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Fic: Composition
I...have Dollhouse fic. Already. Oh, self.
Title: Composition
Fandom: Dollhouse
Characters/Pairings: Priya-centric, Priya/Tony, ensemble
Spoilers: Through "Epitaph Two" (the Series Finale of Awesome)
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Joss is boss.
A/N: Thank you so, so much to my betas:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deird1 for saving me from being an Ugly American (hopefully) by making Priya sound like an actual Australian (any mistakes are mine); and, as always, angearia, for asking for more layers and then telling me what they should be when I was too slow to think of them myself; for letting me know that my first version just didn’t make the cut and then telling me how to improve it; for helping me figure out how to fit it into the finale canon; and for catching all the little things I should be able to catch myself. You’re a lifesaver.
Summary: Torture and hope: the dreams are both, and she doesn’t know how to separate one from the other anymore. Five ways Priya and Tony never fell in love (and one way they did).
Watercolors
For nearly the first year after T is born, Priya is worthless, or that’s how it seems to her. Tony leaves (she sends him away) a week after he holds his son for the first time, when Priya is still bedridden and weak ( there was blood; so much blood: the combination of premature labor, the terror of another attack by Harding’s men, and a lack of medical facilities…well, Adelle says that it’s a miracle she survived at all, and Tony hadn’t been able to deal with almost losing his family).
Adelle says it’s postpartum depression, says that many women suffer from it and that she’ll find her balance eventually (perhaps Claire could help her, Adelle says, if she were here, but Priya knows that there is no Claire anymore, not when they’d restored her to Whiskey’s body and she asked to be taken out again when they left the Dollhouse. They left Whiskey behind as the messenger, and Claire is now only a computer program in a wedge hidden in a place that used to be the Dollhouse, and maybe it’s that knowledge, more than anything else, that makes Tony’s decisions so terrifying to her). But that’s just one of the many little lies they have to tell themselves now to find ways to carry on, because it’s much, much simpler than that: they’re living in hell, and the father of her son has abandoned her, and she’s petrified of raising her child in a world like this one (much simpler? Or much more complicated? It’s all shades of the same thing).
T is teething when Echo finds Priya tracing patterns with her finger into the dirt that always seems to coat the windows no matter how many times they’re scrubbed (this is how Priya measures time now: with T: his first smile, his first word, his first tooth. Any other way would cause too much pain). Echo doesn’t really say anything, just bumps her hip into Priya’s, but when she comes back from the next raid, she hands Priya a small plastic case, then saunters off with that smug grin of hers.
Priya opens it, and there are watercolors inside, hollows filled with dried paint, just waiting for a little water to bring them to life. The red is crushed, nearly ground away entirely, and there isn’t any black at all, but she doesn’t care. She can’t imagine where Echo found it, but it’s just what she needed, and she doesn’t ask.
There isn’t any paper, but T’s cradle (Tony made it, she doesn’t know when, only that when she stumbled back into the bedroom after he left, there it was, waiting) is pushed into a corner, and she covers the off-white walls on either side with birds and bright colors. She hasn’t used watercolors since she was a doll, but her fingers seem to remember. She doesn’t remember that time at all, but Echo does, and she says that Sierra loved to paint, and Victor loved to watch her, and Priya wonders if, since he became Victor again, he remembers those times, and she finds the question burns inside her till she almost can’t breathe. She hates the Dollhouse with an intensity that scares her (sometimes finds herself hating Adelle, no matter how hard she tries, and Topher, no matter how broken he is); it spoils and taints everything.
She had thought, when she became Priya again, that the fact that she and Tony still loved each other meant that they were soul mates (even though she’d never ever believed in them before, what else could it mean?), that no matter what, they would have found each other. She paints another bluebird above the T’s cradle, listening to her son fuss and coo, and she thinks that if it hadn’t been for the hell that is the Dollhouse, Tony might be beside her, critiquing her art, holding their son, himself and whole and human.
The night she paints the first bird is the night she has the first dream.
i.
Leading art therapy sessions with soldiers suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder wouldn’t have even occurred to Priya on her own. After all, she isn’t a counselor, and apart from three questions on one test in her psychology course back at uni, she doesn’t know the first thing about PTSD. She didn’t study art, either—it wasn’t worth arguing with her parents over (she’d never be able to convince them that art was a viable option) and so chemistry it was—and her creations have always come more from her heart and hands than her mind. She’s not sure whether she’ll be any use to anyone struggling with something she can’t even imagine, and she’s never spent much time around either military or mental patients.
But Lacy asked, and she’s one of the first friends Priya’s made since moving halfway round the world. Lacy’s brother committed suicide three months after getting back from Fallujah, and Lacy thinks someone like Priya could have helped him. Priya doesn’t think of herself as patient or sensitive or any of the other things she imagines someone who works with the mentally ill should be, but Lacy still tears up whenever she watches The Simpsons, so Priya agrees.
She likes her patients well enough (patients? Students? She’s never sure what to call them, so she mostly just calls them by name), mostly because they seem to be willing to humor her as she blunders through the first few sessions. The place, though, makes her skin crawl: industrial lighting and a stench of bleach (she’s always hated that smell more than any other: it’s always a mask for something uglier), a desperation in the eyes of the patients, a weariness in the eyes of the staff. She hurries through the halls, her arms wrapped around herself, and she doesn’t breathe free till she’s in the sunlight again.
But the room they set aside for art therapy is the least institutional, the most pleasant: there’s sunlight streaming through big windows and wide tables for spreading out and sinks for cleaning up any mess, and she scatters as much color as she can through the room (tissue paper flowers and Impressionist prints and lots and lots of paint) and the patients lose some of that dogged look in their eyes when they come in.
She chooses watercolors to begin with, fluid and soft, comforting with tinges of kindergarten without the condescension of finger-paints (sometimes it’s good to give up a little bit of control), with a softer texture than oils (she thinks these men and women need comfort more than anything, a warm, soft place to curl up and heal).
ii.
He doesn’t have any talent at all; even his stick figures look awkward. But every once in a while, his dedication will pay off, and he reveals something of his pain in the juxtaposition of colors or the harsh lines of a jagged shape. Most of the other patients use lots of black or red, depict explosions and corpses, recreating their reality. His revelations are more subtle, but seem to come from a deeper place. She’s fascinated, in ways she never thought she would be.
He always sticks around to help her pack up the supplies, clean the brushes, wipe down the tables. They don’t talk a lot, but sometimes he likes to hear about her dog or her latest emails from her little brothers. He doesn’t have much to say back, not when the most important topics of conversation in this place are what’s being served for lunch or what movie’s showing tomorrow night. But that’s okay. His presence is soothing (she hadn’t realized till now that she needed to be soothed, that she’s still unsure of her place here, so far from home), and he seems soothed as well (she never would have thought of herself as being able to give someone else peace, but the thought that she can maybe offer it to him warms her all the way through).
iii.
One day when she arrives, he doesn’t look up to greet her with a smile or the latest baseball stats (he’s a Mets fan, a long way from home, too), and she’s been there for fifteen minutes before she catches a glimpse of his black eye. It seems out of character, so unlike him: he’s the kind of gentle that speaks of power held in check. But she doesn’t ask, doesn’t say anything at all, not until they’re cleaning up at the end of the session. Then she merely looks at him (it’s a look she’s perfected well over the years on two mischievous younger brothers, and it never fails).
He ducks his head a bit, and that seems out of character, too (he’s always so sure, with a bluntness that she would have thought she’d find off-putting but that instead she finds charming). “I got in a fight. With Lloyd,” he says, naming one of the other members of the class (not one of her favorites; he seems too grimly pleased to cover page after page of pristine white paper with too-detailed weapons and corpses). “He…said something. I got mad.”
“What did he say?”
He flushes a bit (she stares, fascinated, certain that she won’t ever see this again), but this time he holds her eyes. “He took it back.”
She finds her hand stealing out, her palm resting on his cheek, fingers brushing against the purple watercolor edges of the bruise (she hasn’t felt tingles shoot through her like this since her first year at uni, that tosser Mike who ended up cheating on her with her “best friend.” But there’s a weight behind this feeling, a substantialness, and that scares her and thrills her more than anything).
iv.
He’s usually a bit rough cheerful, self-deprecating about his attempts at art and at flirting with her. But today his eyes are both ringed with dark circles, and it isn’t from another man’s fist. He manages to look rumpled, despite his consistent military-enforced neatness, and he can’t concentrate all the way through the session (not that he usually does, but today he can’t even concentrate on her). His finger taps a jittery not-rhythm against the table.
When everyone wanders out, she doesn’t rise to pack up. Instead, she sits. And waits.
He shoves his fingers through his hair and then the words come bursting out. “I have these nightmares, right? And that’s nothing—we all had them, over there. But then when I wake up, I’m so angry, and I want to do things I never thought of doing before, and sometimes the things I think about—“
He breaks off abruptly, looks up at her hopelessly, and she’s never wanted anything more than she wants to take him into her arms (she’s not a tender person, not comforting, not naturally, but she thinks that for him, she could be).
The bleakness in his eyes breaks her heart (she doesn’t like pitying him, and hates a world that would leave her with no other option). “They shouldn’t let me around you. You shouldn’t trust me. I might—” He stops again.
And she hears what he’s really saying: I hate this. This isn’t who I am. I don’t know this person at all.
“No,” she says (and means it). “You wouldn’t.”
They sit in silence for a long time.
v.
When he’s released for good, she’s waiting for him. His face breaks out in a huge grin as he walks toward her.
“I didn’t want to leave,” he says, shifting his backpack higher onto his shoulder and falling into step beside her.
“Why not?” No matter how hard they try to cover it up with clean linens and hotel-room paintings above beds and in hallways and softer-sounding jargon, a mental institute is still just an insane asylum.
“I thought I wouldn’t get to see you again.”
“I guess you don’t know me very well.”
“Well, not yet.”
She smiles up at him as he pushes open the door and they walk out into the blast of cleansing sunlight.
