Fic: Five Worlds Unlived
Nov. 20th, 2015 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athingwithfeathersMother
At first, Louise lets Cable hold the baby (her baby) because she doesn’t have any choice. She’s still recovering from childbirth, from being dragged through fights, from the destruction of the town she’d that’d been her home (you knew, she’d hissed, you knew; Cable hadn’t replied). She doesn’t like him much, this strange man from the future/past, from a world she had glimpsed on the news but had never really thought about. She doesn’t trust him, watching her daughter in his arms even when she’s too tired to move.
Eventually, she’ll call him Nathan. It’ll come after deciding she can trust him with her daughter’s welfare, if nothing else and somewhere before she teases him about having no idea what to do with a baby. They’ll share stories of families, his far more complicated than hers but he never treats hers as if they’re any less. They’ll argue over everything and she’ll dryly announces she’s keeping score and he’ll come up with a number, straight-faced because it turns out he has a sense of humor under all those guns. They’ll become partners, out of necessity and out of choice. It’s a long journey, they have the years.
Maybe it starts when he asks her what the baby’s name is. Louise had frozen a moment, mind blank after months of going through books with her mother and never telling her that she planned on giving the baby her grandmother’s name, a woman who had offered only support and asked questions with no judgement (her mother had thought Louise was just guessing it’d be a girl). It’s a good name. But she’d told her mother she didn’t remember the father. It’s true and it might have been one of her one-night stands, she doesn’t keep a calendar. She didn’t tell her about the dream of fire and light and the question asked by a winged figure (Louise doesn’t believe in angels, late at night, once the baby had first started to move, she had flipped through her old books of Greek mythology). In this wasteland, pursued by a madman… Hope is a good name, Louise thinks Hope’s mother would approve. Eventually, she decides her mother would approve of the fact that it becomes Hope Spalding Summers.
Someday they’ll go back. Once they find a way to fix the time shunter thing (no, Nathan, she still thinks you’re making it up), they’ll go back to the world they’ve told Hope about. The two worlds. She listens in equal fascination to tales of heroes battling monsters and those of growing up in an Alaskan town. Both are equally alien. Louise helps teach her child how to fight, learns and teaches things that she once could’ve never imagined. She doesn’t regret saying yes.
Father
They call her Marian. It comes from old stories only partly remembered but put together in new shapes to fit as stories are. They call her Marian, the girl in the green cloak who lives as easily in trees as she does on the ground. The rich are robbed and the poor live on and she’s a story even as she’s named for one. It’s not her real name but they all have two names, those who take the X. There’s the name for family – friends - and there’s the name cursed by those who they’re glad to be cursed by.
Not many people know Marian’s other name. They know how she got her second one, how Perry had thrown a knife and how she’d been faster with an arrow and no one had laughed about the little girl with the bow after that. No one had ever laughed at her dad, no one at all knows his first name. He’s the leader who didn’t want the job but watches them all, the man who’s always a little apart, there’s no X over his eye. No matter how many years pass, he never seems fully comfortable in the woods that are their home, or in the villages they sometimes pass through. He’s a man out of time.
Marian is part of their world. She holds her dad’s hand and leads them through the dark woods without a single stumble. Even her discomfort in the towns fits, she wasn’t made for such places, people say. That’s part of the story. Marian is a spirit of the woods, a foundling from a tree, a lost child who found her home in the safety of the trees. Her father never offers an answer, she never asks him. It doesn’t matter.
Someday they’ll go back. Bishop knows it’s inescapable, even with all he’s tried to escape. He doesn’t know if there’s any point to this, if he’s made anything better. There are people who look to him and he thinks of all the people he’s failed. All the people he might be failing now. But he doesn’t run from it, that’s a choice he made long ago. A choice made when he’d looked at the baby (eyes green, even then) and named the child Hope Summers. The name of the demon from his childhood, the name of his daughter.
Brother
Hope’s first memory is dancing with her brother. Later she’ll realize that other people can’t dance like they can, by then, it won’t be a surprise. There are a lot of ways they aren’t like other people. Most people don’t have a brother like Nate. Nate is special. He’s special because he can dance them through the worlds and because he can see what people need and because he never ages. He’s special because he loves her and always listens and jokes that people will think she’s the older sister if she’s going to look so serious. Nate says that Hope is special too.
