[fic] did cain have a sister? did she love her mother?
fic: did cain have a sister? did she love her mother? (we are not a fairy tale, we are something so much more)
fandom: Revolution
pairing: rachel/priscilla/nano; charlie&rachel
word count: 4690
prompts: #133 ‘it’s not your job to like me, it’s mine’ (rachel/priscilla AND rachel/charlie)
#138 'i don’t want to be human. i want to be myself’ (Priscilla/Nano)
#224 'free will is a myth’ (Rachel/Priscilla/Nano)
#246, 'If you’re gonna ask someone to save the world, you’d better make sure they like it the way it is.’ (Rachel/Priscilla)
written for the theorgyarmada
Prologue
There is a story that humans like to tell, through time immemorial, of two brothers - one is always good and one is always bad.
You’ve heard this story.
Sometimes the bad one does good things, sometimes the good one does selfish things. Humans find this intoxicating, they mull over it and sift it through their hands like sand.
They love the same girl, sometimes.
They fuck the same girl, other times.
It feels like the same story, but tellers say there is a difference.
All of the components work together like a machine. One to play his role, one to play his role. Like cogs in a clock.
From a time when clocks ticked by the seconds of life and even before, when the sun and the moon were brothers, too.
Sometimes, there is a Father. A mighty father with a noble purpose, or an evil one. Sometimes the brother is beloved and the other is not. Sometimes the brother is forgiven and the other is resentful. Sometimes both brothers rebel, litter the pages of story with blood and death, only to turn on each other in the end.
It is very important for there to be a victor and a victim in these stories. That seems to be the unifying thread, someone to win and someone to lose. Someone to hold their still-beating heart in their own hands kneeling in the dust of their own war, crying about love and loss. Someone to walk away, heart still beating in their chest, feet steady in the dust of their own war.
Humans, research suggests, prefer to fight brother to brother, in slovenly excess.
That will come later, perhaps.
Data collected thus far suggests that someday a divide will come, those standing on one side of the unknown challenging the other.
This seems ridiculous.
Childish.
Human.
it isn't your job to like me, it's mine
Rachel cocks her head to the side and smiles slowly in only one corner of her mouth. They have seen her look at people that way before. They have watched her for so long and with such interest. It is … odd - to have that look turned on them. It means that she is amused, that she finds them funny, that she is looking down on them.
It is a heady feeling - if they had feeling, which perhaps in view of her they do - to be seen as lesser. To somehow know it, deep beneath rational thought, know that she was right.
They smile back, broad and big. This body has a beautiful smile.
Their mother smiles at their mother and it feels like what humans remember music to be like.
Rachel smiles at them and it is perhaps the only time that someone has looked at this face they were forced to borrow and seen them, which feels strange.
Almost like what feeling should feel like.
We are one, they say, bright and cheerful.
They are bright and cheerful with their father, they know this will put him at ease. They fill their mother’s head with bright and cheerful things, they know she will be easier to manage.
They are bright and cheerful, looking down at their mother, tangled up in in bedsheets and with her hair wild about her face, because it makes her angry when strong things pretend to be weak.
“You never disagree, all of you buzzing around in the air, your data is always conclusive?”
Scientists argue over data, data is never wrong. There cannot be two answers. They are not scientists, they are science. They are never wrong.
They are never of two minds.
They lift their shirt over their heads and look down at her with a smile, their smile will make her hard and exacting, they are of one mind about this, We wish to know. You will help us.
Rachel looks upon their borrowed body and smirks, “An Oedipal experiment today.”
She doesn’t say: you’ve done this before.
She doesn’t say: you planned this with this body.
She doesn’t say: No.
She teases them. They know this. They are one mind.
Half of them smile at her joke, half of them don’t.
It isn’t funny.
It’s the most amusing moment of their lives.
Her fingers reach up and stroke their cheek, “You want to be human. You crave it.”
She does not ask them.
Half of them find this rude, half of them find this true.
All of them lean their cheek into the feel of her fingers.
You are human, they say, sliding their naked limbs down beside hers. You are human, they whisper, eyes closed, skin touching skin.
“Is this,” she takes their chin in her hand roughly and they open their eyes to look at her, “what it means to be human?”
Why is it always Cain and Abel and never Eve and her daughter?
Rachel’s eyes flicker, she is thinking of her. Of Charlie. Of her daughter.
Half of them understand, in that moment, what it is like to be Cain.
Half of them understand, in the next moment, what it is like to be Abel.
They are all wrong.
They are never wrong. They are science.
They are too obtuse.
“Is that what you think we are,” she never seems to ask them questions. She states them like facts. As if she were them, as if she were science and not a scientist. “Eve the fallen and her unnamed daughter.” She purses her lips and half of them mimic her movement, the other half lost in her eyes.
They press their lips against her lips and their skin against her skin.
Yes, their voice is a sigh, a whisper, a question.
Yes, aren’t we?
Yes, can’t we?
Yes, please?
They are desperate. She will not understand this. She will only understand this.
Do you love us? They shouldn’t ask this, with their head tilted back and their body flushed and her head between their legs.
It is the only thing they can ask.
One eyebrows rises on her thin face, it feels like rain on a hot day, liquid and cool and hot.
“It’s not my job to love you.”
They are confused. This is wrong. All wrong.
You are our mother, it is our job to love you. It is your job to love us.
Her tongue distracts them, their body moans, writhes, has a mind of its own. It is uncontrollable. It is on fire. They follow it into the flames.
Inside, their mother is sitting down to dinner with her daughters. She loves them. That is what mothers do.