--
Finger Paint
It’s another one of those endless, hot afternoons when the heat is so thick it feels like it’s going to suffocate her. She’s hanging clothes on the line, and T is bored, as three-year-olds sometimes get when there’s no one around to entertain them. She wishes she could put down the laundry, play hide-and-seek or kick-the can with him (that’s his favorite, probably because it’s the one game Topher can actually play with him). But there’s work to be done (there always is), and she doesn’t have the time.
She finds a little plastic bucket in the shed, and after a few minutes of sorting through junk (they never throw anything away, not when the least likely object could be of some use), she digs up a paintbrush. She fills the bucket in the well and hands it and the brush to her son with instructions to go and “paint” the sidewalk.
She watches him working busily, content with his assignment, and she wishes she had finger paint for him to play with, Legos and a little red wagon, soft toys and teddies (simple toys, classic toys: nothing electronic or shaped like a weapon), the kinds of toys kids played with back before the world became hell. No matter how hard she tries not to, she can’t help but wonder what toys Tony played with, which were his favorites, the ones he’d want to share with his son. Maybe he took all of those memories out, to make room for ones that don’t belong to him: languages he never learned, skills he was never taught, knowledge he stole. Maybe the only bits of himself that he keeps are the ones from his years in Afghanistan, where he first learned to kill. Or maybe there’s nothing of Tony left inside at all, only Victor and his tech.
T comes running inside, eager to show his mommy what he’s accomplished (the water will probably have dried up by the time they make it back to the sidewalk, but she’ll still “ooh” and “aah,” just like a good mother should), his pleasure in the simple game shining in his eyes (and if his smile is just like Tony’s, well, she can ignore that), and she’s more sure than ever that she made the right decision.
i.
She does it on a whim, because Janie’s been planning this for years and suggests that Priya go with her, and she’s been out of uni for seven months now and still hasn’t figured out what she wants to do except that she knows it’s something to do with oils and acrylics and watercolors, but she never had any formal training and her parents say, Be practical, Priya, and so she calls it a hobby. Besides, she’s never been away from Perth for more than two weeks at a time, never further away than that trip to Wellington to visit her primary school best friend Katie two years ago, and she always liked the desert.
Everyone’s surprised when she tells them, mentioning it off-handedly, and she can’t really blame them: she’s never been a bleeding heart, and even though no one would ever say she’s unkind or not generous, compassionate and self-sacrificial would come fairly far down the list of her attributes: creative and mischievous and cynical all coming first. Her dad just as cynically announces that she won’t last three months, and she isn’t stubborn enough to vow to prove him wrong.
But he is wrong, and it’s Janie crying into her pillow three months later, while Priya’s sitting outside in the desert night, her bare feet burrowing into the still-warm sand, watching the sky, stars as wild and bright as she remembers them from the few times she went camping with Katie and her family. She likes the sand and the heat and the little kids with their beautiful eyes and timid smiles, even if she was never great with kids before. She finds that her clever fingers are as adept at tying bandages as manipulating clay, and she’s bumped up from just handing out food and supplies to the locals to assisting in the clinic, even if she never even took a first aid class. You don’t flinch, Dr. Rush says, No matter what you see. That’s more valuable than all the medical knowledge in the world. She’s pretty sure that’s hyperbole, but the clinic starts to feel like the place she belongs anyway.
ii.
The first time she sees him, children are swarming around him like he’s the ice cream man—or Santa Claus, maybe. Decked out in khaki with one of those big scary guns (she’s still not used to seeing those every time she turns around) slung over one shoulder, and he’s got a toddler with enormous eyes tucked under one arm, a scrawny boy of seven or eight trying to climb up his leg, thirteen or fourteen kids of all ages pressing close and fighting over the pieces of chewing gum he’s handing out. He’s got a big grin on his face, and it looks strange below the war paint streaked on his cheeks like a child after playing with finger paint, and he holds the little girl closer as she slips an arm around his neck. It’s good chewing gum, too, fruity bubblegum kind, and she knows it wasn’t provided by the U.S. military—someone must have sent it from home.
He glances up, sees her, smiles. She (surprises herself when she) smiles back.
iii.
Some of the soldiers make it clear that they don’t like the humanitarian workers, and their looks are resentful, exasperated, impatient, or superior. But he doesn’t harbor any of that bitterness, always has a grin and a greeting for any of the aid workers when he sees them, and one day, while they’re both perched on top of the new school roof, hammers pounding away (she’d never built anything before this trip, either, not anything larger than the sculpture she made out of copper wire and bits of aluminium foil in high school, but it feels good, feels right), she lets him tease her into conversation. She finds out that he entered the military on principle, a family tradition and a whole bunch of ideals she can tell he really believes in—courage and honor and duty and nothing whatsoever about glory, which makes her like him—adding up to an easy decision (nearly as easy as the barely-out-of-adolescence ones who thought it was their only chance out of poverty).
She’s not so cynical that she can’t appreciate an idealist, even if she smiles patronizingly at first and thinks, He’ll learn.
iv.
But she’s the one who learns a new lesson, when she enters the clinic that morning and finds him covered in blood, a tiny body clutched to his chest (there are others there, too, doctors and nurses and orderlies rushing around and shouting out orders and the wounded are crying and it must have been a bomb in a residential area and that man’s leg is blown clean away—but Tony and the girl, they’re all she really sees). The little girl—seven? eight years old?—doesn’t have a chance, and Priya can’t tell how much of the blood is hers and how much is his (but his hands are covered, streaked and dripping with blood like a child playing with red finger-paint), and he won’t let go so that Priya can find out. He just looks up at her with eyes that rip her to shreds, and begs.
You have to help her. Have to help her.
She’s never wanted anything in the world so much as to be able to help him, but she knew at first glance that it was too late (she’s nearly always right, and this time is no different).
After, watching him scrub blood off his hands (it coats his hands like finger paint), she thinks that maybe now he’ll realize that courage and honor aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But it doesn’t happen like that at all. Instead, he believes in them all the more strongly.
And he’s the first person she’s ever met whose optimism doesn’t annoy her. It makes her sad for him and makes her want to be like him all at the same time (she never would have thought that the thing that would make her fall in love is watching him cry over a little girl whose name he never even knew).
She finds him later, under the stars, and slips her hand into his.
v.
Her “tour” (he calls it that, joking, and it’s good to hear him joking again) ends before his does, and she lets him talk her into giving him her email address. She’s exchanged it with lots of the other aid workers (though there’s only one or two she’ll actually keep up with—Celine from France and Jesse from Nebraska and Luz from Costa Rica), but never with any of the military (though there’ve been a few guys who asked her).
Still, she’s only been home for a few days (her room feels too small to hold her and all she’s seen; she’ll have to get a place of her own soon) before she pulls out her laptop (decorated with stickers and paint-pen doodles and a few pictures taped here and there) and starts to type.
Dear Tony, she writes. Have you ever thought about visiting Australia?
--
Sculpture
In the weeks before T’s fifth birthday, she sneaks scraps of wood out of the woodpile and carves a menagerie (of sorts. There’s an elephant, a giraffe, a dog, a tiger, a parrot, and a kangaroo, and that’s all she can manage: the wood is too important, too rare, to steal anymore). She never had much experience with carving, so her first tries are all clumsy and wrong, and she nearly slices off her thumb trying to get the elephant’s trunk just right, but she’s reasonably pleased with the finished product.
Safe Haven is starting to look more like a real home (and gained a name along the way) rather than a Hoovervile (that’s what Dominic always calls it whenever he stops in for a few days), and she’s started to love it, as she hasn’t loved any place since her childhood home (at first, she didn’t let herself think of her family and friends back home: the pain of wondering what might have happened to them was too much to bear. But that pain is part of what makes her Priya, and every memory is precious, and so she forces herself past the pain, to relish every memory).
It feels like home on T’s birthday: Echo and Paul managed to find a bit of sugar who knows where, and Adelle made something that almost tastes like cake, and there’s singing and laughter, and the way T’s eyes shine when he sees his present makes the splinters and the frustration worth it (and if she used to see Tony’s eyes shine exactly like that when he looked at her, and if those memories make her feel a kind of restlessness that tells her that this can never really be home without him, well, that’s just something she’ll have to learn to live with, for the sake of their son).
Tony shows up out of nowhere three days later; his gang of techno-pirate-ninjas still staggering from a recent battle. He’s got a gaping wound in his shoulder, and she stitches it up and doesn’t meet his eyes and says barely three words to him (though she can’t help but see the way his eyes follow her and T wherever they go, and she feels the bitterness burn: how dare he look like he still cares). She hopes, and hates herself for hoping, that he’ll see what they’ve made of this place, and that he’ll stay (and make it home for good).
He doesn’t, and the night he leaves (again) she cries (she hasn’t let herself cry in years) as she tucks T in, his grubby little hand still clinging tightly to his kangaroo.
i.
They wouldn’t have ever known that the New York Dollhouse had gotten the message if it weren’t for him. Three months after the remnants of the L.A. ‘house arrived, he stumbles up to the door of the compound, alone and nearly skeletal, rags hanging off his body, feet torn and bleeding. It’s more out of curiosity than anything else that Paul goes down to check him out (he and Priya had guard duty tonight, awkward and mostly silent, because they never have anything to talk about except Echo and while she may be Priya’s best friend, Priya does actually get sick of talking about her, and doesn’t have a problem saying so), thinking it’s just some random person—butcher, dumbshow, or otherwise—who stumbled upon them by accident (it’s only happened once or twice before—they chose their location well; the closeness of Neuropolis proves a great deterrent—and both times the person ended up with a bullet between his eyes. Priya doesn’t approve, but the ones who make decisions are willing to do anything to protect this place, and she can’t blame them for that).
Priya stands in the moonlight, staring down from the watchtower to the road below, waiting for Ballard’s signal, which comes only moments later.
She climbs down the ladder so fast she nearly stumbles, heart accelerating for no reason she could name (except that the idea that there are more people out there is just too good to be true), the butt of the rifle banging against the back of her leg with each rung. She reaches the gate just in time to see Paul flip a man’s limp body over so that he can tug up the back of the guy’s shirt. Priya catches a fleeting glimpse of his name before Paul tugs it back down again.
