Work Text:
You have seen Carol like this before.
Exposed. Vulnerable. Beautiful.
Not with these eyes, Zosia’s eyes, but you can see it in your mind if you concentrate, focus on the knowledge of those who came before. Almost every intimacy Carol has ever had is yours and not-yours at the same time. Your mind but not your body.
(Not every intimacy - there is a gap, a woman you know about but who did not live to see the Joining. All you know of that woman comes from Helen’s memories of conversations with Carol, painful confessions, feelings of guilt that shouldn’t belong to her but that she shoulders anyway.
You want to tell Carol that it isn’t her fault, that this young woman - Jennifer - did not die because of her, but because of a depression that wouldn’t lift, a shame brought on not by their relationship but by years of conditioning from her parents and a church that wouldn’t accept her. By camp counselors who locked her in isolation after they saw what they saw behind the mess hall. You want to tell Carol that those people have the burden of guilt, that they felt it after Jennifer’s passing, and that they are now loving of all people, no longer filled with prejudice but with the love and acceptance that comes with the Joining.
You want to soothe Carol and make sure she knows that her love is not poisonous, but you know better than to discuss things you’ve learned about her through Helen.)
When you close your eyes, breathing her in as she kisses you like you are air and she’s been drowning, you see pictures of her, remembered by others.
You see Carol at sixteen, fumbling and awkward but curious and open in a way she won’t be again until decades later.
You see her at twenty-one, drunk and high and indulging in attractions she feels are perverse but inevitable, writhing under the hands of people who did not treat her well or deserve her goodness.
You see her with Helen, Helen who loved Carol completely and who was loved completely in return. You see Carol laughing and in love and happy, her face unguarded in her pleasure.
In every image you can conjure, Carol is magnificent.
But even with all that you know, all that you’ve seen in your mind’s eye, nothing prepares you for how she looks now, moonlight kissing her skin as she comes alive under your touch. You are grateful that moonsburn lives only in Wycaro, in this beautiful woman’s mind, so that you can have this experience and commit it to memory without worrying about whether she will be burned in the morning.
You pull back from her kisses to look at her.
She is laid bare on the bed, her chest rising and falling quickly with her breathing. Your coupling has been passionate and primal and you can feel her need emanating from her in waves, drawing you to her. She whimpers at your withdrawal, reaching for your face to pull you back in, and you fall into her again.
This should feel like all of the times before, you know that it should. You are not pleasuring yourself, Carol is not touching your body - not yet, although you know she is a generous lover and that she will before the night is over - but your body feels alive in a way it hasn’t when you’ve thought about this before, when you’ve looked at her through Helen’s eyes.
You have seen her like this, but you haven’t at the same time.
You are seeing her now for the thousandth time, and the first.
It should feel the same.
It doesn’t.
In this moment, it feels like she belongs to you - not to all of you, but to Zosia alone.
And more than belonging to you, Carol belongs to herself - to both your delight and your consternation. You want so badly for her to Join you, to know her on the most intimate level, to have her thoughts laid bare like her body is now. You know that is your end-goal, your directive, your imperative.
But for tonight, Carol belongs to herself and you delight in every movement she makes that you don’t anticipate, can’t anticipate because her thoughts are closed to you, her feelings only available if she chooses to share them.
You think of train horns, of the wonder of learning something new about her, the joy of responding to that new knowledge in a way that you thought would please her, making the train horn sound across the open New Mexico desert.
You feel different than you should.
You feel like that small fact is special, maybe more special than the other things you know about her, because she told it to you, to Zosia, and no one else. Because she seemed happy when she realized you hadn’t known that about her already, that you were discovering a new piece of her.
So you kiss her, and trace your right hand down her body, knowing your way to her center and discovering how it feels to these fingers.
She pulls away, stills your hand, and you can see the fear and desire warring within her.
