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april
Alex dreams every night of slaughter and starfire and screaming.
The nightmares have been relentless ever since she first woke up from subconsciousness to discover how the world had been reinvented. They’d won the siege at Meya, but without the cost of endless lives and a blistering trail of destruction and chaos. The royal family were assassinated by somebody they’d believed to be on their side of the way. Kaiden had saved her skin when the exhaustion of liberating Aven’s enslaved masses had left her blindly vulnerable, but not without protecting the anonymity of what he could do and who he was. She jumps every time she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror; she still hasn’t entirely remembered that her hair’s no longer her natural colour but instead a stark, icy white — the very evidence of how she’d destroyed Vae’varka, how she’d destroyed her sacred bond with Xiraxus.
All things considered, it takes a few weeks before Alex can properly break the habit of flinging her thoughts out to Xiraxus whenever she forgets that they’re no longer bonded.
It’s strange. It’s painful . For the first time in about six months — technically it’s half that, but time paradoxes are absurd like that — Alex has her mind entirely to herself. Of course, she’s tactful enough to never express that sentiment aloud, as the many hundreds of souls who were in a similar circumstance had an experience nowhere near as pleasant. But she catches herself missing the echo of voices — Xiraxus’ wry remarks, Niyx’s snarky retorts, always there, always comforting her even if they weren’t currently bickering in her head.
That first month is a sleepless blur of attending mass funerals and dodging the press and sitting in diplomatic conferences and getting grilled by skeptical Wardens. It’s a relentless four weeks where Alex is fairly convinced she doesn’t once draw a breath of fresh air, wrapped up in a relentless assault of expectations of what to do and things to say and events to attend.
She doesn’t actually get a break until Roka Dalmarta realises she hasn’t had a single wretched opportunity to take her parents’ urns back to Freya and puts his foot down, threatening he’ll personally declare war on the next person who tries to rope her into whatever next errand or meeting. Alex decides to take his word as purely hyperbole and fucks off back to her home world with the urns and a satchel of necessities, firmly telling Soraya to stay put and not attempt to transport herself across galaxies.
Not that it’s much of a break, between organising the funeral and wading through the endless shitshow of legalities and delegating with extended family members she hasn’t properly seen since she was about thirteen and working out what to do with the shipping container’s worth of miscellaneous artefacts and historical documents her parents have accumulated over a lifetime. They won’t be remembered in the archaeological sphere, and the reality of the wastage of their life’s work hits Alex in the gut as she stares down at the manilla folders of drafted journal papers they could never get published. They also have a lot of debt, and their few assets that Alex manages to sell is immediately drained into repaying those.
By the end of the ordeal, Alex is left with no parents, no place to truly call home, and next to no money. Despite the absolute wreckage she’s left Medora in, it’s still a better option than the place where she was raised.
may
Exams are canceled.
Darrius bumbles on about formalities but everyone knows it’s because too many kids were killed and too many more were dragged into an army, whether it was Aven’s or an impromptu militia of teenagers trying to scrape through slaughter by the skin of their teeth. Everyone seems to come to the consensus that it’s somehow Alex’s doing, and for a few days everyone says some nice things about her before they remember that they’re supposed to be blaming her for a genocide, exactly as Aven Dalmarta had intended.
She can’t really bring herself to care, because that’s when it starts getting bad .
Of course, she’d been kind of bad before. The general state of anxiety ever since she first got deposited in Medora and realised she essentially had a stalker, even if she hadn’t articulated it as such at the time. The nightmares, ever since Jordan had been Claimed, go from macabre creations that clutch at her heart to ones that prompt her to wake up screaming. The panic attacks, episodic at first, now almost a daily occurrence that she still hasn’t figured out how best to avoid.
