been trying very, very hard to convince herself of it.
“Okay,” she said, looking down and doing her best not to mumble. “Okay. I mean, I don’t like it, in a strict sense, but I really–I really don’t see why I should get to be the arbiter of this. I’m not–I’m tangential to this whole complex web you’ve got going, and I–to be honest, I really don’t know what to do here.”
“It’s not unreasonable to be perturbed,” Van says, collecting their empty teacups and taking them into the kitchen, where she deposits them into her sink to be cleaned later. “I’m not–I’m not saying I intend to be in any sort of serious relationship with Issa. I’m saying–I’m saying that if you expect me to continue coming to your aid, I will treat Issa like a person. However, I don’t–I don’t want to do anything that would make you feel uncomfortable to be around me.”
“I don’t feel uncomfortable being around you,” Simone said, turning in her chair to look at Van, who remained in the kitchen, shifting her weight from side to side. “I just, I love Taissa. She makes me very happy, but sometimes–sometimes she’s obtuse, and she doesn’t like talking about herself, and she rarely tells me if anything’s wrong. She doesn’t like to offend–it’s the politician in her–and so she prefers to hide, and pretend she’s not hurting. I don’t want to be the reason she’s hurt.”
“But also,” Simone says, standing up, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to care for Issa, too. Maybe not in the same way, but she’s–” Simone stumbles, folds her arms across her chest. Van stares her straight in the face, and it feels centering, but also makes her want to squirm.
“Issa seems very sweet,” she continues, “and honest, and I feel bad for the way Taissa treated her and ignored her. I don’t want her to think she’s something I’m afraid of. If this is a lifelong thing for them, then I want to be someone Issa feels safe with, someone she’s comfortable being around. She deserves someone who’s kind to her, and I–Van, I’m really willing to do anything, for us to feel normal again. Issa loves you, I can tell, and it would be far more comfortable and convenient to keep you from her, but there’s something about that–there’s something about that that feels like doing wrong by her. As far as I’m aware, me and you are literally the only people she has. I want–I want to be able to compromise. I’m just not sure Taissa would ever accept something like that.”
Van offers her a small, hesitant smile, and on her scarred face, with one lip twisted down, it’s boyish and somewhat charming. Van doesn’t read to her as someone who’s particularly good with people, someone with a manipulator’s touch, capable of weaving through her relationships smoothly. Van Palmer crashes like a wave: she sweeps you up and deposits you somewhere you weren’t intending to go, but she carries you with such conviction that it doesn’t feel wrong.
“That’ll be for me and you and Tai to discuss,” she says. Her eyes drift to an old grandfather clock, watching the tick of the hour hand. “It’s six o’clock. I’m going to make us dinner–you can help if you want, I won’t make you,”
Simone starts, “You really don’t have to–”
“It’s okay,” Van says firmly, chidingly. “I want to, it’s really not much effort. Besides, you’re my guest, and I should repay you somehow. What else am I to do but take care of you?”
A part of Simone, the uninhibited part, shudders and coils inside of her, and it doesn’t make her feel uncomfortable, but it does cause in her a sense of profound unsteadiness.
Simone does end up helping, if only because she feels like she really, really needs something to do with her hands. Van gives her instructions, and Simone busies herself enthusiastically. She puts on a pot of boiling water and cuts up a head of lettuce into manageable pieces and a few slices of bread into small chunks. When she runs out of small menial tasks to distract herself with, she steps back and watches Van as she cooks. They’re not making anything special–just pasta with a rich tomato sauce that Van described as a Scatorccio family recipe, whatever that means–but Van seems to take a great deal of care with everything she does, and, her eyes tracking the movements of her hands and the way she steps, it’s the smallest bit enthralling to watch. Her grip is steady, her touch light, and no movement is wasted. Everything has a practiced air to it, like she’s done it so many times the motions have sunk deep into the fabric of her muscles, in such a way that she can perform the act of cooking like a conductor, perfectly synchronized. Simone recalls that one of the things she initially found attractive about Taissa was how she did everything so passionately, with her whole self. She sees a bit of that in Van, at the moment. She thinks, absentmindedly and with a great deal of sheepishness, that she could probably watch this woman do this for hours. Or repair cars. Perhaps this will join the rotating sphere of things she finds herself imagining at night, swirling around in her mind until sleep takes her.
“When the only thing you have to eat for months is meat and bark soup and maybe some roots,” Van says casually, shocking Simone out of her spiral, “You come to appreciate the glory of carbohydrates on a spiritual level.” She delivers the pasta into the boiling water and salts it. The sauce is simmering, with nothing that needs to be done for it except a brief stirring, once in a while. The lights in Van’s house aren’t LEDs, and they blanket everything in a warm, aurum glow.
“Was it–was meat the only thing you had?” Simone asks, and her curiosity may be getting the best of her, but perhaps if she does something slightly offensive, she’ll stop thinking about Vanessa’s hands against Issa’s skin. Or hers. “Wouldn’t–wouldn’t that leave you with a great deal of nutrient deficiencies?”
“Oh sure,” Van says, leaning against the kitchen counter and watching the sauce bubble. She frowns down at it, and adds a pinch more garlic. “You don’t tend to resort to cooking all your friends if you have a balanced diet available. And–well, we were all pretty fucked up, when they pulled us out of there. Months in the hospital on dialysis machines fucked up. I had a tube in my stomach!” She said this jovially, not exactly with happiness, but with a casual tone and a somewhat playful smile on her face. “Nasogastric whatever. And then they did quite a bit of surgery on my face. We sewed it up in the woods–as much as we could, I mean–but as much as I loved Mari, her skills were skewed more towards crocheting little scarves and stuffed animals, and not suturing flesh. So my jaw didn’t work right for most of a year after that.”
