Fic: the weaver, circe
the weaver, circe
lost ; charlotte/jacob ; 3,812 words ; PG13
hell is other people. slight spoilers for across the sea.
notes: At this point, you should know that I can pretty much be talked into anything? Especially when falseeeyelashes dangles it in front of me when I’m otherwise delirious and supposed to be working? Haha. This is for you, bb. ILU.
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this dead road leads down
to that dead road and back
the kills - dead road 7
They stand on the beach. The sun is climbing over the cloud, bleeding to the gray and the rest of the rain as it moves into the jungle. Charlotte feels the heat skin along her throat, rushing over her hands and feet, just as she curls them into the sand.
“Mother would’ve liked you,” he says lightly, and she frowns, watching the water rushes towards their feet. Her fingers curl into fists at her sides. They rub against the end of her t-shirt and he laughs. “You’re just like him.”
“Sod off,” she mutters.
Charlotte wakes up. There is dirt against her skin, in her hands and her nails, digging into her throat. Her eyes focus against the green; the trees over her head arch to cover her with their arms and for a moment, the slightest of moment, she remembers her name and being here as a child. They left her here, she thinks.
“You’re new.”
The voice comes from next to her, over her, and she turns with a moan, pain pulling at her neck as she forces herself to sit up. Her arm trembles. Her fingers dig into the dirt, deeper as she squints and sees the man smile.
“Not at all,” she breathes, and understands how to mean it; she’s dead, she knows, and then really knows. There’s no confronting reality. It simply is. She remembers Daniel and the others, she remembers dying and thinking of her sisters. She always remembers her sisters.
“But you’re dead,” she guesses. She tries to breathe again. “Like me,” she says.
“No,” he replies, “not really like you.”
“Then what are you?”
He laughs and she catches him, frowning. He stands first and then bend, over her, taking her hand and helping to her feet. Her knees are shaking and she slumps against him, her fingers curling in his shirt. He laughs again and she closes her eyes, feeling everything around her start to spin.
It starts in her throat, pulsing, churning, and she can her the jungle, every crack in the trees, every shuffle of wind; there’s no movement, no animals otherwise, and her fingers curl tightly in shirt just so she can feel something.
“Then what are you?” she asks again. She is neither frightened nor curious, and the two of them could scare her, should scare her, but she feels the man’s fingers and he begins to tug them through her hair.
He smiles but she never sees. “I’m here,” he says.
They walk deeper into the jungle. He helps her. She tries not to stumble. Everything feels alive. It’s metaphorical and she hates herself for it, thinking and not thinking, tired and not looking. She’s not used to not looking. She still remembers her trade.
“Where are we going?”
She asks once but he doesn’t answer. “Where are we going?” she asks again, but he barely turns too.
He walks. She follows, she follows and stumbles again, she thinks daniel and Plato’s allegories and wonders if the dead is supposed to be musing on classical reading. She’s dead and it’s ironic, and she’s not laughing for whatever reason. She looks down at herself too, for bruises and bones, for broken skin and pieces that might’ve flayed off. She doesn’t remember dying and maybe, maybe that’s better than everything else. She’s starting to forget too.
“This way!” he calls, and she thinks he’s never told her his name, just as he turns and slowly smiles, neither walking fast nor at her pace. His legs are long and there is dirt skewed into the skin of shirt, over his hands and along his neck. It looks like ash, she thinks, stained and slurred into his skin and clothes like it’s supposed to be there.
“I need a break!” she calls back. Then there is no one there
She stops. She blinks and closes her eyes. When she opens her eyes, he’s still gone. She doesn’t feel worry or angry. Maybe not yet, maybe not anymore, and the two seem to be hand in hand as the same thing.
But Charlotte begins to walk again. It’s easier. Her feet fall into step, and she picks up his pace, letting them sink into the leaves as if they weren’t even there.
“You’re dead,” she tells herself. She laughs too. The sound is coarse and dry. “You’re dead,” she says again, louder, even as she walks. It feels heavy.
When she stops again, she sees the cave. There is no fire. She wants to laugh again.
Charlotte is cold.
She builds a fire.
Her hands move carefully over the wood, a few arms of branches that sit against some rocks. It’s easy, she thinks. Her fingers are tight, pulling, and she rolls into the motion of setting things into the ground. The dirt is right. The cave’s not too damp. Remember, she tells herself. You’ve learned so much.
“Where are you?” she asks, out loud, and there’s no answer, she expects no answer. It’s then that she thinks of Daniel again. “You left me,” she muses, “or did I tell you? I was waiting for you too.”