But there’s other shit that’s new, as well. She flinches at loud noises and makes a point of avoiding crowds or conversing with strangers, lurking behind her friends until the coast is clear. She finds herself trapped in her own head most of the time, her body functioning purely on autopilot as her thoughts spin with screams and starfire, until one of her friends gets a good look at her and can snap her out of it. She’s violently moody, crassly disrespecting professors in the middle of the class one minute and crying in the girls’ loos because some painful memory of D.C. or Niyx bubbled up and caught her off guard. Sleeping becomes a chore of avoiding nightmares and trying to convince herself she’s not afraid of the dark like a stupid child, clutching at the knife under her pillow; sometimes she only feels safe enough to fall asleep when both Soraya’s at her feet and Kaiden’s shielding her back. Eating reduces into a chore, too, entirely forgetting for the majority of the time and forcing it down only when somebody notices and makes her.
She’s even embarrassingly clingy as a girlfriend to Kaiden, which she thought she’d never be that sort, but he doesn’t seem to have many objections about her demanding his attention and affection as soon as they’re in the vicinity of each other. The public scrutiny levied at him and his gift is just as bad, if not worse, as the things they say about her , which just naturally forces them even closer. He’s good at dismissing it, most of the time, but the bags purpling under his eyes from sleep deprivation say otherwise.
Alex doesn’t really realise that until the academy doctor decides to diagnose her with an eating disorder , of all the fucked-up things she could possibly have. She laughs in their face and stalks out of the Med Ward, avoiding looking too closely at her reflection in the mirrors. She wouldn’t have done that if that was Fletcher — but it wasn’t Fletcher, because he was dead too.
But she doesn’t tell anyone about the new doctor’s diagnosis.
You’ve got the medical history for it , the new doctor, Ephraim, had said as she puzzled over Alex’s dental records. Alex had stood there and wondered how many detentions she’d get for drawing a weapon on a faculty member, especially when he’d had added invasively, How old were you the first time you had an episode? Thirteen, fourteen?
She’s never told anyone about that either.
Instead she skips Combat, because Karter doesn’t want to pair her up with Kaiden or Declan these days for whatever stupid reason, and the list of men she can stomach touching her is steadily decreasing by the day. She gatecrashes Bear’s Equestrian class instead, because Tayla still likes her enough to look the other way when Alex is blatantly breaking the rules, even asking her to help some of the younger kids with their technique.
They stare up at her, wide-eyed and gaping-mouthed. Alex grimaces to herself but has a stab at being upbeat, making encouraging comments every now and then or demonstrating herself.
“You ride draekons, don’t you?” One of them asks abruptly, a mousy little thing with braces that makes Alex immediately speculate whether she was really that tiny at the age of fourteen.
Her fingers clench around the reins. Her knuckles are often scabbed over these days, and one of them splits from the tension. “Not as often as people think I do.” She plasters a smile onto her face. “By the way, you should try looking in the direction of where you want to go, not just down at your horse.”
june
It doesn’t feel like summer. It still feels like hell.
Nisha James is finally out of the hospital, switching between a wheelchair and some sort of intuitive suit called an exoskeleton depending on the day. She’s still not medically cleared to command the military full-time but does it anyway, mostly because General Drock despises paperwork with a passion. Sometimes Alex tags along with her, somewhat because there’s a rumour about breeding Shadow Wolves for military use and mostly she suspects because everyone in her life seem to be on some sort of roster to help keep an eye on her.
Since she’s also one of the only survivors from the bombing that killed the royal family that are still loyal to their side, then Nisha has to give a testimony on the events that lead up to it. The testimony is recorded and publicised; they all read it, of course. Alex does what she does best these days and cries hysterically over it for about eight hours straight, mostly out of the relief that her best friend had died swiftly and mercilessly.
Kaiden and Bear seem to be surgically attached to the newsfeeds and it drives Alex mental. People are starving, especially those who lost everything and don’t have the means left to feed their children. There’s protests outside the dilapidated palace almost every day, demanding a system that lets them have more of a voice after so many decisions were made for so many. There’s still factions of the Garseth who somehow slipped through the victors’ fingers, and every so often there’s an ambush, a hasty massacre in a town square or a refugee camp before the Wardens or the Zeltora can intervene.