Paul slides his arms under the guy’s and hoists him up. Priya’s got his legs, one tucked under each arm, so she has a clear view of his face when his eyelids flutter open and he meets her gaze for just a moment (she could never explain afterwards why she felt a shock run through her, and she never admitted to it, either) before they sink shut again.
They get him into the makeshift clinic (one room set aside for the wounded or sick) and onto a pallet, Paul shouting, “Can I get some help here?” but Priya kneels by the guy’s side (she kind of wants to take his hand, but the impulse is a foreign one for her, and so she doesn’t).
“What’s your name?” she asks, urgently, knowing that his answer will determine his future here (or lack thereof).
“Anthony Ceccoli,” he gasps just before he passes out (and she recognizes the conviction in his voice, feels it herself every time she claims her own name), and he is who he says he is (the birthmark never lies).
ii.
Lynn (she was Tango, once upon a time, and before that, a doctor) says that he needs rest and peace and quiet more than anything, so he gets his own room. It’s small—it was a closet once—and just has a pallet pushed up against a wall and a small desk and chair (it looks like a jail cell, but they’re more free here than they ever were in the sinister serenity of the Dollhouse), but it also has a window, one that faces east.
Priya finds herself volunteering to take him his food and change his bandages, partly out of curiosity about what life’s like out there now, but mostly because his room is quiet and he doesn’t talk too loud (she’s learned to live with the headaches, but they never really go away, not even with the vaccine).
He talks, though, just quietly, and she finds herself listening. Over the course of days, as she serves him his meals, helps him to the loo, and changes his sheets, he tells her about the NYC Dollhouse being under siege, about how long the survivors held out until the message about Safe Haven came, about how the remnant set out, twelve of them searching for safety, and about how he watched them die or have their bodies stolen from them, one by one, until he was the only one left.
“I think I should go back out,” he says, and she hears: I don’t think I could ever belong in a place called Safe Haven. “There’s so much I could be doing,” he says, and she hears: I feel like it’s my job to take care of everyone else.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, and she hopes he hears, You deserve some peace.
iii.
Echo teases her when she starts spending all of her free time (time that isn’t spent on kitchen duty or cleaning or helping in the clinic or on guard duty) with Anthony, but Priya’s never been the blushing type. She rolls her eyes, makes a jibe about Paul, and goes back to Tony’s room.
To distract himself from the pain, he asks her about herself, and she finds herself telling him: first, the boring details of her very average childhood and her less than original adventures in adolescence (just your normal sort of teenage trouble—fights with her parents, drinking beer in a carpark somewhere with her friends, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life). She tells him about the LA Dollhouse, and how they found this place and turned it into Safe Haven, her words sculpting a narrative out of something that had seemed just a jumble of nightmares.
She tells him about Nolan, too, and doesn’t cry, just like he doesn’t when he talks about both his wars—the one fought on the other side of an ocean and the one fought on his home soil—and if her eyes are bleak or if his voice breaks, neither one of them mention that (what would be the point?).
It doesn’t change anything, talking about the different shades of hell they’ve both experienced. But it feels good, maybe, to have someone listen.
iv.
One day, he says, “I’d like to see your art.”
He isn’t an artist, has never really “gotten” art, or at least that’s what he tells her. He says that he’s a simple guy: meat and potatoes and baseball, and he’s pretty sure that any appreciation for art that might have made it through Afghanistan certainly didn’t make it through the fallout of Rossum’s war. But he thinks he might like hers (and his eyes when he says that send heat shooting through her body, and how’s she supposed to say no to that?).
There isn’t any paper, no paints or ink or anything to make them out of, but the walls in his room are white, and she finds a rock that works well enough as a piece of charcoal. She hasn’t drawn in, God, forever (before the Dollhouse—Sierra’s watercolors don’t count. Before the end of the world. Before Nolan and the mental hospital. Before all. Of. This), and at first her fingers move stiffly. But then they remember, and she feels like Michelangelo, coaxing forth something that had been there all along, that simply needed her hands to set it free.
She sketches his face in a corner by the window, because he suggests, “Draw me.” She thinks about softening reality: drawing him in the way she imagines he is when he’s healthy, disguising his haggardness and the pain that lines his face.
But she doesn’t. Because they’ve both fought long and hard to remember who they are, and to hold onto that knowledge, and every memory, no matter how painful or petty, makes them who they are (she wouldn’t give up a single memory if she had the chance—not a single one), and every scar and mark does the same. She embraces the truth as she draws, feeling it flow from her fingers, and she is saying, This is who you are, and there is no shame there.
But she’s not sure he really understands, at least not at first, because when she’s done, he just stares at the likeness.
“God,” he says after a moment. “I look like hell.”
“No,” she says, “you don’t,” and climbs up onto his cot beside him, pushes him down (gently: he’s recovering better than they thought he would, but there’s still the pain), and kisses him (and she thinks her lips against his skin, her hands sliding over the carved musculature of his arms, her body pressed close against his says what he couldn’t understand in her art: that he’s perfect because he’s him, and that she’s perfect because she’s her, and that after all they’ve been through, they’ll never let anyone take that away).
v.
After that, his walls become her canvas. She covers it with sketches of the others there at Safe Haven (Echo and Topher and DeWitt and Paul and November—or Mellie or Madeleine or whoever the hell she was; Priya knew her as November, but it was Mellie who gave her life for Paul—and all the others, the ones she loves and the ones she can’t stand, and, as always, the act of turning them into art lends them grace, and she finds herself caring about them, not in a saccharine or abstract sort of way, but with a concreteness she never could have imagined before). She draws her parents and her grandparents, her brothers and her cousins, the little girl down the street who was her best friend for six months before she moved away again, the balloon seller on the boardwalk in Malibu who always had a ready smile, every person she can remember.
And he starts to understand. To understand why each person, their selves are so important, why they need to be remembered just as they are, flaws and all. Beside his bed, at a perfect angle for him to see it when his head is lying on his pillow, she draws their intertwined hands, hers that create so easily (there’s nothing so hard or twisted that she can’t sculpt truth out of), his that were once taught to destroy (except she knows when she examines it that he was never meant to break or shatter) but that now touch her so gently she almost can’t stand it.
Soon, she thinks, she’ll convince him that he belongs here after all.
--
Textiles
She’s still uneasy around Alpha (she doesn’t know that she entirely trusts him: there are psychos and serial killers bouncing around in that head of his), despite what Echo and Paul say, and whenever he comes around, she finds reasons to stay out of his way (and to keep T away, too, of course). He notices, she knows he does from the way he gives her that quirk of a smile, but she never thought that he would think much of it until the day he shows up with a sewing machine.
T’s growing so fast now, so fast that they don’t even try to keep him in shoes anymore and his trousers always seem to be showing his ankles. She’d complained about it one night as she and Adelle were cooking dinner, and Alpha must have heard her, because two weeks later he presents her with the sewing machine.
She stares at it, confused, because there’s a big panel on the side that doesn’t make any sense until Alpha explains that he’s rigged it so that it’s solar powered (no electricity here). She hugs him impulsively, surprising both him and herself, and after that she doesn’t shoot him dirty looks whenever he “happens” to mention how Tony was doing the last time they ran into each other.
She gathers up as many scraps and old garments as she can, and even though she hasn’t used a sewing machine in years, she figures out pretty quickly how to craft the bits and pieces into stronger wholes.
One day she pulls the battered trunk out from under her bed and takes out the shirt. For the first several months after Tony left, she slept in this shirt, wrapping the flannel around her and her son, hoping that the scent would never, ever fade. He was always a flannel sort of guy, the kind who loved baseball and fishing, who loved his mom and shared beers with his dad. He’s all hard angles now, metal and wires and the tech slowly taking him over (he had scars once, on that face, and now he’s disfiguring it all over again) and swallowing him up until he’s not even human anymore.
But she likes the idea (“likes” in a grim, bitter way) of turning this symbol of Tony’s lost humanity into an outfit for T, and she doesn’t cry when her son pulls on his new shirt and proclaims it a perfect fit (no matter how much she wants to).
i.
She’s lying on a towel in the bikini she hand-dyed herself, shifting sand through her fingers and trying to decide if she wants to join the sandcastle competition tomorrow. Work that doesn’t require a visa and winnings that won’t be taxed are good things, and she won three years ago back home in Perth, but she’s been into textiles lately and doesn’t know if she wants to deal with the irritation and lack of precision that accompanies sand (safe at home, her world small and warm and familiar, sand had provided an outlet. Here, though, in a world that’s much lonelier than she’d thought any ever could be, she craves the tangible limits of looms and patterns).
She’s jarred out of her thoughts by a thud and a shower of said sand as an errant volleyball gives one last bounce a few feet away and rolls to a stop on the edge of her towel. She looks up to see a (cute) guy in board shorts come jogging toward her and she thinks, God, this is such a chick flick cliché. Still, she reaches over and scoops up the ball, tosses it to the guy, and smiles in response to his ‘thank you.’
But he doesn’t say anything else, just looks at her for a long moment (she feels like he’s looking right through her, but not in the “I should put on more clothes around this creep” way), and then heads back to his friends.
(She finds herself oddly disappointed.)
ii.
She’s never much cared for the bonfires on the beach, the annoying music (no one at these things ever has much taste), the smoke that gets in your eyes, the throngs of young people doing and saying things they wouldn’t dare in the sunlight (Priya’s the same person by sunlight or moonlight or any light at all), but Kimbra (her only friend from Australia here in the States) had begged and cajoled and the girl has always needed someone to chaperone and make sure she doesn’t go home with some loser. Besides the way the firelight transforms faces into grotesquely beautiful masks, like they’re carved of wood, appeals to her aesthetic sensibilities, and she likes to sit on a driftwood log, drink a beer, and people-watch. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
When she feels the log shift and someone sitting down next to her, she’s ready to be annoyed. Kimbra’s already come over six times, progressively more drunk each visit, and (too loudly: Priya winced) demanded that Priya loosen up and have some fun. But she’s been missing her brothers lately, and she isn’t in the partying mood. She isn’t in the fend-off-the-advances-of-some-inebriated-idiot mood, either, so she turns to the guy (she can tell it’s a guy by his size, and who else approaches a woman sitting alone in the dark without saying something? Other women know better), ready to tell him off.