But then it isn’t about Daniel anymore; it’s about mother, father, and her sisters, the others, always the others, and the ones that she can’t remember.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
When the fire starts, it cracks. Charlotte looks to the mouth of the cave.
The loom is there when she wakes up again.
It might be a day later, two nights later, but she’s not really sure because all of this, every piece of this, seems like it’s just in her head.
The island is alive after all.
It’s morning for a while then, only when her eyes are opened as wide as they can go, bright and earnest like they used to be. There’s no mirror but she can guess, guess how everything is supposed to look.
She isn’t hungry but she wanders the length of trees that are close to the cave. She finds fruit and finds a stream, but isn’t thirsty. She stands over it instead, bowing over the water and studying it, trying to see herself, trying to gauge what she may or may not look like. It shouldn’t matter why, she guesses.
She comes back to the cave though, carrying bits of fruit in her shirt, holding the fabric by her nails. She sees him again, standing, watching. When she comes closer, he is standing over the loom.
“Hello,” he calls.
“You,” she says.
“Me,” he answers, and then he grins, shaking his head. He puts down a mold of thread and moves to her, picking out a piece of fruit from her shirt. “These are delicious,” he tells her. “I found these yesterday.”
Her eyes narrow. “You left me,” she says.
He shrugs.
“You didn’t need me.”
He takes a bite out of the fruit and his teeth crack over the skin. She feels her throat begin to tighten as she watches him eat. The roof of her mouth feels coarse and hard and she coughs, if only to turn away.
“Why can I see you then?” she asks, coughing again. And then again, her eyes watering as she tries to focus; the leaves of the trees begin to sway, crack, and she thinks of his mouth and the fruit. She imagines a bit of juice as it slides down his mouth, closing her eyes.
He chuckles. When she turns, he’s gone again.
The loom is broken when she wakes up. The thread sits in the dirt as if it’s never been touched.
“It’s all in your bloody head,” she chides herself, and then breathes, rubbing the back of her neck as she sits up. Her eyes close and then open. “It’s all in your head,” she says again.
She can’t remember how long she’s been sleeping, or falling asleep for that matter, and she pulls herself against the wall. Her knees press into her chest and she thinks about her habits: observe, note, observe again - is this really all that she has?
But she can’t stop watching the loom, or the pieces of wood that still seem to hold it together, even as the legs stay snapped, stranding flat against the dirt. She thinks of bones, and then her own bones, she thinks of her mother and the things that she used to say to her, “we all have bad dreams,” she would say to Charlotte when she asked about her family or, “silly girl, why would you try to go back?” and that would be when her mother wasn’t looking, or not trying to look because somehow, it would all be the same thing.
“It’s in my head,” she says too.
The threads sit too close to the fire. She notices and stands. She doesn’t move though or feels the need to.
She waits for them to burn.
It takes a few days, if they’re really days.
“I’m dead. I’m dead,” she says out loud. It’s like practice.
The caves are empty and he never comes back, leaving her and the loom to the dirt and the wave of rain that washes into the trees and over the rocks that thicken around and into the caves.
She learns not to wait. She’s stopped walking for some time. It’s a test, really, she’s testing if there’s time and if she can see anything else, anyone else; sometimes she thinks she hears others, voices and moans and breathless sighs, like hers, that seem to wait for her at night. It’s that she’s a child or was a child once, of the island, and something here seems to want to remind her.
It’s then that she decides to leave.
When morning comes, or when there is light, she stands, groping the wall behind her. There is a sense of something else, something less and not more, something that she’s losing and she isn’t sure what to think, Her knees crack and ache and she presses a hand into the small of her back, studying the open mouth of the cave.
“This is ridiculous,” she says, and her voice echoes through the cave, over the loom into the trees that wait for her outside. She hasn’t touched it and the thread hasn’t burned. The fire is out.
So she leaves. She considers the beach but walks into the jungle, just as the morning begins to changes and the branches of the trees begin to arch into her back and arms. She passes the stream, but doesn’t stop. She passes a few flowers, but doesn’t smile. It’s an odd way of trying to understand what’s happening, but she can feel it, she can feel it like before when she knew she was dying.
She doesn’t remember dying anymore.
Charlotte stops at a clearing though. There’s a path that turns and goes back into more of the jungle and she looks up, craning her back and wants to laugh.
“I don’t know you,” she says and then hears him, or feels him, one of them is supposed to make sense. She tugs at her t-shirt though and presses her fingers into her jeans. She slides them underneath her shirt, under her jeans and into her skin.
