Dark Skies - 2. History

In the context of the post-watershed world, ’Recursion’ is neutral, medical language. What do we actually mean when we use the term ‘recursion’? Universally: The past has teeth.

Reverb

Michelle had to put her full weight against the thick wooden door to budge it. It creaked then gave way, cracking open just an inch and then a lot more, letting a miasma of body odour and nicotine and shitty punk music pour through the crack.

“Bri!” She shouted over the din, waiting a few seconds before she felt the pressure ease. Between them they got the door open and Mic poured herself through into the dank pub like a liquid. Throwing her handbag up on the sticky bar near the entrance and to the right, she scanned the room. Rett and the others were huddled down by the shallow stage at the far end. They’d stopped playing and were arguing about something to do with Violet’s bass. Without meaning to, Mic ducked partially out of view. It wasn’t hard: a disorganised mess of mismatched stools and tables cluttered the shittily lit way between the band and where she and Briony stood. Mic turned, giving the other girl a once over: ripped tights and a pleated skirt; oversized black denim jacket with various anarchist and band patches and a fresh side-shave drawing attention to her carefully applied, winged eyeliner. There was something on her cheeks; some sort of sheen, reflective and looking slightly, strategically wet. Mic found Briony’s meticulously applied makeup slightly funny; she always had. It seemed so dissonant with the rest of her whole…ouvre. Working through a rush of affection, she pulled Briony into a perfunctory hug, smiling to herself as the smell of vodka and cigarettes washed over her. It made her want to…but she was being good. Trying out the monogamy thing. Antiquated bullshit that it was.

“Hey gorgeous,” Briony smirked as they parted. “I’m glad you came. Surprised, but glad.” It was as if she were reading Mic’s mind, her lip raising to expose teeth back to her canines in a slightly feral grin before leaning back in, kissing Mic on the cheek and leaving a residue of lipgloss that Mic felt disinclined to wipe off.

“Hey yourself. Get me a drink, would you?”

“What’re you having?”

“Oh, just…surprise me.”

“Might just do that.” Briony winked, making her way back behind the bar. She bent over, opening one of the fridges, before pulling out and uncapping a beer. She held it out towards Mic, eyebrow raised knowingly in a sort of a cross between an in-joke acknowledged and a challenge levelled.

“Oh fuck off.”

“You said to surprise you. Are we not surprised?”

“Disappointed more like…” Mic waved off the beer, walking up to the bar and grabbing for a bottle of bourbon.

“Well that makes two of us, I guess.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“By my count, this is the third time you said you’d drop by - ”

“ - I’m here now, aren’t I? You asked and I came.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be you, shrug it off like it’s nothing. I know you don’t wanna talk about it, but…c’mon, Chel.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“Okay, ‘Mic’,” Briony rolled her eyes. “Since we’ve been talking again I haven’t really brought it up - "

“ - Which I’m grateful for - "

“ - Yeah, but…I’m bringing it up now. You just kind of…disappeared on us. You can’t just…pretend that never happened and segueway into…whatever it is you want to do, now.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not fair.”

“Bri…I’m a flake. I’m a mess. I’m an asshole. We all know it.” Mic shrugged, taking another drink. Briony turned slightly, shaking her head. Her eyes were…Mic took another swig of bourbon.

“Word on the street is you’re a journo, now.” Briony pivoted with a quiet, resigned sigh.

“‘Word on the street’? The fuck are you, a sixties beat cop all of a sudden?”

“Shut the fuck up.” Briony couldn’t help but chuckle to herself, before meeting Mic’s eyes. Mic felt as though she could see the cogs turning, the decision-making apparatus behind Briony’s eyes struggling to choose between small-talk or vulnerability. After a few moments: “You know I’m not going to drop this, right? I missed you. I have feelings. You hurt them.”

“Well, for that much I’m sorry.”

“Oh yeah?” Briony raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Yeah. I never meant to hurt you, Bri. Any of you. I just had shit to do. After - "

“ - It doesn’t matter why. It happened. You’re stuck with it. Still. Even with your new job, your new life, your…new girl? I know who you really are.”