It’s dangerous to be special. It means that people hunt them and that they get hurt and that they have to leave people behind. It means having to run from people who look like them and wanting to change the color of her hair not to match Nate’s (not just to match Nate’s) but because of the people who draw back in fear when they catch sight of her from the corner of their eyes. Nate holds her tight, like when she was still so little that he had to dance alone, just carrying her on his feet, and tells her about a woman who wasn’t the Red Queen and another woman who looked just like her.
Hope gets to know the worlds they travel through. She sits by her brother and listens to him speak – to one person, to three, to a crowd; it’s not the number that matters. They play ridiculous games and make up a language that only they can understand, and Nate gets her a coat that’s far too big but that she never takes off. She’s growing into it. She’s growing as Nate doesn’t. People don’t ask about the gap between their ages, anymore. Hope says it’s useful, how it helps them escape notice, Nate laughs and says some things are clearly genetic.
Once, when he was bleeding from a cut bad enough that Hope refused to cry while stitching it up, she asked what made it worth it. Several years later, Nate tells her a story that’s an answer. It’s the story of a boy made to burn up and the adventures he had and the world he had sacrificed himself for without regret. It’s about how he was brought together again with a child in his arms, how the only thing he knew was that he had to run. It’s about hope, and Hope and he doesn’t regret a moment of it. Except the three months she insisted on only eating green food, he tugs her hair with a grin and she punches him in the shoulder.
Someday they’ll go back. They’ll dance their way back home, once Hope is ready. They’ll find the people waiting for them and a place they can stand still. Hope isn’t ready yet, but she knows one day she will be, it’s not destiny, it’s her choice. She’s Hope Grey, and there’s nothing else her brother could’ve called her.
Sister
Rachel names her Sara Summer Grey because names are important. A name can be a link on a chain. A name can be all you have left to hold onto. She braids Sara’s hair with ribbons of purple and green and doesn’t let herself think of bruises or the last time her dad had sat, carefully braiding her hair after the mess she’d gotten it into trying to fix it with her telekinesis, listening to her as seriously as he always did. There have been a lot of endings in her life, but she wants Sara to know about the moments before. She never wonders if her sister (not her daughter and not just because of the mother dead with the rest of a town) is unusually good at sitting still for her age. Usual isn’t a word that applies to any of this.
In the ring, they call her Hope. It was born of a cruel joke, when they were captured by Mojo’s servants and tossed into games that no one could win. Rachel is a known factor, she’s tied up, ready for her next showing, forced to watch Mojo laugh. Hopeless, no chance to win. Sara who knows how to survive, how to fight, because it’s not what Rachel wishes she could give her but its been a very long time since she believed in wishes. There’s still hope. And Hope survives, never gives up, and when the show is disrupted by rebels, there’s not really a question of whether they’re going to help them or not.
Rachel knows there’s no real hope, even as every part of her burns with the desire for change. She’s heard the stories (she’s been here before). It’s possible to leave this world, it never really changes. The rebels fight, and then they’re taken to fight. They remember, and then they forget. Even the Phoenix can’t win against entropy, Rachel fights for change. Hope fights too (Rachel meets green eyes that don’t mirror hers and doesn’t try to argue when there’s protection to offer instead).
They fight and run and survive. They make friends and find places of peace and live. Hope grows into the sword that really should have been to large for her, fights in the light of cameras and sees the dazzle and the darkness of the only world she’s ever known. Sara sits as Rachel braids her hair and tells her stories of a different world and the power of choices.
Someday, they’ll find a way out. Perhaps the rebels will win another temporary victory. Perhaps it will be through a crack they won’t even expect. Rachel doesn’t know what to expect, doesn’t know what it’ll mean. She watches her sister laugh (as she spins to cut down an enemy, as she plays with the children) and doesn’t care.
Other
There’s a box in the corner of the room. Jean knows that this is only true in one sense, that the White Room only is one level of existence, a moment where she feels like she’s solid in time, when she feels like Jean as well as Phoenix. She’s fire. She’s life incarnate. Now and forever, she’s Phoenix. She’s also Jean Elaine Grey-Summers, with all that means and all the history that comes with it. Some days, that’s the hardest thing to be. That’s why it’s important.