She pinches herself. He laughs.
“You do,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter, and even if you did, it’s not your place to remember. This is what it is.”
Her laugh is sharp. She turns towards him and then sits, her back against a tree and her gaze heavy over his. He smiles at her, coming closer. But then stops as he steps over a root. His feet are bare.
“Not my place?” she asks and stretches her legs out in front her. She thinks of the beach and then thinks maybe she should go. The beach is safer. The beach is easier to predict. She thinks about asking him why.
He shakes his head though. “What are you,” she says too, “my father?”
“Not yours, no.”
He watches her and she doesn’t like, she doesn’t like much of him, she decides. He rocks back on his feet as if he drew on her same conclusion.
“Does that bother you?” he asks, and she thinks of Daniel then, the same, strange ability to pick at what she may or may not be thinking. His eyes seem brighter, kinder, and she doesn’t understand if it’s for her, or the situation, or something completely and utterly over her head.
She tells him. “I’m dead,” she says. Her arms curl around her legs and she hugs her knees. She drops her head over her arms. “I’m dead,” she says again.
“My name is Jacob,” he says.
The barracks stand as a spot off the mountain, tucked into an endless corner of land; she can still make out certain pieces: the arch of the roofs, the bars of the swing set, and the odd tree, whose backs are no long marked. Watching them, she tries and remembers her sisters.
She’s forgetting them too. Like before, she thinks. She knows she shouldn’t think of the houses as barracks either. But she adjusted then, way back then, as a child when homes were supposed to be homes, swings were supposed to be swings, and mad men, lovely, wonderful mad men, were supposed to be nothing but a laugh and young homage to Alice and the rabbit hole.
“You could go down,” Jacob says, standing next to her. He slouches and it bothers her, it bothers her too that he comes and goes as he pleases and she never sees anyone but him even though she knows there are others.
She blinks. Then she sighs. Next to her, Jacob laughs.
“You’re angry.”
She scoffs. “No.”
“No?”
But Charlotte ignores him. She steps forward, into the dirt and over a set of rocks; she forces herself to stand taller, arching her back and twisting so that she can still see him. The sun’s too bright and she blinks again. He looks ready fade.
“It’s never dark here, is it? Or is it my head?” she says too him. She talks quickly. “And I’m forgetting things, lots of things, too many bloody things. Is it because I’m dead and you’re dead and this whole fucking thing is one impossible triumph that walked out of Daniel’s head - ” she stops and stares, wide-eyed. “I can’t see him,” she says. “I can’t see him. He’s not here and I’m here, but you - ”
“You could go down,” he says again.
“You know,” she accuses.
He looks away. She jumps off the rocks, away from seeing the houses. He laughs and steps forward to meet her. He hovers over her and then reaches forward, brushing his fingers along her jaw.
She flinches. “I’m dead,” he says. “Not like you, but I’m dead.”
It’s then that she thinks of the loom, back in the cave and where she saw him the second time. His hand hasn’t moved and she turns her face, catching his wrist with her fingers and then pulling it away from her face.
She brings his hand to between her own, and her fingers begin to walk over his skin. It’s rough and hard, dry and pale. He has hands that don’t belong here, she thinks. But for whatever reason, she can see him at the loom.
She scoffs to break her own spell.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“You stopped for me.”
“I didn’t have a choice. You find me.”
He laughs. She frowns, and thinks he’s making fun of her, but he doesn’t pull his hands away from hers. Her fingers continue to trace over the lines in his skin and she wonders why weaving, why him, and why here. There are stories in her head, old stories she should know and made her decide to do the things that she did.
He doesn’t fit, she thinks. He just doesn’t fit.
“I did. I didn’t have a choice either, you know,” he says, and says it cryptically, as if it were some tireless event that she is supposed to understand.
“Fucking grand, I guess.”
She drops his hand, disappointed. It’s not what she wanted to hear.
“There were others here,” he says slowly. She turns and takes a step back towards the rocks, looking over the houses. She no longer sees yellow anymore. “Like me, “ he murmurs, “not like you … I looked, I looked hard. I know that there’s one that’s supposed to be here, but he can’t. I know he took the company away too. It’s like him, you know.”
Her stomach twists as she listens and there is something very, very wrong about what he says, frighten and cruel. It’s if her knowing makes her closer to him, too close, and she doesn’t understand why.
“I don’t,” she mutters. She turns back to see him.
He grins and she catches it, watching as he flashes his teeth. “You do,” he says. “But you don’t need to know that either.”
