Maidens of the Fall

Willow Finch is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Clarity and truth, without ornament or effort, like a picture etched on a sheet of silver-backed glass. Soft eyes the deep brown of lapsed autumnal dusk, warming and widening as they capture my reflection. Hair a sleek fall in glossy chestnut sheen, each stray strand highlighted against the pale skin of her neck. Her face, the one face I know better than my own misshapen visage in the mirror, elegant as a goddess from the highest mountain peak. Plump cheeks dimple, bow-curved lips curl, eyes so limpid and lucid and round crease up at the corners. She gifts me a smile to entangle my soul. Dressed in plain pastel yellow pajamas, she is a plucked rose set in the unworthy vase of this world, her petals propped up in the sad vale of a hospital bed.

Not all would agree on this undeniable beauty; I’m not fool enough to believe that I’ve been graced by anything so mundane. Willow Finch is no limelight heartthrob, no face to launch a thousand ships, no artificial standard by which teenage girls will starve and cut and torture themselves into inadequate new shapes. This beauty is no subjective judgement, it is irrefutable fact. In her ordinary skin and unremarkable curves and the natural tilt of her lips, I have discovered a treasure that all else overlook, because they cannot comprehend. Magical girls and pop stars and supermodels be damned to the dream. I choose Willow, but not because she is beautiful; she is beautiful because I choose her.

I know this like a flower knows the sun, because when she sees me she lights up as nothing else can, and I am the luckiest mortal in all the waking world.

“Octavia!”

Her voice, a breathy rush, a heady breeze of sweet warm air.

I’m already at her side, leaning over the bed. I pull her into a hug, dredging her up from the rampart of pillows.

She stiffens—

Of course, she doesn’t. Willow relaxes into my arms and lets out a light giggle, the sound of snowflakes melting in sunshine. I’m panting, clutching her, clinging to her body because I’ve been drowning since the moment we parted. She smells of day-old sweat and the astringence of unwelcome medicine. She nuzzles my shoulder and locks her arms around my back.

“Willow! Willow, I— I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I—”

“Shhhhh, shh-shh-shh.” She touches my hair, stroking my skull, soothing all my shuddering fears. “It’s okay, Octavia. It’s okay, I’m here. I’m right here with you. I knew you would come. I knew you could do it. I knew you’d make it back to my side. You’re such a good girl, you know that, don’t you? Good girl. Well done. Well done, good girl. Shhhhh, it’s okay, don’t cry. Shhhhhh.”

She holds me for hours. For a day and night. For the blink of an eye.

Then, somehow, I’ve lowered her back down to the pillows, her torso propped at an easy forty-five degree angle. I’ve eased back from the embrace, just far enough to gaze up at her eyes. Jealousy writhes in my chest; these sheets, this bed, this room, they all got to hold her for over a day, when it should have been me at her side.

Willow smiles, and the jealousy doesn’t matter. I’m on my knees by the bedside, can’t recall kneeling. She smiles in her limitless way, the smile that makes my heart stop yearning.

“Well done, Octavia,” she murmurs, still stroking my hair with one perfect hand. “That’s it. My good girl.”

“I lost you,” I croak, sniffing back tears I don’t recall crying. “You saved me, when that bomb went off. And then I lost you. I lost you.”

“Ahhhhh, but you found me again,” she purrs, a luxurious smile playing on her lips. “I knew you would. My little Octavia. My clever girl. I’m so proud of you, my pet.”

“Oh, Willow.”

Need takes me, hot as a burn wound on the muscle of my heart. I bob my head forward to catch her lips in a kiss. Why not? There’s nobody to see, nobody awake in this world but us. A kiss will seal my return, wash clean all my unfaithful transgressions. A real kiss will fix everything wrong with me. Or maybe it will be just a kiss, like all the others we’ve shared. Though I can’t recall a single one, overwhelmed by this moment.

Willow pulls her head back, blinks in surprise, dodges my lips.

Of course she does—

Of course—

I stop. No kiss.

“ … W-Willow? Why … why did you … what’s wrong?”

Willow adopts an expression I’ve never seen before. How is that possible, when I’ve known her so intimately, so totally, so long? A stilled moment of internal confusion, eyebrows raised, lips half-pursed. As if I’ve done something wrong, and she’s not certain that it’s safe to call attention to my mistake.

She sniffs, three times, as if catching a scent, then wrinkles her nose.

Cold wet slime-flesh stirs in the pit of my gut, a thing I had consigned to dreamless sleep, wakened by this incongruity. A slug, a parasite, a mote of half-smothered thought. It clings to my spine and begins to climb the cord of knotted nerves that lead north to my brain.

“Willow?”

