Chapter Text
just for one moment, thought I’d found my way / destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away
Joy Division - Twenty Four Hours
Between the medications, the brain damage, and the shock of being told that her medical diagnosis is officially “possessed by a ghost,” the first day after V is brought back from the dead is largely a blur. There is a lot of movement and activity, but none of it belongs to her; she gets shuttled around like luggage first from Vik’s clinic, then to Misty’s car, then into a rusted-out folding wheelchair into the equally rusty service elevator up to her apartment, and then finally unpacked and wrapped up and put away into her own bed.
It feels like a century has gone by since the last time she was home. The V who last slept in this single-room apartment lived a different life. A better one, she thinks, bitter, even as Misty’s gentle hands help her down onto the pillows, fold the blankets around her, smooth back her hair.
In her scrambled, battered neurons a memory bounces around of her mother’s hand, cool on her forehead. A fever? The image feels disjointed somehow, and though she can see her mother’s face in her mind’s eye—dark eyes, dark hair, bright smile—something in her brain rebels, insists the picture is wrong. Both the feeling and the memory itself fizzle out too quickly for her to grasp, and she forgets them as soon as they’re gone.
V attempts to make herself comfortable, but it’s a challenge when she feels too heavy and too light all at once. Her body is sinking into the mattress even as her head struggles to float up and away, and the tension between the two extremes is exhausting. While the blankets keep her in place physically, there is nothing to prevent her mind from continuing to scuttle around in its own ruins. She squirms. It doesn’t help.
While she tries and fails to find a place for herself in her own bed, Misty continues to fill the silence. She sets up an assortment of pill bottles on the shelf by V’s head, reminds her which are which. Painkillers, immuno-enhancers, sedatives, and lastly a matched set of bottles. One, she explains, to suppress the code that’s eating her brain; the other to amplify it. In V’s half-stupor she can only blink in confused silence. Amplify it? Misty expands on this, but it doesn’t make it make any more sense. Something about easing the transitional pains by ‘letting go of the leash.’ The word accelerationism bubbles up from somewhere deep in V’s consciousness, accompanied by a pang of something vaguely like disapproval. It feels like a scoff of derision overheard from another room.
“You should get some sleep, V.”
She had begun to drift off. Misty’s tone has an overly careful quality to it that makes V’s jaw clench. It’s pity; it’s the compassionate voice of the palliative care worker and it drives the knife further into the wound that Vik left behind earlier today when he told her she was dying. Not just dying, either, but actively being consumed—a wasting sickness with a face and a name and a whole life’s worth of memories lying just below the surface of her own. A cancerous tumour with a shitty attitude and a discography she could look up on the Net if she cared to. Bitterness and anger creep up in her; a new pain blossoms in her head alongside all of the preexisting pains and V realizes she’s gritting her teeth. She tries to let go. It doesn’t help.
When it takes her too long to respond, Misty continues, now fussing gently with the bedding as if it might make any difference at all.
“Do you want me to stay for a while, keep you company? I know you tend to keep to yourself—”
“I died twice.” The non-sequitur comes up out of her like it’s been dragged from her throat, raspy and unwilling. Her throat feels desert-dry and she coughs a little before continuing, not meeting Misty’s eye although V can see her turning to look at her from the border of her vision. “In the last… however long it’s been. Days, weeks.” She doesn’t know. Vik told her but it didn’t feel real and it didn’t stick. It feels like forever and like no time at all. “I died, and then he died, but it was me dying then too. He…” she coughs again, staring unseeing up at the ceiling of the little alcove of her bed. “I don’t want to do it again, Mist. Not like that.” She can feel tears fighting their way up into her eyes. She closes them to keep the feeling at bay. “Not—by someone else’s hand, not—”
She can feel it through the mattress, the way that Misty shifts on the bed—uncomfortable, uncertain. The other woman waits a beat in wary silence before prompting V to continue. “What do you mean? You’re not considering… ? V, you can’t—”
“I don’t want to be… I don’t want—”
“Shh.” Misty leans over her again, golden hair back-lit by the dim light from the bathroom door. Against the darkness of the room it forms a shaggy halo around her pale, round face. “Come on, V. You don’t need to think about that right now, okay? Right now you need to rest. To recover.” Her mouth attempts to shape itself into a reassuring smile but V can see the way it shakes, the way it stops just short of her eyes. It serves as a reminder to V that, as miserable as she feels right now, Misty is struggling too.
Guilt claws its way up to her heart, nestling in right alongside the misery. They fit neatly, side by side.