“Do you, now?” Mic took a step towards Briony, right up against the bar. It was more a flirtation than a threat and they both knew it, based on the way Briony instinctively leaned in over and towards her…elbows angled just right to expose a hint of cleavage beneath her ratty band tee.

“We’re your people, babe. I know the Echoes are worse for you around…us. But we are who we were to you, still. The only ones who were there every time you broke. The only ones who’ll still be here next time you do.” Mic paused, considering.

“I - "

“ - Where have you been?!” Rett cut in, jogging over to them, pulling Mic into a tight hug. She angled her hips awkwardly against the guitar, her belt catching on a string: punctuating the embrace with a muted ‘tink’. “Girl, you’re getting so big!”

“You smell like…citrus?”

“Correct.” She felt Rett nod against her. Pulling back, she smiled broadly.

“I missed you the most, you big fucking weirdo.” Mic paused, tugging at Rett’s shirt. It was a black button up, tight against his broad chest, and the material was slightly reflective. It looked strange, contrasting with his ginger beard, shaved head and array of tattoos. It was like a viking had raided an upscale mens’ boutique: “What is this?”

“We have a gig later.” He explained, tone almost apologetic. Mic raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, yeah. It’s not the usual, it’s…fancy.”

“Sellout.” She smirked.

“Resistance requires persistence.” He replied solemnly, nodding at Briony: “Drink?”

“Have a beer. It’s already open.” Briony held it out. Rett shrugged before reluctantly taking it. “Our ‘Chel was just getting to why she’s decided to grace us with her pretence.”

“Ha.” Mic rolled her eyes.

“Obviously she came for an interview.” Rett nodded to himself.

“With you?” Mic raised an eyebrow.

“Hell yes. Getting in early. Give it six months and we’ll be the biggest thing to come out of Manchester since the world ended.”

“You sure will, buddy.” Briony reached out over from behind the bar to grip Rett’s shoulder and give him a condescending little shake.

“Where’d Vi and Grace get off to?” Mic looked around the room, her brow furrowing.

“Echo.” Rett shrugged.

“Oh. Bad?”

“Is it ever not for Gracie?”

“Yeah. Poor thing.”

“She crashed out about a month ago. Hard.” Briony added. “She’s back, but barely. So we’re all putting in double duty making sure she…y’know…sticks around. How’ve yours been?” Briony queried pointedly, shifting focus.

“They’re manageable. I’ve got my strategies. They work, mostly. You know how it is, every time you think it’s under control…fingers on flesh, a smell you’d half forgotten, some distant conversation or seeing a ghost walk by and smile at you like it’s nothing and suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely. Someone else entirely.” Rett and Briony both nodded knowingly. Mic took a swig of bourbon from the bottle, gnashing her teeth together for a moment and wincing. “Thing of it is, I spend most of my time feeling like I’m the topmost layer on a mass grave of dead past versions of me. I’m so iterated. We all are. But I get an Echo and it’s like being dragged down into the corpse pile, y’know? Back into some old, dead me. It’s…disorienting.”

“So we’re an Echo for you?” Rett asked. His tone wasn’t cruel or accusatory. Briony averted her gaze, focussing on some arbitrary spot on the ground behind the bar. “That’s why - "

“ - Look…” Mic sighed, cutting him off: “Sometimes moving on isn’t about wanting to go, it’s about not being able to stay. In a very real way, I’m still who I was when everything fell apart. Can’t stay too long in the same place, or the Echoes catch up…or I start to get complacent about things. If I ever stop long enough to feel comfortable, that could mean...”

“‘Comfortable’ isn’t something I’ve ever really seen from you.” Briony made her way out from behind the bar and sidled up to Mic, bumping into her but holding the contact. Mic could feel her warmth. It felt nice, but…the tactile graze of her spoke to a history of being touched by no one and nothing; shadows and mirages and refractions bleeding through time, and…Mic strategically shrugged her way sideways, breaking the contact. Bri glanced at her. Mic saw the glimmer of hurt in her peripherals and buried it deep.

