Chapter 34
You lock yourself in your room.
You are aware that this is what children do when they throw a temper tantrum and their mother tells them to go to their room – not because you remember doing it yourself, but because you have read it happening in some of your books, because you have seen it in some of those television shows that your host and her girlfriend sometimes see – and yet, you do it anyway. You lock yourself in your room, and you curl up in your bed, and you lean forward with your head in your hands, and you push your fingers through the waves of your dark hair, and you stay there, breathing heavy.
You hadn’t run here, after your outburst, you simply were here, in the hallway that led to your room, and you’d rushed to it like it was a safe place, even though the rage inside of you doesn’t want to be in here at all. That’s your cue that it is the right place to be, and even as the rage bubbles ever more within you as you lock the door, you force yourself to stay.
There are a lot of things you do not remember since you died – more, there are a lot of things, forgotten, that haven’t been regained – and one of those is the time you spent locked in this room before, sleeping, waking, pacing, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the door to be unlocked because you were unable to unlock it yourself. You do not remember this, but the rage in you does. The rage in you roars at being locked within again and rubs against your veins, gnawing with its red hot teeth, unable to pierce your skin.
Sitting as you are on your bed is meant to help you regain control of yourself. Unfortunately, it does not help as much as you want. You can feel the rage boiling beneath your skin, and you tremble. Instead of curling your fingers around someone else’s neck, you curl them around locks of your hair, and instead of snapping someone else’s neck to the side, you pull on your own hair, forcing yourself to feel the pain instead of causing it within someone else.
You are not afraid of the rage within you. That is what you tell yourself, and somewhere within, you know that it is true. But that does not mean you want it to overwhelm you again, that does not mean you want it to take control of you the way you have, on occasion, taken control of your host. There must be a way to appease it so that you would not feel such white hot anger so frequently, but you do not know what has caused it, and so you cannot soothe that long forgotten part of you that still remembers it all.
Others might think of if onlys, but you don’t.
You stay locked in your room, and you take your deep breaths, and you try to settle down.
“So how did the meeting with the twerps go?”
Dani barely lifts her head as Jamie enters, slipping her jacket off at the door. She wraps her arms a little tighter around her knees and lets her chin rest on the top of them. “I didn’t see them,” she mutters, still shivering. It’s been hours since that moment with the creature living within her, and she’s still shaking. Whenever she starts to think about it, her stomach tightens into knots, and she feels like she’s going to throw up. What would have happened if she hadn’t chided Viola?
“Oi, don’t tell me they stood you up.” Jamie sits on the couch next to her, stretching one arm across its back. Her brow furrows. “Poppins, you doing okay?”
“No.” Dani looks up just enough to meet Jamie’s eyes. She’s not mad at her. If anything, she just wants to curl up against her girlfriend. She needs the comfort. “Viola—”
“—got mad because you tried to keep it from her?” Jamie tilts her head to one side and plays with her curls. “Told you that was a bad idea.
Dani’s eyes narrow. “No,” she repeats, and then, swallowing, “Yes,” and then, finally, “She brought it up, but then she said that I should be punished for treating her as less than human. We….” She shakes her head and looks away. “I told her we shouldn’t see the kids. That we were bad for them, and she…she went….” There’s a lump in her throat, and it’s hard to speak around it. “She went lady of the lake on me. She referred to me as mortal.” She looks up and tries to meet Jamie’s eyes, but her view is blurry with tears. “I thought—”
She can’t get herself to say it aloud. Not again. It feels like she’s voiced the fear so many times that now it wouldn’t—
It feels more real now than it has in a long time. Dani won’t admit it to herself, but she’s been getting used to Viola, the other voice in her head who occasionally gives her a headache. She’s never really forgotten the beast she can be – the beast she first met – but she’s been growing….
“Hey. Come here.”
Jamie does exactly what Dani wants: she scoots closer to her, wraps one arm around her, and pulls her close to her. She doesn’t make her say anything at all, doesn’t force her to walk through the fears that she has constantly brought up, even if they’re just for herself, doesn't chide her for—
Dani buries her head in Jamie’s chest.