Through her exhaustion, she works a hand free from the blankets to pat clumsily at her friend’s sleeve. The coordination isn’t there, and she ends up batting ineffectually at her arm instead of giving the comforting squeeze she was aiming for; all the same, Misty’s eyes crease as her watery smile grows a little wider, a little less laboured.
“Rest,” she repeats, covering V’s hand with her own. “Here, I brought you something.”
Misty turns away and digs something out of her skirt pocket, placing it in V’s limp, outstretched hand. She folds V’s fingers around it gently. Whatever it is feels small and cold. It takes a great deal of effort for V to bring it up close enough to her face for her to identify it, and even after having done so, it fails to resolve into a recognizable object—at first. Then:
“Is this the bullet that… ?” Even to her own ears V’s voice sounds small, weak. She coughs, inhales, tries again. “Where did you—”
It’s a small-calibre bullet; Misty has taken a few lengths of jewellery wire and affixed it in the centre of a metal hoop on a necklace chain, forming a pendant that falls somewhere between a dream-catcher and a saint’s relic. V turns it over, watches it catch the light. Watches the way that blood has permanently altered its surface.
Looking at it makes her feel sick. She closes it up in her fingers again.
“Vik was going to throw it away, but an object with this much personal significance has a lot of power, V.” Misty says this as though it’s common sense. As though it should be obvious. “I asked him to keep it because I knew you should have it. As a talisman.” She pauses, squeezing V’s hand around the pendant. “I think it could bring you good luck. And… fortitude, maybe.”
V doesn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” she manages eventually. “Could probably use both of those.” She lets her hand fall to the bed, still clutching the pendant loosely. The motion rattles something free in her and she exhales, heavy and slow. “I’m sorry, Misty.”
“What for?”
“For everything. For… this, for dragging Jackie into—”
“You didn’t,” Misty interrupts, her voice soft but insistent. “Jackie never did anything he wasn’t fully committed to, you know that. You didn’t drag him into anything. You couldn’t.” But all the same she looks away, examining the floor, her eyes shuttered. “You don’t need to apologize for anything, but especially not for that.”
“I’m still sorry.”
Misty sighs, then, gaze still on the point in the middle distance where scuffed, dirty laminate meets carpet. “I am, too.”
“… what?”
“I’m sorry that it went this way. That you have to go through this, that we have to, you and your… construct and Vik and Mamá Welles and I. And I’m sorry that the last thing I said to Jack before he… the last thing I said was something I didn’t even mean. We were having a stupid argument. I didn’t—” she’s blinking rapidly now, heavy lashes tapping against her cheeks. “I didn’t tell him. At the end of the last holocall, I didn’t say—”
V has to stop her, then. The misery and the guilt fill her lungs and she wheezes, stricken. “Don’t, Mist. He knew. Trust me, he knew.” Though her body is trying to drag her down into sleep again, she struggles through it. She lets go of the pendant to bring her hand up, finding Misty’s and clasping it. The bullet and its chain fall, tangled in the blankets. “He knew. When he—when we—he loved you so much, he did, to the very end, I promise. He knew.” It’s more words than she’s successfully strung together since she woke up and it burns away the last of her energy; V stares up at Misty through bleary eyes and wiggles their joined hands as if to punctuate her statement. “He did.”
Misty is quiet for a moment, still staring into nothing. Then she turns to face V again and lays her other hand over V’s. “Thank you,” she says, and the gratitude in her voice is so strong that it makes V flinch. It feels like too much, like more than she deserves, and it makes her lower her gaze to their hands because she can’t stand to look at the way Misty’s face brightened at her words. “Thank you for telling me,” she continues, and V can only nod, not trusting her voice. “Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep, okay?” Misty lets go of V’s hands and stands up, smoothing down her skirt. “And promise me you’ll call me if you need anything. Me or Vik. We’ll both be around for anything you might need.”
Again, V can only nod. Misty folds up the wheelchair and then pauses there a moment, resting her weight on its handles. In the dimness of the room V can’t read her expression, but she’s quiet, seeming to consider her next words carefully. Flickers of neon from between the slats of the blinds catch on her hair and tint her first blue, then red, then soft orange. When she finally speaks up, her voice has a distant quality to it, as if she’s almost talking to herself. “He loved you too, you know. You were his sister in every way but blood. He always said so.”
There isn’t anything to be said to that, not really. V swallows hard. “I know.”
“I always felt like that kind of made us sisters, in a way,” Misty adds, and a small, rueful smile twists her mouth. “We’re family, V. You need to let us help you when you need it.” She heads for the door, the click of her boot-heels and the squeak of the wheels echoing loudly in V’s aching skull. “Sleep well, honey.”
Once she’s gone, V turns her face into the pillow and waits for sleep to claim her.
It feels like it takes a very long time.