“That’s–well,” Simone said. I’m sorry didn’t feel quite appropriate. Not that it wouldn't be genuine, but that it wouldn’t be impactful. She had probably heard it hundreds or thousands of times, until it lost most of its meaning and became a pleasantry, a thing one says to people who have gone through horrible ordeals in order to absolve oneself of the responsibility to express genuine sympathy or do anything actively helpful. I’m sorry wasn’t really apology, then. It was more like avoidance.
The pasta cooked quickly, and the sauce had simmered into a thickness that wasn’t quite viscous, but wasn’t anything that could be described as runny. Van reached into a cabinet for two shallow ceramic dishes and directed Simone towards her silverware drawer. The two of them set the table unhurriedly. Simone avoided looking at Vanessa’s hands as much as she reasonably could.
Once again, they sat down across from each other. Van served them both, carrying two plates of pasta and setting one down in front of Simone, who had ferried the small salad she had made from into two small wooden bowls and onto their table. They ate slowly, without much conversation between them. Simone had a brief, embarrassing thought that this situation was somewhat similar to a date, which she quickly quashed deep inside of her. It was unfortunate that the pasta was very, very good. If she ever met a Scatorccio, she would have to thank them adamantly.
Gradually they finished their dinner, and Simone decided that it was her job to wash the dishes, since she felt rather shameful about spending most of the time cooking categorically not doing that and instead ogling the woman whose hospitality and advice she was currently relying on. Simone engaged the dishes with ruthless efficiency, trying to quiet her mind and pretending not to notice Van staring at her when she thought she wouldn’t see.
Van began talking about Canada, again. She didn’t seem to want to speak on the violence anymore, the starvation. Instead, she went on about the early weeks, before they lost serious hope of rescue, and they had a great deal of supplies and food. Before anyone died. The way she spoke of it, she made it sound almost exciting, like an adventure. Maybe that was how they thought about it initially. She talked about the lake, swimming around and splashing each other with water that they were exhilarated to have in such abundance. Finding the cabin, the rotten food and the dead body in the attic. Apparently they held a sort of seance, Lottie began speaking in tongues, and Laura Lee had thrown a bible at her head. Van had described this, with a teasing lilt, as their meet-cute. It seemed to be a longtime joke among them. If Laura Lee weren’t so Catholic they’d be married with two kids by now, she said, and Simone, having met them a few weeks previous, felt inclined to agree.
Van decided to sit somewhere more comfortable, and so they retired to her couch, a few feet apart. She noticed that Simone’s eyes often scanned her face, and, interpreting this as a morbid fascination with her scars, began to talk about them.
“See, we put together an expedition to try and find help–see if we ran across a ski resort or something, you know, those things happen. It was me, Taissa, and a few other girls, and the first night, only a few miles out from the cabin, we camped for the night and put Taissa on lookout.”
“That, she said, turning her head just slightly to display the full breadth of the scar, the distinct marks where fangs had pierced her skin and the rippling, mottled flesh surrounding which had been shifted and collected in the process of sewing the holes shut. “Was when Issa was very early on in her appearances, and before I knew about her. She freaked out, I think, and ran up into a tree. Wolves swarmed our camp, and one bit the side of my face before Tai–stabbed it, I think, I don’t remember it very clearly. But they thought I was dead–not really their fault, I’m pretty sure I looked the part–so they put me on a funeral pyre and lit it. Very dramatic. Then I woke up while I was a little bit on fire, so they pulled me off and carried me back to the camp, and Mari sewed me shut with a fire-sterilized needle. I couldn’t talk for perhaps a week afterwards.”
“Wow,” Simone said, for lack of an appropriate response. She noticed she had gotten slightly closer in the process of staring at Van’s face, and they were only about a foot apart now. “That sounds excruciating. And horrible.”
“Well, it was.” Van responded, leaning back on the couch and letting her arm lay flat on the backrest, and it wasn’t quite around her shoulders, but in practice it was very close. Simone felt a very short distance from squirming, which she did, ever so slightly. A little shift brought her right next to Van, and she could feel the warmth of her thighs against her own. She looked a small angle down at Van, who smiled warmly up at her, and she felt her face grow hot. Simone Abara-Turner generally was not like this. She was happily married, and had been so for years. She was not the kind of person who ogled other women, or thought about their hands on her, or sidled up to handsome mechanics who she had come to for advice regarding her marital problems. Except she had evidently been doing those things, and so had relatively little ground to stand on. And Van was so close, and she was warm, and she had invited her into her home and made her dinner and had been honest with her in a way she could rarely–though understandably–get Taissa to match. The stress must be getting to her. It was all too much, she thought. Vanessa Palmer was simply too much to handle.
