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It begins with a conversation. Heavy words whispered into the light hours of the early morning. Dani’s fingers fiddling absentmindedly with the curls at the back of Jamie’s neck.
They are lying on their respective sides of their small double bed, facing each other, when she asks the question.
“Do you ever think about it?”
“What?”
“Life after death.”
It’s rare for Dani to initiate this kind of talking — rarer, even, for it to be such a heavy topic. Jamie tries not to let the shock show on her face as she stares back at the unblinking blue and brown eyes in front of her.
“I think about it, yeah,” she answers finally. It’s true. Jamie has spent many sleepless nights as a child throwing shadow patterns on to the walls of a cold, cramped bedroom with her hands and wondering what would come of it if she just faded away right there and then.
“And what do you believe?” Dani is pressing. There seems to be more than one question in her words, Jamie senses. She’s not sure she wants to dig further.
“I believe,” Jamie murmurs, “that I never cared for the idea of life after death until I met you.”
Dani simply blinks back at her, a small, disbelieving smile playing at her lips.
“Really?”
“Really, really,” replies Jamie, pressing the softest of kisses to Dani’s nose, lifting her right hand to gently cup Dani’s cheek.
“I think about it too,” Dani says in a shaky voice, and then pauses, as though expecting Jamie to interrupt. Jamie does not, so she continues.
“I think that whatever… whatever this is, in me, she didn’t. Believe, I mean. Even when, you know, it happened to her.”
“And you?”
Dani laughs, then, she actually laughs, turning over on her back to stare at the ceiling above, and Jamie follows suit.
“I believe. I don’t… know what in, exactly, but I see it in the good dreams. I see us, too.”
Jamie twists her head around, knotting her eyebrows together. “Us? As in, dead us?”
“Well yes, technically, but it doesn’t feel like it. And… when I think about death, and me, and all of this, it doesn’t scare me anymore. It just reminds me of how we’ll have forever together, when it finally happens.”
“Which won’t be for a while.”
“No,” Dani agrees, grinning. There’s a hanging plant above their bed, and she lifts a hand to it now, tracing the delicate folds of the leaves.
“And what will we do?” Jamie challenges, rolling over to face Dani next to her again. Dani doesn’t move. Lies quietly, wide eyes staring directly above, her fingers still dancing across the plant.
“We’ll dance in the night sky together.”
The first time it happens, it’s a nightmare.
Dani wakes from crashing waves and muffled screams of missing daughters and stolen clothes to her fingers delicately placed around the throat of Jamie. Jamie, who is staring motionless up at her, coughing out shuddering breaths as Dani removes her hand.
She’s still half stuck in her mind, Dani. Still not quite there. The realisation doesn’t hit until Jamie begins to cry quietly, sitting up straight as a board with Dani on her lap. She is making no attempt to hide her tears; no attempt to muffle the sobs growing louder as Dani wraps her arms around her in silence, and Jamie clings on momentarily, before pulling herself away to stare at the woman in front of her.
“What the fuck was that?!” Jamie whimpers. Dani, to give her credit, seems to be in a similar state of terror, her bottom lip trembling as she stares down into her lap at her fingers.
“That— Jamie, that wasn’t me, I was dreaming and I just woke up on… on top of you, and I didn’t even realise I was doing— that, until I heard you and…”
“It wasn’t you?” Jamie repeats Dani’s words, finally wiping salty tears from her cheeks and placing one hand over her heart as some wild attempt to calm herself down.
“No, Jamie…” — Dani is crying, now — “It wasn’t fucking me, I was asleep.”
It’s Jamie’s turn to take Dani into her arms, rub slow circles into her back as Dani cries into the curve of her shoulder.
“We’ll… keep an eye on it,” Jamie finds herself not only echoing her words from an unfortunately similar conversation they had had about half a year prior, but believing them less and less.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” she repeats firmly. “You didn’t actually… do anything.”
She pulls away, searching for something she doesn’t recognise in Dani’s eyes.