What’s left of her friends try to keep themselves busy, until the new year at the academy begins again. Jordan drinks so frequently that Alex forgets when she last saw him sober, and when he’s not drunk he’s high out of his mind. Declan gets into fights for money, and afterwards he and his best mate argue about the ethics of it all as Kaiden dutifully patches up his wounds. Bear retreats into sketchbooks and chucking oil paints on canvas, rarely leaving his family’s attic so he can continue obsessively detailing his works. When Kaiden’s not fussing relentlessly over his best mate or his family or her, he’s fixated on perfecting every gift in his arsenal, both old and recent acquisitions, often pushing himself until he passes out cold. And Alex —
— well . Alex isn’t entirely sure what she does with herself that isn’t just playing diplomat where she’s not exactly qualified to or popping up at reconstruction sites to help or mourning over exactly how severely Aven fucked up both the world and herself.
About three weeks into the summer break, Jordan talks her and Bear into attending a classmate’s bloody birthday party. Still, Alex puts on an outfit that isn’t just work pants and boots and a weapons belt, putting a loaned hoodie low over her silver-white braid in a pissweak attempt to deflect attention. Jordan laughs a little and Bear hands her a joint sympathetically and they all pretend this is exactly like the third year when they were sneaking off to parties in the Ezera forest on a Saturday night.
It’s surprisingly revelatory , in ways that are good and bad.
That’s a lie. It’s mostly bad.
Alex chats with some other girls at the bonfire and learns that a lot of kids aren’t going back to the academy this year, apparently. Their parents don’t feel safe sending their children away after so many gifted people became targets of a megalomaniac, or maybe they can’t afford it. After all, the economy’s close to nonexistent, according to the constant burble of news reporters emitting from her boyfriend’s ComTCD.
She also learns that she probably shouldn’t have drank alcohol as well as smoked, and Coms Kaiden in a hysteria when neither Jordan or Bear pick up. Later on she’ll learn that they were both fucking people to try and compensate for the absence of who they really wanted. Despite that Kaiden and his family all simultaneously go ballistic when they find out, (which is rather sweet, all things considered) she doesn’t fault the boys for leaving her to her own devices.
“My head’s too empty without Niyx or Xira,” she whimpers to him, pathetic and overstimulated and entirely disorientated. She’s locked herself in a stranger’s ensuite bathroom; she’s fairly certain there’s a couple having sex on the other side of the door. “Is it bad that I just want it to fill up again?”
“Of course it’s not,” he assures her, voice raspy from sleep. There’s swift movement in the background. Alex can picture him on his feet, navigating his way through the darkness of his aunt’s house. “How much have you had to drink, baby?”
Alex attempts to calculate the ratio of cheap liquor in the cups she’d downed and comes to a slightly alternate conclusion: “It’s my fault Dix is dead.”
Kaiden makes an indignant noise at the back of his throat. “It is absolutely not. I know you hate hearing it, but Aven would have gone after her regardless of her connection to you.” There’s a loud thud from his end of the connection. A door closing, perhaps. “Send me your coordinates. I’m getting you right now.”
july
She turns eighteen. Alex doesn’t fucking feel eighteen, thank you very much.
Declan and Jordan try to talk her into a night out on the town, an idea that lasts approximately seven seconds when it falls on Jeera’s ears and she points out how many women are getting spiked in bars and nightclubs now that the Wardens are stretched out way too thin to properly patrol the areas. She practically draws her Stabiliser on Jordan when he tries to push the matter, arguing that Alex is perfectly capable of defending herself.
So instead, Alex goes back to Freya, mostly because she had a pact with her dad that they would go to Berghain, one of the famous clubs in all of Europe, on her eighteenth birthday. Of course, Jack Jennings is dead and she’s more likely to have a panic attack than actually enjoy herself at that sort of thing, but in all honesty she’s not quite sure what else to do with herself.
She’s only been to Berlin once in her life before, and she mostly remembers crying on their hotel bathroom’s floor as she gagged up the pretzel she’d eaten at lunch. Her parents had been oblivious, of course, already plotting their next move. For all the history it has to offer, Berlin was always far too modern for her parents’ tastes. She wanders through a museum or three, buys an entire case of expensive German red wine, and hitches a Library doorway back to Medora. From there, she tracks down Kaiden, and they spend what’s left of the day getting exorbitantly drunk and letting him fuck her somewhere in the depths of the Library.