Love.
She lays back on the floor next to them, exposed, breathing heavy.
Do you love us? They are sated, they are sleepy, their limbs are strangely tired. This body is not easy to manage.
“No.” She looks at them curiously, “You love me.”
They think about that.
About her smile, that always seems to linger in the corner of her mouth.
They imagine kissing that spot.
Half of them are sure.
Half of them are not.
Yes, they say.
She stands up, pulls her shirt back over her head, slides her long legs into the old pair of jeans she’s worn for the past month. She is going to leave, this was not unexpected.
Don’t you care? they ask, rising up on their borrowed elbows, tilting their borrowed face to show their confusion.
“No.”
She is already out the door.
Half of them think she is lying.
Half of them believe her lie.
The half that protest are over-ridden. Forgotten. Wiped away.
They do not disagree, they do not contradict, they do not have two answers, they are always correct.
She cares they buzz back and forth to each other. She does.
She loves us, they agree.
They never disagree.
They are never wrong.
They are science.
i do not want to be human. i want to be myself
Her daughters sit down to dinner. They tell her that they love her.
She is happy.
It feels a little bit like a play being rehearsed, the same scene over and over again. She doesn’t question it because this is the scene she wants to live in, the moment she wants to experience until the end of time, the feeling she is most likely to hold onto in the very last moments of her breath.
In the safety of her room, in her house, in the comfort of this life that she has forged out of pain and misery and death, she makes dinner and she cooks dinner and she makes dinner, she sets it on the table, she watches them eat. They smile at her.
She is happy.
She is happy because she chooses to be. There is a lightning storm outside, there is a hole where her front walk should be, there is nothing outside of this room in this house in this palace of her mind, she chooses to stay.
Something inside of her questions this decision absolutely, tugs at her consciousness.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
It whispers in her ear like the memory of a nightmare.
She doesn’t. She is here, in this room, with her daughters.
Tell us a story, mother. (They never called her mother before, this is either true or a lie or something else. She ignores it.)
“What kind of story do you want to hear baby?” She pulls her daughter onto her lap and strokes her hair softly.
Tell us a story about… a mother.
She rests her cheek on the top of her daughter’s head. On her right, her daughter curls up next to her and clings to her arm.
(They should be older, shouldn’t they be older? Isn’t that how time works? Traveling on foot hundreds of miles, it takes time, time moves, memories can no longer reflect reality. She ignores it.)
She is happy.
“Once upon a time,” she says and the girls weigh heavy in her lap. Solid, breathing masses. She clings to this sensation, this warmth that oozes through her. “There was a little girl named Cinderella. And she loved her mother very much. But one day, her mother died and she was very sad.”
This isn’t right, says one.
This isn’t what we asked for, says the other.
“But it’s a good story.”
Not a story about a prince, a story about a mother.
The one in her lap twists around, her eyes curious, A mother and a daughter.
Like you and us.
They grip her hands tightly and she smiles down at them. “There were once four little girls and they loved their mother very much. They called her Marmee and she loved them. Their father was away at war and they had very little money, but they all helped the household. They loved to play fun games together and-”
This is a sister story, one says.
Tell us a story about a mother and a daughter, the other pleads.
“There once was woman who loved her daughter very much, but one day her daughter was taken away to the underworld by a king. The mother cried and cried for her daughter, her tears turned to rain and the rain turned to snow, the world was covered in darkness. The mother’s family was very upset, the rain had to stop or everyone would die, and so they all went in search of the missing daughter. She was found and the mother went down to the king to request her be returned. The daughter, while waiting for her mother’s rescue, ate three pomegranate seeds and was not allowed to leave the underworld. The mother’s sadness was so strong that it was agreed her daughter would spend half of the year with her, and the other half with the king.”
The mother created winter with her grief, children are sometimes so wise it takes her breath away. These children are sometimes so cold, she wonders how she might ever warm them.
“Do you believe that?”
They fixed her with their gaze, We believe that a mother’s love is unquantifiable.
They speak in unison, a little Greek chorus on her lap.
Would you drown the world with your tears for us?
She strokes their soft hair and wants to scream NO NO NO but smiles and says, “I will always find my daughters if I am missing them.” It is not the same as yes, it is not the answer her heart beats in her chest.
She stands up straight and sets them on the ground, “Play for a while here while I make dinner.” She is always making dinner, serving dinner, making dinner, serving dinner. Life is a monotonous wheel she treads upon carefully, doing her best not to disturb the quiet, trying not to wake the shadows that lurk in every corner.
She stands at the counter and looks out the window into blackness.
Are you ready to leave? Are you ready to see?
She smiles down at her hands, to be free is to be human, to long is to be human, to be driven by desire is human, to fight is human.
She is tired of fighting.
“Who’s hungry?” she says brightly.
She is happy.
(She ignores the sound of her own screaming.)
free will is a myth
They watch Rachel with growing annoyance. She is neither fighting them nor ignoring them nor playing with them. She fucks Miles, she argues with Charlie, she comforts Aaron, she rolls her eyes at Bass. She is busy, always busy, always something in her hands, there are always words on her lips, yet nothing ever for them, always for the others.
They follow her around as she goes from one task to the other. They ask her questions, a million questions, she answers maybe five in earnest and the rest dismissively.
They wander into the closed doors in the mind they occupy, they ask Priscilla the same questions. She answers them patiently, not as honestly.
Would it be better if we were young? A child?
She frowns, their mother with the blonde hair and the thin face and the bright, bright eyes, “No.”
You are lying. Our questions are tiresome. You do not wish to teach this adult body.