“I thought things were getting better, Poppins,” Jamie murmurs, pressing a kiss to the top of Dani’s head. “Maybe this is my fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you to make friends with your ghostie. I should have listened to—”
“No, no, no, you couldn’t have known.” Dani looks up and meets Jamie’s eyes again. “You thought she was getting better. She was getting better. You were right. She was…. We were making progress. I wasn’t, but she was. And I—” She shivers again, shivers and shivers and can’t stop the shivering. “It was a possibility. It was always a possibility.”
Jamie reaches under her chin and tilts her head back, looking back and forth from the one blue eye to the one green one and then back again. “You’re still you, though, aren’t you, Poppins? That means you’re still winning. You’re still you.”
Dani listens to her, but she isn’t so sure that’s the case. Would she even know if she wasn’t? Would she know that she’d been tucked away at all? She can’t be sure. The way Flora described it, being tucked away pushed her into her memories, but whenever Viola has taken her over, Dani hasn’t gone into memories – she’s gone into that room in Viola’s place, or she’s gone onto her side of the gate, or she’s—
She’s been in that world, that mindscape, not in memories, which either means that what she and Viola have is different or that whatever Viola is doing with her isn’t a true tucking away.
“I can’t feel her anymore,” Dani murmurs, head still buried against Jamie’s chest. “Ever since that last argument, she’s been lurking, waiting to talk, and I’ve been ignoring her. She isn’t even doing that anymore. What if she’s building up….” She shakes her head. “What if she’s given up on talking?”
“That don’t sound like her.” Jamie tucks loose strands of Dani’s hair behind her ear. “Your ghostie’s always wanting someone to talk to her. If she’s hiding, I think she’s ashamed of herself. Getting all mad and losing control like that. I’d be ashamed. Quit acting like a kid, Jamie. Grow up.”
Dani laughs – a low chuckle that cuts itself off almost as quickly as it started. “I don’t think that beast can ever be ashamed of herself. She always thinks she’s right.”
Jamie shrugs. “Just don’t think she likes you to see it.” She kisses Dani’s forehead again. “You want me to talk to her? Do all that boundary setting?”
“Yeah.” Dani nods against her again. “She doesn’t listen to me. I don’t think she….” She takes another breath, trying to calm herself. “Sometimes it feels like I’m just a body to her. Like she doesn’t even like me.”
“You don’t like her.”
“That’s different.” Dani presses her lips together into a thin line, trying to think of how to put words to it, but she comes up short. “It’s like being roommates, sharing a common area, and sometimes one of us does something that drives the other crazy, but neither of us says anything about it. She just passive aggressively waits for me to have a conversation I don’t want to have.” Her gaze shifts away. “And I avoid the conversation entirely. And we just get more and more frustrated with each other.” Her eyes search the empty air in front of her. “What happens if one of us decides to kick the other out?”
Jamie brushes a hand through Dani’s hair. “That’s why you have me. To smooth things over between you two.” She tries to smile, but it fades. She sighs. “You need to learn to talk with her. I can’t always—”
“She just tried to—” Dani pushes back from Jamie and searches her eyes. She presses her lips together again, trying to keep herself from snapping. Her gaze drops, and she forces herself to keep quiet. She gives a little shake of her head. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.” She moves away from her partner and stands. “I’m going to sleep. I’ve had a rough day.”
Jamie doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t fight her. In fact, as Dani returns to her room, she knows that the gardener will likely stay in the living room until much later, if she comes in at all. She hates herself for that. But this is her battle, one she would be fighting alone without her. One she would be losing.
But right now, Dani doesn’t want to admit that Jamie is right. She doesn’t want to think about how this is her fault, no matter how much it is. This isn’t how she thought living with the beast was going to be. In some ways, it’s better, but in others, it’s worse. It still feels like that dark cloud is looming over her head, it still feels like the beast is waiting to devour her – she just can’t read the signs.
Sleep will put this behind her, for a while. Sleep will force her to relax.
She needs to relax.
Then maybe she will be able to think through this more clearly.