So it’s Jean sitting in the White Room (even as she’s so much more, so many more places), practicing drawing a still life because what’s the point of being dead if you’re not going to be productive? She can imagine her friends’ reaction to the joke. She has a lot of jokes she’s come up with. Most of them probably aren’t very good, she doesn’t exactly have much of an audience. Except for the box.
It’s a white box, edges slightly rounded. It’s a different type of white than the room, even if it still sometimes gets lost. Or maybe sometimes it’s just not there. Jean tells the box her jokes and old stories she only remembers parts of. She runs her hands over it, looking for a latch. There’s never a latch but one day (an illusion, imposing time on the timeless) she finds a crack. She sits cross-legged in front of the box, looking at the crack. It would likely only need a little effort to open it.
There are a lot of stories about boxes. About boxes that shouldn’t be opened. Jean had had an argument in one of her psychology classes about boxes and apples and the blame laid on women. Her classmate (she can’t remember his name) was lucky that she had far too much control to throw anyone into a wall by then. She should finish that degree. She would like that. They also seriously need some more therapists at the school, there are words to be had with Charles on that. When everything is only thought, it can be hard to keep thoughts in order.
Jean presses her fingers against the side of the box, she doesn’t have time to open it. Perhaps it was just the thought that did it. The box opens (cracks). For a moment, there’s nothing but light, the light that makes up everything, that pulses in Jean’s hand a moment.
There’s a little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor (if there’s a floor) of the White Room. She has red hair and green eyes and sometimes she’s a baby and sometimes a teenager and sometimes a little girl but really all of them at once. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. Jean knows her, as she always has and always will.
Evil wasn’t brought into the world because a woman was too curious for the good of everyone. Jean hadn’t told the girl (the rounded box that could hold anything) that story. She doesn’t tell her that story now. They sit together for eternity, for no time at all. Jean doesn’t finish her story about family before the girl leaves, but then, it doesn’t have an ending. Despite the story she never told, she leans forward to kiss the forehead of the child-teenager-baby, whispering one last message.
Hope.
At first, Louise lets Cable hold the baby (her baby) because she doesn’t have any choice. She’s still recovering from childbirth, from being dragged through fights, from the destruction of the town she’d that’d been her home (you knew, she’d hissed, you knew; Cable hadn’t replied). She doesn’t like him much, this strange man from the future/past, from a world she had glimpsed on the news but had never really thought about. She doesn’t trust him, watching her daughter in his arms even when she’s too tired to move.
Eventually, she’ll call him Nathan. It’ll come after deciding she can trust him with her daughter’s welfare, if nothing else and somewhere before she teases him about having no idea what to do with a baby. They’ll share stories of families, his far more complicated than hers but he never treats hers as if they’re any less. They’ll argue over everything and she’ll dryly announces she’s keeping score and he’ll come up with a number, straight-faced because it turns out he has a sense of humor under all those guns. They’ll become partners, out of necessity and out of choice. It’s a long journey, they have the years.
Maybe it starts when he asks her what the baby’s name is. Louise had frozen a moment, mind blank after months of going through books with her mother and never telling her that she planned on giving the baby her grandmother’s name, a woman who had offered only support and asked questions with no judgement (her mother had thought Louise was just guessing it’d be a girl). It’s a good name. But she’d told her mother she didn’t remember the father. It’s true and it might have been one of her one-night stands, she doesn’t keep a calendar. She didn’t tell her about the dream of fire and light and the question asked by a winged figure (Louise doesn’t believe in angels, late at night, once the baby had first started to move, she had flipped through her old books of Greek mythology). In this wasteland, pursued by a madman… Hope is a good name, Louise thinks Hope’s mother would approve. Eventually, she decides her mother would approve of the fact that it becomes Hope Spalding Summers.
Someday they’ll go back. Once they find a way to fix the time shunter thing (no, Nathan, she still thinks you’re making it up), they’ll go back to the world they’ve told Hope about. The two worlds. She listens in equal fascination to tales of heroes battling monsters and those of growing up in an Alaskan town. Both are equally alien. Louise helps teach her child how to fight, learns and teaches things that she once could’ve never imagined. She doesn’t regret saying yes.