He’s somehow perfectly able to read her mind on the fact that Alex doesn’t want to be able to articulate a single wretched thought. She probably falls in love with him all over again every time she’s reminded just how much Kaiden gets her . He’s also gotten very good at doing all sorts of wonderful things to her body in the last few months since they first started sleeping together, which is also a definite perk.
The next morning, Alex wakes up grouchy, sore and the most hungover she’s been in her life. Despite his similar state, Kaiden whinges nowhere near as much, likely because she’s very much still naked and very much still snuggled up to him, as he forces them both to down hangover tonic and liberal amounts of fresh water.
“We should probably have breakfast at some point,” he muses at some point, his fingers twined thoughtfully through her hair, which is hilariously wild after a night of drinking and sex.
Instead of giving a normal response like a perfectly well adjusted person might, Alex instead blurts out gracelessly, “The new academy quack thinks I have an eating disorder.”
Kaiden’s hand pauses in her hair. His entirely body goes still. “ Fuck ,” he breathes after a long moment. “Nisha was right.”
“Neither of them are,” Alex snaps, slightly embarrassed that her boyfriend’s family have been speculating about her. She avoids looking at the mirror on the other side of the room, knowing fully well that all of the muscle she gained in the winter has been entirely stripped. She can’t remember the last time she picked up a sword properly, having avoided people’s invitations to spar for weeks. “I’ve just lost weight, Kaid, you know that. That happens sometimes when somebody is going through shit.”
He just looks at her sadly. “I thought we’d moved on from hiding things from each other.”
august
“Aren’t you supposed to be back at the academy?”
Despite the cynicism in Kyia’s stern gaze, Alex waves off the Meyarin’s concern with a well practised smile. She palms a Myrox knife from hand to hand; she still hasn’t yet found a permanent replacement for A’enara. Sometimes it’s the trident, sometimes it’s a fan of knives, sometimes it’s another longsword, sometimes she nicks a Stabiliser. “Kyia. Relax. It’s just the orientation day for the firsties. Fifth years are supposed to go and show them around, but Marselle gave me a pass so I wouldn’t get gawked at.”
Kyia glowers at her for another moment or so. “Right.”
She rolls her eyes. “You know just how much I love attention, Ky.”
“You could just dye your hair.” Kyia cocks her head thoughtfully. “I think you’d look good as a blonde.”
Alex makes a face of disgust. “With my complexion? Mierda . You’re just biased.”
“Just because you’re speaking a Freyan dialect doesn’t mean I can’t tell you’re cursing at me,” Kyia clucks.
“Believe it or not, I actually like this colour,” she tugs at the tail of one of her braids, watching the sunlight reflect off the combination of snowy white, silver and icy blue. She’s taken to wearing her hair out with smaller war braids when she can. “It’s unique, y’know? I don’t think you could sit down at a hairdresser and ask for something just like it.”
“You could cut it,” Kyia suggests instead. “Half the reason it’s so eye catching is because it’s past your waist.”
Alex shrugs again, swallowing the sour taste that suddenly enters her mouth at Kyia’s suggestion. Kyia means well, but she doesn’t seem to understand Alex’s attachment to her hair. It’s the only thing she’s ever really been vain about. Brushing out Alex’s hair used to be the one thing that Rachel Jennings did for her daughter on a regular basis that wasn’t remembering to make her eat or some other basic necessity. She didn’t cut it for almost eighteen months when she first came to Medora, and it reached her hips. She didn’t do so until Dorothy Ronnigan hesitantly brought it up after the royal family’s funerals, gesturing to the ends that had been singed by a loose fireball during the siege of Meya. She’d sat at the Ronnigans’ dining room table and tried not to cry as Dorothy lovingly brushed her hair and carefully cleaned up the ends — but of course she’d sobbed like a baby anyway.
