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thedragonagelesbian · 2 years ago

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The Long Way Home

You watch the fire in the rearview mirror. There is a comfort in losing sight of the specifics of your mistakes: the decimated house, the buckling grain silo, the flaming wreckage of a truck, the jagged maw of split earth like Harborview itself had been trying to reach up and swallow you.

The broader picture remains, though, as a stubborn orange haze still smoldering on the horizon, streaked through with the blue and red of emergency response vehicles. It’s clinging to you too, in the ash and soil and tiny flecks of blood still caked under your fingertips. Not your blood, of course, but Gwendolynn’s, a lingering remnant from when you tried to heal her bullet wounds because that too would have been a comfort, apology and recompense all in one. To touch her there, grazing metal and copper, meant you would not have had to acknowledge the other wound.

You would not have had to acknowledge that you nearly lost control of your magic. That you would have, had she not touched you, one hand on your back to settle you and one hand on your outstretched arm to guide you. That you lost control anyway, so Gwendolynn had to take your sputtering failure into herself.

You would not have had to acknowledge any of that, were it not for the way your magic made the smear of burns along her forearm blossom into a gnarled, flame-licked scar.

Ultimately, then, the receding optics of the farm can only bring you so much comfort. For as far as you may drive, there is no distance you can put between yourself and what you’ve done. Eventually, you will have to go through it.

Knowing this, you’re ready with your response by the time that your driver, Moony, clears his throat.

“That was…” Morgen ‘Moony’ Roonie is as unlikely an acquaintance and amateur monster hunter as they come, decades older than you and constantly filtering the world, magical or otherwise, through the lens of his bizarre but harmless conspiracy theories about disappearing lawn statues. You can handle that, though, more than you’re equipped to handle Gwendolynn right now. “That was something…”

“I ought to be the first to apologize for how I behaved back there,” you reply, referring not to the fires but everything that came after. The obsidian monolith with its tendrils in everyone’s minds. The shouting as you and Moony squabbled about what to do with it. Your flailing, feeble efforts to justify preserving it without revealing that the Daybreak Corporation had asked you to. Gwendolynn throwing herself in front of the stone to keep Moony from destroying it— why she cared so damn much, you still don’t know, but she was willing to die for that stupid thing, and it was fixing to drag her into oblivion with it, so you stepped in. Saved her. Shattered it like you had broken so much else with just a touch and a thought of spark and ruin as the whole world shook above you.

Then, you pocketed that last sliver of hued rock to deliver to your betters, but you’re not apologizing for that right now.

“Things like that,” with a sower’s expertise, you weave between truth and obfuscation, “things that old and powerful, fixtures of Harborview, like the church… they give me all sorts of funny mixed up feelings. Makes it hard to know what I want.”

Attachment is a hard thing to throw away. You know because you’ve tried plenty hard. For years, you’ve nourished and cultivated the resentment inside of you until it festered into the rotted purity of hatred toward every inch of Harborview.

But the attachment lingers. Nat reminded you of that. You spent the last three, blissful weeks with her salvaging those memories that had remained unspoiled: the store at the Docks where you bought her that big floppy sun hat she loves so much, the lighthouse the two of you used to break into with your best friend Zak, the Waffle House where the cheerleaders, the band, and the baseball team congregated after games, and the jukebox at its front where Nat used to belt rock standards and shake her hips and look oh so terribly good.

You don’t know what you want.

“Well, I still think we did the right thing, in the end,” Moony replies, and you savor the certainty of his long, slow drawl. “Still, that don’t much excuse yelling at you while waving a pickaxe in your face.”

The pickaxe did not unsettle you nearly as much as Moony shouting over and over again “there’s something you’re not telling me” or Gwendolynn spitting “is there something you’d like to share with us, Adelaide?”

You coax a smile from yourself all the same.

“Fair enough, though you’ve seen what I’m capable of. I can hold my own in a fight.”

“That you can,” he says with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t want to go up against you.”

“You handled that pickaxe pretty well, though. You really did a number on that rock.”

“We did the right thing. Trust me.”

“I do trust you, Moony.”