At the loss of contact, Dani bursts into a fresh flood of tears. Jamie pulls her in again, hands gripping the back of Dani’s head this time, stroking softly through shyly greying hair.
“OK. I’ve got you, baby. I’ve got you.”
“I could have killed you, Jamie,” Dani sobs into her wife’s neck. “If I hadn’t woken up…”
“But you did. And I’m still very much here. We’ll keep an eye on it,” Jamie is insisting firmly, and Dani cannot find it in her to argue.
The second time it happens, it’s an ordeal. The position is almost identical — Dani, in a dream, body balanced precariously on Jamie’s stomach, fingers on Jamie’s neck. The only difference, is that Jamie doesn’t wake. Even when Dani’s eyes shutter open and she finds herself gasping and jerking her hand away, Jamie is still. Almost too still.
“Jamie?” Dani whispers her name uncertainly, and it is so loud in the quiet air of the room.
“Jamie,” she says again, gently shoving Jamie’s right shoulder. She is met with a disheartened grumble.
“What’s up?” Jamie is rising now, appearing to take notice of Dani’s positioning, realisation dawning on her. “Oh. It happened again?”
“Yes,” Dani mumbles, her eyes shimmering as she looks at the small space between them.
“Hey. Look at me.”
When Dani shuts her eyes tight, her head still hanging, Jamie gently places a finger under her chin and pushes up.
“Please, Dani.”
Dani does.
“It’s not your fault.”
Dani’s body is racked with shaking sobs as the guilt washes over her in waves and it is so much worse than the dreams where she feels like she’s drowning.
“It’s not your fault,” Jamie repeats, holding Dani close. “It’s not your fault. Not your fault.”
After some time, she hears Dani swallow, as if to prepare to say something neither of them want to hear.
“We should… do something. About this.”
“What?”
“It’s not safe. I think… I…”
I need to go, she thinks desperately. I need to go before it takes you too.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Dani is sucking her lips into her mouth as the tears flow down her cheeks silently. She didn’t say the words aloud, she’s sure. It makes it worse — to realise how well Jamie can read her without speaking.
“D’you hear me, Dani? Neither of us is going anywhere. We’re both still here. You’re still here. You’re still you.”
“Am I?” Dani asks, and the tears still immediately when she poses the question, staring directly into Jamie’s heart.
“You always will be,” Jamie whispers, and she brings her into an embrace again. Better this way, she thinks, where Dani can’t see the sheer fucking terror on her face, the fear spilling over down her pale cheekbones, her eyes wide in the aching darkness. Better this way, her chin over Dani’s shoulder, where she can keep her promise of feeling for the both of them.
Dreams don’t come to Jamie, often. Nightmares are a rarity — have been, since she met Dani. For Jamie, sleep is a comfort, the knowledge that for once she doesn’t have to hold together the crumbling foundations of others’ lives cradling her into a soft darkness. Sleep is a refuge, and it is quiet, no pictures dancing behind her eyes, no shadows of her old life taking the opportunity to haunt her.
Just peace.
But today, it is cold. Suffocating cold, pressing in on every side of her body, every twist of her head as she opens her eyes.
It is cold, and it is brown. There is a deep, dark brown in both of Dani’s eyes as she grips Jamie’s throat with the strength of a thousand men. Dani’s eyes, which are wide open, staring. No blue to be seen as the early morning sun shimmers cheerfully through the window.
On mornings like that, more often than not, Jamie will wake first. Blink slowly as she shields her face from the light. Turn her head just a centimetre to see the golden glow of Dani’s hair spilling across the pillow.
Dani’s hair is dark, now, not brown, but dark, and so are her eyes, and her skin is porcelain white. Her face. Her hands.
Her hands, which are stealing the breath away from Jamie’s lungs with every flex of fingers.
Jamie. Grasping at Dani’s wrists, attempting vainly to pull them away from her neck, but they only tighten further, and Jamie is gasping now, struggling to inhale, as her vision clouds. This is a nightmare, she thinks. Not real.