Mostly because the last time somebody else had touched her hair, it had been D.C., the last time they’d spent in each other’s company. D.C. had been the one who did Alex’s elaborate warbraids before she went charging off with Kaiden to destroy the Valispath , exactly as his aunt’s battle strategies dictated. Less than forty-eight hours later, she’d been blown to bits.
Alex shrugs. She’s not lying through her teeth, not really. Today is technically the first-years’ orientation day, not that there’s not many. Like many returning students, plenty of families are hesitant to send off their kids knowing they were the prime targets of a mass murderer less than six months ago. She’d fully intended on helping the other fifth years, just to let them gawk and get it out of their systems or whatever, but she’d taken one step inside her old dorm to drop off her gear and promptly keeled over from a panic attack.
It was funny. She’d managed to cope with living in that space for herself for almost two months earlier that year, after D.C. had died, when her ghost still echoed somewhere amongst the stripped mattress and the emptied wardrobe and the bare bookshelves collecting dust. Alex had been the one to pack her side of the room up in the first place, stowing the stash of condoms and sex toys when palace delegates arrived to collect the belongings. When she stuck her nose in, the dorm hadn’t changed. Alex’s side of the dorm was exactly how she’d left in, albeit with a thin film of dust, and so is D.C.’s, but that’s the part that’s killing her. That’s been killing her, chipping away at her until she can’t recognise herself in the mirror.
Her best friend is dead, but the awful thing is sometimes Alex isn’t sure whether it’s Niyx or D.C. she’s mourning for.
D.C. had been her roommate and her confidant, her ally in navigating the ludicrous scrutiny of high school politics — oh, but Niyx had shared her thoughts and played Aven’s loyal sycophant for her and put a blade in her hand and taught her how to use it in such a way that nobody else could hurt her.
He’d died for her, and the reminder drummed constantly with Alex’s heartbeat, an irreplaceable sacrifice she’d never entirely earned, and she’d let his death condemn her, along with every other tragedy she was entirely responsible for.
september
She successfully manages to avoid the new academy quack for the first six weeks of the school term or so, until Alex neglects food for about four days straight and consequently faints in the middle of an SAS assignment.
She wakes on one of the cots in the Med Ward, surrounded by commotion. Soraya’s half on top of her, Kaiden’s standing over her with a permanent death stare fixed on his face, Jordan and Bear appear to yelling at their beloved Hunter, Declan’s hauling some of her classmates out quite literally by their cloaks, and Darrius is watching on with a sad expression, immersed in conversation with the academy doctor. His name’s Ephraim and Alex has made a point of learning absolutely nothing further about him.
She drags her hands over her face, finding there’s been an IV fixed in her forearm, and swallows the urge to retch. Fletcher would never have used needles on her if it was avoidable. She clears her throat and immediately some of the din dies down. “You lot can all calm down now.”
She attempts to drag herself upright and Kaiden’s hands fall on her back to help, supporting her weight against his chest as he presses an absentminded kiss to the crown of her head. “Scared me to death back there, baby.”
“I’m fine,” Alex murmurs, though they both know how blatantly she’s lying through her teeth, watching Darrius and Ephraim nudge their way through the crowd of people towards them.
“Most people would seek treatment after being told they have an eating disorder,” Ephraim tells her, and Alex can’t help but think how snide he sounds. She’s not the only one who picks up on it; Jordan and Bear promptly round on him instead, and Kaiden noticeably steps between herself and the doctor.
“ Enough ,” Darrius barks. “All of you, out. That includes you, Kaiden.”
“And get the damned mutt out,” Ephraim adds.
“You can try that if you want her to maul your face off,” Declan says brightly as he grasps Kaiden by the shoulder and steers his reluctant best mate out of the Med Ward with him.
Darrius supervises, thankfully, as Ephraim checks her vitals. He’s not as invasive as Alex expects him to be, but that’s mostly because Soraya is staunching distrustfully at him, her snout hovering about a foot from his face at all times. Then the doctor utters some excuse about updating her records, though it’s very clear that he’s no longer welcome for the oncoming conversation, and makes himself scarce.
