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TG: its almost time to do this
TG: if were still going to do it
TG: not that i think weve got much of a choice at this point
TG: we are in this shit so deep rose
TG: i was trying to do a good thing but it all got out of hand and this isnt what i wanted
TG: but at least well go out heros right
TG: at least we fucking tried
TT: Dave.
TT: I would rather like some time alone, to lay my affairs to rest.
TT: I am surprised you have not already gone quiet to do the same.
TG: maybe im still in denial about all this
TG: i dont even know anymore
TG: but ok
TG: yeah
TG: ha
TG: i guess this means our kids are gonna know our fucking names
.:.
You don’t drink wine. Half are too sweet and half too bitter, but tonight the soft burn and sickening dryness seems nothing but cathartic. You didn’t even intend it, really, but one bottle left out when you locked away supplies for your child to see her through your absence was too tempting to ignore.
Some people would frown at you, for the collection of bottles you have left unarguably for her. You do not drink, yet still they sit in cupboards and closets all locked away behind mechanisms you have no doubt will be swiftly picked. Some would call it irony, some would call it bad parenting, but you? You consider it leaving her something to cling to while she watches a world of ghosts pass by the same windows you are sitting at to stare up at the stars.
You will not see another night, like this.
You will not see another night at all.
A laugh escapes you against the rim of the cup, the quiet sense of dread that has been settled in your chest awhile contracting painfully around your heart as it skips and stutters its way towards the inevitable crescendo the morning will bring. Perhaps you should be in denial, too. For a moment, you raise your phone again, look at your brother’s name on it, thumb hovering over the red.
The beat passes, and you drop your hand, folding your arms and tucking your phone away against your side as you gain companionship from your reflection instead.
To be honest, the word brother holds little meaning, just as the word daughter holds even less. You are a child of the stars, and you mean it quite literally - your fiery entry into this word is something you have researched at length, and you gravitated to others like you, although by the time you were old enough to grasp your reality, you were too late for some. You have spent hours pouring over old documents, tabloids, books, all to glean a little more of the people who are forever beyond your reach, yet still feel closer than any of those who insist on surrounding you. There were families, children, certainly - but you found yourself hesitant to approach them. You felt like you would be intruding on a life that is familiar to you, yet in no way yours to interrupt.
A young heiress was best observed through rumours and speculation than by bursting the comfortable bubble in which she hung, a fragile flower late to bloom and quick to be picked by fuschia-painted claws. You are well aware that her bubble was burnt in flames she cannot escape - it was never your place to light the fire any sooner, and what you do even now, you do for selfish reasons, for your own gain, not for hers, or anyone elses.
You will die, just as whispers in your dreams have often told you you would. You will die in glory, in defiance, in pointless sacrifice. A daughter they have sung of in their vile babbled songs who is only your blood by the burning chariot that brings her crashing from the stars shall look back upon you and long for you, just as you have sometimes longed for her as you sat upon an empty bed, knitting a long scarf in colours you hope she will like. They feel right, you can see them about her neck, albeit one older, prettier, come to you in dreamed flashes of something you feel you should not have.
For someone who has so long felt a stranger in her own body, your death should be a freedom, of a sort. It makes it no less bitter a pill to swallow. The cyanide sting of your future may smell of sweetest almonds, but though once you dined on them in pleasure now you find they simply turn your stomach.
Death was always a friend to you, but here at the last you realise you are still very much afraid.
Little Rose Lalonde who fell from the stars, and wrote long stories of meta and madness to stave off the insanity she felt beating against the inside of her skull like the leathery flapping of a trapped bat. Sweet Rose who stared at herself in the mirror one day with a glass in her hand and dark lipstick on her face and laughed until she cried about how much she looked like a mother she didn’t have. Dearest Rose who fought for the freedom of mankind even though the dark things that crawled and oozed about her mind from the blackest depths of the distant night had told her all along her world was doomed.
When you were young, the woman who was fool enough to take you in once asked you about monsters beneath your bed. You assured her the monsters were not lurking in the furniture; you knew for a fact they were writhing within your head.
Your hand is shaking, when you take another sip of your wine.
It burns like lies in your throat, promises your head will ache the day after. You cling to it, for it implies there shall be a whole day for it to ruin.
Someday your daughter will feel that fire, and you think she will find it more pleasure than mocking pain. A glass in the hand of a woman who was, but will never be, her was well loved, well savoured, well sampled. She will drink herself to ruin and then use the crumbled wreck to form herself anew, and when she does, you will be oh so proud to think how far she will have come. You might be providing her the poison, but you know she will overcome it, you are certain, you have faith. She is not the woman from your dreams who lived on it like it was air itself; she is something new, something stronger, and if she draws breath it will be from somewhere that is not the bottom of a bottle, in the end.
Perhaps you should leave her notes.
Perhaps you should leave her stories.
But then again, perhaps not. She already has your books, and you hope she will admire them. If you are honest, you never wrote them for anyone but her. You remember wizards, and so you wrote of them, and you find yourself craving only the approval of the one person who can never give it.
Someday she will read your words, and you hope as she does, she smiles.
In your dreams, you trade barbs, and waste opportunities. You squander your chances at knowing this shadow of a woman, wallow instead in foolish, childish rebellion. If you could go back, you would appreciate her more-
Go back? Go back where? These dreams are just visions, and nothing you can touch. Whatever chance was there that a girl did not take, you were not that girl in the bedroom, you were but an observer who screamed and banged their fists against the glass while she threw away the time she had, not knowing how soon it would be gone forever.