She wasn’t entirely sure how they began kissing, but she definitely knew that she was doing it. Van’s lips didn’t quite meet hers evenly, her facial features prevented it, but she kissed her slow and tender and easy, and pulled Simone closer until she had one leg over Van’s, situating itself between hers. Van’s hands found the nape of her neck and the curve of her waist, and held her steady. Simone wanted those hands against her skin, but didn’t dare ask for it. Van’s mouth was hot against her, the press of her body a slow, tempering burn. Her form was stocky, she had few curves. Her arms were strong, her hands, her hands, were dextrous and careful and gentle with her. Simone’s fingers found themselves tangled in Van’s curly red hair. For a few minutes, they rocked together slowly, kissing back and forth. It wasn’t erotic, in a strict sense of the word. It was carnal in a way that didn’t thrill her, but did send intense warmth shuddering through her body, like it was being slow-cooked over a licking flame. Van’s tongue brushed into her mouth and she accepted it.
Eventually, the heat itself became too much, and Simone pulled away with kiss-warm lips and slid off of Van’s lap. She scooted a few feet away, back to her original spot. The two of them did not look at one another. They sat like that until the silence became uncomfortable. Van fidgeted and refused to face in her direction.
“I-I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice was rough and tousled with kissing. She spoke with a tongue that had felt the backs of Simone’s teeth. “That was highly inappropriate of me. You were–you are in my home, and stressed, and in a vulnerable position, and–”
“It’s–you don’t need to apologize to me,” Simone cut in, voice a little sharp. It was not her place to decide what Simone did or did not want. “I did not tell you to stop. And I–and I enjoyed it.”
“Well–I’m still sorry,” Van said, self-flagellantly. She gripped a cushion, white-knuckled, and looked back at Simone, her face flushed and ashamed. “I do not pretend to be a very good person.”
“It’s okay,” Simone chided, not entirely sure who she was trying to convince. “I think I’m going to leave.” She got up, stepped towards her coat on the back of her chair.
Van pushed herself off the couch, catching her by the wrist. “Wait,” She said, earnestly, desperately. “It’s late. There aren’t many streetlights, and the roads get icy. Stay–just for the night. You can sleep on the bed. Please.”
Simone looked back at her, and saw a woman who had very little left. She gently extricated her wrist from Van’s grasp, and nodded.
“Okay,” she said. She still stepped to gather her coat, though rather than putting it on, she instead folded it up. The two of them began, rather awkwardly, preparing for the night. Van went out of her way to avoid touching her. She did so for the rest of the evening.
In the morning, Simone left Van sleeping on the couch on which they had kissed, with only her phone number written on a notecard and two waffles set out on a plate. She stepped out into the cold morning air and paused, letting the wind caress her skin. She tried not to think about Van’s hands again. She was not successful.
Notes:
Thank you very much for reading, both those returning and those new to this story. We're getting there! Just a bit more spousal infidelity before we get into the really juicy stuff. Chapter six might be relatively short compared to the previous, because it will mostly be the world's most deranged exes fighting (and more). Notes!
-Taissa sorry about cucking you on this one. Don't worry you'll get your share (of Van).
-I promised that Simone and Van would kiss, and I have delivered! Please thank me below.
-Hopefully I did a good job with the sexual tension. I really have no idea, but I thought it was hot, so hey.
Chapter 6: Girl-Eater
Summary:
Van and Taissa fight (sexily) and fraternize (angrily). Issa panics. Simone once again proves she is the most reasonable person in this polycule (spoilers).
Notes:
Hello folks! Thank you for putting up with my habit of not updating for a month! Happy Holidays! Comments are very appreciated and encouraged, and always make my day! Once again, I am honored to present the Messy Sad Lesbian Show.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Simone told Taissa about it. That was without question–she might have felt compromised in the moment, but she was a reasonable woman, one who could recognize when she was doing something not strictly covered within the bounds of her vows to her wife. And no matter how many times she repeated to herself that their particular situation was an outlier, that there was no precedent for it, she simply could not shake the insistent feeling that she had done something horribly wrong, even if she couldn’t quite say that she regretted it. She had–well, maybe infidelity was admittedly a strong word for what amounted to a little bit off kissing and an innumerable amount of strange feelings it had summoned up in her, but there really wasn’t another way to describe it, was there? Despite this sensation, Simone found in herself a great resolve not to blame a single person for it. The way it was between her and Taissa and Van, or Van and Tai and Issa–it was like they were all homewrecking each other, in strange and incalculable ways that the innovators of such a word could not possibly have predicted. Simone had navigated a great deal of complex relationships in her life and her career, and not a single one of them could even fractionally compare with how labyrinthinely lost she felt every moment of this ordeal.
So, when she arrived home the next morning, and after a few hours of milling around avoidantly like a sullen housecat, she told Taissa. She did it efficiently, without much detail, in a wavering voice that belied her rather futile attempts to hold back tears. The worst part of it was that, sitting across from her on the other side of the couch, stock-still, Taissa betrayed extremely little emotion the entire time. Simone had expected to be shouted at, or chastised, or lectured, or comforted in a way that suggested she was the victim of some atrocity, but Taissa, bewilderingly, conformed to no such assumptions. She sat there with tightly clasped hands as Simone explained the night to her, staring at her tear-heavy eyes and quivering attempt at stoicism. Her account had many interjections, some apologies–I’m sorry, it was a severe lapse in my judgement, I hope you can still trust me, I was lonely and overwhelmed and wasn’t thinking–and others assertions–I did it of my own volition, it wasn’t her fault, she didn’t take advantage of me, she was very kind and courteous. To her own surprise, she didn’t stumble as much talking about her betrayal of her wife’s trust and affections as she did describing her and Van’s conversations during every other part of the night. It was a strange thing–she was entirely willing to admit everything to Tai when it concerned making out with her ex-girlfriend on a couch, but much more reticent at the thought of telling her about how Van got her to laugh, or made her dinner, or offered whatever information she wanted on a platter.