But then she looks up, and it’s volleyball guy, and the firelight is doing amazing things to his face, and so she decides not to tell him off (instead, she waits: warily but curiously).
“I’m Tony,” he says. “Another beer?”
iii.
After a few false starts and another beer each, they talk, hitting the basics (he’s military, on leave before he gets shipped out for another tour, family back home in New York; she’s an artist, no work visa, trying to figure things out thousands of miles from home) briefly before stumbling into deeper waters, surprising themselves and each other with how much they reveal (she’s not sure whether or not she’s got the talent or—more important—the drive to take her art very far, and it was her parents’ disappointed eyes as they watched her waste more time on silk-screening and oils that drove her across the ocean; he’s still trying to reconcile the good he knows his comrades are doing with the destruction he knows they’re capable of as well and where he fits in to all of it).
The warm sand at her feet and the dance of firelight and the amber taste of the beer and the crash of the waves not far away are their own kind of intoxicating, but it’s his voice that sweeps her away.
iv.
She bunches the well-worn flannel of his shirt (the night air is cool, and the flannel is warm) in her fists, brushes her cheek along the soft cotton of his t-shirt and slides her tongue along his collarbone. He’s scooped her up in his arms, propped her between himself and her front door (they barely made it into the house; this could’ve just as easily happened on her excuse for a verandah), his hands sliding the crinkled linen of her skirt up her legs.
She’s not this kind of girl, not because of some ingrained sense of morality, but just because she’s not interested in the kind of guys who do the casual sex thing. But that’s the thing: he isn’t the kind of guy to do casual, and if she believed in instant connections, she’d say that this means more to him than just a way to get off, that this isn’t just one last lay before he gets shipped out to the land of hands-only relief for a year or so, that he cares somehow (and that, scariest of all, she does, too).
But she doesn’t want to think about that, because she doesn’t believe in soul mates and never has. She focuses on sensation instead. And that’s easy, because his dog tags are digging into her sternum and she doesn’t care, just like she doesn’t care that his hands are callused, because he smells so good and the sounds he makes (and the ones he coaxes out of her) and he has the kindest eyes she’s ever seen and somehow he knows to nuzzle behind her ear and her toes curl and all she wants is for him to be closeclosecloser (alwaysalwaysalways), even though she knows he’s leaving tomorrow and she’ll never see him again.
When he comes, he half-sobs, half-chokes her name, and she feels a rush of affection that terrifies her.
(Scarier still is that it she feels it again the next morning when he pulls his clothes back on, kisses her, and says, “Goodbye, Priya.”)
v.
She’s up to her elbows in purple dye when someone knocks on the door (purple’s always been her favorite color, and she’s humoring herself). With a sigh, she pulls out the spaghetti-tangled wool, watches the dye drip from the loops and twists, and sets it down to dry (looks like it’ll be lilac instead of eggplant, but it doesn’t really matter).
She runs her hands under cool water, brushes them briskly, but her forearms are still tinged lavender. Whoever’s at the door can just deal with it.
The door sticks, and she has to jiggle the lock just the right way to get the door open (and if, every time she opens the door, she flashes back to that night, two years ago, in the dark with her body trapped—in the best possible way—between his and the door, so what? It was great sex, and that’s all). She’d thought that she’d have saved enough money to move into a nicer place by now, but last-minute flights to the other side of the world cost a lot, and attending her grandmother’s funeral was more important than where she’s living anyway. Still, she can’t help but sigh as she wrenches the door open, trying not to wish that she could live somewhere that doesn’t remind her of Tony every time she opens the goddamn door.
Except that as soon as she opens it, she’s glad she never moved on (because this moment could never have happened if she had).
Because it’s him.
--
Collage
She still can’t believe that she let Echo convince her to come along. This armored tank of Tony’s is gobbling up the road, racing towards LA, and with every mile, Priya’s that much closer to hell. She had sworn never to return to that place and now here she is, sitting beside the machine that was once the father of her son (the only man she’s ever loved), their child sleeping behind them (she hates herself for bringing T even one inch closer to that place), on the way to Pandemonium, the city of demons that were once people.
She can’t stop thinking of that place, of being closed up in that hellhole for years—again—of keeping her son locked away like a bird in a cage. The serenity of the place, its dark woods and sparkling pools (the beds in the ground), are horrifying, and knowing she’ll be close the Chair, the tech that made this possible, is almost enough to make her scream.
She can’t help but think about it, knows it’s worthless to even try, so instead she thinks about the wall in Adelle’s office. She wonders if the collage is still there, the little picture memorial, wonders if anyone has ever seen them and gained a little bit of hope. She wonders if Tony—Victor—still remembers how she kissed him before she placed his picture beside her own. As she climbs back to the little cot T’s sleeping on, eager to join him in sleep and forget for a little while where they’re going, she shoots a glance over at Tony—Victor—in the driver’s seat, but his eyes are locked on the road, his jaw set. She hates herself for the little leap of hope she feels whenever she sees him, the hope that maybe he’ll choose her and T after all ( it’s the dreams that make her hope, the way her soul goes searching for his, night after night, the way she finds him and falls in love again every time she closes her eyes. Torture and hope: the dreams are both, and she doesn’t know how to separate one from the other anymore).
Hope seems almost cruel at this point, but she can’t help but cling to it.
i.
He looks familiar.
ii.
She tilts her head to the side, studies him as he orders a hot dog and a drink (relish and spicy mustard and Dr. Pepper, she notes idly), and tries to place him. The certainty that she knows (knew, will know, shifting tenses moment by moment, never settling on one, and what does that mean?) him niggles up along her spine, sparking into the tips of her fingers, throbbing behind her temples. She closes her eyes, feels the sunshine fall like rain on her face, lets herself drift for a moment, certain that if she lets go, she’ll find it (the answer).
She does. Only there’s no it, only them--lots and lots of them, lots and lots of memories, of snapshots sharper and more colorful than any she ever took on her Polaroid (and what ever happened to it, anyways? She misses the stickers): she sees him in tracksuit pants, in jeans, in dozens of suits, each suited to a different occasion, sees him bare and paint-smeared (or is that blood and war paint?). She sees him smile, sees him knit his brow, sees his eyes flash anger, sees a tear slide down his cheek. She’s a visual artist, but she’s never assembled anything so detailed, so colorful, so emotion-filled (so beautiful).
iii.
When she opens her eyes, she knows. And she wonders why. Why him? Everything else from those seven years she had stolen from her, everything else is all gone. Wiped away completely, not like a chalk board (she hates chalk smell, the sound the duster makes against the slate, the way the dust coats your hands and lungs, but she always sort of liked how if you tilt your head at the right angle in the right light, you can see the remnants of what you tried to erase) but like a wall painted over in a darker color. She remembers the before, she remembers the after she’s been trying to create (it’s harder than she’d thought it would be the day she walked out of that place and into the sunshine), but she doesn’t remember the during. Not even in her dreams.
The woman (she hadn’t wanted to know her name) had assured her in that (meant-to-be-reassuring) crisp accent that everything was completely gone from the during and that every bit of before had been returned to her intact, but Priya had been skeptical. She’d walked out of there positive that she’d blunder into dreams or flashbacks or be on the receiving end of the sucker-punch that is déjà vu, but she was wrong. She hasn’t stumbled across one scrap, one crumb of the during (no ghosts return to haunt her).
Until him.
She thinks she should be scared or excited or vindicated. Instead, she’s curious.
iv.
He looks up from where he’s trying to juggle his food (he got a funnel cake, too, she notes), and his eyes meet hers. He tilts his head. She knows he’s trying to remember. She wonders what his collage looks like, his jumble of memories, if they’re as sharp as hers or if instead of images he hears sounds or smells scents or feels textures or tastes flavors.
She doesn’t even consider that she isn’t as familiar to him as he is to her.
She stands there where the boardwalk meets the sand and dives back into to the images again, waiting for him to approach her (it doesn’t even occur to her that he might not. Of course he will). He walks slowly, his face crinkled in concentration, but the lines fall away when he’s standing in front of her and he smiles.
Hello, he says.
Hello, she replies.
v.
And they begin.
--
Book Binding
She’s done this a thousand times before, curled up on a couch before bedtime, T tucked into the curve of her body, and a well-worn book open on their laps. T is a great reader; he rarely stumbles over any words anymore, and he insists on doing the reading now himself and acts like it’s a big favor to allow her to listen (she knows that it’s all show, that he loves their bedtime ritual as much as she does, but she understands how necessary it is to preserve a seven-year-old’s pride). She listens to the familiar sound of his voice, rests her chin on the top of his head and breathes in the scent of his hair. Yes, she’s done this a thousand times before, but never just like this.
Never with Tony on the other side of their son, never with his gaze moving back and forth between T and Priya herself, as though he can’t decide which of them he wants to look at most. Never with his hand stealing up to touch her cheek (and his hand still feels just like she remembers—warm and rough and human—it feels so right that she can ignore, for the moment, those studs in his face, the ones she’s always wanted to rip right out to see if he’s still human enough to bleed. He is, she knows that now, and she knows he’ll remove them soon enough, and she can be patient. They have time now).
Maybe she shouldn’t find this peace now. Safe Haven was home, but even there she felt restless sometimes, and the dreams (the precision of them all, the level of detail, the real-ness of them, like her soul reaching out to his every night, reminding her that she wasn’t really whole unless he was with her, reminding her that she still needed him and always, always would) were always there to remind her of what was missing (of the way she was being torn apart by the love she had for her son and the love she had for Tony, when she tried to make them fit but couldn’t). And now they’ve lost so much (her heart hurts for Echo, for all that her friend has lost, even if she’s so grateful that Echo’s desperate words reminded her that she still has everything she needs, if she’s only willing to forgive and to reach out and take it), now they’re back in the worst hell she’s ever known (a place that used to make her soul shrivel up in the same way the memory of Nolan’s touch did), but she doesn’t care. And she doesn’t need the dreams anymore (hope and torture).
She closes her eyes, listens to T’s voice, feels Tony’s skin against hers, and all the could-haves and might-have-beens fall away, and there’s only this. Only what is.