I pull back a little, but I don’t let go, because I’m never letting go of my Willow again. The hospital room reveals nothing, no reason for this creeping sense of restless attention. A plain room, nothing special. White plastic walls, a sink and a sideboard. Half-dead flowers wilt in a glass by Willow’s bed. A television plays cartoons to itself, sound on mute. One large window stands with curtains drawn wide on the dreary Oxford day, rooftops and towers blurring into rain-shrouded haze. No cameras, no microphones, no watching Dream Control agent. No door at my back when I glance over my shoulder; we have been sealed in together, so none may interrupt. One extra chair faces the window, as if somebody has been sitting with my Willow, waiting for her to wake up.

“Octavia?” Willow purrs my name. “Octavia, my sweet little thing?”

The room goes away, doesn’t matter, only Willow remains. Her smile has returned, a shaft of summer sun on my upturned face. She strokes my hair with one hand, runs the fingers of her other down the jagged line of my scar. I sigh, close my eyes, lost in her bliss.

“Why … ” I struggle to recall the problem. “Why didn’t you want to … to … ”

“To what, my sweet?”

“Kiss me?” my lips say. My eyes open, a struggle. Willow pauses, smile too. “Why didn’t you want to kiss—”

Willow reaches past my shoulder and plucks a flower from the glass. A rose in full bloom, fluffed with fat purple petals, fresh morning dew glistening in perfect bright beads. She holds it out to me, the stem stripped of thorns.

“It’s alright, Octavia,” she whispers. “Everything is going to be alright.”

Cold mucus climbs another few rungs of my spine, chill slime beginning to seep into my thoughts, numbing my purpose. But I came here for a reason — for Willow — and I won’t fail now.

“It … it will be all right, yes.” I start to stand up, get back to my feet. But of course, I can’t leave Willow’s side, so I stay where I was. Where I am. Down on my knees. “We have to get you out of here, Willow. Dream Control, the guards outside, they were all gone, vanished! Something very bad is happening. We have to move, we can’t stay here. There’s a place I can take you, you won’t believe where it is, but it’s on the moon! And it’s safe, they can’t get to us there!”

Willow’s eyes hitch with a new note of curious confusion, as if I’ve presented her with a mildly amusing puzzle. A squint, of a kind I’ve never seen before.

Then a laugh, so light and full of air.

“Oh, you silly thing, Octavia,” she says. “Everything is going to be alright. Do you know why? Because I say so.”

“ … Willow?” Panic gutters in my chest, a flame that won’t catch, snuffed and smothered by that spreading cold slime. “What do you mean? We have to get you out of the hospital. We have to get out, now! Did you see me on the television, is that it? I can explain, I can explain all of it, but I’m not crazy, I swear. Dream Control are using you as bait, and there’s … ” Slime-slick cold pushes deeper into the back of my head; the traveller up my spine has reached the root of my mind. “There’s something wrong happening! Dreamland stuff. I— I can’t— I can’t think—”

“You don’t need to think,” Willow purrs. “Just focus on me. Don’t you worry about a thing anymore, Octavia. I’m here, and you’re at my side. Isn’t that the only thing which matters?”

Cold tendrils curl deep in the whorls of my brain. One last moment of fight is all I have left—

Of course, I don’t need to fight anymore.

Warm comfort floods the barren plain of my soul, washes away all the silly things I’ve no need to consider. Willow’s right; I’m by her side, the place I was born to occupy. Eyelids heavy with bliss, a dopey smile on my face, wrapped in the warmth of belonging.

A pinprick of cold lurks at the core of that warmth. But of course, it doesn’t matter. It never did before.

“You’re in a lot of trouble, aren’t you?” Willow purrs, eyes creased in the corners. “But I’m going to protect you, Octavia. Just like I always have. I can make it all go away, I promise.” She reaches forward, cups my cheeks in both hands, runs fingers down my neck, encircles my throat, squeezes with a fraction of her strength. “I’ve made some new friends, you see. Very special friends. And I’ve decided that I’m done with all the pretending and playing, this farce of a life. That filthy stunt with the bomb yesterday, it’s put everything in perspective. I was a fool to think I could leave you behind, my pet.” Her grip tightens — then relaxes, hands fleeing to my shoulders, down my arms. “So, I won’t. I’ve altered the deal, and all those government fools and pretty little things, they’ll go along with it. The others I can convince, they all have their own attachments, questioning mine would be the height of hypocrisy.” She smiles, tight-lipped and glowing inside. “I’m going to keep you forever, my little Octavia. And not over there, but right here. I’m going to keep you so close, and so safe, you’ll never have to be afraid again. And I’m going to keep you all for my—”

Her left hand reaches my upper right arm, paused on the transition from meat to prosthetic. She feels the socket through my coat, jumper, and t-shirt. Her purring voice dies away.