“I really, really don’t want for you to be angry with her,” Simone had said near the end of her almost stereotypically tearful confession, looking Taissa straight in the eyes and challenging the force of her stubbornness. “She–she seems very lonely, and sad, and I think all this has been very bad for her.”
“That’s not a goddamn excuse,” Taissa spat, sitting straight up. It was the first thing she had said since the start of Simone’s speech, and she shrank back into herself at the harshness of her wife’s tone. Taissa abruptly rose from the couch, and began pacing back and forth along their large footrest cushion, hands at the small of her back. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a genuine, but rather forced air. “I’m sorry–I shouldn’t be angry with you, I’m telling myself that, but I–I don’t think I can promise you that, with her. You–you understand.”
“Okay,” Simone said, looking back at Taissa and then down at her hands. Taissa sighed, in a way that was somewhere between exasperation and fury. She turned her head to gaze at Simone with an unreadable expression, then quickly stepped out of their parlor, taking her coat from a hook along the wall. She slipped it on, refusing to look back in Simone’s direction as she watched her from the couch, and, with an angry set to her jaw, walked straight out the door, which she narrowly avoided slamming.
Simone, left alone, pulled a pillow to her chest and allowed her tears, which up until now she had been primarily occupied with stemming, to flow.
The drive to Van’s small town was quiet, and long, and the visuals of it caused small spikes of half-remembered fear to crawl up Taissa’s spine like the pricking of cold at exposed skin. She had always hated snow, since returning from Canada. She found that when she looked at it, she had a hard time not seeing it with a wet, crimson hue, soaked through with the blood and melted fat of a cooked human body, or blackened with the soot of their first failed attempt at cremation. Winter always came with a perennial and frighteningly explicable sense of guilt, and her tolerance of meat dropped quickly once the leaves began to fall from the trees. When she was at her worst in winter, she wouldn’t eat for days, out of fear that everything she brought to her lips would taste like the charred remains of a teenage girl she used to share notes with in class.
For two and a half hours she sat in her car alone, in silence, and laser-focused on her goal, her destination, the thing which had consumed her life whole–not only for this past month, though not that she would admit it to anyone, much less herself, for years. Even now, especially now, she found herself unable to extricate her thoughts from Vanessa Palmer.
Taissa understood, in clinical terms, that she was a very troubled woman. That she had developed, somewhat against her own will, extremely strong bonds with the people she had survived with, their shared sin holding them together inexorably, across time and space. She knew that her separation from Van, driven primarily by her–of course it was her, Van had loved her, Van had been in love with her, and Taissa has never been good at allowing herself good things and filtering out the harmful ones. Van would never have left her, if Taissa hadn’t taken it upon herself. If she hadn’t been–and still continued to be–fundamentally unable to properly cope with her own existence. Van would have followed her anywhere, and Taissa couldn’t bear the thought that she deserved her, that she was eligible to receive love, that she was a person who could be understood, could be identified with, could be connected to. They were all sworn to secrecy, and so no one would ever punish them for what they did to each other, for allowing each other to become like this. That, then, was another thing she had taken up. And what–what was the worst punishment imaginable, to her nineteen-year-old mind? What was her personal, specially designed agony? There it was–she could admit it, shameful and gluttonous, that the worst hurt she could have engineered was to be apart from Van. Was to deny deny deny deny, to make herself a fractal, to fold the parts of her that ached on top of each other until they appeared diminished. She could convince herself that she wasn’t hurting if, when she looked down on herself from above, the punctures in her soul weren’t visible. If she could make herself unspeakable in her own mind, she wouldn’t have to accept anything but that which was the most acceptable from the outside.
Outside her car, the snow-covered hills and woods sprawled on and on and on, and the landscapes blurred together in her vision, superimposing on top of one another until she couldn’t quite say for certain that this wasn’t all a dream, that she couldn’t still feel the slow hollowing of starvation, or the muscle atrophying on her arms, or the sickening pleasure of fullness after a winter feast.
New England had a feeling to it that reminded her of the Wilderness: a sense of wrongness, of something lost, of things not quite the way they should be. There was something in the air that lamented, ached for what had been. The ache of a past too heavy to bear if one acknowledged it, of too much blood in the snow, running red and sticky down one’s jaw and buried underneath one’s fingernails, a violence restrained only by the creaking slowness of age.
Van’s house was frustratingly mundane, she thought, pulling along the sidewalk in front of it. It had a small yard devoid of any decoration saved for a small garden cordoned off with stones, clearly attended to lovingly. It was brick-built, red and brown, colors Taissa associated mostly with death and nausea. Square windows, a triangular roof, a single floor. There was something about the frustration she felt towards Van that made her want to despise anything associated with her, but her attempts at summoning up anger were so far futile and disheartening.
Taissa stepped briskly along the stone path leading up to her porch, refusing to look at anything too long for fear of circling back around and developing an appreciation for it. She walked up to the door, drew the knocker upwards, and slammed it into the wood as hard as she could manage several times. In only a few seconds, she could hear the scrabbling of feet as someone rushed to the entrance of the house, perhaps concerned, and wrenched the door open. Taissa found herself looking Van Palmer in the face, taking all of her in–her scars, her bright eyes moving towards fear, the way her lips came apart slowly, as if she was about to speak–
Taissa was overcome with an intense surge of anger, and reared back and hit her directly in the face.