It almost passes for normal conversation, and not the musings of two would-be monster hunters who were at each other’s throats just minutes ago debating whether they should, in fact, be hunting this particular monster. You are inclined to crack a joke about just how bad you are at this. It is, after all, pretty fucking funny how many lives have depended on the three of you despite the group’s obvious dysfunction: your repeated defiance of Gwendolynn’s insistence that fire not be your first resort, Moony’s penchant for wandering directly into danger against express instructions, Gwendolynn’s caginess and her dogged, unerring commitment to her own martyrdom.

But for all your many crossed wires, you do trust Moony and Gwendolynn. You would never dare undermine the weight of that. You’ve not trusted anyone but yourself in a very long time. Even that trust was recently earned and hardwon: you forgot it for a bit, how to have faith in your breath, your body, your mind.

You once told Moony you got your start practicing magic with bindings and barriers. That was the first magic you encountered, yes, but it wasn’t the first you did yourself. Your real start was a trick you taught yourself to keep from drowning when the fear and loneliness and grief caught you like the undertow: how to forge a life raft of silver and blood.

You’ve held yourself together for so many years with just the scar tissue on your thighs, and it wasn’t until you met Moony and Gwendolynn that you realized how much strength that took.

Trust means that that strength doesn’t have to be all your own anymore.

And as the faint lights of Harborview emerge from the darkness, demarcating a horizon you cannot otherwise see, it is that trust that compels you to say, “Moony, you mind if I ask you something? It doesn’t really have much of anything to do with what just happened, but… it’s been on my mind for a bit.”

“Oh? Sure. I actually got something I want to ask you too. But, you go first.”

“You went to school with my dad, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, ’course I did. Harborview High Class of… eh, gosh, what year was it again?”

“What was he…” The question starts fast, but just as soon as you begin it, you watch its end stretch out in front of you, and suddenly you cannot get your mouth around it anymore than you can keep the tide from receding. Rather, it is the question that finishes you, coming back in as the undertow wrapped around your throat and choking out your last breath as a quiet prayer: “…like?”

Who was Wyatt Dellouise before becoming the man who ruined your life?

You have the mythos you’ve built in your head. In those early days when you barely ever left your bedroom, you had little else to do but string together half-remembered anecdotes and wishful fantasies until they took the form of your infidelity. You thought he might have been awkward and gangly. Or else stoic and obnoxious, preaching to any peer unlucky enough to find themself caught in his orbit. Maybe he was even a bully and a nark who rattled off sermons for every slight transgression.

The specifics don’t matter: you’re just hoping Moony will sanctify your blasphemy.

Instead, he says, “Popular.”

You blink, hard.

“Yeah, yeah, you know,” Moony continues, “he was real popular. Wasn’t the star football player or nothing, but he was the jock everyone knew. And, y’know, he was nice enough to me and Tubbs. We didn’t interact all that much, but we got on alright whenever we did get to talking. He didn’t bully us or nothing, wasn’t an asshole athlete like some of the others.”

You are staring up at the night sky. Faint pinpricks of starlight fight to shine through wisps of smoke still curling from the fires— some of which you started, all of which somehow feel like your fault. Most nights, though, the whole Milky Way opens up above you. When it isn’t cloudy or storming, a crack runs through the universe itself, silver and blue and purple and reaching.

Back when your dad still thought he could just talk you into staying, he would take you stargazing. He once rented a boat and took you out on the ocean in the calm summer twilight to watch the sea and sky blur together.

He told you, in that soft stupid apologetic mumble, like he had never once himself enjoyed that same natural splendor he was leveraging against you, “they don’t have stars like this anywhere else, Addie.”

You can’t breathe.

How could he have ever been anything else?

“Did you—?”

“I was wondering—”

You both stumble to a stop, and you feel the pressure building in your chest, warming your cheeks and tightening your throat.

“Sorry,” you say quickly, “sorry, I suppose it ain’t fair if I get to ask you two questions and you only get the one.” And it is a stupid question anyway, with an answer you’re not sure you’re ready to hear.

“No,” Moony assures you, “no, it’s okay, you go ahead.”

You swallow, and now you cannot avoid it.

“Did you know my mom too?” When you blink, you see the smiling statue built over her grave. You’ve never been able to remember much else: the hem of a long jacket, a sly laugh, a wordless voice full of vigor. “Melanie?”