My eyes snap open, though I don’t remember closing them, or what exactly she was saying. Willow’s smile is all gone. She stares down at my arm, blank in the face, eyes empty as dry wounds.

“Willow?” I whisper.

“Roll up your sleeve,” she says. “Show me this arm.”

I say yes in my heart, and it’s done right away. Coat off one shoulder, sleeve rolled up, glove skinned from the carbon fibre beneath. My prosthetic arm lies fully exposed, for Willow’s eyes only.

She stares at it like an unexploded bomb smeared with faeces—

Of course, she doesn’t. She lifts it gently with both hands, tilting her head to examine the limb, as if seeing it for the first time. A frown grows hard on her perfect pale brow.

“Between this and the smell?” she murmurs to herself, as if I cannot be expected to hear. “I take my eyes off you for one day, just one, and look what happens.”

Something isn’t right. Warm comfort tells me not to bother, but the problem must be with me, not Willow. Never Willow. Therefore I must rectify it, in case it harms her. But what could possibly be wrong? I’m right where I should be. I’ve made it, good girl! Willow is here, she’s safe and sound and whole and—

“They said you were burned,” I force my lips to say.

Willow’s head snaps up, eyes flashing in the light. “Who is they?”

“Uh. John Smith? A Dream Control agent. Or not, he was … it doesn’t matter. You weren’t burned? Why are you in here, then? I don’t … I can’t … can’t think … ”

Slime corks up the rear of my thoughts, cold and sticky, too thick to push through. Go back to the warmth, it says. Stop thinking, stop trying. You already won.

Willow sets my arm down on the covers with exaggerated care, as if depositing a baby she wishes to strangle. She turns a smile on me the likes of which I’ve never seen before, strange cruelty alight behind the warm brown of her eyes, a distant forest fire filling autumn skies with toxic smoke.

“I was burned,” she says, “but I’m not anymore. I got all better while I was waiting for you. But that’s such a strange question to ask. You would never have asked that before. Would you prefer if I was all burned up to a crisp?”

“W-what? No, no of course not, I’m happy you’re safe, I’m just—”

“Of course you’re happy, you’re with me. But then, why ask that question? Perhaps you’re just curious what it would feel like? Yes, that must be it. Curiosity and the cat. Not that you’ve ever been cat-like. Do you want to see?”

“Willow? What are you saying? No, no—”

“Like this?”

In my arms, a charred corpse.

A scarecrow of spent kindling, limbs burnt down to brittle black sticks, skin scorched to a roasted layer of carbonised flesh, weeping thin pus from cracks in the crust. A reek like burned pork punches down my throat, a torrent of bile meeting it from my gut, eyes watering in the haze of cooked human meat. Eyelids, lips, ears, nose, hair, all gone. Eyeballs burned out, greasy slime in the sockets.

I scream and recoil, scramble up to my feet. Back away in blind terror, but I can’t escape the gut-churning stench.

The burned thing on the bed shifts like ashes stirred by wind. Limbs move against the sheets, staining them with sooty dark residue. The jaw clacks open, hanging by strings of dry tendon.

“No?” rasps Willow’s charred voice.

And then she’s back.

Clean, perfect, untouched by the world, let alone ruined by flame. Willow, my Willow, hospital bedsheets pooled in her lap, her back propped on the pillows.

“ … W-Willow— what— what— I-I don’t—”

She giggles, a sound like ice crystals blooming in fresh blood. “It’s okay, my silly little thing. Just an illusion. A joke, a trick. Did you really think I was burned? You’re seeing things, Octavia. Come back to bed.” She pats the covers. “Come here.”

Comforting lies suggest I obey; but my prosthetic hand is curled in a fist, so tight I feel the tension all the way to my shoulder.

“I … I don’t … I don’t understand—”

“Oh?” Willow smiles again, cruel spark in her eyes. “Do you want something closer to the truth? Is that your little secret, Octavia? Have you known all along, always wanted to see? Show me yours, I’ll show you mine, that kind of play? We can try that, if you want.”

“See what? Willow, I don’t—”

A starlit slit opens on the bed. Pure black, the absence of even the memory of colour, wrapped in a whirlpool of dying suns and the corpses of worlds. Shaped like a woman, but without anything inside. A gap in reality, a gravitational point from which no light can escape. Nameless planets wheel around that void, ripped apart by pressures that tear at my eyeballs. Black suns are swallowed, great clouds of gas drunk down, whole galaxies spiralling toward ignominious end.

I feel like I’m falling, sucked forward into forever.

Of course, I’m not.

Willow gifts me a smile, sitting in the bed.

No stars, no void, no cold eternity of space. No black hole shaped like a person. No ever-hungry maw yawning wide in reality’s ruptured skin.