“You think not?” Mic smiled sadly. “We were all getting pretty comfy, no?”

“I mean, I thought we - "

“ - Okay, she’s good.” Vi incidentally terminated Briony’s line of thought, making the announcement to no one in particular as she emerged from the door to the backroom, closing it gently before making her way over. Mic averted her eyes the moment they met Vi’s…saw Vi’s steps stutter momentarily. “Oh. Would you look who’s back?” She drawled. Mic had forgotten that voice - what it did to her - all...smoky and riverine, flowing and wafting around her like an aura.

“Be nice.” Briony warned. Vi positioned herself directly in front of Mic. Mic had forgotten how tall she was. Standing toe-to-toe, Vi was a good couple of heads worth of height over herself.

“I’m always nice.” Vi stated in the deadest deadpan Mic had ever heard. She forced herself to look up at Vi, their eyes meeting.

“I invited her. Thought it’d be good to clear the air.” Briony offered.

“There’s air to clear? Huh. News to me.” Vi’s eyes were hypnotic. Mic felt…paralysed. No, that wasn’t quite right. More…deer in headlights. Car stalled on the tracks with an oncoming train bearing down. “Bourbon, please?” Vi raised an eyebrow. Mic took a swig and then handed the bottle over, watching as Vi did the same, her mane of thick, curly jet-black hair falling back around her shoulders…pale vampiric skin, smoky overdone eye makeup seemingly drawing in and soaking up light from around her. There were a few barely noticeable patches of regrowing stubble around the corners of Vi’s chin that seemed to punctuate her passive little snarl. “Thanks, Chel.” Vi thrust the bottle back at Mic, turning away and towards the bar.

“Gracie’s okay, then?” Rett smiled awkwardly, clearly trying to diffuse tension.

“She’s tough. She handles her shit. We don’t have to worry about her going weird, bottling it up until she just…cuts and runs.” Vi spat the last few words back in Mic’s direction.

“Vi…” Rett muttered.

“I love you both, but you’re doormats. Why is she here? What does she want? She never apologised, never made things right. I know you’ve both caught up with her behind Grace and my backs, and that’s fine. But worming her way back in with you doesn’t mean she’s back in. It doesn’t mean she gets to be here.”

“I’m sorry, Vi. I just…missed you guys. When Bri asked me to come - ”

“Cry me a river. You should’ve known better. Isn’t that your whole thing? Thinking you know best and acting accordingly?”

“Come on, I - “

“ - Save it.”

“I fucked up. I’m sorry.” Mic hissed out through gritted teeth.

“Knowing you’re a piece of shit doesn’t absolve you from the consequences of being a piece of shit.” Vi shrugged. She glanced at Briony: “Why exactly am I not kicking her out on the spot?”

“She’s family.” Briony said quietly: firmly.

“She’s our own personal Yoko-fucking-Ono…” Vi bit back.

“Well actually,” Rett raised a finger, preparing to launch into an analysis of what actually broke up the Beatles.

“Dude, read the room.” Vi pre-empted in his direction, before focussing back on Mic specifically: “You damn near broke up the polycule.”

“Vi - "

“ - We thought you were dead, Chel. We were in a relationship and you just…fucked off out of our lives like it was nothing. Without a word. We looked for you. Eventually worked out you’d hooked up with some normie, become a fucking hack; with what qualifications, by the way? Are they fake?”

“No.” Mic admitted quietly. “I got my Bachelor’s back before the Echoes.”

“Which feels like yet another thing we should’ve known. I guess you always had one foot out the door, huh? God, did we ever really know you?”

“An argument could be made that you were the only ones who did…” Mic said slowly.

“Great. So the ‘real you’ is a fucking asshole, and the ‘fake you’ is this doting, monogamous wage-slave? Not sure which I’m hating more right now.”