Van, entirely defenseless, was knocked backwards inside her house, her body sprawled on the wooden floor as she struggled to her feet. Taissa, realizing that she was outside, in public, stepped into the home and closed the door behind her.
Van groaned, bringing one hand to her cheek and bracing herself upright with the other.
“What the fuck–” she started, but Taissa grabbed her by the arms and hauled her up before she could finish the sentence, the sound forced from her throat as she was shoved into the wall of the hallway.
“You do not get to talk like that,” Taissa snarled, and dug her fingers harshly into the skin of Van’s arm. “You–you demand my wife come to your home and then you–you try to take her to your bed, you piece of shit–”
“That is not what happened, ask her, you fucking maniac, I can’t believe you–”
Taissa pushed her into the wall harder, incensed. She was near shouting now, her voice picking up in volume.
“What, Vanessa, what part of this don’t you believe? You didn’t think that maybe, there would be consequences to your fucking actions? You thought that I wouldn’t be fucking enraged at you for trying to take advantage of my wife?”
Van, who for many years had been stronger than her in a great multitude of ways, reared forward and shoved Taissa away from her. She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, sneering across at her.
“You,” she said, voice cold and harsh as Canadian winter, and hurting just as deeply, “do not just get to come barging into my home, hit me in the face, and accuse me of things I didn’t fucking do, just so you can, once again, avoid discussing something difficult with the woman you married. If that’s all you came here to do, you are going to walk out that door right fucking now, or I will call the police on you, you absolute bitch.”
Van’s face grew cruel, and she bared a wolfish, broken-lipped smile and stared her down. “Are you jealous, Taissa? Is that it? Are you that fucking insecure? Do you think I’m trying to steal your wife or something? Don’t kid yourself–as if I care enough about you to bother. She kissed me, Taissa, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that, but I would be remiss if I let you keep on believing I’m some sort of devious homewrecker.”
“You asshole,” Taissa growled. She stepped forward–maybe to strike Van–but she caught Taissa’s arms, holding them tightly, and pressed forward until Taissa’s back met the wall.
“Is it?” Van pressed. “Tell me, Tai, I know you, I know how you think, I know how fucking impossible you are–?
“Fucking whore,” Taissa said angrily, all of her noble motivations and complex feelings dissolving in the face of Vanessa Palmer, the sheer, indignant intensity of her. “You’re just trying to get a rise out of me, I don’t need to stoop to your–your level–”
Van laughed, a high-pitched, exasperated noise that was almost unbecoming of her. She tilted her head, smiling, looking Taissa in the eyes.
“Seriously, Tai?” she said, genuinely incredulous. “You’re so fucking weak, baby, I don’t even need to try.”
“Do not talk to me like that, you arrogant, deranged, self-righteous motherfucker.” Taissa shouted in her face, fought against her grip in a desperate but ultimately futile struggle. Van held her tight, kept her pressed between her stocky, strong body and the hard surface of the wall. She was smiling in the face of her rage, teeth sharp and voice savage. It was like the wolf had left a part of itself behind in her expression, in the cruel lilt of her tone and the violent beauty of her face.
“Oh?” Van said, amused and teasing, always poking, always prodding. Never could leave anything to itself. “What are you going to do about it?”
The distance between them is only a few inches, infinitesimal, painfully small and in some ways, the farthest she ever wanted to be from Van for the rest of her life. Taissa knew she was a troubled woman, she knew she never had quite as tight of a grip on her impulses as everyone thought she should have, she knew she let her anger get the better of herself more often than not.
Taissa has never been able to control herself around Vanessa Palmer, and nothing in the world was worse than being this close to her, after everything. Nothing was worse than having the option, feeling its terrible, shameful pull, and instead of taking it in her hands and pulling back, wrenching herself from Van as she should, as she had been angry at her own wife for not doing, Taissa allowed herself to sink into it. She let it take her, let herself be driven by her own fractal desires. Van Palmer loved to prod, and Taissa always, always gave her exactly what she wanted.
Taissa closed the distance between them and kissed her angrily, her hands still held up in the air on either side of her head. She felt Van kiss back and chased it aggressively, biting her scarred lips and licking across them and allowing herself to take and take and take.
There was nothing gentle about it, nothing passionate, nothing loving. There was an intensity, a subtle violence that belied their motions as they pressed against each other, kissing hard and vindictive. Van’s lips tasted like warmth, like meat, and it reminded her of bodies in the wilderness, of flesh parting under the scraping pressure of teeth. She could bite down, deeper and deeper until their mouths ran slick and bloody, and they could lick it off of each other’s lips like wolves to a blade. She knew Van knew it just as deeply as she did. Taissa hated to feel like she was someone who could be understood, but with Van, no pretense was possible–Van was just like her, all sharp edges and the memory of emaciated skin taut over jutting bones, brutal guilt buried deep inside, shame and pain and memory that warped and melted over the years into something like connection, something like desire. There was nothing right about them, but at least they were wrong in the same sort of way.
“Fucking whore,” Taissa gasped into her lips as Van kissed across her jaw, down her neck and back up to her lips, capturing them aggressively. “You’re so–pathetic.” Van had long released Taissa’s hands to press her into the wall by her shoulders, and Taissa buried them into her hair and curled them tight in the locks, grip strong enough to hurt.