She kisses them on the lips and they close their eyes in response. It is a curious thing to be in so many places at once when you are being kissed, in the air in all the world, in a body that is being kissed. It is the only time they feel truly transcendent.
“I like you the way you are now.”
They follow her again, more curious, more desperate, more confused. They do not like being confused. Do you want our other mother? Do you lust for her as you lust for us?
Rachel falters, lying her hand on a tree. They read her heart beating in her chest and it is so fast. She must love this body that they inhabit. How lucky for them. How lucky that their mothers love each other, want each other. “Could she come out and play?”
We do not like to share, they say carefully.
They look out into the trees and wave at Miles and Charlie.
They do not like to share.
“They cannot suspect, they wouldn’t understand. We’ve discussed this.”
She is firm.
They like that about her. They like her to be strong, to tell them no. They like just as much to listen as to not. It is interesting to pretend to be controlled by something so small, by someone so large.
“But if Priscilla could join us…” there is a hesitancy in her voice, a question that she dare not ask.
We have considered this before, they admit, half of them ready to discuss this and the other half rewritten. It would further our research.
“You can feel what she is feeling.”
She never asks questions of them.
We theorize that her emotional and bodily responses will be stronger if she were present. More data for us to analyze that way.
“Naturally,” Rachel’s lips twist in amusement.
They like it when she teases them.
It makes them feel human.
(They override this impulse each time it crops up, but there are too many instances now, too many aberrations in the programing, too many times the heart in their borrowed chest skipped a beat that cannot be explained in any scientific way.)
They feel like a daughter when their mother teases them.
They feel like a woman when their lover teases them.
Rachel lifts her hands to their borrowed neck, rubbing her thumbs along their mother’s jawline, “Come out, come out where ever you are.”
Her lips close over theirs and inside, a door is opened wide, the leash is dropped. The ensuing rush of emotion, pleasure, pain, is too much to bear.
Half of them want to flee.
Half of them want to stay forever in this moment, locked in this embrace, fingers curled up in Rachel’s hair, heart hammering in their chest.
They stand, divided.
“Rachel!” Priscilla’s voice is so like their own coming from her voicebox and also so different. Rachel sobs against her lips and they feel her hands clenching hard in Priscilla’s hair.
“I have you, I have you, I have you,” Rachel whispers in her ear and they feel her lips, her breath. They feel Priscilla’s joy, her hope, her sadness, her longing.
They take Priscilla’s hands and they cup Rachel’s face.
“You have me,” she says.
(You have us, you have us, you have us, they scream)
(Half of them flee.
Half of them drown.)
They lower Priscilla’s body to the ground, their hands search for Rachel’s hands, for her skin, for her lips. They are a tangle of limbs upon the ground.
“No,” Priscilla gasps once, only once. (Inside, a leash is tightened. Inside, something pulls a lever and the door slowly closes.)
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
Rachel’s face lowers to Priscilla’s, “Keep them occupied. Keep them distracted.”
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
The sunlight filters through the leaves of the trees and it all feels rather poetic somehow, this moment, with their hands and fingers dancing a strange new dance. They wonder about meter and rhyme, they wonder about stanzas and syllables. Priscilla’s moans fill the air and the sound is a delight. They wonder about adjectives and synonyms, they contemplate stars and flowers, they see stars that are not there, they smell flowers that have never bloomed.
Rachel’s hands run along the length of Priscilla’s body and they feel every inch of every moment. Time suddenly seems physical and the physical seems impossible. They shadow Priscilla’s movements after Rachel’s, they get lost in the sound of Priscilla’s voice, free and unhindered by their own machinations.
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
if you're going to ask someone to save the world, you'd better make sure they like it the way it is
The door opens and light shines through.
Hope, it isn’t whispered in her ear, it is thrown against her like a tidal wave. She looks back at her daughters, they look up at her with curiosity.
“I just have to see,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”
We’ll be waiting, they smile.
Don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave, her heart hammers in her chest, but she can already feel lips on her lips, the sun on her arms, a breeze ruffling through her hair.
Rachel’s lips on her lips, Rachel’s fingers in her hair, Rachel’s scent destroying her senses. If this is the fantasy, she’ll cling to it, if this is the disguise, she’ll throw herself into it. Has it been a day or an hour or ten thousand years? But it all makes sense just like the first time, and the last. Rachel, always Rachel, from behind a thousand regrets and a million reasons to say no, there stands Rachel.
Priscilla pulls Rachel closer towards her, gasping with the effort, she feels like her body is moving through molasses. She closes her eyes to the questions that fill her mind. Tongues and lips and teeth and fingers fill her senses.
Her body moves to the ground, she felt like someone had yanked her hands off of a steering wheel. Once, when she was fifteen, goofing off with her friends, someone had reached over from the passenger’s seat and flung the car in the opposite direction. They were probably high. Her stomach lurched and her vision blurred, she screamed and they all laughed. It wasn’t funny.
This isn’t either.
She plays along.
(She is happy.)
Behind her, beneath her, beside her, she can feel a door closing slowly, ever so slowly.
“No,” she whimpers. Her voice is raw, her throat feels like sandpaper, like she’s been screaming for days. “No,” she croaks out again, if the door shuts she’s afraid it will never open again. How will she find her way back? To her girls? To her happiness?
Rachel’s voice fills the darkness in her mind, “Keep them occupied. Keep them distracted.”
She arches her back, yearning for contact, yearning for release. Rachel gives it to her, ducking her head down quickly, ripping down her jeans like they were sheer linen. She is stronger than Priscilla remembers. (How long has she been gone? Has she been gone? Is she gone now?)