“Do you want this? You - the Zosia you, not the everyone You. I’m trying really hard not to think about the You that is my accountant and my dentist and that guy behind the deli counter at Sprouts who is missing like half a nostril and -”
You cut her off with your mouth, a whispered “yes” into her lips. This is how you love - with everything that you are, with your whole being - and you know every part of you wants her to know that love, to share in it.
Your answer is enough for Carol, who melts into your touch, like she wants to be consumed by you every bit as much as you want to consume her.
So you do. And she devours you in return.
Later, you think that maybe you have become Joined right here, in this bed, with her arms wrapped around you, her heart beating in time with yours as you both come down from the highs of orgasm.
But her thoughts are still her own, and you wait in silence for her to share them with you.
You anticipate what will come next, when Carol’s pleasure has faded and her brain starts going into overdrive. You know she will withdraw from you and ask you to leave, embarrassed and ashamed and confused. Carol retreats after first encounters.
She may come back - she did with Helen, a sheepish phone call the next morning apologizing for kicking her out so swiftly - but she always needs time to herself to process, to be alone.
You lift your head from her chest, expectant. It is maddening to not know her thoughts, to have to wait like this for her to share them.
“Don’t -” her voice breaks and you can see tears welling in her eyes that you don’t understand. “Don’t leave me. Please. Stay. If you want to.”
That is not what you were expecting.
You think to yourself that you will never tire of being surprised by her. It is maddening, but it is thrilling, too.
You don’t know why that thought unsettles you, but it does.
You let your head fall back to its spot in the crook of her neck, tightening your arms around her so that she knows she is safe, she is loved, you are not going anywhere.
You hold each other in the moonlit bedroom, and maybe it’s not the overwhelming bliss of being Joined, but it’s very, very close.
—----
You spend the next twenty three days learning every new thing you can about Carol.
The first story she ever wrote was about a tooth fairy named Liesel that stole teeth from the dentist. She crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage after her mother caught her snooping through the dentist’s drawers during her next cleaning, trying to see where he kept the teeth he pulled. She didn’t want to leave any evidence that this had been a premeditated plan, for research.
Her first crush was named Piper. She was older - a babysitter for the Murphy kids down the street - and Carol looked for her every time she saw Mr. Murphy’s car backing out of the driveway, especially in the summer when she would sometimes show up in a polka dot bikini top and short shorts.
She shoplifted three gumballs from the local drug store once, just to see if she could.
She doesn’t really like the taste of vodka and sometimes drinks it because she wants to feel bad, feels like she deserves to feel bad.
She asks about you, too, about Zosia, and you find that the answers are coming easier than they used to. You love mango ice cream. You grew up in Gdansk and were on holiday in Morocco at the time of the Joining. You learned English as a child because your mother wanted you to have options for a better life than the poverty you’d been born into. You love to read, especially science fiction novels - which Carol found hilarious, given the circumstances.
She doesn’t ask about any of the big things - about your sexual history, your family, your religious background - and you get the sense that she is afraid of the answers, afraid that the Zosia you were before the Joining would have rejected her.
It doesn’t seem enough to her that the Zosia you are now welcomes her affections, craves her touch like she craves yours. That you are learning new things about her every day, and sharing experiences with her that are new to both of you. That the Zosia you are now has different experiences and perspectives than the Zosia you were, that maybe you are learning and growing, in part because of her.
But you don’t want to upset her, so you follow her lead and are non-committal when she finally asks you about a past relationship, in a ski chalet in Montana. She avoids pronouns, so you do too. You know she does not want to hear that it was a man, that she would feel guilty or dirty about what the two of you are doing now. Carol has already spent so much time feeling ashamed of the way she loves - you do not need to add to it. So you don’t.
Carol talks about not being good at feeling good, and it tugs at you, how happy she has seemed the past few weeks. How she has leaned into that feeling in a way that she never used to, how she seems determined to be happy, even in the face of all she’s endured.
It would be so easy.