Van leaned her body fully into Taissa’s, so that there was not a single point of separation between them. She sighed in pleasure and kissed her hard enough to bruise her lips, hands sliding down her body and bracing against her waist while Taissa’s fisted themselves at the back of her head. She chased after Taissa’s mouth mercilessly, like she was hungry for her, would starve without a part of Taissa inside her. Both of them knew exactly what that felt like.
“You should–get over yourself,” Van said teasingly, between rough kisses and high-pitched sounds of pain at the stretch of her hair that might also have been pleasure. “You’re so obsessed with me–obsessed with ruining everything you have–with your pretty wife and your big house and your high-power job and you still can’t fucking help yourself–”
“Shut the fuck up,” Taissa snarled at her, and kissed her so that she would stay quiet.
They didn’t touch each other–Taissa’s hands remained firmly in Van’s hair, while hers gripped white-knuckle on the curve of Taissa’s waist but didn’t do anything further–but their bodies rocked against each other as they kissed, roughly and vindictively, each chasing something from the other, each trying to draw some form of power, of satisfaction. It was like back when they were curled up in the cabin trying to save warmth, shivering from the loose boards and broken windows. There was less of that sweetness to it, though, less of that innocent pain, that longing before everything went to shit. It was after they lost real hope of rescue and before they started considering each other’s bodies as potential sources of food, and so that period had a melancholic kind of peace to it. They were going to die out there, so they no longer cared about hiding anything from each other. A month or two pressed close in a sleeping bag, Van’s injury barely healed, Taissa rubbing the pain out of her jaw or pressing soft, chaste kisses to her cracked lips. Sometime along the way they had lost the capability for that kind of innocence, that caring gentleness. At some point they had become as hollow as their stomachs, the frost settling into their bones and making them cold and hurt and hateful. As much as Taissa wished for that sweetness back, she knew that this was all they had–this savage, undefinable sort of love, still shining and bone-white after a decade spent festering in resentment.
Van’s presence was all-encompassing–every inch of her body in contact with every inch of Taissa’s. Van was hot and assertive and willing, pressing firmly into her and kissing the life out of her, her mouth scathing, the soft brush of it on Taissa’s skin so intense it nearly hurt. Taissa slipped one arm from her hair and wrapped it around her neck, pulling her closer, closer, closer, desperate for her. She was panting, overheated, her skin flushed and breath stuttering. Her perception of her own body was slippery, shifting unsteady in her mind. There was a gentle pain at the base of her jaw and behind her temples. Taissa ignored it, trying to kiss Van hard enough to become engulfed within her, to surrender herself fully. The heat and the pressure of it swam in her mind. Her eyes closed with a shock of unreality and ache. She felt Van’s tongue edge past her lips, and then she was gone.
Issa Turner awoke in a body that was, frighteningly and wonderfully, pressed tightly against one she identified near-instantaneously as Vanessa Palmer, mouth to mouth, chest to chest. She realized this, and froze up so quickly it made the soreness of her muscles evident. Her mind was running fast, trying to compile a possible scenario that explained what was currently happening to her. Clearly, she was not in the house, because it didn’t look like Taissa’s, and evidently she was not in Taissa’s room there, because if she was, she didn’t imagine that Taissa would be doing this–and clearly Taissa had been doing it, whatever she had woken up in the middle of, because there wasn’t a third person, and she had developed more self-control than this over the time she spent with Van, and so the only other option was that Taissa had gone to Van’s house–she presumed that it was Van’s house, having never been inside the building before. So, this was a bad situation, or at least a highly irregular one. This was something she could see herself doing, if she was a bit more impulsive, but clearly she wasn’t the one doing it.
Van noticed quite quickly that she had frozen up, and pulled back to look at her in her frazzled, confused face. And oh–Van was so beautiful like this, so pretty it made Issa regret that she wasn’t the one who had been doing this before. She had never felt jealous of Taissa before–it was a very unfamiliar sensation. Van’s face was beautifully pink, her hair messy, her eyes full of want, her lips kiss-bitten and roughed up.
“Tai?” she said, and looked a little deeper, stared into her eyes, and then, credulously, “Issa?”
“Um,” Issa said, entirely unsure of what to do and suddenly filled with an intense desire to run away and squirrel herself someplace small and cozy, “please don’t follow me.”
Issa broke away from Van’s embrace, and Van didn’t even fight it, just watched as she took a long look at her, then turned away and bolted down the hallway and out the door.
She was thankful Taissa had not taken her coat off during whatever that had been. Outside was cold and dreary and faintly reminiscent of the place she tended to think of as her birthplace, her home. She rushed off the porch, past the nice garden, and to a vehicle she vaguely recognized as hers but couldn’t quite figure out where she had gotten that idea from. The door lock clicked off as Issa approached it with the keys still in her pocket, and she wrenched it open and crawled inside. Once in the driver’s seat, a word which she knew but had little context for the meaning, she braced herself against the dashboard and screamed.
She did this until she was a little hoarse, and until her–their–body calmed down from the intense arousal she realized it had been feeling. Her heart rate was brought down slowly, and she rested her head against the steering wheel and sighed heavily. For a moment she stopped to consider what had just happened. Obviously, Taissa was going through something intense enough to warrant willingly being in Van’s presence, and somehow that evolved into being shoved against a wall and kissed furiously. As much as she might like to, though, she didn’t actually share many of Taissa’s personal, experiential memories, only the background ones relating to speech and things, and so she had no idea how that had actually come about.