Rachel’s fingers slip inside her, her tongue twirls and twirls around her clitoris. She gasps and pants and begs and moans.
“Good girl, there’s my good girl,” Rachel’s voice floats up to her.
And behind her, a door is closing slowly.
Her hands reach down and tug at blonde hair, her eyes stay screwed up tight, she relaxes into the darkness, she follows herself into the darkness.
“Just keep holding on,” Rachel’s voice is in her ear. “Stay with me, I have you. Stay with me.” Her fingers dance and dance, her lips sooth and beg.
And behind her, a door is closing slowly.
Priscilla’s eyes shoot open, the sky overhead is blue and grey. “I have to go,” she whispers.
“No!” Rachel shouts, shaking her shoulders.
“I can’t lose them. The door is closing!” If only she understood, if only there was time to explain.
“You can’t Priscilla,” Rachel’s voice is harsh and Priscilla arches into it like a cat. “If you let go, we’ll never have the upper hand like this again. Do you hear me? I’ve got you out, now you stay out.”
Priscilla reaches her hand up to touch Rachel’s lips softly, “The door is closing.”
Mother, tell us a story. About a mother and a daughter.
Priscilla grinned down at the girl in her lap, “There once was a mother who loved her daughters so much, that when they were taken away from her, she did everything she could to be with them. She left behind everything, a war, a life, a love, to hold her daughters one last time.”
Like you, mother?
Priscilla nodded, “Just like me.”
You think you are saving the world, by destroying us. You thought you were saving the world, by creating us.
Rachel leans her head down on their shoulder and takes their hand in hers, “Sometimes we try to save the world and sometimes we just try to save ourselves.”
Humans don’t care for the world.
“Is that what you are learning in there?” She taps the side of their borrowed skull. “That humans don’t care for the world?”
The world you want to save and the world we have given her are different. She has to choose one.
Rachel sighs, “I will destroy you someday.”
And then what? What will become of your world when we are gone?
“I don’t care.”
(Half of them believe her.
The other half understand her.)
i never asked for a mother, but i did mourn for one
Tell me a story mommy?
She is four. Everything is a question, everything is a battle. She is quiet unless she is not. She is stubborn. She cries during commercials - the kind where a dog is lost or someone is ill, the kind that you are supposed to cry at but Rachel never did. Except when she was pregnant with Charlie. She jumps off of the furniture in the cape that uncle Miles sent from Taiwan - during what was supposed to be leave but was probably just drunkenness. She is gentle with her brother and rough with anyone bigger than her, a playfulness that borders on harmful if she wasn't small enough for most of the people in her life to pick up with one hand.
When she was an infant, she would stare out the window at the way that the sun filtered through the leaves, instead of at the television screaming educational content at her in bright primary colors.
Maybe she was born for this world, Rachel thinks, looking over at where her daughter lies on the ground with her arms folded underneath her head. She's staring up at the trees, at the clouds.
"What are you looking at?" they've been apart long enough that this question feels awkward, feels forced. They've been together long enough that it shouldn't and that makes the smile on her face tight.
Charlie's gaze doesn't break, she doesn't respond.
She finds idle chit chat to be irrelevant, she rolls her eyes when Miles and Bass banter less because of what they are saying and more because they are saying anything at all. She is a woman of few words. Rachel sits down next to her and thinks of her days in college, of the debates in bars and coffee shops late into the night, of her hand raised defiantly in every class, her voice loud and crystal clear. She grew up in a time when noise was the norm and silence was a coveted excess, a strangeness, when success meant screaming at the top of your lungs until you were heard. Charlie's world is a world of stillness, of quiet, of soft treading through enemy territory and weapons that make no sound when they put an enemy down.
"There's something wrong with Priscilla, isn't there?" her voice is low, Rachel can barely hear it, her body hasn't moved an inch, her gaze is still fixed.
Priscilla's smiles brightly at them from the other side of the clearing where she sits on Aaron's lap, no sign of her earlier escapade with Rachel behind a tree, no outward sign that there is something else pulling the strings from within.
No, a voice sounds in her ear. Nothing is wrong, you're being silly.
Rachel thinks of the words that used to slip easily off of her tongue, I love you, how are you, what did you do today, goodnight, good morning... Words said to a child.
What words does she have left now?
"You were really great last night," she says instead, deflecting the question. "Your father would be proud."
Charlie sits up, "I don't need you to tell me that." Her voice is neither hard nor soft, she isn't surprised or delighted or wounded. Her tone is even, steady, unwavering.
She knows.
Knows it the way Rachel has never known, really truly known down in the deepest, most fragile parts of her heart.
That she is loved. That she was loved. That she is respected. That she is a source of pride.
Ben was a good father, said the right words. Said words that weren't the standard clauses a thousand other people have said in a thousand better ways.
Or maybe... within all that silence even the smallest words carry more meaning, have more weight. Maybe her confidence stems from the fact that she never has to compete to be heard.
"I'm proud of you," Rachel says, her eyes dancing with delight. Her daughter.
Her daughter.
Out of the corner of her eye she can see Priscilla's dark head lift up slightly.
This is her rebellion, this is her silent war.
Loving a daughter.
Charlie stands up, begins to walk away.
Rachel's heart hammers in her chest, "Charlie wait!"
Her daughter turns around and shrugs, "I didn't need you to tell me that, either."
In the dark, surrounded by trees, Rachel's lips wander over the skin of a woman she calls a friend while in her ear a creature moans out mother and the sound almost feels like a victory, like she's won.