Darrius pulls an armchair up next to the cot and takes a seat. He rests his elbows, tents his hands and props his chin there thoughtfully. “What do you feel comfortable telling me, Alex?”
It’s a careful, deliberate question. Alex rolls her bottom lip between her teeth and blurts out something tactless instead. “I don’t understand why you let that asshole work here after Fletcher.”
“Faculty employment is neither as consistent or as high performance as I like it to be,” Darrius admits. “It’s also not your place to comment as a student, but I’ll let the matter slide. When did Ephraim diagnose you with an eating disorder?”
Alex glances away. Her fingers dip to one of the bracelets on her wrist — a seashell one her dad had once bought her in Mykonos because he thought she’d like the colours — and begins to twist anxiously. “I dunno. Back in May?”
He exhales roughly. “Did you think he was exaggerating?”
“No. I knew it was accurate.” Alex swallows thickly. She’s feeling a little more hydrated than she was; she suspects that nourishment has been forced into her while she was unconscious. “I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
Darrius raises his eyebrow. “Did you tell anyone else?”
“Kaiden,” she admits. “About two months ago. He’s been trying to help, he gets me those military bars because it’s less actual quantity but still has energy and nutrients and that kinda stuff.” She tugs the seashell bracelet off her wrist and wraps it around her fingers absently. “But then I have a nightmare or a panic attack and puke it up again. I thought I could just deal with it myself, but —“
“But then you fainted in the middle of the Ezera forest,” Darrius sighs. “Into one of Hunter’s traps, no less. I’ve ordered him to pull you from the next overnight assignment.”
Alex jerks with surprise. “ What ?”
“Your vitals indicated you hadn’t eaten in about four days,” he rebukes. “You’re not charging off into the wilderness without supervision on camping rations , no less when you are responsible for younger students.” He pauses. “I’d like to refer you to a clinical psychologist.”
Alex shuts her eyes and turns her face away from him entirely, not caring if she’s being rude. “I’m not talking to a shrink.”
“Alex, it won’t be without precautions, I’ll make sure they have mental shields and there’s a contract —“
“I don’t care . I’m not doing it.” She sucks in a hitched breath. “I am not going to sit there and tell some stranger all of the different ways that Aven Dalmarta managed to fuck me up.”
“Well, then.” She’s not entirely sure of what to make of his tone. Is he unsure? Resigned? Annoyed with her? “If you won’t have a discussion about this, then was there a particular reason this time why you didn’t eat for several days on end?”
Alex’s eyelids flutter open a little bit as she deliberates on a response. “Just this time?”
“If that’s all you want to say, then yes.”
“What’s the date today, Darrius?”
His response is fringed with a little uncertainty. “The nineteenth of September — why?”
“Well. See.” Alex twists her seashell bracelet into an infinity loop between her hands. “My mum’s birthday is September sixteenth, and my dad’s is actually the day after on the seventeenth. Coincidence, right? And they both got tortured and then murdered by Aven’s sycophants because of me, and I’m pretty sure my mum was raped too. So. Yeah. That’s why I didn’t really have much of an appetite.”
“Ah.” He doesn’t seem entirely sure how to respond, which was honestly Alex’s intention. Darrius clears his throat. “I’ll ask the boys to come back in, and I’ll speak to Ephraim. I suspect you won’t be eager to stay the night in here.”
october
“I’m worried about Jordan,” Bear confesses quietly under his breath, though Alex can’t entirely see the point of trying to be discreet. Everyone else around them seems to be hopelessly sloshed; fifth year is for studying and for partying, it seems, though Alex can’t remember the last time she was particularly enthusiastic about either. Her grades are quite literally a dumpster fire; she can’t help but be grateful that there’s no parental figures left in her life to give a shit that she’s completely flunking almost every subject.
Alex accepts the opened beer he presses into her palm. “You and me both.” She takes an experimental swig with a grimace. “What’s the nicest way to tell him I think he’s an alcoholic without coming off as a total dick?”