Willow pats the bed. “Come here, Octavia. Here, girl.”

Freezing sweat coats me from crown to tiptoes. My gut is clenched hard, as if I’ve been vomiting for hours, with nothing left to purge. Cold tendrils of slime tighten on my thoughts with an urge to stop trying. But this is too much, and my fist is still clenched.

“I know what I saw,” I force the words out. “What— Willow, what was that?”

Willow tilts her head, pouting with thin disappointment; another expression I’ve never seen before, didn’t know she was capable of such petulance. “Another question you shouldn’t know how to ask,” she says. “I would apologise for the trickery, but you’ve rather brought it on yourself. They’ve almost stolen you from me, and you went along with it. Though happily for us you’re not quite gone, not yet. Enough that you know how to ask, but not enough to already know. You’ve always been such a good girl, Octavia. So receptive and obedient. It’s the only thing keeping you here. Don’t push any further, you won’t like the answers.”

Something is wrong with Willow’s words; they make no sense, won’t stay still in my head, stirred up and snatched from the air by the cold slug in my brain.

“Something … Willow, please … something’s … wrong?”

Willow almost laughs, a little snort so unlike her. “Quite right. Something is indeed rather wrong, isn’t it? Perhaps you can explain to me why that is? Because … ” She sniffs the air several times, a little performance. “Because I smell somebody on you, Octavia. I smell another woman.”

“No!” Grimgrave. “No, no, I swear—”

“Not just any woman, but a clown of a woman. You’ve betrayed me for a clown, Octavia? Have you been purchased so cheaply?”

“No, no no, I didn’t— I didn’t, it was a mistake, nothing happened, nothing happened! Nothing!”

“And you reek of alcohol.” Willow’s face hardens, from disappointment to almost anger. “You know I don’t like it when you drink. You know that.”

“When I … what? But I’ve never drunk alcohol before. Never, not until today, never before. I don’t … ”

Willow’s smile cuts me off; suddenly she’s herself again, back to normal, filled with infinite mercy and unconditional kindness.

“But I shall forgive you, Octavia,” she says. “I will forgive you anything, even the woman. Do you know why?” Her smile brightens, rays of sunlight forcing back the grey and dreary day through the window. “Because I’m the only thing you will ever have—”

Grimgrave. Not true.

“—and it would be too cruel to cast you out, no matter if you’ve been a bad girl. I’m nothing if not merciful, aren’t I?” She giggles, raises a hand from the bedsheets. “Now, be a good girl again. Be a good girl for me. Come here. By my side. Where you’re meant to be.”

Sweat pours off my flesh, cold and slick and slimy. I screw my eyes so tight my blotted vision explodes with false colour. Clench my teeth so hard they creak with pressure. Trails of drool slide down my chin.

“This— this isn’t right— Willow, what— what’s happening?”

“Take a deep breath, my pet,” she purrs. “That’s it, nice and slow, take it slow. You’ve had a shock, that’s all. Open your eyes, see where we are, see how beautiful our world can be.”

My eyelids creak open, I can’t hold them shut. Oxford is gone; beyond the window lies the lush and verdant green of endless rolling meadows. Golden sunlight spills into the room, caressing the floor with feelers of pure warmth, catching Willow’s hair like clouds in the dusk. Her smile is one with the light, a beaming beacon to my heart. Everything is going to be alright. Stop asking so many questions. Stop asking at all.

“Come here,” she croons.

I’m by her bedside, no memory of crossing the gap. Her hands reach up, to cup the bare carbon fibre of my right arm once again.

“Willow … Willow, I want … I want to be here, but— but something’s not—”

Willow nods slowly, an angel’s stolen smile stitched to her face. “I know, I know. They’ve made you into a magical girl. Or, they’ve tried, at least. That’s what’s coming between us, Octavia. That’s the single thing keeping us apart, the one wrong note in our song. Without that, you would see me as you’ve always seen. But this taint, it’s spoiling you. Spoiling everything.”

A sob breaks free from my throat. “I— I didn’t have a choice, they shot me.”

The smile kinks sideways, stitches coming loose, showing too many teeth. “I know. But we can’t be together, not when you’re like this.”

“I-I’m sorry, I— please don’t— please don’t leave—”

“Shhhh, shhh-shh-shh. I’d never leave you, I promise that, my darling little pet. And not to worry, because I can make it all go away.”

“ … you can?”

Willow nods, caressing the naked carbon fibre of my prosthetic arm, running sharp fingers over the surfaces, golden nails lingering on my elbow joint.

The arm can’t feel a thing. Willow’s touch doesn’t transmit.