Father
They call her Marian. It comes from old stories only partly remembered but put together in new shapes to fit as stories are. They call her Marian, the girl in the green cloak who lives as easily in trees as she does on the ground. The rich are robbed and the poor live on and she’s a story even as she’s named for one. It’s not her real name but they all have two names, those who take the X. There’s the name for family – friends - and there’s the name cursed by those who they’re glad to be cursed by.
Not many people know Marian’s other name. They know how she got her second one, how Perry had thrown a knife and how she’d been faster with an arrow and no one had laughed about the little girl with the bow after that. No one had ever laughed at her dad, no one at all knows his first name. He’s the leader who didn’t want the job but watches them all, the man who’s always a little apart, there’s no X over his eye. No matter how many years pass, he never seems fully comfortable in the woods that are their home, or in the villages they sometimes pass through. He’s a man out of time.
Marian is part of their world. She holds her dad’s hand and leads them through the dark woods without a single stumble. Even her discomfort in the towns fits, she wasn’t made for such places, people say. That’s part of the story. Marian is a spirit of the woods, a foundling from a tree, a lost child who found her home in the safety of the trees. Her father never offers an answer, she never asks him. It doesn’t matter.
Someday they’ll go back. Bishop knows it’s inescapable, even with all he’s tried to escape. He doesn’t know if there’s any point to this, if he’s made anything better. There are people who look to him and he thinks of all the people he’s failed. All the people he might be failing now. But he doesn’t run from it, that’s a choice he made long ago. A choice made when he’d looked at the baby (eyes green, even then) and named the child Hope Summers. The name of the demon from his childhood, the name of his daughter.
Brother
Hope’s first memory is dancing with her brother. Later she’ll realize that other people can’t dance like they can, by then, it won’t be a surprise. There are a lot of ways they aren’t like other people. Most people don’t have a brother like Nate. Nate is special. He’s special because he can dance them through the worlds and because he can see what people need and because he never ages. He’s special because he loves her and always listens and jokes that people will think she’s the older sister if she’s going to look so serious. Nate says that Hope is special too.
It’s dangerous to be special. It means that people hunt them and that they get hurt and that they have to leave people behind. It means having to run from people who look like them and wanting to change the color of her hair not to match Nate’s (not just to match Nate’s) but because of the people who draw back in fear when they catch sight of her from the corner of their eyes. Nate holds her tight, like when she was still so little that he had to dance alone, just carrying her on his feet, and tells her about a woman who wasn’t the Red Queen and another woman who looked just like her.
Hope gets to know the worlds they travel through. She sits by her brother and listens to him speak – to one person, to three, to a crowd; it’s not the number that matters. They play ridiculous games and make up a language that only they can understand, and Nate gets her a coat that’s far too big but that she never takes off. She’s growing into it. She’s growing as Nate doesn’t. People don’t ask about the gap between their ages, anymore. Hope says it’s useful, how it helps them escape notice, Nate laughs and says some things are clearly genetic.
Once, when he was bleeding from a cut bad enough that Hope refused to cry while stitching it up, she asked what made it worth it. Several years later, Nate tells her a story that’s an answer. It’s the story of a boy made to burn up and the adventures he had and the world he had sacrificed himself for without regret. It’s about how he was brought together again with a child in his arms, how the only thing he knew was that he had to run. It’s about hope, and Hope and he doesn’t regret a moment of it. Except the three months she insisted on only eating green food, he tugs her hair with a grin and she punches him in the shoulder.
Someday they’ll go back. They’ll dance their way back home, once Hope is ready. They’ll find the people waiting for them and a place they can stand still. Hope isn’t ready yet, but she knows one day she will be, it’s not destiny, it’s her choice. She’s Hope Grey, and there’s nothing else her brother could’ve called her.
Sister
Rachel names her Sara Summer Grey because names are important. A name can be a link on a chain. A name can be all you have left to hold onto. She braids Sara’s hair with ribbons of purple and green and doesn’t let herself think of bruises or the last time her dad had sat, carefully braiding her hair after the mess she’d gotten it into trying to fix it with her telekinesis, listening to her as seriously as he always did. There have been a lot of endings in her life, but she wants Sara to know about the moments before. She never wonders if her sister (not her daughter and not just because of the mother dead with the rest of a town) is unusually good at sitting still for her age. Usual isn’t a word that applies to any of this.
