Chapter Text
The radiator is rattling and Van is dead. Years have passed since her death the day before – Taissa can feel the decades carved into her body. She feels old in a way she thought she would never see herself become, and there is no joy in that feeling because Van is dead. Her lips are dry and cracked, her stomach beginning to pang with hunger. She has refused all food or drink, refused to brush her teeth even, lest anything erase the taste of Van’s blood from her mouth. The coffee she’d had with Misty had sat untouched upon the formica diner table and her head aches with the loss of caffeine. Taissa is crumbling and Van is dead.
She blames Shauna – why shouldn’t she? Shauna is to blame, after all. She has been the perpetrator of so much for so long that Taissa learned not even to recognize it, to allow their bond to regress to a relic of their pre-crash days when Shauna was a bitch but that’s all she was, and Taissa had loved her. Now she loves only Van, and Van is dead.
She is unsure whether she should sleep. Her eyes itch with dried tears and exhaustion, and she longs for the absence of any feeling or thought. But she is fearful of what that other part of her might do if she allows her – allows It – the chance. She wants the satisfaction of killing Shauna to be hers. Even if she has to share it with Misty fucking Quigley. She won’t let that other one, who has taken so much from her already, take this too. It is too precious.
Plenty of therapists had attempted to diagnose Taissa over the past twenty five years. Some of them had even seemed like they knew what they were talking about – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Depression, Depersonalization, paranoid hallucinations, Bipolar Disorder. None of them had any idea what was really wrong with her. No one had, not even Van. And now, she never would.
Taissa cannot move. She physically cannot wrest herself from her chair at the kitchen table, cannot muster the strength to turn on the lights even though the sun set hours ago, cannot shut the open window which is permitting a harsh breeze to blow into the house. The window, which looks into the dark backyard, is gaping like an open wound. For a moment, she fantasizes about a break-in. Let someone try, she prays to god and the wilderness and nothing at all. Let them fucking try. The breeze is too cold – a wind really, rushing in. In a moment of weakness, she bends her neck forward, leans her forehead against the wood grain of the table. Lets the cold air brush over the back of her neck like a lover’s touch. She does not even close her eyes. She could well and truly swear she kept them open. But in the next moment that registers, the gray light of dawn is creeping into the dark and she is surrounded by a cacophony of shattered glass and smashed ceramic dishware – the nice stuff from her and Simone’s wedding registry. There are gashes on her hand and shards of glass in the pads of her bare feet, and she winces, resenting the pain from detracting from that far more important pain. She is no longer surprised by the sleepwalking – merely resigned to the nightmare. In her more forgiving moments, she conceives of her body not as her own but as something shared. Herself and The Bad One. Taissa thinks of her that way, sometimes. Sometimes though, she questions which one of them is worse. The Other, then, she corrects. They share this body like a too-small apartment, splitting custody of her life. And though it makes her feel weak, she begins to cry again, looking at the mess around her. She is not the only one in this body grieving.
She gingerly picks her way across the kitchen to the bathroom. She gets bandages and antiseptic from the cupboard, items which still feel like a luxury at times, thinking of the wounds sustained and suffered in the filth of the wilderness. She exhales hard at the alcohol sting on her wounds, wraps them tightly in clean bandage, and rises. She braces her hands on the cold ceramic of the sink, staring herself in the eye. Taissa feared mirrors for a long time; she knew it was not always quite herself looking back. Now, she looks for that other one in the glass. It is a fickle thing, this balance they have struck, a dance played out over twenty long years. She cannot be sure who she is looking at, but she raises her chin and pushes her long hair back from her face and looks. And then she howls, the anguish seizing her again with a violence that surprises her. She wonders if it is the work of The Other. Maybe by looking at her, she has empowered her to emerge again from the depths of her mind, to mourn the way Taissa had over Van’s cooling body. It must have been around 36 hours – the lingering taste of flesh and blood are curdling in the back of her throat as she continues to wail. Beneath the grief and anguish, Taissa feels her mind waking up, thinking in a way she had been unable to in the immediate aftermath of it all. It is the first time she considers the possibility that she owes something to that other version of herself. The Other is the only person who loved Van like she did, yet she was confined to the darker edges of their shared existence. Only that other one knows what it means to have lost her. I’m sorry, Taissa is murmuring, over and over again. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry she cries, her voice rising, and it is not an apology to Van for being too late, for not coming to find her sooner – though she is certain she will carry that guilt to her grave. I’m sorry. I should have saved her. We were supposed to protect her. She wasn’t supposed to die. She is shouting now. The words are nearly incoherent but that means nothing. She is talking to herself, after all. The broken glass and the sliced skin are punishments well-deserved. In The Other’s place, she would surely have done the same.
She screams at the mirror, and what must her neighbors think? That veneer of respectability that some idiot version of herself had treasured all those pointless years ago… she wishes she could slap that younger, idiotic Tai, knock some sense into her before she let go of the one and only beautiful thing in her life. Thinking about it now enrages her, and in a moment of blind fury she lashes out and strikes the mirror, fracturing it at its center. The fragmented version of herself that looks back now seems closer to the truth.
Her knuckles are bleeding now, running into the white of the bandages on her right hand. She curses. With shaking fingers, she wraps another bandage around the fresh blood. She leaves the roll of gauze and the antiseptic on the edge of the sink and hauls herself out of the bathroom. She will clean the floor, she decides. She doesn’t really care whether the glass cuts her again, but it’s something to do. This is what she is thinking when she re-enters the kitchen, and finds it different. Something is wrong. The lights are still off – that is unchanged; the glass, too, is still on the floor. She can sense something is off though, so much so that it barely registers as a surprise when she catches a glimpse of the figure in the periphery of her vision.
They are hard to discern in the gray darkness of the room, standing still beside the open window. She gasps and steps backwards instinctively. Her foot catches against the leg of a chair and she goes down, hard, sprawling onto the floor. She scrabbles for purchase attempting first to rise and then merely to get away, pushing herself back across the floor with all four limbs.
The man with no eyes cocks his head and takes a single step towards her. And then he is gone. Disappeared as if he were never there and maybe he never was. But now there is a different figure in his place, standing where he was. This new intruder sways once before falling to their knees upon the bed of broken glass, heaving.
Taissa’s breath catches in her throat. She is choking, surely. Perhaps she is already dead – it is the only way to make sense of what she sees. But the moment passes and she is able to get out a single word to the person who now kneels on the other side of her kitchen.
“Van?”