“When you figure that out, pass it on,” Bear retorts. They watch their friend for a moment, from the other side of the room. They’ve barricaded themselves in the tiny, shitty classroom situated in the Combat arena for the purposes of a scarce theory lesson; the whiteboard still bears Karter’s shocking attempts at hand-drawn diagrams from the last time she’d had a class in here, well over a fortnight ago now. It’s the standard fare Alex has come to expect: the same shitty music, same cheap liquor, same crowd of faces. The only difference is which girl Jordan decides to suck face with for the evening.
She should probably bring up STD testing to him in the same conversation, come to think of it, not that it would exactly lighten the mood.
Alex shrugs and draws her knees to her chest, playing absently with the untied laces of her high-tops. “Not sure why you think I’m a reliable source for anything.”
“That’s not even half true,” Bear argues, loyally. “You’re exceptionally invaluable when we need an example of falling flat on your face.”
“Name the last time I was a total klutz, you twat,” she snorts, adding, “while I was sober .”
Bear trails off from a moment and then shrugs. “Got nothing.”
“Exactly.” Alex emphasises, feeling triumphant. For a few moments she half heartedly attempts to be enjoying herself, although Medoran beer tastes like piss on your period and their house music is somehow even worse.
Bear’s not convinced. He bumps his knee into hers. “Hey now, while we’re on the subject, I’m also worried about you.”
“I dunno why you’re wasting your time. It’s not like some psycho’s trying to slit my throat every waking hour anymore.” Alex takes a long sip despite cringing at the taste.
“You’ve clearly got PTSD,” Bear begins. He’s probably been reciting the lecture in his head for days, she thinks to herself. “You have an eating disorder , Alex, you have panic attacks sometimes multiple times a day and if you think you can hide how depressed you clearly are — well, I hate to break it to you, but —“
“Maybe Darrius should send me to you instead of some bloody shrink,” she interrupts dryly, before pushing to her feet and walking away to force herself into a conversation with the nearest classmate who doesn’t look like they’ll ask too many stupid questions.
Bear’s right, of course, not that she’d admit it to his face. The eating disorder is very much still kicking her ass, despite that the guys are all vigilantly monitoring her eating habits and she has weekly checkups with fucking Ephraim now. The panic attacks don’t seem to be ceasing or slowing down any time soon — just as Alex is sure she’s made it through the day, finally just one day where she doesn’t irrationally break down and start hyperventilating, some newsfeed update will cross her ComTCD screen or she’ll find a half-empty bottle of D.C.’s perfume and it totally sets her off. She’s not stupid enough to think she’s not depressed — normal people can get out of bed every morning and don’t think of death constantly and don’t linger a little too long over their shaving razor.
But the thing is, Alex deserves it . It’s a fact she holds to her heart with absolute certainty. Cities burned and children were killed and women were raped and men were forced into legions of brainwashed slaves against their own people, and it’s all because Alex fucked up, because she made one too many miscalculations, because she couldn’t stop Aven Dalmarta in time. Medora didn’t just suffer , she was bled dry and pillaged and razed and terrorised, so the very least Alex can do is suffer a little in return.
So yes she’s traumatised, and yes she’s in pain, but as far as Alex is concerned, it’s her own comeuppance she has to pay.
november
Kaiden insists on walking her back to her dorm after she breaks his heart.
Maybe somebody else would laugh at the absurdity of it all, but Alex just wants to cry. He shouldn’t be looking out for her. He shouldn’t be trying to protect her. He shouldn’t be — she’s set him free , boys will say like they always do, out of spite and ignorance, whenever it is that word spreads — but he is .
They don’t speak. They don’t touch. She dares a look at him once or twice, but his expression is so carefully blank that she feels sick. You couldn’t tell that he’d been crying less than an hour ago, a monumental force of nature somehow contained within human flesh and bones, begging her to keep him. Before that, he’d tried to argue with her, tried to negotiate whatever set of terms as long as it meant they’d still call each other mine , but then Alex had yelled at him — she’d never done that before, and it had silenced him.
