fanfiction: maybe there's a light that's always on (dollhouse, pg)
For Jaela, for Yuletide. (Fun fact: I know Jaela through Twitter, and cackled evilly when I found her prompts on the Yuletide Madness list.)
Maybe There's a Light That's Always On
Somewhere, beneath the gauze of layers wrapped round and round her soul, she has a steady centre. She doesn't always know what it is, what it means, only that no matter who she is, it thrums inside of her like a heartbeat.
Today she is a shy girl, navigating the strangeness of her new boyfriend's family reunion, not quite sure she belongs here. "It's okay, Katya," Jack tells her. "I don't know if I do, either." He looks at her a minute, considering. "That's why you're here."
She doesn't feel very capable of keeping someone else steady. She keeps retreating to corners of the room. Jack begins to look frustrated, grim, and she tries to remember how exactly a boy she's been dating for a week and a half convinced her to attend a family reunion with him and why she'd agreed to go and when the answer eludes her she feels a little dizzy. Too much wine, she decides, and puts her glass down.
She sits and is silent. Before long it comes to her: her centre. She is herself, and somehow she is loved. She doesn't think about why. She doesn't think about anything. She only knows - tonight she will go home and she will be okay, and love will wait for her, keeping her safe, warm: keeping her herself.
She's saving the world as only she can, and she likes it. She leaves her hair down even though it isn't strictly practical, and enjoys every thrill of the mission. Also her leather pants, which are, in fact, pretty fantastic, and she knows people are watching her, and she can almost taste their desire. Desire's a good weapon. It keeps people's senses dim and their minds distracted and makes her job a little more fun and satisfying.
And everything's over, she's got the money, and she feels fierce and bright with accomplishment (though, she thinks, the leather pants could still have something to do with it). And she thinks, suddenly: okay, I'm going home. I love you.: and she feels a brief peace that has nothing to do with the slowing adrenaline of a job over and done with. Funny, she thinks, slinging her jacket over her shoulder.
Charlotte Li's never really believed in love at first sight, so she's not exactly sure why she suddenly feels both steady and gloriously adrift when the new physicist smiles at her. Fifteen minutes later they are somehow kissing in a broom closet and beneath her hands the planes of his face are devastatingly familiar-
She is a vessel, waiting for her self to enter in, but sometimes, lying in the pod at night, she is afraid that her self, wherever it has gone, is fractured and managed, that it will not fit back into its old place, that it may not fit back at all. She presses her hands against the clouded glass, and thinks: I am alone.
She wakes from her troubled sleep - she does not dream, exactly, because she has no past or present or future to dream about, but worlds flow hazily through back rooms of her mind, worlds she cannot quite see or catch at, and these days they always seem to be windy and dark and cold - because the glass is sliding back away from her, and she blinks at the darkness, straying out of her un-dreams, suddenly frightened.
He slips down into the pod and smiles at her, that smile that is like being home. "Hello Sierra," he says softly. He touches her hand. "You have not been sleeping well. I hear you turning. You are unhappy?"
"I am not unhappy now," she tells him.
Beneath the layers that surround her soul, her self sparks: she loves and she is loved. No matter who she is.