“Then why are you here?”
He shakes her head. Maybe, he even mocks her. “Company, I guess.”
It scares her all the same.
He follows her to the beach. She doesn’t expect that.
The beach is just the same, the same that she’s used to seeing, that she knows or thinks she knows; they’ve already been one in the same. She stops then, kicking her boots off and letting them land somewhere on the other side of her. She won’t pick them up again. She doesn’t care.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
She says nothing. She keeps walking, walking down the slow slop of sand. It’s hot and then cool, and when she turns, she catches the shadow of the statue and the high green of the other islands that somehow fade in the distance. She should be surprised, she’s dead, and she had hoped for some kind of confirmation.
“Charlotte,” he calls. “Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to drown myself,” she says and turns, staring hard at him. “Don’t worry. I get it. I’m dead. Can’t kill myself twice. Not even for fucking irony.”
He doesn’t laugh, but she does. Her fingers flex at her sides and she whirl back around closer to the water and then stopping. She stares. There’s too much blue, she thinks. Far too much blue.
She has a few memories left and this is what she sees, not the desert or the dry, coarse pull of winds and heat. She remembers her hands and how they feel when she digs them deep, carefully, on that strange allure, the high of an adventure and of rediscovery. She’s still addicted to vindication.
But she listens, and the breeze picks up, closer and closer as she leans into the colors of the water. She can hear him as he begins to move to her and doesn’t stop; it could surprise her, but she doesn’t let.
“Charlotte.”
“Stop it,” she snarls, and she’s too aware of him suddenly, quickly. “Now that I’ve bloody pointed out that you’re here - you’re following me.”
“It’s just you.”
“You keep telling me that.”
She’s getting angry, angrier, and the realization, and knowing, really knowing that somehow she’s caught in all of this haunts her. There’s no exit plan, no genius, no sense of unity. This is it. It’s just her.
“There isn’t much else to say,” he says.
He touches her shoulder. She flinches and tries to pull away. Her feet can’t move.
“You’re looking for them.”
Her eyes are wide, wet but she isn’t crying. “I’m never going to see them,” she yells. “You’ve made that point. You’ve made that point quite clear that you’re here and I’m here and I can only ever see you.”
“You’re missing the point,” he says gently.
It builds in her. She’s losing and losing fast. He knows and looking at him, really looking at him, she begins to understand.
“Bastard,” she accuses. His mouth turns slightly. “Bastard,” she says again.
She kisses him then. She throws her body into his, pushing him into the sand as he laughs and laughs against her mouth. He laughs like it’s something that he’s wanted, finally, and as if she understands. He laughs into her and she swallows the sound, as if to punish him right back. Her teeth sink into his lip and he turns them, rolling them closer to the water.
Her hair is wet, her head it hurts, and she can feel herself, little by little, lose whatever measure of herself is left. She can remember names, her own and a few others, and she can remember his. But it’s no longer about that anymore.
It’s the sensation of the sand as it sinks into her skin, over and under her shirt when he yanks it over her head. Her fingers catch in his shirt too and he helps her struggle through pulling off. They’re lonely, she’s lonely, and he’s even more so, and he kisses her, really kisses her until she can’t breathe.
“Jacob,” she breathes, and her fingers slide into her hair. His hands are at her hips and she lifts them as he peels the rest of her away. “Jacob,” she breathes again, and then again, and again, until his mouth covers hers once more.
When it becomes this: his nails in her skin, in her hair and the water as it pulls at the both of them, she feels him as he is. His mouth sticky and hot, the thickness of him pressing into her thigh, then sliding inside of her. She feels herself gasp and then arch, and then sand as it licks his hands when they slide over her back.
They are hard and soft and it’s strange, so strange to know herself this way. To want this, to want more, walking into the desperation of connection.
His mouth brushes over her ear. “Say it again,” he tells her.
He isn’t begging. When she arches, she is.
There is no fear, he doesn’t tell her.
She guesses. Little by little, everything gets taken away.
They stay at the beach. Or stays and he decides to hang around, something that she could find funny if she wanted to.
They sit side by side. Charlotte’s jeans are wet, tight over her legs and Jacob studies the sky with a slight frown.
“The memories come and go, names and faces, mother and father, brother and sisters, who died and who lived, why you and not them, him and her, why you tried to be good and do the right thing, it’ll all fade and fade so fast and you’ll do the best you can” he tells her, “but you’ll never forget your choice.”
His eyes are bright and hard and she no longer asks why he stays.