“I can make it all go away, yes,” she repeats, her voice a soft whisper. “I can make it so none of this ever happened. You can live alongside me, and we won’t have to part, not anymore. Like I said, I’m done with that farce, I’ve decided it doesn’t matter. So I can make it all go away, so it can just be me and you. Do you want me to do that? Do you want to go back?”

I nod. The cold slug doesn’t need to press anymore, because this is what I want, the only thing I want.

“Good,” Willow says. “Good girl. First, I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything. Anything!”

Willow’s gaze lingers on my eyes for a moment, stares hard into the slit of my right. Were her eyes always so golden? Of course they were. Silly question.

“You have to give this up.” She pats my prosthetic arm. “This too.” She reaches down and taps my right hip, just above the socket of my prosthetic leg. “That’s how they’ve ruined you, the crack in your armour, the flaw they’ve exploited. Do you understand?”

“You want me to take my prosthetics off? That’s it?”

Willow shakes her head. “Give them up. Forever. Discard everything that isn’t you. Then you will be just yourself, as you should be.”

A hot mote stirs in my chest, a spark taking flame; a faint hint of red taints the golden sunlight.

Willow glances at the window, brow kinked with a frown.

“Octavia, my pet,” she says. “What are you doing?”

“What? Nothing. I didn’t say anything?”

Willow looks back at me, eyes tight with sudden urgency. A clicking sound tickles at the edge of my hearing, like metal feet stomping on far-off wooden floors.

“Octavia,” she says, a quick warning in her voice. “Do you understand what I asked you to do?”

“You want me to give up my prosthetics? I—I can buy new ones, I mean, eventually. I can’t walk without the leg, but if that’s what you want, I suppose I can try. I-I don’t understand why, but for you—”

“You won’t need to get new ones,” Willow says with a giggle. “Oh, Octavia. I’ll look after you.” She puffs out her chest, puts a hand to her breast. “I will be everything you need. I will be your arms and your legs. Your eyes and your ears. I will keep you so safe. You won’t need anything but me.”

Willow would never say such a thing; Willow would never make me so afraid.

I try to take a step back, away from the bed, but the cold slug in my brain glues my feet to the spot, my eyes to Willow’s face. My breath comes like a bellows, hot and hard in my chest, breathing in sync with the distant clicking of hard metal feet. The floor and walls begin to shake, keeping rhythmic time in rapid beats.

“Octavia?” Willow snaps. “Did you hear me? Are you listening? Octavia!”

“I— my limbs— they’re … they’re me, Willow. You— you know that, you—”

“They’re metal and plastic!”

“Carbon fibre and foam,” I hiss.

Golden light dies away beyond the windows, sun swallowed by spreading wings of red-black night. The sky bleeds that burning crimson shade, washing over the landscape, turning the room to a blood-soaked pit. Willow stares at the change, eyes widening with a cold clutch of fear. She quickly turns back, reaches toward me, fingers curling for my arm.

“Octavia!” she cries out. “You have to hurry! Take the arm off! Undo the straps, let it fall! Take it off, I can do the rest!”

“No, I— no, no—”

“Do you love me?” she whispers.

I nod. Of course. Of course. Of course I love Willow, says the cold clot in my head. Of course.

She smiles, for me. A last ray of golden sunshine glowing through red-black finality.

“Then do it for me,” she whispers. “Trust me, Octavia.”

“I-I do, but— I don’t— I don’t understand what’s happening! Willow, what is this, what—”

Willow wets her lips, hesitates for one second.

“I love you,” she says.

The world softens at the edges, blurs down to nothing, so only Willow remains.

My left hand reaches for the prosthetic socket of my right, fingers hooking toward the soft plastic sheath; break the seal and the whole thing will come free, slide off my stump and crash to the floor. From this height the damage will be extensive, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Willow wants this gone, wants this part of me excised, and so I shall willingly shed another sliver of my self. For her. For Willow. Of course.

The wall at my back explodes inward, chunks of plaster and brick flying across the room, air choked with a dark cloud of masonry dust and a storm of splintered wood.

Red-black light blazes through the breach.

No time to turn and face the monster; metal footsteps sprint across the gap, slamming like pistons on shattered hospital floor. Folds of black dress sweep around my sides, engulfing me like the skirts of some deep-sea leviathan digesting its paralysed prey. A metal-gloved hand lances out, slams into the back of my neck. Red-hot fingers burn through skin, fat, muscle, and bone, digging for the base of my skull. A searing red heat makes contact with my mind, flash-cooks everything that is not me.

With a tearing of ruined flesh and a sizzling of raw meat, the hand rips something free from where it was wrapped around my spine. Cold tendrils drag from between the whorls of my brain.

I lurch round, catch a glimpse.