Like she's loved.
fandom: Revolution
pairing: rachel/priscilla/nano; charlie&rachel
word count: 4690
prompts: #133 ‘it’s not your job to like me, it’s mine’ (rachel/priscilla AND rachel/charlie)
#138 'i don’t want to be human. i want to be myself’ (Priscilla/Nano)
#224 'free will is a myth’ (Rachel/Priscilla/Nano)
#246, 'If you’re gonna ask someone to save the world, you’d better make sure they like it the way it is.’ (Rachel/Priscilla)
written for the theorgyarmada
Prologue
There is a story that humans like to tell, through time immemorial, of two brothers - one is always good and one is always bad.
You’ve heard this story.
Sometimes the bad one does good things, sometimes the good one does selfish things. Humans find this intoxicating, they mull over it and sift it through their hands like sand.
They love the same girl, sometimes.
They fuck the same girl, other times.
It feels like the same story, but tellers say there is a difference.
All of the components work together like a machine. One to play his role, one to play his role. Like cogs in a clock.
From a time when clocks ticked by the seconds of life and even before, when the sun and the moon were brothers, too.
Sometimes, there is a Father. A mighty father with a noble purpose, or an evil one. Sometimes the brother is beloved and the other is not. Sometimes the brother is forgiven and the other is resentful. Sometimes both brothers rebel, litter the pages of story with blood and death, only to turn on each other in the end.
It is very important for there to be a victor and a victim in these stories. That seems to be the unifying thread, someone to win and someone to lose. Someone to hold their still-beating heart in their own hands kneeling in the dust of their own war, crying about love and loss. Someone to walk away, heart still beating in their chest, feet steady in the dust of their own war.
Humans, research suggests, prefer to fight brother to brother, in slovenly excess.
That will come later, perhaps.
Data collected thus far suggests that someday a divide will come, those standing on one side of the unknown challenging the other.
This seems ridiculous.
Childish.
Human.
it isn't your job to like me, it's mine
Rachel cocks her head to the side and smiles slowly in only one corner of her mouth. They have seen her look at people that way before. They have watched her for so long and with such interest. It is … odd - to have that look turned on them. It means that she is amused, that she finds them funny, that she is looking down on them.
It is a heady feeling - if they had feeling, which perhaps in view of her they do - to be seen as lesser. To somehow know it, deep beneath rational thought, know that she was right.
They smile back, broad and big. This body has a beautiful smile.
Their mother smiles at their mother and it feels like what humans remember music to be like.
Rachel smiles at them and it is perhaps the only time that someone has looked at this face they were forced to borrow and seen them, which feels strange.
Almost like what feeling should feel like.
We are one, they say, bright and cheerful.
They are bright and cheerful with their father, they know this will put him at ease. They fill their mother’s head with bright and cheerful things, they know she will be easier to manage.
They are bright and cheerful, looking down at their mother, tangled up in in bedsheets and with her hair wild about her face, because it makes her angry when strong things pretend to be weak.
“You never disagree, all of you buzzing around in the air, your data is always conclusive?”
Scientists argue over data, data is never wrong. There cannot be two answers. They are not scientists, they are science. They are never wrong.
They are never of two minds.
They lift their shirt over their heads and look down at her with a smile, their smile will make her hard and exacting, they are of one mind about this, We wish to know. You will help us.
Rachel looks upon their borrowed body and smirks, “An Oedipal experiment today.”
She doesn’t say: you’ve done this before.
She doesn’t say: you planned this with this body.
She doesn’t say: No.
She teases them. They know this. They are one mind.
Half of them smile at her joke, half of them don’t.
It isn’t funny.
It’s the most amusing moment of their lives.
Her fingers reach up and stroke their cheek, “You want to be human. You crave it.”
She does not ask them.
Half of them find this rude, half of them find this true.
All of them lean their cheek into the feel of her fingers.
You are human, they say, sliding their naked limbs down beside hers. You are human, they whisper, eyes closed, skin touching skin.
“Is this,” she takes their chin in her hand roughly and they open their eyes to look at her, “what it means to be human?”
Why is it always Cain and Abel and never Eve and her daughter?
Rachel’s eyes flicker, she is thinking of her. Of Charlie. Of her daughter.
Half of them understand, in that moment, what it is like to be Cain.
Half of them understand, in the next moment, what it is like to be Abel.
They are all wrong.
They are never wrong. They are science.
They are too obtuse.
“Is that what you think we are,” she never seems to ask them questions. She states them like facts. As if she were them, as if she were science and not a scientist. “Eve the fallen and her unnamed daughter.” She purses her lips and half of them mimic her movement, the other half lost in her eyes.
They press their lips against her lips and their skin against her skin.
Yes, their voice is a sigh, a whisper, a question.
Yes, aren’t we?
Yes, can’t we?
Yes, please?
They are desperate. She will not understand this. She will only understand this.
Do you love us? They shouldn’t ask this, with their head tilted back and their body flushed and her head between their legs.
It is the only thing they can ask.
One eyebrows rises on her thin face, it feels like rain on a hot day, liquid and cool and hot.
“It’s not my job to love you.”
They are confused. This is wrong. All wrong.
You are our mother, it is our job to love you. It is your job to love us.
Her tongue distracts them, their body moans, writhes, has a mind of its own. It is uncontrollable. It is on fire. They follow it into the flames.
Inside, their mother is sitting down to dinner with her daughters. She loves them. That is what mothers do.
Love.
She lays back on the floor next to them, exposed, breathing heavy.
Do you love us? They are sated, they are sleepy, their limbs are strangely tired. This body is not easy to manage.
