Dreaming
This was hard.
Clara had known it was going to be hard. She'd thought she had an idea of what it was going to feel like. But time had dulled the edges of pain in her memory.
This was worse.
By day, she and Ezri played pretend. Playing pretend was very hard work. She knew Ezri's script for submission—that part, she could play easily, for a while, numb. But the audience, the trainees, demanded constant improv. And worse, sometimes, in those quiet moments with Ezri, it didn't feel much like playing pretend at all.
By night, the numbness didn't last long. Night four—Jen woke her, said she'd been crying in her sleep, that it was just a bad dream. Clara had no memory of a nightmare. Evening five, a long, cyclical beating that failed to elicit any tears, but that night, the same. Night six, Jen stopped waking her. She woke to a damp pillowcase and a love note on the nightstand.
It was hard to explain.
And then, of course, there was Lalia.
Clara wished she disliked her. Wished she was just jealous of the way Ezri looked at her. It would be simpler that way. All add up when she inevitably broke Ezri's heart, like her last favorite trainee—whom Clara still had to look at in the mirror every morning—and like every too good to be true woman who'd caught her eye since.
But, deep down, Lalia was her favorite, too.
From her perspective, Lalia worked the hardest. Yes, she had some natural and preexisting skills, but she more than made up for any gaps by putting in the work, which Clara respected more. With the other trainees, she felt like she was often negotiating—more than the trainees were really supposed to negotiate at this point. Lowered standards, extended deadlines, fewer tasks, playing in between for them and Ezri, and resisting the urge to make them all take their complaints up with Ezri directly unless it really counted. But Lalia didn't negotiate. She had curiosity—really, she was kind of nosy—and passion. She wanted to know what more she could do, how to do better, how to—if it helped—get it done faster. She sheepishly handed in written assignments twice the length of the minimum, while Clara tried to bribe, threaten, and plead with half of the others to get to a hundred words under the same minimum. She asked if there were further reading recommendations while Clara had to just about beat the others with the assigned book to get them to convincingly skim it. And she was smart enough to more than notice the others' failings, to not copy them, to not quite cover for them, but kind enough to frequently help them where she could.
Yes, she liked Lalia just fine and hadn't yet found her fatal flaw that would ruin Ezri's life, and Lalia liked her, too, or at least seemed to prize her experience more highly than the others. Ezri clearly—in Clara's opinion—thought Lalia put the stars in the sky, and Lalia beamed if Ezri so much as acknowledged she existed, which was frequently, then had a way of blushing and looking away, though neither of them were talking about it. Yet.
...
"But I miss you."
Ezri could hear the pout. "I miss you, too," she said. "Don't think I don't. I've just been..."
"Busy. I know. You could not possibly leave four adults alone or with Clara for two hours."
"Don't be like this, Jenevieve." But her tone was light. She tapped a pen against a trainee's theoretical meal plan assignment. It met all the technical requirements, but lacked... ingenuity, or at least almost any variety whatsoever. She had the phone on speaker with her office door shut. The pen was green, one she used for rare decorative purposes; Fiona also wrote primarily in purple, and it wasn't like she had a copyright on the color, so she'd changed the pen she made notes on her assignments with. Clara's first pass of notes were in red.
"Lunch. That's all I'm asking. I haven't even seen you in over a week."
"Okay," she relented. "I'll pick you up at noon tomorrow."
"I love you." Cloying.
Eye roll. "I love you, too. I'll see you tomorrow."
...
She did feel better, finally away from all of it for a little while, Jen's fingers twined through hers as they sat on the couch and talked for most of an hour before they even broached the subject of where to get lunch, then took another most of an hour to decide where—for lack of focus, not decisiveness—then got lunch, and were still talking when they'd both been done eating for another most of an hour, and...
"I should really get back," she sighed.
"Yeah," Jen admitted, fidgeting with her hand, having gotten more than she bargained for already. But, "I could go with you. Then you wouldn't have to drop me off. I could go home with Clara later." She did seem to be going a little stir crazy with Clara out, with the car, most of the time.
"Okay." She talked herself into it easily.
At home, Clara was waiting for them, possibly eager to get more answers out of Ezri than she'd been forthcoming with over text about the effects of this change in plan, and more likely eager just to see Jen. They were still just as nauseatingly in love as they had fallen on day one, and it probably helped that two of the trainees, who obviously mostly saw Clara as Ezri's territory, were watching while she gave Clara a rather long kiss on the mouth in greeting, one hand tight around her collar, the other not quite letting go of Ezri just yet.
Westley squirmed; Lalia gave a curious head tilt, her eyes mostly on Ezri.
And Ezri had no simple explanation for any of it.
...
Jen stayed. Ezri had missed her, deprived herself of her for no reason other than workaholism. In a way, she missed Clara—the version that largely spoke and acted freely with her, which, ironically, in the end, she loved best. By day, if the trainees were in earshot, which they were most of the time, they were back to high protocol—Clara being her shining example. By night, they weren't allowed to talk about it—she could only demand so much of someone who wasn't hers—and the filter, the unspoken, was ever noticeable. Sometimes, for a moment a time, she wanted training to be done, to be able to talk through all of it in a healing way, and for things with them to go back to normal.
Mostly, though, her thoughts had been consumed by someone else, and the terrifying hope that things would never quite go back to the way they were.
This did feel like a giant trap. She sensed the protectiveness on Clara, and now, on Jen—though the latter was quicker to encourage risks. Yes, she'd done exactly this before and gotten burned. But... this was different. And she did have a way of depriving herself for no reason. She'd told Clara no and no and no even though they clearly needed to have tried, to have loved and lost and healed, stronger for it. She'd shut Jen out like a distraction even though they needed each other. There were other mistakes she didn't want to keep making.
And Lalia—clever, sweet, dutiful Lalia—was different. She was happy here, and that made Ezri happy, and it made her not want to think of that happiness ending. Clara had never been truly happy here. Sometimes she'd seemed... serene, maybe, but always in a melancholy way. Some days were harder. Almost anything that perked her up too much was slightly out of line. And no matter how well she played her part, Ezri always knew she was hurting and it was because of her, and she couldn't stand that for long. No, the version of Clara she loved best was Clara happy.
She loved everyone best when they were happy, really. Which was why she loved Clara free to tease and dance and play with fire, and Lalia on her knees at her feet, and Jen giving her immediate opinions of meeting the trainees a little more loudly than was private.
Still... risks were hard to take. She always felt braver with Jen at her side, asking (perhaps a little quieter), "Why not?" But that feeling couldn't last forever, or probably even long enough.
Could it?