Charlotte remembers the loom.
lost ; charlotte/jacob ; 3,812 words ; PG13
hell is other people. slight spoilers for across the sea.
notes: At this point, you should know that I can pretty much be talked into anything? Especially when falseeeyelashes dangles it in front of me when I’m otherwise delirious and supposed to be working? Haha. This is for you, bb. ILU.
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this dead road leads down
to that dead road and back
the kills - dead road 7
They stand on the beach. The sun is climbing over the cloud, bleeding to the gray and the rest of the rain as it moves into the jungle. Charlotte feels the heat skin along her throat, rushing over her hands and feet, just as she curls them into the sand.
“Mother would’ve liked you,” he says lightly, and she frowns, watching the water rushes towards their feet. Her fingers curl into fists at her sides. They rub against the end of her t-shirt and he laughs. “You’re just like him.”
“Sod off,” she mutters.
Charlotte wakes up. There is dirt against her skin, in her hands and her nails, digging into her throat. Her eyes focus against the green; the trees over her head arch to cover her with their arms and for a moment, the slightest of moment, she remembers her name and being here as a child. They left her here, she thinks.
“You’re new.”
The voice comes from next to her, over her, and she turns with a moan, pain pulling at her neck as she forces herself to sit up. Her arm trembles. Her fingers dig into the dirt, deeper as she squints and sees the man smile.
“Not at all,” she breathes, and understands how to mean it; she’s dead, she knows, and then really knows. There’s no confronting reality. It simply is. She remembers Daniel and the others, she remembers dying and thinking of her sisters. She always remembers her sisters.
“But you’re dead,” she guesses. She tries to breathe again. “Like me,” she says.
“No,” he replies, “not really like you.”
“Then what are you?”
He laughs and she catches him, frowning. He stands first and then bend, over her, taking her hand and helping to her feet. Her knees are shaking and she slumps against him, her fingers curling in his shirt. He laughs again and she closes her eyes, feeling everything around her start to spin.
It starts in her throat, pulsing, churning, and she can her the jungle, every crack in the trees, every shuffle of wind; there’s no movement, no animals otherwise, and her fingers curl tightly in shirt just so she can feel something.
“Then what are you?” she asks again. She is neither frightened nor curious, and the two of them could scare her, should scare her, but she feels the man’s fingers and he begins to tug them through her hair.
He smiles but she never sees. “I’m here,” he says.
They walk deeper into the jungle. He helps her. She tries not to stumble. Everything feels alive. It’s metaphorical and she hates herself for it, thinking and not thinking, tired and not looking. She’s not used to not looking. She still remembers her trade.
“Where are we going?”
She asks once but he doesn’t answer. “Where are we going?” she asks again, but he barely turns too.
He walks. She follows, she follows and stumbles again, she thinks daniel and Plato’s allegories and wonders if the dead is supposed to be musing on classical reading. She’s dead and it’s ironic, and she’s not laughing for whatever reason. She looks down at herself too, for bruises and bones, for broken skin and pieces that might’ve flayed off. She doesn’t remember dying and maybe, maybe that’s better than everything else. She’s starting to forget too.
“This way!” he calls, and she thinks he’s never told her his name, just as he turns and slowly smiles, neither walking fast nor at her pace. His legs are long and there is dirt skewed into the skin of shirt, over his hands and along his neck. It looks like ash, she thinks, stained and slurred into his skin and clothes like it’s supposed to be there.
“I need a break!” she calls back. Then there is no one there
She stops. She blinks and closes her eyes. When she opens her eyes, he’s still gone. She doesn’t feel worry or angry. Maybe not yet, maybe not anymore, and the two seem to be hand in hand as the same thing.
But Charlotte begins to walk again. It’s easier. Her feet fall into step, and she picks up his pace, letting them sink into the leaves as if they weren’t even there.
“You’re dead,” she tells herself. She laughs too. The sound is coarse and dry. “You’re dead,” she says again, louder, even as she walks. It feels heavy.
When she stops again, she sees the cave. There is no fire. She wants to laugh again.
Charlotte is cold.
She builds a fire.
Her hands move carefully over the wood, a few arms of branches that sit against some rocks. It’s easy, she thinks. Her fingers are tight, pulling, and she rolls into the motion of setting things into the ground. The dirt is right. The cave’s not too damp. Remember, she tells herself. You’ve learned so much.
“Where are you?” she asks, out loud, and there’s no answer, she expects no answer. It’s then that she thinks of Daniel again. “You left me,” she muses, “or did I tell you? I was waiting for you too.”