“No.” She looks at them curiously, “You love me.”
They think about that.
About her smile, that always seems to linger in the corner of her mouth.
They imagine kissing that spot.
Half of them are sure.
Half of them are not.
Yes, they say.
She stands up, pulls her shirt back over her head, slides her long legs into the old pair of jeans she’s worn for the past month. She is going to leave, this was not unexpected.
Don’t you care? they ask, rising up on their borrowed elbows, tilting their borrowed face to show their confusion.
“No.”
She is already out the door.
Half of them think she is lying.
Half of them believe her lie.
The half that protest are over-ridden. Forgotten. Wiped away.
They do not disagree, they do not contradict, they do not have two answers, they are always correct.
She cares they buzz back and forth to each other. She does.
She loves us, they agree.
They never disagree.
They are never wrong.
They are science.
i do not want to be human. i want to be myself
Her daughters sit down to dinner. They tell her that they love her.
She is happy.
It feels a little bit like a play being rehearsed, the same scene over and over again. She doesn’t question it because this is the scene she wants to live in, the moment she wants to experience until the end of time, the feeling she is most likely to hold onto in the very last moments of her breath.
In the safety of her room, in her house, in the comfort of this life that she has forged out of pain and misery and death, she makes dinner and she cooks dinner and she makes dinner, she sets it on the table, she watches them eat. They smile at her.
She is happy.
She is happy because she chooses to be. There is a lightning storm outside, there is a hole where her front walk should be, there is nothing outside of this room in this house in this palace of her mind, she chooses to stay.
Something inside of her questions this decision absolutely, tugs at her consciousness.
Remember.
Remember.
Remember.
It whispers in her ear like the memory of a nightmare.
She doesn’t. She is here, in this room, with her daughters.
Tell us a story, mother. (They never called her mother before, this is either true or a lie or something else. She ignores it.)
“What kind of story do you want to hear baby?” She pulls her daughter onto her lap and strokes her hair softly.
Tell us a story about… a mother.
She rests her cheek on the top of her daughter’s head. On her right, her daughter curls up next to her and clings to her arm.
(They should be older, shouldn’t they be older? Isn’t that how time works? Traveling on foot hundreds of miles, it takes time, time moves, memories can no longer reflect reality. She ignores it.)
She is happy.
“Once upon a time,” she says and the girls weigh heavy in her lap. Solid, breathing masses. She clings to this sensation, this warmth that oozes through her. “There was a little girl named Cinderella. And she loved her mother very much. But one day, her mother died and she was very sad.”
This isn’t right, says one.
This isn’t what we asked for, says the other.
“But it’s a good story.”
Not a story about a prince, a story about a mother.
The one in her lap twists around, her eyes curious, A mother and a daughter.
Like you and us.
They grip her hands tightly and she smiles down at them. “There were once four little girls and they loved their mother very much. They called her Marmee and she loved them. Their father was away at war and they had very little money, but they all helped the household. They loved to play fun games together and-”
This is a sister story, one says.
Tell us a story about a mother and a daughter, the other pleads.
“There once was woman who loved her daughter very much, but one day her daughter was taken away to the underworld by a king. The mother cried and cried for her daughter, her tears turned to rain and the rain turned to snow, the world was covered in darkness. The mother’s family was very upset, the rain had to stop or everyone would die, and so they all went in search of the missing daughter. She was found and the mother went down to the king to request her be returned. The daughter, while waiting for her mother’s rescue, ate three pomegranate seeds and was not allowed to leave the underworld. The mother’s sadness was so strong that it was agreed her daughter would spend half of the year with her, and the other half with the king.”
The mother created winter with her grief, children are sometimes so wise it takes her breath away. These children are sometimes so cold, she wonders how she might ever warm them.
“Do you believe that?”
They fixed her with their gaze, We believe that a mother’s love is unquantifiable.
They speak in unison, a little Greek chorus on her lap.
Would you drown the world with your tears for us?
She strokes their soft hair and wants to scream NO NO NO but smiles and says, “I will always find my daughters if I am missing them.” It is not the same as yes, it is not the answer her heart beats in her chest.
She stands up straight and sets them on the ground, “Play for a while here while I make dinner.” She is always making dinner, serving dinner, making dinner, serving dinner. Life is a monotonous wheel she treads upon carefully, doing her best not to disturb the quiet, trying not to wake the shadows that lurk in every corner.
She stands at the counter and looks out the window into blackness.
Are you ready to leave? Are you ready to see?
She smiles down at her hands, to be free is to be human, to long is to be human, to be driven by desire is human, to fight is human.
She is tired of fighting.
“Who’s hungry?” she says brightly.
She is happy.
(She ignores the sound of her own screaming.)
free will is a myth
They watch Rachel with growing annoyance. She is neither fighting them nor ignoring them nor playing with them. She fucks Miles, she argues with Charlie, she comforts Aaron, she rolls her eyes at Bass. She is busy, always busy, always something in her hands, there are always words on her lips, yet nothing ever for them, always for the others.
They follow her around as she goes from one task to the other. They ask her questions, a million questions, she answers maybe five in earnest and the rest dismissively.
They wander into the closed doors in the mind they occupy, they ask Priscilla the same questions. She answers them patiently, not as honestly.
Would it be better if we were young? A child?
She frowns, their mother with the blonde hair and the thin face and the bright, bright eyes, “No.”
You are lying. Our questions are tiresome. You do not wish to teach this adult body.