Minorly panicking, and operating on muscle memory as was her most common state, she pulled her phone from her coat and punched in a number, the meaning of which was lost on her, but the familiarity of it and the ease with which it came to her likely meant that it was important. She held the phone up to her ear and waited several long seconds.
The quality of the sound wasn’t so great, but a concerned, familiar voice came through when someone on the other side picked up.
“Taissa? Simone said. She sounded like she had been crying recently, but Issa was so relieved by someone she knew being there that she didn’t bother to poke at it. “Are you–are you okay?”
“Not Tai, Issa,” Issa said, and promptly burst into tears. “I’m sorry–I’m sorry, I’m at–I think it’s Van’s house, I think Taissa was kissing her–and I don’t know where I am and I’m alone and I’m cold and I don’t know how to drive a car–”
“Hey, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Simone said quickly, trying to sooth her as Issa sobbed into the phone. “We can figure it out, it’s okay, do you–do you need me to come get you?”
“Um, Issa said, and looked around. There was no one on the street, and she only really knew two people, most of the other girls seemed to have scattered to the winds after they left her first home. “Please?”
“Okay, I’ll–I’ll be there. Stay in one place, okay?”
“Okay,” Issa said, and sobbed harder once Simone hung up. She had never felt more alone in her life, including her first terrified steps in the wilderness. What if Taissa shut her out again? What if she never let Van come visit her? Simone–Simone was alright, maybe fine, she was nice, but she wasn’t Van. Issa needed her–needed the first person who was ever nice to her, who gave her her name, who took care of her in her wildest moments, when she was the least of a person.
Issa sat in the driver’s seat of the car, curled up, and cried, waiting for someone to come help her.
By the time Simone arrived, she had finished crying, but that had only left her with a terrible feeling of emptiness, the familiar hunger that accompanied her every time she woke up, like her body didn’t know how to be full, after spending its formative year and a half in the middle of the woods, with only snow and bodies for sustenance.
Simone pulled up alongside her own car, parallel, and Issa wasted no time scrambling out of the metal object which she had no idea how to use–much less how to get home if she could–and into the passenger seat of her body’s wife’s car. She curled into herself, bracing her knees against her chest. Simone leaned over and pulled a strap across her body, fastening it into the seat to keep her in place. Vaguely, Issa understood this was for safety. She looked at Issa with a concerned expression. Of course she would–she’s only seen her a few times, she wouldn’t know what she’s like. Simone pursed her lips, eyes pitying.
“Issa,” she began, “Are you–are you alright?”
Issa briefly considered the question. “I don’t know.” she said. “I get–like this, every time I, I wake up.” She looked away from Simone, trying to escape her gaze. “Simone–sorry. I’m hungry. Really hungry.”
Simone froze, struck with the realization that this is the first time Issa has ever said her name, ever referred to her directly. She addressed her again, tone gentle. “You only eat meat, right?”
A small shudder coursed over Issa’s body. “Mm. Yes. It’s–the only thing I’ve ever had.”
“Oh,” Simone said. “I don’t have any in the house–Taissa doesn’t like it in the winter. We can go to a grocery store, and I can make you something?”
“Sure. Please.” Issa mumbled, looking up at her with reddened eyes and tear stains down her face. “Can we go?”
Simone nodded, and started her car again. She stopped for a moment to call Van to arrange the return of Taissa’s car, and then turned around on the street and began the drive back to New Jersey, back to home.
The drive back home was almost entirely silent, as the day rolled on and the sky began to grow dark with early night. Issa curled herself into a ball and refused to talk, and Simone made little effort to talk to her past a few tepid attempts. Staring out the window and watching the snow roll by in the dark, Issa mused that maybe here wasn’t so different from there.
The parking lot of a grocery store in New Jersey was an entirely overwhelming experience. Simone asked if she would like to wait for her, and Issa responded with “No, no, please no, don’t want to be alone.” Simone acquiesced, and, once they had both gotten out of the car–Issa more by climbing that anything else–she took Simone by the hand so that she couldn’t be left alone, and held it tight.
Issa had never been inside a building like this before. It had a great many people in it, more than she had ever met in her life (though probably the hospital had more, just in many different rooms and not a single large one) and so many different things that were apparently food, as Van used to describe to her. She stared with amazement at all the different shapes and colors of things, some of which she recognized from the structural, pattern-based memories she shared with Taissa, those which came from a shared neurology. Many of them were unfamiliar, and she focused on things like fruit and plants–things she knew about but had never considered eating before–as Simone dragged her like an unruly child towards the raw meat department. This, she was familiar with. She was so hungry that she would have eaten it bleeding, but she had the nagging sense that then Simone would be angry at her, which, as potentially the only person she had access to now, she desperately did not want. Issa gestured vaguely, and Simone bought a slab of meat. The word Issa’s mind associated it with was steak.
Carrying a plastic bag in the crook of her arm, Simone led her gently by her hand between the aisles and displays to the checkout and out of the store. People looked at them as they walked, which made Issa want to squirm. She was not particularly used to the idea of being looked at, except by Van.