And they begin again.
Title: Composition
Fandom: Dollhouse
Characters/Pairings: Priya-centric, Priya/Tony, ensemble
Spoilers: Through "Epitaph Two" (the Series Finale of Awesome)
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Joss is boss.
A/N: Thank you so, so much to my betas:
deird1 for saving me from being an Ugly American (hopefully) by making Priya sound like an actual Australian (any mistakes are mine); and, as always, angearia, for asking for more layers and then telling me what they should be when I was too slow to think of them myself; for letting me know that my first version just didn’t make the cut and then telling me how to improve it; for helping me figure out how to fit it into the finale canon; and for catching all the little things I should be able to catch myself. You’re a lifesaver.Summary: Torture and hope: the dreams are both, and she doesn’t know how to separate one from the other anymore. Five ways Priya and Tony never fell in love (and one way they did).
Watercolors
For nearly the first year after T is born, Priya is worthless, or that’s how it seems to her. Tony leaves (she sends him away) a week after he holds his son for the first time, when Priya is still bedridden and weak ( there was blood; so much blood: the combination of premature labor, the terror of another attack by Harding’s men, and a lack of medical facilities…well, Adelle says that it’s a miracle she survived at all, and Tony hadn’t been able to deal with almost losing his family).
Adelle says it’s postpartum depression, says that many women suffer from it and that she’ll find her balance eventually (perhaps Claire could help her, Adelle says, if she were here, but Priya knows that there is no Claire anymore, not when they’d restored her to Whiskey’s body and she asked to be taken out again when they left the Dollhouse. They left Whiskey behind as the messenger, and Claire is now only a computer program in a wedge hidden in a place that used to be the Dollhouse, and maybe it’s that knowledge, more than anything else, that makes Tony’s decisions so terrifying to her). But that’s just one of the many little lies they have to tell themselves now to find ways to carry on, because it’s much, much simpler than that: they’re living in hell, and the father of her son has abandoned her, and she’s petrified of raising her child in a world like this one (much simpler? Or much more complicated? It’s all shades of the same thing).
T is teething when Echo finds Priya tracing patterns with her finger into the dirt that always seems to coat the windows no matter how many times they’re scrubbed (this is how Priya measures time now: with T: his first smile, his first word, his first tooth. Any other way would cause too much pain). Echo doesn’t really say anything, just bumps her hip into Priya’s, but when she comes back from the next raid, she hands Priya a small plastic case, then saunters off with that smug grin of hers.
Priya opens it, and there are watercolors inside, hollows filled with dried paint, just waiting for a little water to bring them to life. The red is crushed, nearly ground away entirely, and there isn’t any black at all, but she doesn’t care. She can’t imagine where Echo found it, but it’s just what she needed, and she doesn’t ask.
There isn’t any paper, but T’s cradle (Tony made it, she doesn’t know when, only that when she stumbled back into the bedroom after he left, there it was, waiting) is pushed into a corner, and she covers the off-white walls on either side with birds and bright colors. She hasn’t used watercolors since she was a doll, but her fingers seem to remember. She doesn’t remember that time at all, but Echo does, and she says that Sierra loved to paint, and Victor loved to watch her, and Priya wonders if, since he became Victor again, he remembers those times, and she finds the question burns inside her till she almost can’t breathe. She hates the Dollhouse with an intensity that scares her (sometimes finds herself hating Adelle, no matter how hard she tries, and Topher, no matter how broken he is); it spoils and taints everything.
She had thought, when she became Priya again, that the fact that she and Tony still loved each other meant that they were soul mates (even though she’d never ever believed in them before, what else could it mean?), that no matter what, they would have found each other. She paints another bluebird above the T’s cradle, listening to her son fuss and coo, and she thinks that if it hadn’t been for the hell that is the Dollhouse, Tony might be beside her, critiquing her art, holding their son, himself and whole and human.
The night she paints the first bird is the night she has the first dream.
i.
Leading art therapy sessions with soldiers suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder wouldn’t have even occurred to Priya on her own. After all, she isn’t a counselor, and apart from three questions on one test in her psychology course back at uni, she doesn’t know the first thing about PTSD. She didn’t study art, either—it wasn’t worth arguing with her parents over (she’d never be able to convince them that art was a viable option) and so chemistry it was—and her creations have always come more from her heart and hands than her mind. She’s not sure whether she’ll be any use to anyone struggling with something she can’t even imagine, and she’s never spent much time around either military or mental patients.
But Lacy asked, and she’s one of the first friends Priya’s made since moving halfway round the world. Lacy’s brother committed suicide three months after getting back from Fallujah, and Lacy thinks someone like Priya could have helped him. Priya doesn’t think of herself as patient or sensitive or any of the other things she imagines someone who works with the mentally ill should be, but Lacy still tears up whenever she watches The Simpsons, so Priya agrees.
She likes her patients well enough (patients? Students? She’s never sure what to call them, so she mostly just calls them by name), mostly because they seem to be willing to humor her as she blunders through the first few sessions. The place, though, makes her skin crawl: industrial lighting and a stench of bleach (she’s always hated that smell more than any other: it’s always a mask for something uglier), a desperation in the eyes of the patients, a weariness in the eyes of the staff. She hurries through the halls, her arms wrapped around herself, and she doesn’t breathe free till she’s in the sunlight again.
But the room they set aside for art therapy is the least institutional, the most pleasant: there’s sunlight streaming through big windows and wide tables for spreading out and sinks for cleaning up any mess, and she scatters as much color as she can through the room (tissue paper flowers and Impressionist prints and lots and lots of paint) and the patients lose some of that dogged look in their eyes when they come in.
She chooses watercolors to begin with, fluid and soft, comforting with tinges of kindergarten without the condescension of finger-paints (sometimes it’s good to give up a little bit of control), with a softer texture than oils (she thinks these men and women need comfort more than anything, a warm, soft place to curl up and heal).
ii.
He doesn’t have any talent at all; even his stick figures look awkward. But every once in a while, his dedication will pay off, and he reveals something of his pain in the juxtaposition of colors or the harsh lines of a jagged shape. Most of the other patients use lots of black or red, depict explosions and corpses, recreating their reality. His revelations are more subtle, but seem to come from a deeper place. She’s fascinated, in ways she never thought she would be.
He always sticks around to help her pack up the supplies, clean the brushes, wipe down the tables. They don’t talk a lot, but sometimes he likes to hear about her dog or her latest emails from her little brothers. He doesn’t have much to say back, not when the most important topics of conversation in this place are what’s being served for lunch or what movie’s showing tomorrow night. But that’s okay. His presence is soothing (she hadn’t realized till now that she needed to be soothed, that she’s still unsure of her place here, so far from home), and he seems soothed as well (she never would have thought of herself as being able to give someone else peace, but the thought that she can maybe offer it to him warms her all the way through).
iii.
One day when she arrives, he doesn’t look up to greet her with a smile or the latest baseball stats (he’s a Mets fan, a long way from home, too), and she’s been there for fifteen minutes before she catches a glimpse of his black eye. It seems out of character, so unlike him: he’s the kind of gentle that speaks of power held in check. But she doesn’t ask, doesn’t say anything at all, not until they’re cleaning up at the end of the session. Then she merely looks at him (it’s a look she’s perfected well over the years on two mischievous younger brothers, and it never fails).
He ducks his head a bit, and that seems out of character, too (he’s always so sure, with a bluntness that she would have thought she’d find off-putting but that instead she finds charming). “I got in a fight. With Lloyd,” he says, naming one of the other members of the class (not one of her favorites; he seems too grimly pleased to cover page after page of pristine white paper with too-detailed weapons and corpses). “He…said something. I got mad.”
“What did he say?”
He flushes a bit (she stares, fascinated, certain that she won’t ever see this again), but this time he holds her eyes. “He took it back.”
She finds her hand stealing out, her palm resting on his cheek, fingers brushing against the purple watercolor edges of the bruise (she hasn’t felt tingles shoot through her like this since her first year at uni, that tosser Mike who ended up cheating on her with her “best friend.” But there’s a weight behind this feeling, a substantialness, and that scares her and thrills her more than anything).
iv.
He’s usually a bit rough cheerful, self-deprecating about his attempts at art and at flirting with her. But today his eyes are both ringed with dark circles, and it isn’t from another man’s fist. He manages to look rumpled, despite his consistent military-enforced neatness, and he can’t concentrate all the way through the session (not that he usually does, but today he can’t even concentrate on her). His finger taps a jittery not-rhythm against the table.
When everyone wanders out, she doesn’t rise to pack up. Instead, she sits. And waits.
He shoves his fingers through his hair and then the words come bursting out. “I have these nightmares, right? And that’s nothing—we all had them, over there. But then when I wake up, I’m so angry, and I want to do things I never thought of doing before, and sometimes the things I think about—“
He breaks off abruptly, looks up at her hopelessly, and she’s never wanted anything more than she wants to take him into her arms (she’s not a tender person, not comforting, not naturally, but she thinks that for him, she could be).
The bleakness in his eyes breaks her heart (she doesn’t like pitying him, and hates a world that would leave her with no other option). “They shouldn’t let me around you. You shouldn’t trust me. I might—” He stops again.
And she hears what he’s really saying: I hate this. This isn’t who I am. I don’t know this person at all.
“No,” she says (and means it). “You wouldn’t.”
They sit in silence for a long time.
v.
When he’s released for good, she’s waiting for him. His face breaks out in a huge grin as he walks toward her.
“I didn’t want to leave,” he says, shifting his backpack higher onto his shoulder and falling into step beside her.
“Why not?” No matter how hard they try to cover it up with clean linens and hotel-room paintings above beds and in hallways and softer-sounding jargon, a mental institute is still just an insane asylum.
“I thought I wouldn’t get to see you again.”
“I guess you don’t know me very well.”
“Well, not yet.”
She smiles up at him as he pushes open the door and they walk out into the blast of cleansing sunlight.