But then it isn’t about Daniel anymore; it’s about mother, father, and her sisters, the others, always the others, and the ones that she can’t remember.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
When the fire starts, it cracks. Charlotte looks to the mouth of the cave.
The loom is there when she wakes up again.
It might be a day later, two nights later, but she’s not really sure because all of this, every piece of this, seems like it’s just in her head.
The island is alive after all.
It’s morning for a while then, only when her eyes are opened as wide as they can go, bright and earnest like they used to be. There’s no mirror but she can guess, guess how everything is supposed to look.
She isn’t hungry but she wanders the length of trees that are close to the cave. She finds fruit and finds a stream, but isn’t thirsty. She stands over it instead, bowing over the water and studying it, trying to see herself, trying to gauge what she may or may not look like. It shouldn’t matter why, she guesses.
She comes back to the cave though, carrying bits of fruit in her shirt, holding the fabric by her nails. She sees him again, standing, watching. When she comes closer, he is standing over the loom.
“Hello,” he calls.
“You,” she says.
“Me,” he answers, and then he grins, shaking his head. He puts down a mold of thread and moves to her, picking out a piece of fruit from her shirt. “These are delicious,” he tells her. “I found these yesterday.”
Her eyes narrow. “You left me,” she says.
He shrugs.
“You didn’t need me.”
He takes a bite out of the fruit and his teeth crack over the skin. She feels her throat begin to tighten as she watches him eat. The roof of her mouth feels coarse and hard and she coughs, if only to turn away.
“Why can I see you then?” she asks, coughing again. And then again, her eyes watering as she tries to focus; the leaves of the trees begin to sway, crack, and she thinks of his mouth and the fruit. She imagines a bit of juice as it slides down his mouth, closing her eyes.
He chuckles. When she turns, he’s gone again.
The loom is broken when she wakes up. The thread sits in the dirt as if it’s never been touched.
“It’s all in your bloody head,” she chides herself, and then breathes, rubbing the back of her neck as she sits up. Her eyes close and then open. “It’s all in your head,” she says again.
She can’t remember how long she’s been sleeping, or falling asleep for that matter, and she pulls herself against the wall. Her knees press into her chest and she thinks about her habits: observe, note, observe again - is this really all that she has?
But she can’t stop watching the loom, or the pieces of wood that still seem to hold it together, even as the legs stay snapped, stranding flat against the dirt. She thinks of bones, and then her own bones, she thinks of her mother and the things that she used to say to her, “we all have bad dreams,” she would say to Charlotte when she asked about her family or, “silly girl, why would you try to go back?” and that would be when her mother wasn’t looking, or not trying to look because somehow, it would all be the same thing.
“It’s in my head,” she says too.
The threads sit too close to the fire. She notices and stands. She doesn’t move though or feels the need to.
She waits for them to burn.
It takes a few days, if they’re really days.
“I’m dead. I’m dead,” she says out loud. It’s like practice.
The caves are empty and he never comes back, leaving her and the loom to the dirt and the wave of rain that washes into the trees and over the rocks that thicken around and into the caves.
She learns not to wait. She’s stopped walking for some time. It’s a test, really, she’s testing if there’s time and if she can see anything else, anyone else; sometimes she thinks she hears others, voices and moans and breathless sighs, like hers, that seem to wait for her at night. It’s that she’s a child or was a child once, of the island, and something here seems to want to remind her.
It’s then that she decides to leave.
When morning comes, or when there is light, she stands, groping the wall behind her. There is a sense of something else, something less and not more, something that she’s losing and she isn’t sure what to think, Her knees crack and ache and she presses a hand into the small of her back, studying the open mouth of the cave.
“This is ridiculous,” she says, and her voice echoes through the cave, over the loom into the trees that wait for her outside. She hasn’t touched it and the thread hasn’t burned. The fire is out.
So she leaves. She considers the beach but walks into the jungle, just as the morning begins to changes and the branches of the trees begin to arch into her back and arms. She passes the stream, but doesn’t stop. She passes a few flowers, but doesn’t smile. It’s an odd way of trying to understand what’s happening, but she can feel it, she can feel it like before when she knew she was dying.
She doesn’t remember dying anymore.
Charlotte stops at a clearing though. There’s a path that turns and goes back into more of the jungle and she looks up, craning her back and wants to laugh.
“I don’t know you,” she says and then hears him, or feels him, one of them is supposed to make sense. She tugs at her t-shirt though and presses her fingers into her jeans. She slides them underneath her shirt, under her jeans and into her skin.