In the ring, they call her Hope. It was born of a cruel joke, when they were captured by Mojo’s servants and tossed into games that no one could win. Rachel is a known factor, she’s tied up, ready for her next showing, forced to watch Mojo laugh. Hopeless, no chance to win. Sara who knows how to survive, how to fight, because it’s not what Rachel wishes she could give her but its been a very long time since she believed in wishes. There’s still hope. And Hope survives, never gives up, and when the show is disrupted by rebels, there’s not really a question of whether they’re going to help them or not.
Rachel knows there’s no real hope, even as every part of her burns with the desire for change. She’s heard the stories (she’s been here before). It’s possible to leave this world, it never really changes. The rebels fight, and then they’re taken to fight. They remember, and then they forget. Even the Phoenix can’t win against entropy, Rachel fights for change. Hope fights too (Rachel meets green eyes that don’t mirror hers and doesn’t try to argue when there’s protection to offer instead).
They fight and run and survive. They make friends and find places of peace and live. Hope grows into the sword that really should have been to large for her, fights in the light of cameras and sees the dazzle and the darkness of the only world she’s ever known. Sara sits as Rachel braids her hair and tells her stories of a different world and the power of choices.
Someday, they’ll find a way out. Perhaps the rebels will win another temporary victory. Perhaps it will be through a crack they won’t even expect. Rachel doesn’t know what to expect, doesn’t know what it’ll mean. She watches her sister laugh (as she spins to cut down an enemy, as she plays with the children) and doesn’t care.
Other
There’s a box in the corner of the room. Jean knows that this is only true in one sense, that the White Room only is one level of existence, a moment where she feels like she’s solid in time, when she feels like Jean as well as Phoenix. She’s fire. She’s life incarnate. Now and forever, she’s Phoenix. She’s also Jean Elaine Grey-Summers, with all that means and all the history that comes with it. Some days, that’s the hardest thing to be. That’s why it’s important.
So it’s Jean sitting in the White Room (even as she’s so much more, so many more places), practicing drawing a still life because what’s the point of being dead if you’re not going to be productive? She can imagine her friends’ reaction to the joke. She has a lot of jokes she’s come up with. Most of them probably aren’t very good, she doesn’t exactly have much of an audience. Except for the box.
It’s a white box, edges slightly rounded. It’s a different type of white than the room, even if it still sometimes gets lost. Or maybe sometimes it’s just not there. Jean tells the box her jokes and old stories she only remembers parts of. She runs her hands over it, looking for a latch. There’s never a latch but one day (an illusion, imposing time on the timeless) she finds a crack. She sits cross-legged in front of the box, looking at the crack. It would likely only need a little effort to open it.
There are a lot of stories about boxes. About boxes that shouldn’t be opened. Jean had had an argument in one of her psychology classes about boxes and apples and the blame laid on women. Her classmate (she can’t remember his name) was lucky that she had far too much control to throw anyone into a wall by then. She should finish that degree. She would like that. They also seriously need some more therapists at the school, there are words to be had with Charles on that. When everything is only thought, it can be hard to keep thoughts in order.
Jean presses her fingers against the side of the box, she doesn’t have time to open it. Perhaps it was just the thought that did it. The box opens (cracks). For a moment, there’s nothing but light, the light that makes up everything, that pulses in Jean’s hand a moment.
There’s a little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor (if there’s a floor) of the White Room. She has red hair and green eyes and sometimes she’s a baby and sometimes a teenager and sometimes a little girl but really all of them at once. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. Jean knows her, as she always has and always will.
Evil wasn’t brought into the world because a woman was too curious for the good of everyone. Jean hadn’t told the girl (the rounded box that could hold anything) that story. She doesn’t tell her that story now. They sit together for eternity, for no time at all. Jean doesn’t finish her story about family before the girl leaves, but then, it doesn’t have an ending. Despite the story she never told, she leans forward to kiss the forehead of the child-teenager-baby, whispering one last message.
Hope.
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