“Oh, sure! Melanie. Yeah, she was about the smartest woman I ever met. Y’know, only time Harborview High ever made it to the state quiz bowl was ’cause of her. She and Wy, well, they put up a good act, playing like they hated each other, but we all suspected something. Y’know, she used to tell him he was all brawn and no brain, and he’d call her bookworm and the like, but it weren’t much of a surprise to anyone when they got hitched.”

“That… that sounds about right.”

You say it because you don’t know what else to say. Because it sounds like the kind of thing you’re supposed to say, like the throughline should have been so obvious as to be self-evident. Of course this was who he was, who they were, of course they never hated each other the way you told yourself they did, of course he was just a boy once, and a young man in love after that.

So why can’t you see it? If the line between past and present is so neat and clean and obvious and right, why are you trembling trying to keep it straight in your head?

Is it you? Maybe it’s you who’s wrong. Maybe it’s always been you, something about you that changed him, made him do what he did to you.

Your mind flashes to that statue in the cemetery: its chiseled benevolence and granite serenity, its hands sculpted into a perpetual fold of piety. If you die here, is this how your daddy will memorialize you too? Sand down the rough edges until all that’s left is the placid smile of a dutiful daughter already six years in the ground?

Moony is driving slow now, the car trundling past the gold neons and sleek flashing signs of Daybreak’s corporate cathedral which marks the outskirts of Harborview proper.

“Now, Adelaide, I gotta ask you…” he says, just as slow as the vehicle. “You keep mentioning… barriers and binding and the like, this kinda magic that keeps folks stuck somewhere. I know you said that’s how you got your start with the whole…” He makes a low whistling sound, followed by a bassy boom imitating an explosion. He smiles at his impression of your powers, but the joy fades fast as his brows furrow and his mouth tightens. “Is there… is there something else going on that I should know about?”

“You wanna know the truth, Moony?” You don’t want to give it, but you think you can still spin this, towing the line between soul-bearing and obfuscation like you did with your motivations for destroying the rock. “When I was eighteen, just a bit after my birthday, I got in my car and I drove up this very road, got a little bit past the Madison’s farm back there, and crashed into…” you pause like you don’t know how to describe it, like you haven’t spent the last six years throwing yourself against it, “something. Some kinda magic barrier.” You shrug like you don’t know anything else, like the story ends here. “And I haven’t been able to leave Harborview ever since.”

The car rolls to a stop at the first stoplight in town, sandwiched between suburban housing and Moony��s place of work, the Yard and Sale lawn emporium. When the light flicks green, though, Moony doesn’t take his foot off the break. The car hums in place through another light cycle. When you glance at him, you see his knuckles have blanched white around the steering wheel.

“Did…?” His voice comes out phantasmal and quiet. “No… Did he…? Was it…? Was it Wyatt? Did he do this to you?”

You feel your heart like a rabid dog. It is still tethered to your chest by a fraying string, but it snarls against your throat, desperate to sink its teeth into your jugular.

What else are you supposed to say?

“Yeah.”

“Shit…”

“Yeah.”

Tears burn your eyes as you pull your knees up and curl in on yourself. You’ve held this truth so close to your chest for so long you feel something tear inside your ribcage as you loosen your grip on it. It is one thing to go through your life as a ghost, walking through hollowed-out ruins that others insist are whole, beautiful structures. It is another to finally see someone else standing with you in the debris, and that recognition still hurts. Not like drowning, not like burning, but like ripping away a band-aid while the wound underneath is still bleeding.

Your world has already ended once. This is not the end of a world but rather the impression of one, the end of a story you could once tell others about the kind of man your father is not because it’s true but because no one has ever believed anything else.

And sometimes, on your worst days, during your absolute bedridden nadirs wasted wondering if it would be easier to just give up, you tricked yourself into believing it too.

Behind you, the wail of sirens announce the ambulances that have followed you back to Harborview. Moony runs the red light and pulls over to let them stream pass, but even as the blaring recedes through the darkness, he lingers there, letting the car idle.

“I’m sorry,” he says at last. “Adelaide, I’m so, so sorry…”

What else is he supposed to say? There are no words, magical or otherwise, powerful enough to pull the glass and metal out of your eighteen year-old corpse— Wyatt already tried that trick in the hospital after the car accident. The apology can’t fix anything, not really, but it can soothe your frantic, feral heart. It can wrap itself around you and hold you tight as the tears start to fall from your eyes.