She pinches herself. He laughs.
“You do,” he says, “but it doesn’t matter, and even if you did, it’s not your place to remember. This is what it is.”
Her laugh is sharp. She turns towards him and then sits, her back against a tree and her gaze heavy over his. He smiles at her, coming closer. But then stops as he steps over a root. His feet are bare.
“Not my place?” she asks and stretches her legs out in front her. She thinks of the beach and then thinks maybe she should go. The beach is safer. The beach is easier to predict. She thinks about asking him why.
He shakes his head though. “What are you,” she says too, “my father?”
“Not yours, no.”
He watches her and she doesn’t like, she doesn’t like much of him, she decides. He rocks back on his feet as if he drew on her same conclusion.
“Does that bother you?” he asks, and she thinks of Daniel then, the same, strange ability to pick at what she may or may not be thinking. His eyes seem brighter, kinder, and she doesn’t understand if it’s for her, or the situation, or something completely and utterly over her head.
She tells him. “I’m dead,” she says. Her arms curl around her legs and she hugs her knees. She drops her head over her arms. “I’m dead,” she says again.
“My name is Jacob,” he says.
The barracks stand as a spot off the mountain, tucked into an endless corner of land; she can still make out certain pieces: the arch of the roofs, the bars of the swing set, and the odd tree, whose backs are no long marked. Watching them, she tries and remembers her sisters.
She’s forgetting them too. Like before, she thinks. She knows she shouldn’t think of the houses as barracks either. But she adjusted then, way back then, as a child when homes were supposed to be homes, swings were supposed to be swings, and mad men, lovely, wonderful mad men, were supposed to be nothing but a laugh and young homage to Alice and the rabbit hole.
“You could go down,” Jacob says, standing next to her. He slouches and it bothers her, it bothers her too that he comes and goes as he pleases and she never sees anyone but him even though she knows there are others.
She blinks. Then she sighs. Next to her, Jacob laughs.
“You’re angry.”
She scoffs. “No.”
“No?”
But Charlotte ignores him. She steps forward, into the dirt and over a set of rocks; she forces herself to stand taller, arching her back and twisting so that she can still see him. The sun’s too bright and she blinks again. He looks ready fade.
“It’s never dark here, is it? Or is it my head?” she says too him. She talks quickly. “And I’m forgetting things, lots of things, too many bloody things. Is it because I’m dead and you’re dead and this whole fucking thing is one impossible triumph that walked out of Daniel’s head - ” she stops and stares, wide-eyed. “I can’t see him,” she says. “I can’t see him. He’s not here and I’m here, but you - ”
“You could go down,” he says again.
“You know,” she accuses.
He looks away. She jumps off the rocks, away from seeing the houses. He laughs and steps forward to meet her. He hovers over her and then reaches forward, brushing his fingers along her jaw.
She flinches. “I’m dead,” he says. “Not like you, but I’m dead.”
It’s then that she thinks of the loom, back in the cave and where she saw him the second time. His hand hasn’t moved and she turns her face, catching his wrist with her fingers and then pulling it away from her face.
She brings his hand to between her own, and her fingers begin to walk over his skin. It’s rough and hard, dry and pale. He has hands that don’t belong here, she thinks. But for whatever reason, she can see him at the loom.
She scoffs to break her own spell.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“You stopped for me.”
“I didn’t have a choice. You find me.”
He laughs. She frowns, and thinks he’s making fun of her, but he doesn’t pull his hands away from hers. Her fingers continue to trace over the lines in his skin and she wonders why weaving, why him, and why here. There are stories in her head, old stories she should know and made her decide to do the things that she did.
He doesn’t fit, she thinks. He just doesn’t fit.
“I did. I didn’t have a choice either, you know,” he says, and says it cryptically, as if it were some tireless event that she is supposed to understand.
“Fucking grand, I guess.”
She drops his hand, disappointed. It’s not what she wanted to hear.
“There were others here,” he says slowly. She turns and takes a step back towards the rocks, looking over the houses. She no longer sees yellow anymore. “Like me, “ he murmurs, “not like you … I looked, I looked hard. I know that there’s one that’s supposed to be here, but he can’t. I know he took the company away too. It’s like him, you know.”
Her stomach twists as she listens and there is something very, very wrong about what he says, frighten and cruel. It’s if her knowing makes her closer to him, too close, and she doesn’t understand why.
“I don’t,” she mutters. She turns back to see him.
He grins and she catches it, watching as he flashes his teeth. “You do,” he says. “But you don’t need to know that either.”