“I needed - "

“ - You can’t just…do whatever you want at the expense of people you’ve made promises to…commitments to, and say it’s fine because it was ‘right for you’.” Vi paused. “No, actually, you can, but there are consequences. These two might be willing to forgive and forget, but you’re fucking dead to me. And if you so much as look in Grace’s direction - "

“ - Vi, I’m sorry…”

“It’s too late. It’s not enough.” She shook her head. She nodded to Briony: “You wanna let her back in? Fine. It’s on you. But keep her out of our fucking house.” Vi finished with a growl, stalking back towards the back room. For a few moments there was silence.

“Well that went about as well as it - "

“ - She’s not entirely wrong, ’Chel.” Rett interjected softly. “You broke our hearts. And now you just…walk back in like nothing’s changed? Me and Bri, we’ve been catching up with you for a few months now, and…we’ve talked about it, y’know? It’s like you want to pretend none of it ever happened. That hurts. That’s confusing for us. I’m not even saying you can’t have it, but…what do you want?”

“I don’t know.” Mic replied quietly; sincerely. “I still love you all. I think I always will. But I can’t be her. I can’t be the girl you all loved. Vi’s right. And if I wasn’t willing to hurt you all again, I wouldn’t have come back.” Briony sighed.

“Then I think you’d better go. This was a mistake. I’m sorry. Me and Rett, we’ll always be here for you, but…”

“But I’m intruding.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you are.”

“Okay.” Mic breathed. “See you when I see you.”

Recursion

Mic had spent the day at the Orphean campus, futilely meandering around, talking to whoever would talk to her…taking notes. None of it useable. She couldn’t get her head in the game: it was fixed - implacably and definitively - on the events of yesterday. Mic didn’t have time to dwell on it but she couldn’t help herself. Rett had been right: they were Echoes to her. That was the problem with permanence in the world they’d found themselves in. It was no one’s fault, really, just…a byproduct of the way the architecture of self became weightier with time spent, familiarity compounded, until you found yourself crushed under the weight of the history of it all. Mic supposed maybe she was just too weak, too fragile to…endure the weight of it. Periodically, a clean slate was needed. She could handle Echoes. She was better at it than anyone she’d met. People, though? The weight of them? The heaviness of connection and history? Less so.

It was raining when Mic left Wythenshawe. Dense, heavy droplets impacted sporadically, like punctuation, as she walked towards the nearest station. The patter grew increasingly intense, forcing her to break into a reluctant run for cover. Huddled under an awning and trying to get her bearings, she felt as if she could almost hear Vi’s voice through the cacophony of rain drops on metal and pavement; a sensory bleed-through of thought intruding on white noise. She let her head loll back against brick, biting her lip, remembering the way that voice used to sound, before the venom. Back when it only said sweet things; kind things…things that made her feel warm and seen, or made her breath rasp and hitch. It was easy to get lost in the memory of it. When she finally made it to the station - darting from patch of cover to covered patch of sidewalk - she took the train into the city instead of out.

By the time she showed up at the familiar door, Mic was dazed and shaking. As the door slowly opened, she was breathing heavily; her body dysregulated and her mind racing.

“Y’know what, fuck you, Violet!” She shouted, barging into the doorway and forcing the door open fully, backing Vi up against the wall of the entranceway. She kicked the door shut behind her, forcing a finger up into Vi’s face: “How fucking dare you?!” Vi just stared at her, shellshocked. Mic’s brain started to cycle back through a hundred vignettes of her standing in that same entranceway; taking her coat off, pressed up against the wall herself, or kissing Vi in the doorway. Mic could picture the current scene from a few metres away; the significantly taller girl prone against the wall with her aggressively waving a finger in her face…and Mic backed up, holding up her hands almost apologetically. “You always knew who I was. Better than anyone. Yeah, I fucked up, but you knew I was a fuckup. And you come at me with like…’stay away from Grace’? ‘Keep her out of our house’? Like I’m a monster?”

“Are you not?” Vi asked, her head tilting to the side as her arms slowly slid into a tight fold across her chest. “Do you know what you did? Do you care?”