The red-black monster from my nightmares, framed by broken wall, reeking of burnt steel and scorched oil, her void-dark mask riven by a mirror of my scar. She holds a wriggling pale lump aloft in one hand, a cold slug of limp tendrils, slick with my blood, grown turgid on a diet of cerebrospinal fluid and the effluence of long-forgotten dreams.

She crushes the wriggling obscenity in her metal fist. It bursts like a balloon filled with rancid salt water.

~~~~~~~

My eyes fly open.

My lungs fill with a gasp, as if only just wakened.

I feel like I’ve been lost in deep dreams, for aeons of time.

My prosthetic hand is open before me, cold slime dripping from mechanical fingers, scraps of grey flesh caught in the joints. I wipe it on my opposite sleeve, cringing with disgust, thankful that insensate carbon fibre can’t feel the details. The cold slug is gone; vodka didn’t kill it, only made it retreat, but now it’s been ripped clean from my head. I slap my left hand to the back of my neck, but there’s no wound, no blood, no monster to my rear. Only the door back to the corridor, restored to where it should be.

The hospital room is just as it was. A plain box with white plastic walls, strewn with the mechanical detritus of a burn unit. A television plays mute cartoons to itself. Half-dead flowers wilt in a vase by the bed. A wide window looks out across grey Oxford skies, the underbelly of the storm threatened by concrete towers, droplets of stale rain running down the glass.

A young woman is propped up in the hospital bed.

Brown eyes, dark-ringed with exhaustion, sullen with a unique species of petulant defeat. Long brown hair, limp and lifeless, lying across the shoulders of crumpled pajamas, tangled in the back from the unkind surface of hospital pillows. Sallow skin, the pale of a mushroom kept from sunlight for years. A slight pout on her lips, caught between humiliation and a close cousin to hate.

Her name is Willow Finch.

But that is the only thing I know about her, the only certain fact which remains real in my mind. All else is washing away, scoured clean by the harsh clarity of awakening.

All my memories of Willow begin to fade, drifting into the colourless shade of recent dreams. Every time our lips touched, every hasty embrace, every hushed whisper. Every confidence, every secret, every private admission of unspeakable lust. All our shared history grows thin and pale, the spent dregs at the bottom of the longest of all nights.

Can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t feel blood in my veins. My jaw works, but words won’t come out. My eyes mist with tears, but I can’t cry over things that never happened.

I’ve been woken, by force, from a decade-long dream.

Willow tuts. “Now look what you’ve done.”

She rises from the bed, like no mortal can; she floats up from the pillows, sheets falling from her body, trailing down curves I thought I knew. The memory of her skin and her warmth recede, swallowed by grey darkness. She straightens up, feet leaving the mattress, floating six inches off the surface. Her hair billows out, as if caught in a frozen breeze. Her pajamas ripple and writhe, more flesh than fabric.

She looks down at me with an expression my Willow would never wear.

“You’re … ” I say, my voice reduced to a thin reed. “A Dreamer?”

Willow smiles, tight and cruel. “What gave it away?”

A tear breaks from my right eye and rolls down my cheek, burning as it falls, caught in my scar. “W-Willow? When— how—”

“I’ve been a Dreamer since before we met, my dearest Octavia.” Her smile sharpens. “But I don’t want you to feel bad for missing something so obvious. I know how much it matters to you, to know everything about me. Your incessant cataloguing of every last detail. But this? You had no chance. Or rather, I should say, no choice. I didn’t give you one. No matter how meticulous your obsession, you never could have known this. It would be rather beside the point of our relationship. So don’t fret, it’s not your fault. Don’t blame yourself. Blame me.”

Tears run freely down my cheeks, but I’m too numb to sob. I try to focus on memories of her, clutching them to my chest, grey phantoms thinning further with every passing second.

Times we kissed, things I told her, our nights curled up in secret private places. The taste of her lips. The feel of her cunt.

“I … how much … ” I swallow, vast rotten slabs of myself falling away. “Y-you and I … how much was … real?”

The cruel smile slackens. She blinks hard, a sheen of tears catching the light in her eyes. “None of it, all of it. Real does not mean the same thing to you as it does to me, my beautiful little pet.”

“You don’t even talk like her. Who … who are you?”

Her face shifts. Not transformation of form, just mere softening of muscles, loosening of eyes, rearrangement of priorities. When she smiles, she’s herself again, the girl of whom I dreamed.

“Octavia,” she says with that smile, so warm and accepting. “I’m still your Willow.”

“It’s not— you’re not real. It was all dreams.”

The smile heats up, hot enough to scorch the air. “Real is whatever I decide. And for you, this is real. Why does that make it any lesser?”

“You … you never really kissed me … or held me, or … or any of it.”