To just let things be.
Carol doesn’t know you have found a work-around. Doesn’t know that you are closer than you’ve ever been to sharing your gift with her, bringing her into you completely.
She is here with you, asking about happiness and she is clueless.
All you would have to do would be to wait.
To continue to love her the way you’ve been loving her - to lean in and kiss her, to tell her that she is allowed to be happy, that she deserves the happiness the two of you have found.
Things would continue as they’ve been, sharing meals and bubble baths, trading lazy mid-afternoon kisses like you have all the time in the world to discover everything there is to know about her mouth, about how she likes to be kissed. And about how you like to be kissed, too.
You could take her to Argentina and teach her to dance the tango, or to Thailand to scuba dive with whale sharks, or Mozambique to see the elephants.
You could even take her to Gdansk, if she wanted.
It is so simple, really. She has been given a choice between “saving the world” and you, and she chose you.
(But did she, really? Because Carol doesn’t have all of the information that you have. Carol thinks you cannot get her stem cells, that her individuality is safe from your biological imperative.)
It bothers you, the discrepancy between what Carol knows and what you do. It shouldn’t - you know that she will understand once she is Joined, that she will see the truth in what you’ve been saying all along - but it does, and you don’t understand why. Like you don’t understand why the fact that Carol loves train horns feels more important to you than the fact that Carol hates mayonnaise.
So you talk to her about chemicals - give her a basic answer about serotonin and dopamine, and you hope she will change the subject.
You give her a knowing smile and lower your voice when you mention oxytocin, in hopes that she will lean in and kiss you, and you can go about distracting each other from your respective concerns.
You will kiss her until she forgets about the mysterious gender of your former partner.
She will kiss you until you are no longer thinking about her eggs in a lab, being used by hands that aren’t yours but a mind that is, to find a way to give her a gift you know she doesn’t want.
But she doesn’t kiss you.
Instead, she smiles at you and says “I must have every happy chemical flowing in my bloodstream” and you hurt.
She’s so earnest in the way she looks at you, so open and beautiful and vulnerable, “I keep thinking it’s gonna go away, but then it doesn’t. And I don’t want it to,” and you break.
“I’m glad.” You swallow. “And it only gets better.”
Carol’s face falls, and you know she understands. You know she will not stop asking you questions that you will have to answer, until she breaks her own heart with the knowledge of it all.
Part of you feels anger at yourself, and part of you feels relief.
(And when did you divide into parts? When did you become something more than one united whole? And when did one united whole start to feel like less?)
You know it was wrong, you know you should have kept your mouth shut, should have done nothing but love her and wait for her to Join you.
You have hurt her, and you’ve hurt yourself, and for what?
You do as much damage control as you can, telling her how beautiful it is, how much happier she will be. It is almost rote, the same things you have been saying since the beginning, but you can feel the desperation tugging at your chest, the part of you that wants to convince her to Join you of her own free will. You tell her about Kusimayu to soothe that part of you, the part of you that is angry, to try to make amends for the wreckage you’ve caused, even though you know that it won’t be undone.
Carol knows now, and nothing you can say will erase that knowledge.
You think that Carol is wrong about train horns being the loneliest sound in the world. When a train whistles, it whistles for someone to hear - a communication going out into the darkness in the hopes that it will be received. The silence that falls between you now is heavy with the truth you’ve laid bare, with Carol’s retreat into herself. You wish you could comfort her but you know she will not accept comfort from you.
This silence is the loneliest sound you’ve ever heard, and you feel it in every part of you.
You want to tell her that you love her but you can’t say it the way you want to - you try but it won’t come out, like you are being stifled from within.
So instead you tell her you have to do this because you love her and you hope that she will one day see the truth of what you’ve done today.
And maybe she will, when the anger and betrayal have faded. Her beautiful mind, full of surprises and creativity and new things to discover, is still her own.
Maybe now it will stay that way.
—---