“It feels good to say it out loud,” you mumble at last. “Nice to tell someone… I’ve never told anyone… I spent so many years watching half the town show up to listen to him every week that I…” Your voice cracks with the weight of something it cannot hold as you think of them, your so-called family friends who knew you and Wyatt had been fighting, who knew how excited you were to go off to college, who didn’t so much as bat an eyelid when you didn’t. “I got so used to thinking no one else would care…”

Moony is silent as he eases back onto the road, following Main Street down toward the Docks, toward home, which currently takes the form of Gwendolynn’s inn, the Cuddly Rockfish. You don’t expect him to say anything else, though, and you don’t need him to either. It’s enough to have finally unshouldered some of the burden you’ve been carrying for so, so long. Even if it’s left your sternum popped open and your heart raw and exposed and aching in the salty sea breeze, you know that Moony cares.

You know that Gwendolynn will care too.

It is a new thing for you, to be loved without being smothered.

Or, so you thought.

“Is that what you meant by April? You wanna get out of here by April?”

At first, there is a wash of relief. You can finally admit that you have been trying to get out, and more than that, you can get Gwendolynn and Moony’s help.

And then, the fullness of Moony’s words slam into you, and the light in your stomach goes out like a blown match, all curling smoke and hard wax and cold, coiling dread.

“What do you mean by April?”

April is what Nat told you. April is when she comes back for good, when you have to be good too because you cannot get her involved in this. She can’t see the truth of this world, magic and monsters alike lurking in the shadows and you more monstrous and magical than most. April is when you have to escape because she can’t see what you do to get there.

Moony stares at you with a frown.

“It’s okay—”

“How do you know about April, Moony?!”

April is what Nat told you when you were alone with her in her old bedroom, drunk and taciturn as she pleaded with you to talk to her, clamped up around precisely this truth because you did not trust yourself not to break down and bleed out like open floodgates.

“Well, Gwendolynn told me all about—”

“She what?!”

The tether breaks. Your heart scrabbles over your lungs and up your throat, clawing at your windpipe and slicing through your tongue and pressing against your clenched jaw like it wants to pop it out of its socket and suck the marrow of your mandible.

“She let me know everything, y’know, about her listening in on that conversation you had with that old friend of yours on New Year’s Eve and…” Moony trails off, his voice growing quieter with every word until you hit the intersection where you should turn right onto the Docks. “And Gwen never told you…”

No, you would have remembered Gwendolynn mentioning she had been spying on you. Watching you.

You’re quaking now.

You brought her to that party because you needed her help, because you couldn’t trust yourself but you could trust her to take care of you, and she didn’t say anything. Didn’t follow up. She saw you in Nat’s bedroom fighting not to fall apart right then and there.

And she didn’t care. Doesn’t care.

“She promised…” Moony whispers, so soft you think he’s more talking to himself. “She promised me she’d tell you… Damn it, Gwen…”

You stare out the window down the stretch of shoreside road that is the Docks. In the faint glow of a streetlamp, you can just make out the Cuddly Rockfish’s storefront, slanted and distorted at this angle, its awning casting a warped shadow across the concrete of the sidewalk. It reaches toward you, and your chest tightens.

This, this does feel like drowning.

But you’ve swallowed your fair share of salt water over the years, so you swallow another and clear your throat and say, “I think… I think I could use another place to stay the night.”

“Yeah…” Moony is turning the car around even before you finish your request, “yeah, you can come back home with me. You stay as long as you need.”

“Thank you…”

Neither of you say anything on the drive back through town. The sky is clearing up. The streets are quiet. No ambulances, no fire trucks, no fires, no nothing.

Mercy be, you hate this town.

But for the first time in six years, as you’re pulling into Moony’s driveway, someone tells you exactly what you’ve been needing to hear:

“We’re gonna get you out of here, I promise you, Adelaide, we’re gonna get you out.”

#adelaide posting #this is the most self-indulgent thing ive ever written and i dont mean in a content way #i mean in a style way #a 'i wrote this to make ernest hemingway roll over in his grave' way #second-person purple prose be upon ye

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