--
Finger Paint
It’s another one of those endless, hot afternoons when the heat is so thick it feels like it’s going to suffocate her. She’s hanging clothes on the line, and T is bored, as three-year-olds sometimes get when there’s no one around to entertain them. She wishes she could put down the laundry, play hide-and-seek or kick-the can with him (that’s his favorite, probably because it’s the one game Topher can actually play with him). But there’s work to be done (there always is), and she doesn’t have the time.
She finds a little plastic bucket in the shed, and after a few minutes of sorting through junk (they never throw anything away, not when the least likely object could be of some use), she digs up a paintbrush. She fills the bucket in the well and hands it and the brush to her son with instructions to go and “paint” the sidewalk.
She watches him working busily, content with his assignment, and she wishes she had finger paint for him to play with, Legos and a little red wagon, soft toys and teddies (simple toys, classic toys: nothing electronic or shaped like a weapon), the kinds of toys kids played with back before the world became hell. No matter how hard she tries not to, she can’t help but wonder what toys Tony played with, which were his favorites, the ones he’d want to share with his son. Maybe he took all of those memories out, to make room for ones that don’t belong to him: languages he never learned, skills he was never taught, knowledge he stole. Maybe the only bits of himself that he keeps are the ones from his years in Afghanistan, where he first learned to kill. Or maybe there’s nothing of Tony left inside at all, only Victor and his tech.
T comes running inside, eager to show his mommy what he’s accomplished (the water will probably have dried up by the time they make it back to the sidewalk, but she’ll still “ooh” and “aah,” just like a good mother should), his pleasure in the simple game shining in his eyes (and if his smile is just like Tony’s, well, she can ignore that), and she’s more sure than ever that she made the right decision.
i.
She does it on a whim, because Janie’s been planning this for years and suggests that Priya go with her, and she’s been out of uni for seven months now and still hasn’t figured out what she wants to do except that she knows it’s something to do with oils and acrylics and watercolors, but she never had any formal training and her parents say, Be practical, Priya, and so she calls it a hobby. Besides, she’s never been away from Perth for more than two weeks at a time, never further away than that trip to Wellington to visit her primary school best friend Katie two years ago, and she always liked the desert.
Everyone’s surprised when she tells them, mentioning it off-handedly, and she can’t really blame them: she’s never been a bleeding heart, and even though no one would ever say she’s unkind or not generous, compassionate and self-sacrificial would come fairly far down the list of her attributes: creative and mischievous and cynical all coming first. Her dad just as cynically announces that she won’t last three months, and she isn’t stubborn enough to vow to prove him wrong.
But he is wrong, and it’s Janie crying into her pillow three months later, while Priya’s sitting outside in the desert night, her bare feet burrowing into the still-warm sand, watching the sky, stars as wild and bright as she remembers them from the few times she went camping with Katie and her family. She likes the sand and the heat and the little kids with their beautiful eyes and timid smiles, even if she was never great with kids before. She finds that her clever fingers are as adept at tying bandages as manipulating clay, and she’s bumped up from just handing out food and supplies to the locals to assisting in the clinic, even if she never even took a first aid class. You don’t flinch, Dr. Rush says, No matter what you see. That’s more valuable than all the medical knowledge in the world. She’s pretty sure that’s hyperbole, but the clinic starts to feel like the place she belongs anyway.
ii.
The first time she sees him, children are swarming around him like he’s the ice cream man—or Santa Claus, maybe. Decked out in khaki with one of those big scary guns (she’s still not used to seeing those every time she turns around) slung over one shoulder, and he’s got a toddler with enormous eyes tucked under one arm, a scrawny boy of seven or eight trying to climb up his leg, thirteen or fourteen kids of all ages pressing close and fighting over the pieces of chewing gum he’s handing out. He’s got a big grin on his face, and it looks strange below the war paint streaked on his cheeks like a child after playing with finger paint, and he holds the little girl closer as she slips an arm around his neck. It’s good chewing gum, too, fruity bubblegum kind, and she knows it wasn’t provided by the U.S. military—someone must have sent it from home.
He glances up, sees her, smiles. She (surprises herself when she) smiles back.
iii.
Some of the soldiers make it clear that they don’t like the humanitarian workers, and their looks are resentful, exasperated, impatient, or superior. But he doesn’t harbor any of that bitterness, always has a grin and a greeting for any of the aid workers when he sees them, and one day, while they’re both perched on top of the new school roof, hammers pounding away (she’d never built anything before this trip, either, not anything larger than the sculpture she made out of copper wire and bits of aluminium foil in high school, but it feels good, feels right), she lets him tease her into conversation. She finds out that he entered the military on principle, a family tradition and a whole bunch of ideals she can tell he really believes in—courage and honor and duty and nothing whatsoever about glory, which makes her like him—adding up to an easy decision (nearly as easy as the barely-out-of-adolescence ones who thought it was their only chance out of poverty).
She’s not so cynical that she can’t appreciate an idealist, even if she smiles patronizingly at first and thinks, He’ll learn.
iv.
But she’s the one who learns a new lesson, when she enters the clinic that morning and finds him covered in blood, a tiny body clutched to his chest (there are others there, too, doctors and nurses and orderlies rushing around and shouting out orders and the wounded are crying and it must have been a bomb in a residential area and that man’s leg is blown clean away—but Tony and the girl, they’re all she really sees). The little girl—seven? eight years old?—doesn’t have a chance, and Priya can’t tell how much of the blood is hers and how much is his (but his hands are covered, streaked and dripping with blood like a child playing with red finger-paint), and he won’t let go so that Priya can find out. He just looks up at her with eyes that rip her to shreds, and begs.
You have to help her. Have to help her.
She’s never wanted anything in the world so much as to be able to help him, but she knew at first glance that it was too late (she’s nearly always right, and this time is no different).
After, watching him scrub blood off his hands (it coats his hands like finger paint), she thinks that maybe now he’ll realize that courage and honor aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But it doesn’t happen like that at all. Instead, he believes in them all the more strongly.
And he’s the first person she’s ever met whose optimism doesn’t annoy her. It makes her sad for him and makes her want to be like him all at the same time (she never would have thought that the thing that would make her fall in love is watching him cry over a little girl whose name he never even knew).
She finds him later, under the stars, and slips her hand into his.
v.
Her “tour” (he calls it that, joking, and it’s good to hear him joking again) ends before his does, and she lets him talk her into giving him her email address. She’s exchanged it with lots of the other aid workers (though there’s only one or two she’ll actually keep up with—Celine from France and Jesse from Nebraska and Luz from Costa Rica), but never with any of the military (though there’ve been a few guys who asked her).
Still, she’s only been home for a few days (her room feels too small to hold her and all she’s seen; she’ll have to get a place of her own soon) before she pulls out her laptop (decorated with stickers and paint-pen doodles and a few pictures taped here and there) and starts to type.
Dear Tony, she writes. Have you ever thought about visiting Australia?
--
Sculpture
In the weeks before T’s fifth birthday, she sneaks scraps of wood out of the woodpile and carves a menagerie (of sorts. There’s an elephant, a giraffe, a dog, a tiger, a parrot, and a kangaroo, and that’s all she can manage: the wood is too important, too rare, to steal anymore). She never had much experience with carving, so her first tries are all clumsy and wrong, and she nearly slices off her thumb trying to get the elephant’s trunk just right, but she’s reasonably pleased with the finished product.
Safe Haven is starting to look more like a real home (and gained a name along the way) rather than a Hoovervile (that’s what Dominic always calls it whenever he stops in for a few days), and she’s started to love it, as she hasn’t loved any place since her childhood home (at first, she didn’t let herself think of her family and friends back home: the pain of wondering what might have happened to them was too much to bear. But that pain is part of what makes her Priya, and every memory is precious, and so she forces herself past the pain, to relish every memory).
It feels like home on T’s birthday: Echo and Paul managed to find a bit of sugar who knows where, and Adelle made something that almost tastes like cake, and there’s singing and laughter, and the way T’s eyes shine when he sees his present makes the splinters and the frustration worth it (and if she used to see Tony’s eyes shine exactly like that when he looked at her, and if those memories make her feel a kind of restlessness that tells her that this can never really be home without him, well, that’s just something she’ll have to learn to live with, for the sake of their son).
Tony shows up out of nowhere three days later; his gang of techno-pirate-ninjas still staggering from a recent battle. He’s got a gaping wound in his shoulder, and she stitches it up and doesn’t meet his eyes and says barely three words to him (though she can’t help but see the way his eyes follow her and T wherever they go, and she feels the bitterness burn: how dare he look like he still cares). She hopes, and hates herself for hoping, that he’ll see what they’ve made of this place, and that he’ll stay (and make it home for good).
He doesn’t, and the night he leaves (again) she cries (she hasn’t let herself cry in years) as she tucks T in, his grubby little hand still clinging tightly to his kangaroo.
i.
They wouldn’t have ever known that the New York Dollhouse had gotten the message if it weren’t for him. Three months after the remnants of the L.A. ‘house arrived, he stumbles up to the door of the compound, alone and nearly skeletal, rags hanging off his body, feet torn and bleeding. It’s more out of curiosity than anything else that Paul goes down to check him out (he and Priya had guard duty tonight, awkward and mostly silent, because they never have anything to talk about except Echo and while she may be Priya’s best friend, Priya does actually get sick of talking about her, and doesn’t have a problem saying so), thinking it’s just some random person—butcher, dumbshow, or otherwise—who stumbled upon them by accident (it’s only happened once or twice before—they chose their location well; the closeness of Neuropolis proves a great deterrent—and both times the person ended up with a bullet between his eyes. Priya doesn’t approve, but the ones who make decisions are willing to do anything to protect this place, and she can’t blame them for that).
Priya stands in the moonlight, staring down from the watchtower to the road below, waiting for Ballard’s signal, which comes only moments later.
She climbs down the ladder so fast she nearly stumbles, heart accelerating for no reason she could name (except that the idea that there are more people out there is just too good to be true), the butt of the rifle banging against the back of her leg with each rung. She reaches the gate just in time to see Paul flip a man’s limp body over so that he can tug up the back of the guy’s shirt. Priya catches a fleeting glimpse of his name before Paul tugs it back down again.