Willow’s smile twists back into a sharp-edged wound. Too many teeth in her mouth. “You won’t care about the distinction, Octavia. I meant what I said, I can put it all back, make all this pain go away. I can make it so none of the last day ever happened. You and I, our lives, your memories, it will feel just as real, just like it did before. I can put things back the way they were. Do you understand?”

Temptation roars like a disease in my guts. My lips form the first pleading word; make this all go away, plunge me back into the dream, into the dream of you. Give me back my life; give me back my Willow.

But it was all—

“A lie,” I say, so small, hot as a nugget of molten metal, burning out the infection. “It was all a lie.”

Humiliation, worse than I’d ever known was possible. Every kiss, every word, all of it fake. When I look at Willow I feel a tremor worse than any terror. She is a lie in which Octavia Carter was lost. A Dreamer who took me away, and left me a stranger to myself.

Willow sighs. “A lie you chose, again and again. Now now, my wounded bird, don’t pretend otherwise. I know you didn’t want to end up like you are now, that’s for certain. I know how much you hate magical girls, because I know everything about you—”

“What’s to go back to?” I ask. “When my life is already ruined. When you—”

Willow laughs. I’ve never heard her real laugh before, a hitching squawk of cold-faced mirth. “I made a deal, Octavia,” she says. “I made a deal before you and I even met. I can put your life back exactly how it was, and nobody will dare question the details.”

“What? What deal? With who?”

She shrugs, floats forward off the bed, inching toward me. “Dream Control, I suppose? The Trio, the ones who back them, the Gods themselves. They can’t afford not to acknowledge us. The ones like me, the lucid ones who stay in the waking world.”

I try to back away, but my feet won’t move. She has Willow’s face, Willow’s voice, Willow’s everything. She is Willow, even if not as I knew.

“Dreamers never stay,” I hiss.

Willow smiles, but not in the way I would like. “I never lost my lucidity, never left, so here I am.” She raises her chin. “I suppose in the end I made the only deal that matters. Forget all the others. My deal was with England, nothing lesser.”

“You … you work for Dream Control?” My mind can’t keep up, my lungs can’t get air. “You … what about … I’ve known you for … y-your parents, they—”

“I killed my parents, by accident, when I was eight. The ones you know are things I’ve planted in your mind, puppets I have walk around on occasion, to deflect questions from people who might think too hard. So, you see, you and I, Octavia, we do have something in common. We’re both orphans. That’s part of why I liked you, what drew me to you. We’re the same. Both betrayed by the dream.”

Willow drifts forward, gravity no object. She stretches out one hand. I can’t bring myself to step back.

“I can put it all right, Octavia,” she says. “The bombing, yesterday, it sharpened my mind. Pretending to live a normal life, it’s not enough anymore. I’m a Dreamer, and the world will bend to my will. And you, you can be my pet again, my little plaything, back just the way you want.”

Part of me wants that more than anything; for all those fading dreams to be made real again.

“Pet?” I murmur. “Plaything? I … but you and I—”

“You were mine. Are mine. I picked you up when you were a broken little bird. Back then I had no idea of your desires, but … ” She swallows, tears thickening in her own eyes. “It has been fun to explore you, my little thing. You are such a delight. You have no idea. Lucid Dreamers need anchors, you see. We grow strange without them. And you?” She sighs, sick adoration lurking in her eyes. “You are the only anchor I need.”

I’ve never argued with Willow, never once raised my voice, not a single disagreement in all my greying dreams. And now I know why.

My face hardens, my teeth come out. “I’m not a toy. And— and you, you were the only one who really saw me, you can’t, you can’t do this—”

“And this is the first time in ten years that you’ve dared to stray from my side. Magical girls, the one thing neither of us wanted. That bitch, that filthy little zoog-thing. She wouldn’t have dared take you away from me if she’d known who she was thieving from.”

“Nerys?” I whisper.

Willow cocks an eyebrow. “Is that her name? Whatever you call her, you’re not hers. You don’t belong to that rancid little clown I smell on you either. You are mine, Octavia.” Tears are falling down her cheeks now, rolling like tiny diamonds. “I’m sorry to give you such a harsh introduction to the truth of the world, but this is all there is. I know what I am, I’m powerful, so I take what I want, and all else will be left behind. England is a wreck, it would have killed you a hundred times over if not for me, but I’m more than some peasant. And you, I do not want to leave you behind. My little broken thing, my favourite. You’re mine. Come here, come back to my side, and we can both dream again.”

I finally take a step back, shaking my head.

Willow snaps. “Come here!”

“But … but I loved you, I love—”

