Work Text:
i.
The rescue changes Van in ways that only the wilderness, all the way back in its little pocket of Canadian hopelessness, will ever be able to comprehend. At the same time, Van remains in stasis.
Taissa is the only thing that can shuffle her around, and Taissa left for college. Taissa is chasing a stronger life, the life that was almost stolen from them by the cold---a life wrapped in newspaper articles and magazine headlines and journal pages. Taissa is going places! Taissa is going to branch out into the world and soar over the skies, and she is never going to crash!
What is Van going to do?
In the mirror, she curls her red hair around her fingers, gazes at her reflection and tries to decipher the person she sees giving an empty stare right back. She takes her essence in her hands like soft clay and forms a new herself. She brushes her hair with her fingers, splays it all out across her shoulders and neck. She drills a little hole into her head and lets all of the pressure flutter out, lets the memories of the past trickle down onto the shitty tile flooring of wherever-she's-living-these-days, and she tries to let it go. If you love something, you have to let it go.
It shouldn't have to be like this, but there is a distance between them now - a literal distance, and a metaphorical distance. Van is so far away from Taissa that oceans have formed between them, so distant from her lover that the tectonic plates have broken apart their Earth and shifted them into entirely different continents.
It's been so long since the rescue, but Van hear's Lottie's shrill scream in her mind every single night, haunted and hunted and hollowed.
Something has to change.
She picks up a nearby pair of fabric scissors, and chops away at her hair. She watches the locks fall and scatter on the floor, watches her reflection transform. When she is done cutting, her hair is much shorter, stopping just past her ears. She turns and examines herself in the mirror, sways side to side; it's a sloppy job, uneven, but the rugged cut juxtaposed with the scarring on her face actually makes it work.
She'll clean that up later. For now: she shakes all the extra hair off of her and climbs into her shower. No hot water. Later she'll pick a tape at random, pop it in, and evaporate. Tomorrow she has a job interview.
Something has to change.
x.
They tell Van it's going to take over a year - maybe multiple years - to complete the process. She's grown her hair out by now, and she's been able to keep this job for a while, and as long as she doesn't get fired in the meantime (and no one finds out she's going to have a penis), everything should be fine. Sure, it's expensive even so, but:
Something has to change.
The surgeon swears she won't tell anyone that Van Palmer Yellowjackets is getting phalloplasty. The intern asks Van out, and they fuck in her parked car in the back of an alley because this year marks seventeen years after the rescue and she's empty, and Van doesn't talk to her ever again because this year marks seventeen years after the rescue and she's empty.
"Can I have your arm?" the surgeon asks her at one appointment, and her touch is light and soft over Van's rough skin. She studies Van's arm for a moment, almost as if admiring it. "I'm going to press down in a few places, okay?"
Van can hear it in her voice, can sense the frantic failed attempts to disguise the pity. She's looking at Van like Van is a shelter animal, lowering her voice with caution like Van might shatter with sudden movement.
"What do you want to be able to do with it?" the surgeon asks.
I want to have control over my body again. I want to be able to control something. I want to do something to my body that is my choice.
"I want to feel like myself again," she says, her typical constructed response. "I want… I don't know. Your typical, run-of-the-mill dick."
Dr. Peck laughs. "I think we can do that."
xiii.
She doesn't understand the symptoms, but she can't afford medical insurance now that she's at a different, much shittier job, so it's going to have to be okay. She's going to have to get through this.
The girl she's going out with tonight wants to meet at a museum, and she wouldn't have agreed to the location if she wasn't absolutely itching to try her dick out. They'd talked about it on the app, she's been healed for a while, the girl's fascinated. She's a little bit younger, and she walks in with dangling pink earrings and dark lipstick, and Van hates absolutely everything about this.
She shouldn't be here. It's too close to—
"These artifacts of our past serve to remind us of where we've been, and will inform us, help guide us, as we move forward into the future. I believe that if we do not shy away from our reality—if we recognize the truth of our past, all of its wonders and its unimaginable horrors—we are able to make decisions based in equity and justice. By ensuring we do not repeat our prior mistakes, we evolve into a greater, and more prosperous, society."
Her date laughs at the distant voice. "Do you think she's talking about history, or the teenage cannibalism?"
Van shivers and jolts. "What?"
"I thought you'd know, considering your… age. You know, the Yellowjackets? Taissa Turner?"
Van's heart splits, and she feels her head lighten as that sharp, needling pain slithers into her abdomen again. "She's here?"