“I ran. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Vi asked, with a shrug, looking down at her feet. Mic paused.

“What?”

“Why did you run? Wasn’t I - weren’t we - enough for you?” Mic inhaled sharply. The question reverberated inward, recollections and rhymes attaching themselves to it; Echoing back through all the times Vi had reassured her, comforted her, made her feel safe. It broke her heart, hearing that tremor of uncertainty coming from the girl who had always held space for her own brokenness and asked so little in return. She covered her face with her hands and ran them down her cheeks, surprised by how wet they suddenly were. She realised she was sodden. She tried to wipe her hands off on her coat, only to find it equally soaked through. “Come on,” Vi sighed, grabbing for Mic’s wrist and pulling her deeper into the apartment. It was all so familiar to Mic. She watched as Vi ducked into the bedroom, returning with a couple of towels and some oversized clothes: sweatpants and a band tee. Vi pointed towards the dryer without a word.

“Thanks…” Mic murmured. Slowly, she made her way to the bathroom, stripping down, towelling off, and pulling on the dry clothes. The shirt wasn’t washed and it smelled like Vi. Her eyes flickered shut as she resisted the urge to pull the collar up to her nose. She left the bathroom, dumped her wet clothes into the dryer and turned it on. It's machinery rumbled to life hesitantly. Begrudgingly. Crotchety old man of an appliance that it was. And it was all so...familiar. In a different order, under different circumstances, she had performed all these actions before. They felt...lived in.

“So?” Vi stood across the room, holding a tumbler of brown liquor.

“So…what?”

“Oh fuck you, ‘Chel.”

“It’s not that you weren’t enough.” Mic admitted cautiously. “It’s that…I don’t know how to explain it…”

“We were too much?”

“No, I just…”

“You owe me an explanation.”

“I’m trying,” Mic insisted. “Just…let me talk it through, okay?” Vi rolled her eyes and nodded, taking a sip of what was probably bourbon. Mic sighed, slouching her way to the couch, sitting down and folding one leg over the other. “The version of me who I was, then…I was happy. ‘Happy’ isn’t a permanent state. It’s not something you get to hold onto.” Wordlessly, Vi moved towards her, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch, one knee up on a cushion and facing Mic. “The idea that one day, I’d be looking back on that…that the present would be an Echo in the future, and it’d be…intertwined with whatever fucked up ending it all had, I…I wanted to keep it safe from that. I wanted the memory of you all, loving me…making me happy, to stay…pure. Before I managed to fuck it up like I always do. I didn’t want the memory of you to be through the lens of my inability to be a functional partner.”

“You…see the iro - "

“ - Yes I see the fucking irony of that. The irony of that haunts me, Vi.”

“So it wasn’t because you - "

“ - No. It wasn’t. I never stopped loving you. I just needed to run before you stopped loving me.”

“But Chel - "

“ - No, I know. But that’s my entire history, Violet. That’s the only data I have access to. There’s something in me…and I don’t know what it is, but there’s something buried in my behaviour, or my mind, that…when people see it, when they peel back enough layers of me to uncover it, it’s incompatible with loving me. This isn’t a…self esteem thing, I don’t even know what part of me to hate, or to change, I just know - know - that there’s something fundamentally wrong in me. Something…that makes people…hate me. I wanted the versions of you, of Grace, of Bree and Rett that I was going to be forced to relive through god damned Echoes…to be the versions who hadn’t seen it. Y’know: whatever it is that makes me impossible to love?” Vi downed the last of her bourbon, leaned to place the tumbler on the coffee table, and closed the distance between them. Reaching up, she cupped Mic’s face in her hands, making eye contact, waiting for the small nod and breathy “Please…” to rush from between Mic’s lips before covering them over with her own. She inhaled sharply as Mic’s arms wound around her, arching her back and pressing against Mic, pushing her back against the arm of the couch. Hands still on Mic’s cheeks, she pulled away, reclaiming eye contact with deadly seriousness:

“I will never stop loving you.” Involuntarily, Mic groaned, feeling herself melt and her eyes flutter closed as Vi’s lips went to her neck.