Her face twists with a sneer, the worst thing I’ve ever seen. “You don’t love me, you fool. You’re just obsessed with me because you have nothing else, and that is very different indeed. But it’s what I like about you, one of your best qualities. Now, come back to my side. We’ll get those limbs off you and purge that gunk from your soul. You haven’t transformed yet, so it’s still possible. You can still come back, still be mine again. Octavia? Octavia, are you listening?”

Ten years of adoration and ardour go up in white-hot flame, hardening and darkening to a red-black core of baked iron.

Love does not transmute or transform, because it never existed, just the half-remembered gloss of a dark and fading dream. But the memory of it fuels a wave from my gut, vomiting up breath so hot it burns my back teeth, comes out as a bark, then pours forth in a torrent. A wave of laughter, mad and lost and cut with hot tears. Wild beyond words, beyond any control, it takes me like a storm.

Anger wakes. I know who I am.

“My whole life has been a lie?!” I scream. “You did this to me?! You … you.”

I do the unthinkable. I raise my hand to Willow. Raise my prosthetic, make a fist for her face.

She sighs, bright tears rolling down both cheeks. She drifts closer, well within my range, close enough that I could strike her with ease.

“It wasn’t a lie,” she murmurs. “It was a dream. It wasn’t love, no. And it never will be, because neither of us are capable of that. But it was the best we will ever get, and I will accept warm rot if I must. Come back to me, my Octavia. We were so good together.”

Can’t swing my fist, because it’s her, it’s still her, it was Willow all along. Anger is not enough.

She reaches out, brushes past my hair, fingertips tracing my scar; it feels nothing like her, ice-cold and dead-clammy, the hand of a corpse.

“Give up, my little pet,” she croons, her voice warbling far from human, gone too high and full of broken glass. “That’s all you were meant to be, and you were so very good at it. Give up, be mine. Let me keep you safe. My Octavia. My—”

The door behind me slams open, bouncing off the wall with a hard metal crack.

I stumble back, spell broken, twisting away from the floating memory of the girl who was once Willow Finch. In the doorway stands Grimgrave, struggling with the blonde girl from the corridor, the sharp-faced one with the bruise on her mouth. Her hand is buried in Grimgrave’s gut, Grimgrave’s fist yanking her around by her hair, both sets of teeth bared in half-matching snarls.

They both stop dead when they see.

The blonde woman leaps aside, letting Grimgrave go, as if washing her hands of the whole situation. Her sharp eyes flicker with disgust over Willow’s floating form, then lock on mine with a heady cocktail of acid emotion that I am too overwhelmed to decode.

Grimgrave just gapes, staring up at Willow.

“Begone, clown,” says Willow. Grimgrave squints and recoils, as if buffeted by strong winds, white hood and long hair snapping out behind her.

“Grimmy!” I cry out, lost in sudden tears, reaching for her help, though she feels so far away, beyond oceans of time. “She was a Dreamer!”

Grimgrave still has my sports bag slung over one shoulder; she swings it as a counterweight and leaps into the gale, over the threshold of the hospital room. Her motions are like a swimmer underwater, fighting against a strong current. She reaches out for my hand, fingers closing on thin air. Willow laughs from my rear, squawking mirth in cold certainty. Hands close on my shoulders, frozen as the void, burning through my coat.

“Octavia is mine!” Willow screeches, voice not of this earth. “Mine alone! I will not see my favourite sullied by some slut of a clown! Begone, you filthy little whore! You joke of a rapist! You surgical wound, you—”

Grimgrave’s face splits in a maniac grin. One hundred percent ripping wide from ear to ear, a floodlight in the night, a true star in the dark.

She yanks a sawn-off shotgun from under her white skirt — a truncated stub of metal and plastic, two barrels like empty train tunnels. She stabs it past my shoulder, grinds the muzzle into Willow’s chest.

“Occy’s one of us now!” she cackles. “No bitch exes allowed!”

Grimgrave pulls the trigger. A deafening blast roars two inches from my right ear. Willow howls like a banshee, a voice from a nightmare, bleeding radioactive sunlight over my shoulder, hot as a furnace on the back of my neck. The window shatters; shards of glass fill the air.

Grimgrave bowls me over, knocking me down, her feet kicked out behind with a wild flail of her shoes.

The last thing I see before the world goes topsy-turvy is the face of the blonde girl from the corridor. She’s framed by the doorway, one long-fingered hand cupping that bruise on her mouth, eyes locked on my own. She stares as I go down, with jealousy and need and something I’ve never seen on any real face before, an expression I now remember only dimly, from dreams.

Then the floor opens up, spins aside, turns away. Grimgrave’s ridiculous pratfall is too silly for reality to accept. Translocation takes hold, Grimgrave-style.

For which I silently thank her, drowned by my own inconsolable sobs. Because I would rather be anywhere but here, in this cruel waking world.