If your daughter had those chances to know you, would she have wasted them, you wonder. Would she have clung to you, and treated you dearly, or spurned you, thinking your attempts at connection were misguided and infuriating? You are unsure. In daydreams you do not admit you have, you and she get on wonderfully, and spend many hours sharing hobbies, and interests, and laughter. She sits upon your lap beneath a blanket and watches films with you, of wizards and adventure and perhaps, sometimes, silly comedies made by a man who could have done far better, if he tried.
You both giggle about it, trade snide remarks in an affectionate manner, and when she falls asleep in a bed always bizarrely surrounded by bottles and cats, you kiss her head and tell her you love her, and she replies very softly that she loves you too, Mom.
Oh.
Alone, you don’t bother to pretend something is in your eye. Tears well up with stinging swiftness, and you blink them out and down your pallid cheeks, watching the little touches of black mascara they drag with them stain your skin in the glass.
Is it possible, to miss someone you’ve never met? To yearn for simpler times, when you know things have never been simpler?
It must be, because the pain in your heart is so bitterly real, and she is so terribly far. You should have left more while you had the chance, left videos, letters, written every single thing you think and feel, left her enough of a shadow of you that she could construct you in her mind and close her eyes and think of your black lips leaving marks on her pretty forehead as you kissed her goodnight-
The time is passed, now. The morning looms.
You think you would have called her Roxy. The name feels familiar on your tongue.
Something stirs, in the back of your mind, and chitters approving, unintelligible things.
Roxy, then.
She will be such a wonderful girl.
You have a feeling, if you had a mother, you would not have appreciated her until she was gone. Perhaps if you are gone from the start, Roxy - you like using the name, it feels like falling back into comfortable old habits, despite being new - will appreciate you without delay as well. Dave often talks about his brother as though he is simply back home, and he will return and see him at any moment. You always laughed off such things, but the more you think of your daughter, now, the more you wish you had allowed yourself the same fantasies, before. Your house is big and empty; it is so easy to think she is just upstairs sleeping, that you tucked her in before you came down here to have a little nightcap, that you could just walk up there and see her and sit beside her and run your fingers through her hair and feel her warmth and know she was real and-
The thoughts end with your fist, slamming against the glass with a loud crack as the phone still clenched between your pale fingers hits the window more sharply than you intended.
She must be real. She must. You have clung all these years to whispers and promises from things you are certain man was not meant to know, you have all but sold your soul for their secrets and the visions of the future they brought you. If you are simply mad, then what was all this for? What was the point of any of it? Is this all just to try and break the toy of the being that has made your home her plaything? Is this all just an attempt to tear everything to shreds, so that you leave the world more chaotic and scarred in your absence?
When you were younger, you enjoyed dismantling rules, deconstructing realities, but you are older now. This world is already broken enough, and you are jumping across the cracks and chasms carved through it by a three-pronged nightmare. By the time your daughter walks these halls (she will, she will, she must) the chasms will be yawning wide all about her, and this will be an island in an ocean of blood and regret. You chose it just for her, built it just for her, and now leave it just for her. It is all arranged, by people you know you can trust, although it is nowhere in your will.
The last will and testament of Rose Lalonde is to be opened on a particular date, for they will never find your body, and it will be gently pried apart by painted nails, read by inhuman eyes.
It contains precisely three words, and three you thought over for a long time. A good quote from an author whose mythos is the only thing that comes close to matching the roiling madness behind your sharp eyes.
"Never Explain Anything."
It is a rule you have long written by, and it is what you will leave as your legacy. This house is arranged, you know your daughter is coming to fill it, but the witch shall know none of it.
You are happy, in your final act of defiance, the one that shall echo even after you are rotting and gone. The witch deserves nothing better from you.
There is so much night left, and so much you could do, yet it is with a sense of finality that you turn away from yourself, and walk with echoing steps up a grand staircase that feels superfluous, along a corridor that is dark, and cold.
Your hand rests on the door of a young girl’s bedroom, and you close your eyes, ignore the fresh wet on your cheeks, and picture intently how she would be lying within, curled up in bed, how she would have your lipstick marking your last goodnight and her dreams to shield her from the coming day. With eyes still closed, you open the door, and the image within is perfect in your mind, this room as familiar to you as the back of your own hand. You tread carefully forward, setting your glass down softly so as not to wake the ghost your mind tells you is there, and oh so quietly you settle on your knees beside the bed, leaning your head on your arms with your face tipped towards where you imagine- where she is sleeping.
She is so pretty, when she sleeps.
You should have written her notes.
"I’m sorry, mother." The words slip out, and in the numbing haze you do not notice the contradiction. Your fingers reach for her, but stop short, not wanting to touch her, to wake her, to break the illusion.
You miss her terribly.
You always did.
Tomorrow you will go to die, but you think it is for the best. This world, this place, was never meant for you. You were just passing through, a shade of another time, and all you can hope is that you leave it as painlessly as you aimlessly drifted through it, a trick of the light that some fools thought belonged.
You have never belonged here, though. The terrible things in your mind are singing to you again, but this time it is a lullaby, and it beckons you home.
Will she ever think of you, you wonder.
You think of her, as your mind drifts away, to a place beside her on a bed much like this one, reading books together as she slurs about wizards and magic and sweet happy endings.
You think of her, and in the face of all that is to come, you still manage one last smile.