“That’s what they all say,” Mic whispered bitterly.

“I’m not ‘them’.” Vi growled, nipping her teeth against Mic’s neck, making her flinch and grin.

“God…Dylan…”

“Who?”

“My girlfriend. I’m such a piece of shit, Vi…”

“Yeah, maybe…” Vi shrugged into her, kissing up and around her earlobe. “But none of us love you because you’re good.” Mic grabbed at Vi’s hair urgently, managing to get a hold of her face, anchoring her into place and staring at her:

“Say it again,” Mic murmured.

“What?”

“Tell me what I don’t have to be.” Vi nodded.

“You don’t have to be good…or useful…or strong, baby. You never did with us and you fucking know it. The fault-lines of your soul are a map to us, not an excuse to discard you.”

“You still want me?”

“I will never not want you.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“What if I run again?”

“You don’t have to.”

“But I might.”

“And now we know that. And now I know why. We can work with this. I don’t want to clip your wings, sweetheart, I just want…”

“To know you’re loved?”

“Same disease, different symptoms, I guess.”

“Anxious versus avoida - Ow!” Mic yelped as Vi grinned and latched onto her neck, biting down with a practiced amount of pressure.

“Don’t start with that shit. I swear, every journalist wants to be an armchair everything. Fucking…psychologist, physicist, financial analyst…”

“Fuck you,” Mic laughed, throwing her weight into Vi, trying push her back against the couch but finding herself prone, arms pinned on either side of her head, Vi straddling her into the couch and bearing down on her.

“Oh please.” Vi rolled her eyes. Mic had seen that eyeroll a hundred times - more - and…her vision swam, like a thousand panes of an infinity mirror superimposing themselves one over the other; different fractal representations of Vi, smirking at her…that look in her eyes.

“I want you back,” Mic admitted. “I want you all back.” And quietly; without fanfare, Mic’s dam broke. Every version of Vi melted into every version of her. Mic lost herself in the Echo of every iteration of that moment, threading back through her history.

Distant Thunder

Harsh shards of light - headlights and strobing, unnecessary floods - spun and twisted through the windows, skittering unbidden into the apartment before dissipating, as if by osmosis, into nothing. The punctuating lights, cutting through the soundscape and into the apartment…they soaked into the softer, more consistent glow of street lights; neon brocades; more faintly, the full moon in the sky above, their aggression overpowered by consistency. In the distance, thunder rumbled and rippled, creating an audial visualisation of distance: closeness receding; distance contracting. Soft rain on tin and tile and leaves and concrete built a steady atmospheric metronome. Mic lay, angled awkwardly into Vi’s naked body on the long, narrow couch…less like a couplet and more like discreet matter conjoining into a single, inseparable state. She slowly raked her nails up and down the other girls soft torso. Occasionally she inched back towards Vi’s waistline…lower…her eyes slanting upwards; gauging the reaction. There consistently wasn’t one. Mic wondered about that. Dissonant: not like it had been, Echoing back through time. New Vi. New reactions.

“This doesn’t feel real.” Mic muttered. “Feels like an Echo.”

“Squeeze your shoulder.” Vi instructed, yawning and rolling slightly, nestling into her. Slowly, reluctantly, Mic did just that, awkwardly angling her arm to tentatively envelope her shoulder with her fingers. She pressed down, provoking a dull ache. She realised she’d been holding her breath and nuzzled into Vi’s neck, kissing at her flesh.

“You were always so good at this.”

“You’re better. Difference is you want to drown in it.”

“No…” Mic chuckled.

“Yes…” Vi almost hissed, the ’s’ at the end of the word distending, arcing like it was rolling off of a forked tongue. “You make me want to, too.”

“Do I, now?”

“Sometimes. When I’m feeling…” Vi started, stopped, then sighed. “Weak.”

“I make you weak?”