Paul slides his arms under the guy’s and hoists him up. Priya’s got his legs, one tucked under each arm, so she has a clear view of his face when his eyelids flutter open and he meets her gaze for just a moment (she could never explain afterwards why she felt a shock run through her, and she never admitted to it, either) before they sink shut again.
They get him into the makeshift clinic (one room set aside for the wounded or sick) and onto a pallet, Paul shouting, “Can I get some help here?” but Priya kneels by the guy’s side (she kind of wants to take his hand, but the impulse is a foreign one for her, and so she doesn’t).
“What’s your name?” she asks, urgently, knowing that his answer will determine his future here (or lack thereof).
“Anthony Ceccoli,” he gasps just before he passes out (and she recognizes the conviction in his voice, feels it herself every time she claims her own name), and he is who he says he is (the birthmark never lies).
ii.
Lynn (she was Tango, once upon a time, and before that, a doctor) says that he needs rest and peace and quiet more than anything, so he gets his own room. It’s small—it was a closet once—and just has a pallet pushed up against a wall and a small desk and chair (it looks like a jail cell, but they’re more free here than they ever were in the sinister serenity of the Dollhouse), but it also has a window, one that faces east.
Priya finds herself volunteering to take him his food and change his bandages, partly out of curiosity about what life’s like out there now, but mostly because his room is quiet and he doesn’t talk too loud (she’s learned to live with the headaches, but they never really go away, not even with the vaccine).
He talks, though, just quietly, and she finds herself listening. Over the course of days, as she serves him his meals, helps him to the loo, and changes his sheets, he tells her about the NYC Dollhouse being under siege, about how long the survivors held out until the message about Safe Haven came, about how the remnant set out, twelve of them searching for safety, and about how he watched them die or have their bodies stolen from them, one by one, until he was the only one left.
“I think I should go back out,” he says, and she hears: I don’t think I could ever belong in a place called Safe Haven. “There’s so much I could be doing,” he says, and she hears: I feel like it’s my job to take care of everyone else.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says, and she hopes he hears, You deserve some peace.
iii.
Echo teases her when she starts spending all of her free time (time that isn’t spent on kitchen duty or cleaning or helping in the clinic or on guard duty) with Anthony, but Priya’s never been the blushing type. She rolls her eyes, makes a jibe about Paul, and goes back to Tony’s room.
To distract himself from the pain, he asks her about herself, and she finds herself telling him: first, the boring details of her very average childhood and her less than original adventures in adolescence (just your normal sort of teenage trouble—fights with her parents, drinking beer in a carpark somewhere with her friends, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life). She tells him about the LA Dollhouse, and how they found this place and turned it into Safe Haven, her words sculpting a narrative out of something that had seemed just a jumble of nightmares.
She tells him about Nolan, too, and doesn’t cry, just like he doesn’t when he talks about both his wars—the one fought on the other side of an ocean and the one fought on his home soil—and if her eyes are bleak or if his voice breaks, neither one of them mention that (what would be the point?).
It doesn’t change anything, talking about the different shades of hell they’ve both experienced. But it feels good, maybe, to have someone listen.
iv.
One day, he says, “I’d like to see your art.”
He isn’t an artist, has never really “gotten” art, or at least that’s what he tells her. He says that he’s a simple guy: meat and potatoes and baseball, and he’s pretty sure that any appreciation for art that might have made it through Afghanistan certainly didn’t make it through the fallout of Rossum’s war. But he thinks he might like hers (and his eyes when he says that send heat shooting through her body, and how’s she supposed to say no to that?).
There isn’t any paper, no paints or ink or anything to make them out of, but the walls in his room are white, and she finds a rock that works well enough as a piece of charcoal. She hasn’t drawn in, God, forever (before the Dollhouse—Sierra’s watercolors don’t count. Before the end of the world. Before Nolan and the mental hospital. Before all. Of. This), and at first her fingers move stiffly. But then they remember, and she feels like Michelangelo, coaxing forth something that had been there all along, that simply needed her hands to set it free.
She sketches his face in a corner by the window, because he suggests, “Draw me.” She thinks about softening reality: drawing him in the way she imagines he is when he’s healthy, disguising his haggardness and the pain that lines his face.
But she doesn’t. Because they’ve both fought long and hard to remember who they are, and to hold onto that knowledge, and every memory, no matter how painful or petty, makes them who they are (she wouldn’t give up a single memory if she had the chance—not a single one), and every scar and mark does the same. She embraces the truth as she draws, feeling it flow from her fingers, and she is saying, This is who you are, and there is no shame there.
But she’s not sure he really understands, at least not at first, because when she’s done, he just stares at the likeness.
“God,” he says after a moment. “I look like hell.”
“No,” she says, “you don’t,” and climbs up onto his cot beside him, pushes him down (gently: he’s recovering better than they thought he would, but there’s still the pain), and kisses him (and she thinks her lips against his skin, her hands sliding over the carved musculature of his arms, her body pressed close against his says what he couldn’t understand in her art: that he’s perfect because he’s him, and that she’s perfect because she’s her, and that after all they’ve been through, they’ll never let anyone take that away).
v.
After that, his walls become her canvas. She covers it with sketches of the others there at Safe Haven (Echo and Topher and DeWitt and Paul and November—or Mellie or Madeleine or whoever the hell she was; Priya knew her as November, but it was Mellie who gave her life for Paul—and all the others, the ones she loves and the ones she can’t stand, and, as always, the act of turning them into art lends them grace, and she finds herself caring about them, not in a saccharine or abstract sort of way, but with a concreteness she never could have imagined before). She draws her parents and her grandparents, her brothers and her cousins, the little girl down the street who was her best friend for six months before she moved away again, the balloon seller on the boardwalk in Malibu who always had a ready smile, every person she can remember.
And he starts to understand. To understand why each person, their selves are so important, why they need to be remembered just as they are, flaws and all. Beside his bed, at a perfect angle for him to see it when his head is lying on his pillow, she draws their intertwined hands, hers that create so easily (there’s nothing so hard or twisted that she can’t sculpt truth out of), his that were once taught to destroy (except she knows when she examines it that he was never meant to break or shatter) but that now touch her so gently she almost can’t stand it.
Soon, she thinks, she’ll convince him that he belongs here after all.
--
Textiles
She’s still uneasy around Alpha (she doesn’t know that she entirely trusts him: there are psychos and serial killers bouncing around in that head of his), despite what Echo and Paul say, and whenever he comes around, she finds reasons to stay out of his way (and to keep T away, too, of course). He notices, she knows he does from the way he gives her that quirk of a smile, but she never thought that he would think much of it until the day he shows up with a sewing machine.
T’s growing so fast now, so fast that they don’t even try to keep him in shoes anymore and his trousers always seem to be showing his ankles. She’d complained about it one night as she and Adelle were cooking dinner, and Alpha must have heard her, because two weeks later he presents her with the sewing machine.
She stares at it, confused, because there’s a big panel on the side that doesn’t make any sense until Alpha explains that he’s rigged it so that it’s solar powered (no electricity here). She hugs him impulsively, surprising both him and herself, and after that she doesn’t shoot him dirty looks whenever he “happens” to mention how Tony was doing the last time they ran into each other.
She gathers up as many scraps and old garments as she can, and even though she hasn’t used a sewing machine in years, she figures out pretty quickly how to craft the bits and pieces into stronger wholes.
One day she pulls the battered trunk out from under her bed and takes out the shirt. For the first several months after Tony left, she slept in this shirt, wrapping the flannel around her and her son, hoping that the scent would never, ever fade. He was always a flannel sort of guy, the kind who loved baseball and fishing, who loved his mom and shared beers with his dad. He’s all hard angles now, metal and wires and the tech slowly taking him over (he had scars once, on that face, and now he’s disfiguring it all over again) and swallowing him up until he’s not even human anymore.
But she likes the idea (“likes” in a grim, bitter way) of turning this symbol of Tony’s lost humanity into an outfit for T, and she doesn’t cry when her son pulls on his new shirt and proclaims it a perfect fit (no matter how much she wants to).
i.
She’s lying on a towel in the bikini she hand-dyed herself, shifting sand through her fingers and trying to decide if she wants to join the sandcastle competition tomorrow. Work that doesn’t require a visa and winnings that won’t be taxed are good things, and she won three years ago back home in Perth, but she’s been into textiles lately and doesn’t know if she wants to deal with the irritation and lack of precision that accompanies sand (safe at home, her world small and warm and familiar, sand had provided an outlet. Here, though, in a world that’s much lonelier than she’d thought any ever could be, she craves the tangible limits of looms and patterns).
She’s jarred out of her thoughts by a thud and a shower of said sand as an errant volleyball gives one last bounce a few feet away and rolls to a stop on the edge of her towel. She looks up to see a (cute) guy in board shorts come jogging toward her and she thinks, God, this is such a chick flick cliché. Still, she reaches over and scoops up the ball, tosses it to the guy, and smiles in response to his ‘thank you.’
But he doesn’t say anything else, just looks at her for a long moment (she feels like he’s looking right through her, but not in the “I should put on more clothes around this creep” way), and then heads back to his friends.
(She finds herself oddly disappointed.)
ii.
She’s never much cared for the bonfires on the beach, the annoying music (no one at these things ever has much taste), the smoke that gets in your eyes, the throngs of young people doing and saying things they wouldn’t dare in the sunlight (Priya’s the same person by sunlight or moonlight or any light at all), but Kimbra (her only friend from Australia here in the States) had begged and cajoled and the girl has always needed someone to chaperone and make sure she doesn’t go home with some loser. Besides the way the firelight transforms faces into grotesquely beautiful masks, like they’re carved of wood, appeals to her aesthetic sensibilities, and she likes to sit on a driftwood log, drink a beer, and people-watch. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday night.
When she feels the log shift and someone sitting down next to her, she’s ready to be annoyed. Kimbra’s already come over six times, progressively more drunk each visit, and (too loudly: Priya winced) demanded that Priya loosen up and have some fun. But she’s been missing her brothers lately, and she isn’t in the partying mood. She isn’t in the fend-off-the-advances-of-some-inebriated-idiot mood, either, so she turns to the guy (she can tell it’s a guy by his size, and who else approaches a woman sitting alone in the dark without saying something? Other women know better), ready to tell him off.