She believes it less and less as the empty darkness begins to creep in around her eyes.
Even less when the icy fingers around her neck tighten and she feels her throat constrict.
Even less when Jamie finally understands, as she reaches for a breath she knows she won’t be able to catch, that she couldn’t do it this time. Couldn’t save Dani from herself, bring her back to the unassuming, affectionate woman she met at Bly Manor those years ago.
She’s never been one for giving up, Jamie. As a rule, she’s believed in perseverance and resilience.
But here, as she feels her hands fall away from Dani’s wrists and the breath finally leave her body, she thinks it doesn’t matter if she does.
It doesn’t matter, as long as her last thoughts are of Dani Clayton.
Screaming.
That’s the best word that can be used to describe the sound that rips open the skin of the apartment in the morning.
The sound is animal, and it shreds Dani’s throat with the power of a million suns. She’s screaming, and screaming, and she cannot stop, barely registers she’s doing it.
There had been a waking, and a denial before realisation. Dani Clayton’s wrists were burning and bruised, her fingers cramping as she woke buried in the crook of Jamie’s shoulder.
Jamie, staring unblinking at the ceiling, her eyebrows knitted together in a final twist of fear.
And then the screaming.
A raw, savage thing, hurled into the breeze of the morning, punctuated only by hysterical sobs and “Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.”
She’d dreamt this. Never told Jamie, because, even though you’re my best friend and the love of my life and I’m actually pretty in love with you it turns out Dani had wondered if that would be the thing to scare her away. The gnawing anxiety she felt every time she jolted awake from the picture of dragging Jamie underwater, deeper, deeper, was enough for her. It was not a burden she was willing to pass on.
Here, at midday, clutching at Jamie’s face — stiff, yet still so soft — she wishes she could take it all back. She’d swallow that lake a million times if it meant keeping Jamie breathing. She’d burn down that Manor with her inside as long as Jamie stayed alive.
But it’s too late, isn’t it? And that’s the worst part of it all, in the end. She waited too long, always thinking one more day, one more week, you, me, us but now it’s just her.
Her, and this thing in her bed she cannot call Jamie because that means that she won’t pad into the kitchen to see Jamie cursing a plate of burned toast, won’t feel Jamie slip into the shower behind her and immediately seeking her body heat, won’t feel Jamie’s lips on hers or fingers in her hair.
If she gives this body a name, it’s over forever.
So she doesn’t, not until hours later when she thinks she’s cried every millilitre of water out of her body. Dani remembers, eventually, that there are people on earth besides her. People who know her — love her.
She resorts to calling Owen, fingers shaking around the phone, her bottom lip trembling.
“A Batter Place, let’s cut to the cheese. How can I help you?”
Of course. It’s late afternoon, probably prime order hour, and the voice on the other end of line is distinctly not Owen, rather one of his female employees. Dani punches the button to hang up the phone before she remembers how to exhale.
She doesn’t move, not for some time. Resorts simply to sliding to the ground and sobbing again, finding there are still tears left in her to cry, and it’s a good half an hour later that she picks herself up, steering clear of the bedroom and the icy grip it has on her wife.
She knows someone will have to move the body, also knows it isn’t going to be her. Dani Clayton has never been selfish, but in this moment as the air around her is pressing in and as her mind reels with empty green eyes and pale skin, she cannot bring herself to care as she sits at the coffee table with a half ripped sheet of paper and a biro.
Clenching her hands enough to steady the shivering that has been racking her body all day, Dani writes.
Owen.
You once told me —
Tears are falling already.
you once told me that grief is the price we pay for love. Thirteen years ago, on a night in Bly before the entire world tipped sideways and took us with it. Think you were a little drunk, actually, but the details are blurry, now — there’s mercy, in forgetting things. Please, Owen — remember that. Remember to forget this. Love turned its back on the both of us, really. Broke me, but shattered you. And just — words once fell from your lips like sunshine, you know? If I’ve taken that away from you, if doing this is what takes that away from you — I’m so sorry. I’ll say that too many times, I think, but I need you to take those words and hold them so close. That none of this — none of this, Owen — is your fault. You never deserved to be the last one standing, to carry all of this loss. There’s a brutal irony, really, in always being right. The type of irony which takes words like “grief is the price we pay for love” and throws them back as daggers, one by one.