"Uh, yeah?" her date shrugs, pointing to something high directly behind Van. She knows that she cannot look, that looking will only lead to that drilling pain metastasizing into her heart, but she is still a creature of the past herself and she c a n n o t h e l p i t —-
She turns. She looks.
She knew Taissa had been doing some political stuff, the first and last time she did her curious little Google search. She finally made it. She knew Taissa was destined for this, she knows that Taissa will accomplish anything she can sink her teeth into. She really did see this coming.
Look at where she is now. She doesn’t need Van at all.
God, she hopes Taissa doesn’t see her.
(God, she hopes Taissa sees her.)
She turns back to her date. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
xiv.
Teeth chomp down into Van’s heart. Another mirror. Another vessel she is forced to witness herself through. If she had scissors, she’d cut her hair again right here and now, in this museum bathroom. If she could transform once again, go through yet another metamorphosis as she stands, she would disguise herself as a new Van and escape back to safety.
Van pulls each metaphorical tooth out of her heart and runs her fingers over the dents of their markings. Too sharp, not sharp enough. Every crevice and flutter and beat just makes her think of Taissa, so close to her now. They’re so close. It’s been so long.
She looks down to wash her hands, piles the soap on thick and rubs her hands underneath the water until they feel raw and red. She’s so fucking stupid. She knew coming here was a risk. She came regardless- and why? Because she was horny? How embarrassing.
She reaches for the towel dispenser, her back to the wilderness of the crowd, and this is when the prey is struck——
“Van,” she says.
Van exhales, loses her breath for a moment as she turns to meet Taissa. For a small, ephemeral flicker, it feels like everything is back the way it used to be - the way it should be - fragmented - Taissa and Van so young and so broken and still trying to hang on. Taissa and Van after the rescue and their drifting hands. Taissa and Van in their mystical circle, their entwined souls consuming themselves in a spiral. Taissa would hate that comparison, Van thinks, and a small giggle escapes before she can wrangle it.
Taissa raises an eyebrow. “What— what’s funny?”
“Hello to you, too.”
“Van. It’s been—“
“Please, Tai, just—-“
“It’s been ten minutes since I saw your date leave,” Taissa finishes. It wasn’t what she was going to say. Neither of them understand anything anymore.
“Oh,” Van replies, then laughs again. “Shit.”
Taissa stops for a moment, her expression twisting from anxious to shocked and finally descending its graceful landing onto calm. She joins in on Van's laughter, until they're both giggling loud enough for it to be unbecoming of a politician. There's no one else in the bathroom, though---Taissa is simply Taissa in here, the one anchored to Van during their time in their wilderness, their time beyond. She's the Taissa Van knew intimately, their bodies and essences entangled.
What was it Taissa had said? If we do not shy away from reality---if we recognize the truth of our past, we'll… something or other. She doesn't remember; she was too focused on how Taissa looked, the way she's aged, her open demeanor, to truly process what she'd been saying.
Well. The reality: Taissa is going to be a senator, maybe. Probably. Almost definitely. Van knows that she can do it, and she'll do it. That's just how things are. Van can't really pay her bills, and she's getting sicker, and Taissa is going to be a senator. That's their truth, the reality that neither of them can shy away from.
Her laughter fades.
"Tai," she says. It's supposed to sound strict; it isn't supposed to match the apparent tranquility Taissa has in Van's presence. Isn't she --- doesn't this hurt for her? Doesn't this haunt her? Why does it feel like both a damning and an ascending to be near Taissa Turner nowadays?
"I'll go," Taissa says. She takes the hint. "But I... I hope you're okay."
Taissa turns, her shoes making clicks against the floor. Van should let her go - she loves Taissa, if you love something you let it go - but Van is still anchored to the nineties, still sleeping in the ghost of Taissa's arms, still floating.
"Wait," she says. "Tai, wait."
xv.
"This is me," Taissa says. The car is fancy - sleek and black and long - someone else usually drives it, she says, but they'll catch a ride with someone else and we can go anywhere you want. The subtext says within reason, of course, and the offer is pointless in truth; they both know that Van is going to take her home. She'll get Van's car, she tells Van, and Van doesn't ask.
Van takes her home.
She's terribly pushy with her directions, but she guides Taissa home with touches as gentle as she can manage. It's a long drive, and there's a long, harrowing silence as they exit the city and the sun sets around them.
The sunsets were, at first, a small comfort in their tragedy, until they became a reminder of another day stranded. But they had kissed underneath each fall sunset regardless of the pain, and now Van wants to kiss her underneath this sunset, regardless of the pain.
It would be like kissing a stranger, but she's not unfamiliar with kissing strangers, these days.