But then she looks up, and it’s volleyball guy, and the firelight is doing amazing things to his face, and so she decides not to tell him off (instead, she waits: warily but curiously).
“I’m Tony,” he says. “Another beer?”
iii.
After a few false starts and another beer each, they talk, hitting the basics (he’s military, on leave before he gets shipped out for another tour, family back home in New York; she’s an artist, no work visa, trying to figure things out thousands of miles from home) briefly before stumbling into deeper waters, surprising themselves and each other with how much they reveal (she’s not sure whether or not she’s got the talent or—more important—the drive to take her art very far, and it was her parents’ disappointed eyes as they watched her waste more time on silk-screening and oils that drove her across the ocean; he’s still trying to reconcile the good he knows his comrades are doing with the destruction he knows they’re capable of as well and where he fits in to all of it).
The warm sand at her feet and the dance of firelight and the amber taste of the beer and the crash of the waves not far away are their own kind of intoxicating, but it’s his voice that sweeps her away.
iv.
She bunches the well-worn flannel of his shirt (the night air is cool, and the flannel is warm) in her fists, brushes her cheek along the soft cotton of his t-shirt and slides her tongue along his collarbone. He’s scooped her up in his arms, propped her between himself and her front door (they barely made it into the house; this could’ve just as easily happened on her excuse for a verandah), his hands sliding the crinkled linen of her skirt up her legs.
She’s not this kind of girl, not because of some ingrained sense of morality, but just because she’s not interested in the kind of guys who do the casual sex thing. But that’s the thing: he isn’t the kind of guy to do casual, and if she believed in instant connections, she’d say that this means more to him than just a way to get off, that this isn’t just one last lay before he gets shipped out to the land of hands-only relief for a year or so, that he cares somehow (and that, scariest of all, she does, too).
But she doesn’t want to think about that, because she doesn’t believe in soul mates and never has. She focuses on sensation instead. And that’s easy, because his dog tags are digging into her sternum and she doesn’t care, just like she doesn’t care that his hands are callused, because he smells so good and the sounds he makes (and the ones he coaxes out of her) and he has the kindest eyes she’s ever seen and somehow he knows to nuzzle behind her ear and her toes curl and all she wants is for him to be closeclosecloser (alwaysalwaysalways), even though she knows he’s leaving tomorrow and she’ll never see him again.
When he comes, he half-sobs, half-chokes her name, and she feels a rush of affection that terrifies her.
(Scarier still is that it she feels it again the next morning when he pulls his clothes back on, kisses her, and says, “Goodbye, Priya.”)
v.
She’s up to her elbows in purple dye when someone knocks on the door (purple’s always been her favorite color, and she’s humoring herself). With a sigh, she pulls out the spaghetti-tangled wool, watches the dye drip from the loops and twists, and sets it down to dry (looks like it’ll be lilac instead of eggplant, but it doesn’t really matter).
She runs her hands under cool water, brushes them briskly, but her forearms are still tinged lavender. Whoever’s at the door can just deal with it.
The door sticks, and she has to jiggle the lock just the right way to get the door open (and if, every time she opens the door, she flashes back to that night, two years ago, in the dark with her body trapped—in the best possible way—between his and the door, so what? It was great sex, and that’s all). She’d thought that she’d have saved enough money to move into a nicer place by now, but last-minute flights to the other side of the world cost a lot, and attending her grandmother’s funeral was more important than where she’s living anyway. Still, she can’t help but sigh as she wrenches the door open, trying not to wish that she could live somewhere that doesn’t remind her of Tony every time she opens the goddamn door.
Except that as soon as she opens it, she’s glad she never moved on (because this moment could never have happened if she had).
Because it’s him.
--
Collage
She still can’t believe that she let Echo convince her to come along. This armored tank of Tony’s is gobbling up the road, racing towards LA, and with every mile, Priya’s that much closer to hell. She had sworn never to return to that place and now here she is, sitting beside the machine that was once the father of her son (the only man she’s ever loved), their child sleeping behind them (she hates herself for bringing T even one inch closer to that place), on the way to Pandemonium, the city of demons that were once people.
She can’t stop thinking of that place, of being closed up in that hellhole for years—again—of keeping her son locked away like a bird in a cage. The serenity of the place, its dark woods and sparkling pools (the beds in the ground), are horrifying, and knowing she’ll be close the Chair, the tech that made this possible, is almost enough to make her scream.
She can’t help but think about it, knows it’s worthless to even try, so instead she thinks about the wall in Adelle’s office. She wonders if the collage is still there, the little picture memorial, wonders if anyone has ever seen them and gained a little bit of hope. She wonders if Tony—Victor—still remembers how she kissed him before she placed his picture beside her own. As she climbs back to the little cot T’s sleeping on, eager to join him in sleep and forget for a little while where they’re going, she shoots a glance over at Tony—Victor—in the driver’s seat, but his eyes are locked on the road, his jaw set. She hates herself for the little leap of hope she feels whenever she sees him, the hope that maybe he’ll choose her and T after all ( it’s the dreams that make her hope, the way her soul goes searching for his, night after night, the way she finds him and falls in love again every time she closes her eyes. Torture and hope: the dreams are both, and she doesn’t know how to separate one from the other anymore).
Hope seems almost cruel at this point, but she can’t help but cling to it.
i.
He looks familiar.
ii.
She tilts her head to the side, studies him as he orders a hot dog and a drink (relish and spicy mustard and Dr. Pepper, she notes idly), and tries to place him. The certainty that she knows (knew, will know, shifting tenses moment by moment, never settling on one, and what does that mean?) him niggles up along her spine, sparking into the tips of her fingers, throbbing behind her temples. She closes her eyes, feels the sunshine fall like rain on her face, lets herself drift for a moment, certain that if she lets go, she’ll find it (the answer).
She does. Only there’s no it, only them--lots and lots of them, lots and lots of memories, of snapshots sharper and more colorful than any she ever took on her Polaroid (and what ever happened to it, anyways? She misses the stickers): she sees him in tracksuit pants, in jeans, in dozens of suits, each suited to a different occasion, sees him bare and paint-smeared (or is that blood and war paint?). She sees him smile, sees him knit his brow, sees his eyes flash anger, sees a tear slide down his cheek. She’s a visual artist, but she’s never assembled anything so detailed, so colorful, so emotion-filled (so beautiful).
iii.
When she opens her eyes, she knows. And she wonders why. Why him? Everything else from those seven years she had stolen from her, everything else is all gone. Wiped away completely, not like a chalk board (she hates chalk smell, the sound the duster makes against the slate, the way the dust coats your hands and lungs, but she always sort of liked how if you tilt your head at the right angle in the right light, you can see the remnants of what you tried to erase) but like a wall painted over in a darker color. She remembers the before, she remembers the after she’s been trying to create (it’s harder than she’d thought it would be the day she walked out of that place and into the sunshine), but she doesn’t remember the during. Not even in her dreams.
The woman (she hadn’t wanted to know her name) had assured her in that (meant-to-be-reassuring) crisp accent that everything was completely gone from the during and that every bit of before had been returned to her intact, but Priya had been skeptical. She’d walked out of there positive that she’d blunder into dreams or flashbacks or be on the receiving end of the sucker-punch that is déjà vu, but she was wrong. She hasn’t stumbled across one scrap, one crumb of the during (no ghosts return to haunt her).
Until him.
She thinks she should be scared or excited or vindicated. Instead, she’s curious.
iv.
He looks up from where he’s trying to juggle his food (he got a funnel cake, too, she notes), and his eyes meet hers. He tilts his head. She knows he’s trying to remember. She wonders what his collage looks like, his jumble of memories, if they’re as sharp as hers or if instead of images he hears sounds or smells scents or feels textures or tastes flavors.
She doesn’t even consider that she isn’t as familiar to him as he is to her.
She stands there where the boardwalk meets the sand and dives back into to the images again, waiting for him to approach her (it doesn’t even occur to her that he might not. Of course he will). He walks slowly, his face crinkled in concentration, but the lines fall away when he’s standing in front of her and he smiles.
Hello, he says.
Hello, she replies.
v.
And they begin.
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Book Binding
She’s done this a thousand times before, curled up on a couch before bedtime, T tucked into the curve of her body, and a well-worn book open on their laps. T is a great reader; he rarely stumbles over any words anymore, and he insists on doing the reading now himself and acts like it’s a big favor to allow her to listen (she knows that it’s all show, that he loves their bedtime ritual as much as she does, but she understands how necessary it is to preserve a seven-year-old’s pride). She listens to the familiar sound of his voice, rests her chin on the top of his head and breathes in the scent of his hair. Yes, she’s done this a thousand times before, but never just like this.
Never with Tony on the other side of their son, never with his gaze moving back and forth between T and Priya herself, as though he can’t decide which of them he wants to look at most. Never with his hand stealing up to touch her cheek (and his hand still feels just like she remembers—warm and rough and human—it feels so right that she can ignore, for the moment, those studs in his face, the ones she’s always wanted to rip right out to see if he’s still human enough to bleed. He is, she knows that now, and she knows he’ll remove them soon enough, and she can be patient. They have time now).
Maybe she shouldn’t find this peace now. Safe Haven was home, but even there she felt restless sometimes, and the dreams (the precision of them all, the level of detail, the real-ness of them, like her soul reaching out to his every night, reminding her that she wasn’t really whole unless he was with her, reminding her that she still needed him and always, always would) were always there to remind her of what was missing (of the way she was being torn apart by the love she had for her son and the love she had for Tony, when she tried to make them fit but couldn’t). And now they’ve lost so much (her heart hurts for Echo, for all that her friend has lost, even if she’s so grateful that Echo’s desperate words reminded her that she still has everything she needs, if she’s only willing to forgive and to reach out and take it), now they’re back in the worst hell she’s ever known (a place that used to make her soul shrivel up in the same way the memory of Nolan’s touch did), but she doesn’t care. And she doesn’t need the dreams anymore (hope and torture).
She closes her eyes, listens to T’s voice, feels Tony’s skin against hers, and all the could-haves and might-have-beens fall away, and there’s only this. Only what is.
And they begin again.