“Oh…baby: you make me very fucking weak.”

“I can be strong for you,” Mic offered, surprised at how breathy the words were as they slipped from between her lips. Vi laughed. With an edge of bitterness.

“Save it for the girls who don’t know you like I do.” Vi shook her head.

“No, I can,” Mic insisted, angling herself up on her elbow.

“You’re strong like…a hurricane. You don’t tilt towards building things up, it’s…more the other thing.”

“Oh.”

“Oh come on,” Vi sighed. “Before…well, before, you were begging me to tell you that being good didn’t matter to me.”

“Just because I’m not a good person doesn’t mean I can’t be good. To you.”

“Then be it, ‘Chel. Don’t say it, do it.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, exactly. Okay.”

“You seem different.” Mic sighed.

“Bad different?”

“Oh. No, never.”

“You still love me?”

“Yes, always.”

“Does it matter, then?”

“It matters…academically.”

“Like I’m a research subject?”

“Aren’t we all, to the people that love us?”

“Bleak.”

“Not inaccurate, though.”

“I suppose not. From a certain angle.”

“So what’s changed?” Vi considered that for a few moments. Mic gave her thought process some space to breath, waiting patiently.

“Innocence lost, I guess?”

“Oh.”

“No, don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like…that. Things changed. I changed, you changed…change is constant. If you want us to love every version of one another, that does sort of need to include the new ones.”

“In my brain…every new version of you is a version that might not love me anymore. It’s like I said, I have data - “

“Your brain’s an asshole, Mic. You know this. In two days I went from saying you were dead to me to…using you to stress-test my IKEA furniture: don’t doubt that I love you. Your claws are in deep.”

“Deep enough?”

“Bone deep? In my marrow? That deep enough to reassure you?”

“You can’t…” Mic trailed off. She angled her head down, deeper into Vi’s chest. “You can’t say shit like that to me if it’s a lie, y’know? It has to be true. It has to stay true. You know that, right? I’m not like other girls. I don’t stop loving the people I love. I don’t stop feeling the things I feel.”

“I know. And I’m more sure of it than anything. Even when I hated you I loved you.”

“You hated me?”

“You left me. Us. Our…little family. Yes, Mic…I kinda fucking hated you.”

“Me too.” Mic admitted. Vi leaned down, kissing the top of her head. “What changed?”

“Mostly? You reminding me that you need to be protected from yourself just as much as any of us need to be protected from you. It’s easy to forget, y’know? When someone hurts you - badly - it’s easy to only see that version of them. To reduce them to that one thing you’re scared of.”

“Dylan’s gonna hate me.” Mic sighed. “I guess I have to…I dunno, do the thing.”

“I don’t know how anyone could do monogamy with Echoes, to be honest.” Vi sighed. “Love is almost as strong as hurt. Bleeds right back into your schema. Can’t fuck anyone without an enthusiastically participating audience of your exes. Can’t love anyone without remembering all the times you felt like that before, without those people sidling up beside you. Hard to hide, too. Someone knows you - like really knows you? They’re gonna see it. See them.”

“Dylan gets that. As long as it’s just Echoes, she…” Mic trailed off. “I’m a bad person.”

“So I have a question.”

“What?”

“More like…a theory, I guess.”

“Oh god, just say it, whatever it is.”

“Is she - "

“ - Yeah.” Mic nodded into Vi’s chest.

“Do you - "

“ - No, it’s not like that. I’m not like…a chaser. We all just…run in the same circles. It just sort of happened. If anything, the reason I’m attracted to her is the opposite of the reason I’m attracted to you.”

“How so?”

“With you, I feel…sheltered. Protected. With her, she…she needs me.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“I dunno, maybe you are a bad person.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Not that it matters.”

“Huh?”

“I wasn’t…playing it to the crowd when I said I didn’t need you to be good for me to keep loving you, ‘Chel.”

“I love you, Violet.” Mic breathed, nestling into her.

“I love every atom of you.” Vi whispered. “I will till it kills me.”