Dani pauses, blows her nose. Takes a moment to set the pen down as the back of the head pounds with the reminder of Jamie.
When I ask you to forget me, I mean it. I mean it, as in; it’s the only mercy any of us will ever get.
Don’t think I can find a way to write this without breaking down, so if the ink here is smudged when you’re reading this, you’ll know why. It’s Jamie.
Writing her name sends twists of fire through Dani’s soul.
Not Jamie. It’s me, really, my selfishness, the way I would’ve given anything for a few more days with her and god, because she’s the price I ended up paying. The grief, for love. I promised myself I’d leave, before anything ever happened to her. Promised, and failed.
She’s gone, Owen. Because of me. If you’re seeing this — don’t really want to finish that sentence.
She has to.
If you’re seeing this, so am I.
The thought does not shock Dani, necessarily, but she draws in shuddering breaths as she stares at that sentence.
It was how it was all supposed to end, wasn't it?
She’s going to take me, and, well, that much was still true, despite Dani’s attempts to fight it. The beast had asked for Jamie — asked, and received. In Dani’s nightmares it had always been the lake she saw, the green-blue ripples swallowing her.
“No,” she says aloud, and there is true conviction in her voice, “You can’t have me like that. I won’t give you what you want.”
Pen to paper, once again.
I love you, though, you know. Same sort of way I loved Jamie’s coffee, or the sunset through my window at Bly, or the smell of the earth after it’s just rained. The sort of way you love anything, anyone, who you’ve learned to call home. Does that make sense — that you felt like home to me? Does anything make sense, anymore? I’m not sure at all if love is a salve, or just a deeper kind of wound, at this point. Don’t think it matters, when it comes down to having to write words like this. Issue is, you were in love. We both were. There’s no cure for that.
Not asking for forgiveness, for what I’ve done. For what I’m about to do. Just — just asking you to keep going. For Hannah. For Jamie. For me. This isn’t how it was ever supposed to be — but I think the world laughed, at that. Took my grief by the throat and said but this is how it is.
If there’s anything left that I believe in, though — it’s you. There’s a universe inside your head, Owen. Constellations of the words left unsaid.
The time we had was never going to be long enough, for all the lives we could have lived.
Dani does not sign the letter, barely registers the process of sliding paper into envelope and stamping it.
Barely notices her strides out of the door, the bottoms of her sleep trousers swinging through the puddles on the pavement.
Barely thinks as she pushes her letter into the screaming red of the postbox and presses her forehead against the cold metal for a lingering second before she turns.
It’s the opposite direction to home, Dani is completely empty, and everything is dark, punctuated every so often by the glare of a streetlight. She did not bring anything with her - nothing but the ice of Jamie’s skin on her lips as she had pressed a kiss to her still forehead before she left, eyes blinking shut so as not to prolong her presence around the body.
Now, all of her is cold as she strides along the side of the road, past tall brick houses and empty cars. She vaguely registers the hum of them on the road below her as she steps to the side of the bridge, dodging below tree branches that almost seem strategically placed, as if screaming no no don’t do this you have so much to live for, but Dani doesn’t, and so she slides around.
Not giving you what you want, she thinks. You already took that from me. This is my decision.
White knuckles grip the barrier of the bridge behind her as Dani looks, unblinking, to the stars. The lucid sprinkles scattered across the blue-black background. Paint on canvas. Her eyes stare further up, hands slowly releasing her grip on the cold metal against her back. She will never know, in these final minutes, how blue her eyes were. The final part of her, rising in defiance. That she will leave this earth as no one else but Dani Clayton.
She raises her head back as far as she can. Stares. Remembers a conversation as she breathes to the stars.
We’ll dance in the night sky together.
And with that, Dani falls.