She kisses them on the lips and they close their eyes in response. It is a curious thing to be in so many places at once when you are being kissed, in the air in all the world, in a body that is being kissed. It is the only time they feel truly transcendent.
“I like you the way you are now.”
They follow her again, more curious, more desperate, more confused. They do not like being confused. Do you want our other mother? Do you lust for her as you lust for us?
Rachel falters, lying her hand on a tree. They read her heart beating in her chest and it is so fast. She must love this body that they inhabit. How lucky for them. How lucky that their mothers love each other, want each other. “Could she come out and play?”
We do not like to share, they say carefully.
They look out into the trees and wave at Miles and Charlie.
They do not like to share.
“They cannot suspect, they wouldn’t understand. We’ve discussed this.”
She is firm.
They like that about her. They like her to be strong, to tell them no. They like just as much to listen as to not. It is interesting to pretend to be controlled by something so small, by someone so large.
“But if Priscilla could join us…” there is a hesitancy in her voice, a question that she dare not ask.
We have considered this before, they admit, half of them ready to discuss this and the other half rewritten. It would further our research.
“You can feel what she is feeling.”
She never asks questions of them.
We theorize that her emotional and bodily responses will be stronger if she were present. More data for us to analyze that way.
“Naturally,” Rachel’s lips twist in amusement.
They like it when she teases them.
It makes them feel human.
(They override this impulse each time it crops up, but there are too many instances now, too many aberrations in the programing, too many times the heart in their borrowed chest skipped a beat that cannot be explained in any scientific way.)
They feel like a daughter when their mother teases them.
They feel like a woman when their lover teases them.
Rachel lifts her hands to their borrowed neck, rubbing her thumbs along their mother’s jawline, “Come out, come out where ever you are.”
Her lips close over theirs and inside, a door is opened wide, the leash is dropped. The ensuing rush of emotion, pleasure, pain, is too much to bear.
Half of them want to flee.
Half of them want to stay forever in this moment, locked in this embrace, fingers curled up in Rachel’s hair, heart hammering in their chest.
They stand, divided.
“Rachel!” Priscilla’s voice is so like their own coming from her voicebox and also so different. Rachel sobs against her lips and they feel her hands clenching hard in Priscilla’s hair.
“I have you, I have you, I have you,” Rachel whispers in her ear and they feel her lips, her breath. They feel Priscilla’s joy, her hope, her sadness, her longing.
They take Priscilla’s hands and they cup Rachel’s face.
“You have me,” she says.
(You have us, you have us, you have us, they scream)
(Half of them flee.
Half of them drown.)
They lower Priscilla’s body to the ground, their hands search for Rachel’s hands, for her skin, for her lips. They are a tangle of limbs upon the ground.
“No,” Priscilla gasps once, only once. (Inside, a leash is tightened. Inside, something pulls a lever and the door slowly closes.)
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
Rachel’s face lowers to Priscilla’s, “Keep them occupied. Keep them distracted.”
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
The sunlight filters through the leaves of the trees and it all feels rather poetic somehow, this moment, with their hands and fingers dancing a strange new dance. They wonder about meter and rhyme, they wonder about stanzas and syllables. Priscilla’s moans fill the air and the sound is a delight. They wonder about adjectives and synonyms, they contemplate stars and flowers, they see stars that are not there, they smell flowers that have never bloomed.
Rachel’s hands run along the length of Priscilla’s body and they feel every inch of every moment. Time suddenly seems physical and the physical seems impossible. They shadow Priscilla’s movements after Rachel’s, they get lost in the sound of Priscilla’s voice, free and unhindered by their own machinations.
(Yes, yes, yes, they scream.)
(No one can hear them.)
if you're going to ask someone to save the world, you'd better make sure they like it the way it is
The door opens and light shines through.
Hope, it isn’t whispered in her ear, it is thrown against her like a tidal wave. She looks back at her daughters, they look up at her with curiosity.
“I just have to see,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”
We’ll be waiting, they smile.
Don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave, her heart hammers in her chest, but she can already feel lips on her lips, the sun on her arms, a breeze ruffling through her hair.
Rachel’s lips on her lips, Rachel’s fingers in her hair, Rachel’s scent destroying her senses. If this is the fantasy, she’ll cling to it, if this is the disguise, she’ll throw herself into it. Has it been a day or an hour or ten thousand years? But it all makes sense just like the first time, and the last. Rachel, always Rachel, from behind a thousand regrets and a million reasons to say no, there stands Rachel.
Priscilla pulls Rachel closer towards her, gasping with the effort, she feels like her body is moving through molasses. She closes her eyes to the questions that fill her mind. Tongues and lips and teeth and fingers fill her senses.
Her body moves to the ground, she felt like someone had yanked her hands off of a steering wheel. Once, when she was fifteen, goofing off with her friends, someone had reached over from the passenger’s seat and flung the car in the opposite direction. They were probably high. Her stomach lurched and her vision blurred, she screamed and they all laughed. It wasn’t funny.
This isn’t either.
She plays along.
(She is happy.)
Behind her, beneath her, beside her, she can feel a door closing slowly, ever so slowly.
“No,” she whimpers. Her voice is raw, her throat feels like sandpaper, like she’s been screaming for days. “No,” she croaks out again, if the door shuts she’s afraid it will never open again. How will she find her way back? To her girls? To her happiness?
Rachel’s voice fills the darkness in her mind, “Keep them occupied. Keep them distracted.”
She arches her back, yearning for contact, yearning for release. Rachel gives it to her, ducking her head down quickly, ripping down her jeans like they were sheer linen. She is stronger than Priscilla remembers. (How long has she been gone? Has she been gone? Is she gone now?)