Once they were out, it was only a short drive home. Issa followed Simone up the stairs and into the house, and let herself be directed to sit at the counter. Simone removed the plastic wrap from the meat, pulled a pan from the cabinet, and after the click-click of the oven turned into an intense blue fire, she began to cook the meat with butter and a few sprigs of plants. Cooking meat was a smell that Issa was intimately familiar with. But this was different than it had been in the woods–less acrid, less intense. It was warm and aromatic, and strangely pleasant. It didn’t take very long–she liked it on the raw side, anyways–and she waited silently and obediently until the cooked meat was presented to her on a plate.
Issa knew how to eat with a fork and knife–Van had taught her–but she was so hungry that she roughly cut the meat into several pieces much too large for polite dining and shoved them into her mouth as fast as possible. The taste was rich and sensual and the best, most wonderful thing she had ever felt. Issa audibly moaned as she finished it, and stiffened when she realized that Simone had been watching her. Shyly, she wiped at her mouth and throat with a napkin and set her knife aside.
“Thank you,” she said, which she had been told was a polite thing to say after someone had done something for you. Simone smiled, so it seemed like she had done it right.
“It’s the least I could do,” Simone said. “Do you need anything else?”
“Tired. I’m very tired. Do you–do you not want to sleep close to me?” She recalled something like threatening her the first time she had met her, and remembering it caused a surge of embarrassment, considering how Simone had only ever been kind to her. People were afraid of Issa, she knew that. She knew she was unsettling, and that most of the others in the woods only really tolerated her, and even then, only because Van was very, very insistent.
“No, it’s–It’s okay. You aren’t dangerous, and I promise–I promise I’m not afraid of you. I mean that.”
“Mm. Thank you.” Issa slipped off of her chair, taking a few small steps back and wrapping her arms around herself, trying to be smaller.
“I know it’s not that late, but–it’s been a long day. Come one. I’ll–I’ll help you get ready for bed.”
Issa nodded, and followed Simone across the room and up the stairs, towards their room and accompanying bathroom. It was a large room–with a nice soft bed, a bookshelf, an armchair, and a small table.
Slowly, trepidatiously, Simone and Issa slipped out of their clothes and into what they normally wore to sleep–which Issa had to be directed to, as she normally never went to sleep without having Taissa do it first. They took turns in their shower. Issa felt a strange shyness, an odd modesty about her body, which she knew Simone had seen, but never as her, and the thought made new and unsettling feelings slide up her spine. Simone didn’t comment on it, if she found it strange.
They settled into Tai and Simone’s bed together, with Issa facing the wall, and Simone behind her. Issa struggled and fidgeted, trying to fall asleep and finding only failure.
“Simone?” she said, and it was still a shock, even if it was the second time now. Issa turned over so that they were facing one another. Her eyes were afraid, and shy. Simone was struck with the desire to comfort her.
“Yes?” she said. Issa briefly looked away, a breath shuddering in her chest, as if gathering courage.
“I–when I woke up, Van was–was kissing me, and I think had been, because I wasn’t doing it–I didn’t do it again, I promise, I’m sorry, but–are you mad at me? Or her? I don’t–don’t want to ruin all this.”
Simone’s eyes softened, though her expression was a bit pained. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said gently. “No, I’m not mad at you. I don’t blame you. Or Taissa. It’s–It’s hard to be mad at Taissa, with what she’s been through. She loves me, and I care a lot about her, and by extent, I care about you. Taissa is–she can be difficult, and she’s troubled and hurting, but she’s not a bad woman. Neither are you, Issa, or Van. It’s hard to live, after having things like that happen to you. It’s hard to be normal.”
“You should blame me,” Issa said, her voice cracking slightly. “It’s–it’s my fault. Really.”
Simone moved closer, and carefully reached out, cupping Issa’s cheek with one hand. Forever hungry for touch, Issa leaned into the warmth and support.
“Issa,” she pressed, “You haven’t done anything wrong. This isn’t what I expected when I married Taissa, and maybe I was a bit frightened of it at the start, but you’re a lovely thing, Issa. There’s nothing you need to apologize to me for. It doesn’t have to be hard between us, and it won’t be, I promise. It’s–I’ve been thinking about you a lot, you and Taissa. I know how you feel about me, and my marriage, but I–I know that you’re lonely, and you’ve only ever relied on one person, and I hope it can be two, if you want. I hope you let me care for you, sometime.”
“I don’t know how I feel,” Issa said, and she felt tears coming back. She quivered under the blankets, and Simone stroked her cheek and gently brought Issa’s body closer to hers. “I’m sorry,” She tried to say, but it was broken up by soft weeping. Issa felt herself collapse into tired sobs again, and Simone pulled her close and wrapped her arms loosely around her, bracing Issa’s head on her collarbone. Tired, hurt, and allowing herself to be held. Issa buried her face in Simone’s shoulder and allowed her tears to come until she coaxed herself to sleep, with Simone’s fingers carding carefully through her hair.
Notes:
Thank you for reading! Basic updates on projects:
-Chapter 7, 1996, is Callie Shipman's sixth birthday. Drama! Yay!
-If I can get my shit together, I will be writing my original work medical drama romance novel over the course of the next month, and publishing it once it is fully written with a regular update schedule.
-In terms of other projects that are not this fic, I have four immediate ones: one Apothecary Diaries fic, two kpop movie fics, and potentially a third work in the AENEID series, unrelated to the first two. Keep on the lookout for these if you'd like!
-As I delivered on my promise of making Simone and Van kiss, I have now delivered on making Tai and Van kiss. Probably Simone and Issa next!
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