Instead, she says, "So, I see a dent on your ring finger. You took off your wedding ring when you saw me. Tell me all about that."
Taissa shrugs, doesn't even stop to process Van's words. "We're on a break right now. Things are... hard."
It's vague. Van suspects she's keeping it that way on purpose, but Van doesn't need to know anything else. She doesn't want to know. She shouldn't even be here.
What is she doing here? Taissa knew Van would take her home. She's fucking married. They're both getting themselves into trouble. Van brushes her hair out of her face---
"Your arm," Taissa notes. "What happened?"
"Velociraptor attack," Van replies. It's not funny this time.
xvii.
She pours Taissa a drink. It's the cheap stuff, definitely not what Taissa is used to drinking these days. At first she refuses it, but then makes a face like what the hell and downs it. They are each other's worst ideas and greatest weaknesses and everything sappy and poetic and doomed, and as Van pours another drink for herself, she shakes her head. Coughs for a moment, swears she sees flecks of red in her palm. She must be seeing things. She hopes that she's the only one, prays to---prays that Taissa is okay, these days, that she's fine and safe and healthy.
Van shrugs. "So, tell me. Why'd you come?"
"To the museum, to...?"
"With me. Home. Why did you do it?"
Taissa puts her glass down on Van's coffee table. "I don't know."
"That's what every girl loves to hear."
A sad smile. "Because it's you. Because... I don't know, Van. Because how could I not?"
They're silent for a moment - for a minute - for too long. Taissa, next to Van on her partially-stained couch, tries to inch closer and closer and closer as the silence hangs---hey, that's Van's move.
Van sighs, rolls her sleeve up further. "Radial forearm free flap surgery," she explains.
"What?"
"I got phalloplasty a few years ago. The scar is from the graft they used to make my dick."
Taissa blinks. It looks like she's been told that aliens landed on Earth and she has to personally be their ambassador to the human race. It looks like she's witnessed swine floating through the air. It looks like she's been pulled out of the ocean seconds away from being a shark snack. She genuinely doesn't know what to say to that.
"I wanted control over my body," Van asserts. "So many things happened that I couldn't control, that were... fucking done to me. I wanted to change something for myself."
Taissa finally speaks. "Did it help?" is all that she says.
"Yeah," Van nods. "It did."
And then Taissa kisses her.
xviii.
Taissa seems eager to get her hands on Van's new cock, to explore this new, metamorphosed Van Palmer, but Van stops her, slows her down. She rests Taissa's body on her bed - it isn't very comfortable, she knows, but Taissa isn't complaining. At first they're just curled up, Van on top of her. She presses her head sideways against Taissa's chest, her hand over Taissa's heart as her fingers sink inside of Taissa below. She feels the fluttering, tries to work her movements in time with the beating, some sick rhythm as Taissa breathes out against Van's forehead.
Another, softer laugh. "What are you doing?"
"I like knowing you're alive," Van replies. Taissa reaches down to take her pulse, but Van gently pushes her away; these days her heartbeat is too slow to be sexy. "That you're still here."
Taissa gives a slight moan as Van curls up to kiss her, so wet around Van's fingers now, so wet for her.
"Does it, um…"
Van smiles, presses the button on the scrotum they'd installed just for this purpose. Taissa's hands stroke Van from beneath her as she hardens, and Van feels the fluid building up inside of her, feels the warmth boiling within her, feels her own need blossoming.
"Please," Taissa breathes. "I missed you."
Van says nothing as she carefully pries Taissa open and pushes inside. God, she'd fantasized so much about this as a teenager, the sensation of Taissa around her cock as she gives gentle bucks and thrusts inside. In those fantasies she was always taking care of Taissa, getting her there with her words and her body, their bodies entwining in fate. "Do you like that?" she asks.
"Yes," Taissa replies, whimpering out. It's her first time with someone else since the final stage healed up, and Van must be doing well.
She grips Taissa's hips beneath her, steadies herself over Taissa's body. "Do you like taking me? Did you really miss me that much?"
Taissa grunts. "Be, ah—"
"Quiet? Okay, you first," Van replies, pulling Taissa forward, giving a sharp shift of her hips that makes her cry out shrill and high.
She pulls Van back up, and their eyes meet with Van deep inside. This can't last, and is definitely a mistake, but for now Van kisses Taissa, feels her breasts hot against her own chest, tries to savor the little time they have left together. Tomorrow Taissa will leave and go back to bringing transformation and prosperity to New Jersey. For now Van just feels her metamorphosis in her bones, embraces her new becoming as she pleasures Taissa, and tries to forget about both the future and the past. A clean slate, an unencumbered state of being.