“Then why are you here?”
He shakes her head. Maybe, he even mocks her. “Company, I guess.”
It scares her all the same.
He follows her to the beach. She doesn’t expect that.
The beach is just the same, the same that she’s used to seeing, that she knows or thinks she knows; they’ve already been one in the same. She stops then, kicking her boots off and letting them land somewhere on the other side of her. She won’t pick them up again. She doesn’t care.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
She says nothing. She keeps walking, walking down the slow slop of sand. It’s hot and then cool, and when she turns, she catches the shadow of the statue and the high green of the other islands that somehow fade in the distance. She should be surprised, she’s dead, and she had hoped for some kind of confirmation.
“Charlotte,” he calls. “Where are you going?”
“I’m not going to drown myself,” she says and turns, staring hard at him. “Don’t worry. I get it. I’m dead. Can’t kill myself twice. Not even for fucking irony.”
He doesn’t laugh, but she does. Her fingers flex at her sides and she whirl back around closer to the water and then stopping. She stares. There’s too much blue, she thinks. Far too much blue.
She has a few memories left and this is what she sees, not the desert or the dry, coarse pull of winds and heat. She remembers her hands and how they feel when she digs them deep, carefully, on that strange allure, the high of an adventure and of rediscovery. She’s still addicted to vindication.
But she listens, and the breeze picks up, closer and closer as she leans into the colors of the water. She can hear him as he begins to move to her and doesn’t stop; it could surprise her, but she doesn’t let.
“Charlotte.”
“Stop it,” she snarls, and she’s too aware of him suddenly, quickly. “Now that I’ve bloody pointed out that you’re here - you’re following me.”
“It’s just you.”
“You keep telling me that.”
She’s getting angry, angrier, and the realization, and knowing, really knowing that somehow she’s caught in all of this haunts her. There’s no exit plan, no genius, no sense of unity. This is it. It’s just her.
“There isn’t much else to say,” he says.
He touches her shoulder. She flinches and tries to pull away. Her feet can’t move.
“You’re looking for them.”
Her eyes are wide, wet but she isn’t crying. “I’m never going to see them,” she yells. “You’ve made that point. You’ve made that point quite clear that you’re here and I’m here and I can only ever see you.”
“You’re missing the point,” he says gently.
It builds in her. She’s losing and losing fast. He knows and looking at him, really looking at him, she begins to understand.
“Bastard,” she accuses. His mouth turns slightly. “Bastard,” she says again.
She kisses him then. She throws her body into his, pushing him into the sand as he laughs and laughs against her mouth. He laughs like it’s something that he’s wanted, finally, and as if she understands. He laughs into her and she swallows the sound, as if to punish him right back. Her teeth sink into his lip and he turns them, rolling them closer to the water.
Her hair is wet, her head it hurts, and she can feel herself, little by little, lose whatever measure of herself is left. She can remember names, her own and a few others, and she can remember his. But it’s no longer about that anymore.
It’s the sensation of the sand as it sinks into her skin, over and under her shirt when he yanks it over her head. Her fingers catch in his shirt too and he helps her struggle through pulling off. They’re lonely, she’s lonely, and he’s even more so, and he kisses her, really kisses her until she can’t breathe.
“Jacob,” she breathes, and her fingers slide into her hair. His hands are at her hips and she lifts them as he peels the rest of her away. “Jacob,” she breathes again, and then again, and again, until his mouth covers hers once more.
When it becomes this: his nails in her skin, in her hair and the water as it pulls at the both of them, she feels him as he is. His mouth sticky and hot, the thickness of him pressing into her thigh, then sliding inside of her. She feels herself gasp and then arch, and then sand as it licks his hands when they slide over her back.
They are hard and soft and it’s strange, so strange to know herself this way. To want this, to want more, walking into the desperation of connection.
His mouth brushes over her ear. “Say it again,” he tells her.
He isn’t begging. When she arches, she is.
There is no fear, he doesn’t tell her.
She guesses. Little by little, everything gets taken away.
They stay at the beach. Or stays and he decides to hang around, something that she could find funny if she wanted to.
They sit side by side. Charlotte’s jeans are wet, tight over her legs and Jacob studies the sky with a slight frown.
“The memories come and go, names and faces, mother and father, brother and sisters, who died and who lived, why you and not them, him and her, why you tried to be good and do the right thing, it’ll all fade and fade so fast and you’ll do the best you can” he tells her, “but you’ll never forget your choice.”
His eyes are bright and hard and she no longer asks why he stays.
Charlotte remembers the loom.