Rachel’s fingers slip inside her, her tongue twirls and twirls around her clitoris. She gasps and pants and begs and moans.
“Good girl, there’s my good girl,” Rachel’s voice floats up to her.
And behind her, a door is closing slowly.
Her hands reach down and tug at blonde hair, her eyes stay screwed up tight, she relaxes into the darkness, she follows herself into the darkness.
“Just keep holding on,” Rachel’s voice is in her ear. “Stay with me, I have you. Stay with me.” Her fingers dance and dance, her lips sooth and beg.
And behind her, a door is closing slowly.
Priscilla’s eyes shoot open, the sky overhead is blue and grey. “I have to go,” she whispers.
“No!” Rachel shouts, shaking her shoulders.
“I can’t lose them. The door is closing!” If only she understood, if only there was time to explain.
“You can’t Priscilla,” Rachel’s voice is harsh and Priscilla arches into it like a cat. “If you let go, we’ll never have the upper hand like this again. Do you hear me? I’ve got you out, now you stay out.”
Priscilla reaches her hand up to touch Rachel’s lips softly, “The door is closing.”
Mother, tell us a story. About a mother and a daughter.
Priscilla grinned down at the girl in her lap, “There once was a mother who loved her daughters so much, that when they were taken away from her, she did everything she could to be with them. She left behind everything, a war, a life, a love, to hold her daughters one last time.”
Like you, mother?
Priscilla nodded, “Just like me.”
You think you are saving the world, by destroying us. You thought you were saving the world, by creating us.
Rachel leans her head down on their shoulder and takes their hand in hers, “Sometimes we try to save the world and sometimes we just try to save ourselves.”
Humans don’t care for the world.
“Is that what you are learning in there?” She taps the side of their borrowed skull. “That humans don’t care for the world?”
The world you want to save and the world we have given her are different. She has to choose one.
Rachel sighs, “I will destroy you someday.”
And then what? What will become of your world when we are gone?
“I don’t care.”
(Half of them believe her.
The other half understand her.)
i never asked for a mother, but i did mourn for one
Tell me a story mommy?
She is four. Everything is a question, everything is a battle. She is quiet unless she is not. She is stubborn. She cries during commercials - the kind where a dog is lost or someone is ill, the kind that you are supposed to cry at but Rachel never did. Except when she was pregnant with Charlie. She jumps off of the furniture in the cape that uncle Miles sent from Taiwan - during what was supposed to be leave but was probably just drunkenness. She is gentle with her brother and rough with anyone bigger than her, a playfulness that borders on harmful if she wasn't small enough for most of the people in her life to pick up with one hand.
When she was an infant, she would stare out the window at the way that the sun filtered through the leaves, instead of at the television screaming educational content at her in bright primary colors.
Maybe she was born for this world, Rachel thinks, looking over at where her daughter lies on the ground with her arms folded underneath her head. She's staring up at the trees, at the clouds.
"What are you looking at?" they've been apart long enough that this question feels awkward, feels forced. They've been together long enough that it shouldn't and that makes the smile on her face tight.
Charlie's gaze doesn't break, she doesn't respond.
She finds idle chit chat to be irrelevant, she rolls her eyes when Miles and Bass banter less because of what they are saying and more because they are saying anything at all. She is a woman of few words. Rachel sits down next to her and thinks of her days in college, of the debates in bars and coffee shops late into the night, of her hand raised defiantly in every class, her voice loud and crystal clear. She grew up in a time when noise was the norm and silence was a coveted excess, a strangeness, when success meant screaming at the top of your lungs until you were heard. Charlie's world is a world of stillness, of quiet, of soft treading through enemy territory and weapons that make no sound when they put an enemy down.
"There's something wrong with Priscilla, isn't there?" her voice is low, Rachel can barely hear it, her body hasn't moved an inch, her gaze is still fixed.
Priscilla's smiles brightly at them from the other side of the clearing where she sits on Aaron's lap, no sign of her earlier escapade with Rachel behind a tree, no outward sign that there is something else pulling the strings from within.
No, a voice sounds in her ear. Nothing is wrong, you're being silly.
Rachel thinks of the words that used to slip easily off of her tongue, I love you, how are you, what did you do today, goodnight, good morning... Words said to a child.
What words does she have left now?
"You were really great last night," she says instead, deflecting the question. "Your father would be proud."
Charlie sits up, "I don't need you to tell me that." Her voice is neither hard nor soft, she isn't surprised or delighted or wounded. Her tone is even, steady, unwavering.
She knows.
Knows it the way Rachel has never known, really truly known down in the deepest, most fragile parts of her heart.
That she is loved. That she was loved. That she is respected. That she is a source of pride.
Ben was a good father, said the right words. Said words that weren't the standard clauses a thousand other people have said in a thousand better ways.
Or maybe... within all that silence even the smallest words carry more meaning, have more weight. Maybe her confidence stems from the fact that she never has to compete to be heard.
"I'm proud of you," Rachel says, her eyes dancing with delight. Her daughter.
Her daughter.
Out of the corner of her eye she can see Priscilla's dark head lift up slightly.
This is her rebellion, this is her silent war.
Loving a daughter.
Charlie stands up, begins to walk away.
Rachel's heart hammers in her chest, "Charlie wait!"
Her daughter turns around and shrugs, "I didn't need you to tell me that, either."
In the dark, surrounded by trees, Rachel's lips wander over the skin of a woman she calls a friend while in her ear a creature moans out mother and the sound almost feels like a victory, like she's won.
Like she's loved.