Out of habit she wants to take his hand, or tuck herself into his side, but she swallows the impulse every time with a shudder. Now she must relearn to live without his place in her life. It’s entirely possible, of course, she spent seventeen years of her life without him and she was just fine , right? Never mind the fact that he’d made her feel more loved than anyone else ever had, and she’d not just believed his words but known it, known it and loved him back and then she’d used him, sucked him dry until it was all too much, the voices in her head and also the lack of them, and the knives in her room were looking all too inviting, and she’s had the letters drafted and hidden under her mattress for weeks now, but she couldn’t keep Kaiden knowing she was lying to his face every minute of every day —
— so she’s ending it, heartsick and guilty and appalled with herself.
They reach her dorm, both staring at the door. An hour ago she’d been knocking on his, already half sobbing with the knowledge of what she’d have to say to him. He’d ushered her in and held her as he always did and stroked her hair and — no, stop, stop thinking about it . She can’t get his expression out of her head, when he’d finally realised that there was nothing he could say or do, she wouldn’t have him anymore.
Alex stares at the little seven emblazoned on the door and swallows another sob, damn her. She won’t stay in there for long, not when every surface echoes with a dead best friend or him . She’ll reach for him when the nightmares jerk her awake like she does, and he won’t be there , can’t Com him and let his husky assurances drape over her scattered mind, and the realisation closes Alex’s throat to a dry vice.
Their eyes meet. It’s impossible to read his expression. Kaiden jerks a chin at the door. “I’ll see you in a few days, yeah?”
Alex feels her eyebrows pinch together. “What do you mean?”
“Ba— Alex ,” he corrects himself, and the slip of the tongue hits her in the gut a little. She watches the muscles in his neck swallow, and for the first time notices that there’s still fading love bites on his collar. She’d left them there only a few days ago; no doubt there’s still similar evidence of his own handiwork on the inside of her thighs. “I can’t stay here. I just — I need to be alone.”
Alex opens her mouth to object but can’t think of a reasonable way to say that. “That’s not like you.”
“I could say the same about you,” he replies, a little snappishly, and maybe it would surprise her if she didn’t understand his pain entirely. “Alex, I don’t understand —“
It’ll be better for him , her mind argues. It’ll hurt him less if you’re not together whenever you end up offing yourself .
But she hasn’t told him that. She hasn’t said the words, I’m dumping you because I think about killing myself more than anything else and I’m scared what that will do to you , instead feeding him more lies, small and shitty, like she’s handing him shards of glass.
She folds her arms. “Please stop arguing with me, Kaid. We’re done, okay?”
“I — everyone knows the only reason I took on Aven was for you ,” he grits out, and Alex’s lips part a little with the admission. He’s never admitted it aloud before. “The whole world has known who I am and what I can do and you know how they all reacted. I didn’t care because I had you and now —“ He cuts himself off.
Take him back. Take him back now , some stupid, needy part of her cries.
She folds her arms. “We can still be friends,” she offers limply.
He laughs, but it’s a strange, joyless sound. “We tried that before.” He catches her off guard by pressing a soft kiss to the crown of her head, exactly like he’s done a thousand times before. “I’ll make sure Declan or my sister don’t give you any grief.” Alex tries not to notice how his voice breaks at the end. Then Kaiden’s gone, his strides swift and his shoulders set. He doesn’t look back and Alex’s throat closes as she watches him walk away from her.
( Later on, in the early hours of the morning, she’ll Com him, over and over, hysteria seizing her as her wrists swell with too much blood , she’s scared and it’s too much and she doesn’t know how to stop it, but he doesn’t pick up. Kaiden doesn’t answer because she used him and wrecked him as much as she loved him and they both know it , and who knows, he’s probably made himself pass out somewhere after overexerting his gift so he doesn’t have to dwell on it too much. She can’t bring herself to blame him.
Her vision blurring through the tears, Alex hits the next name on the list of contacts in her ComTCD. This time she gets an answer.
“Darrius,” she croaks. “You need to send me away from the academy.” )
december
Alex spends the first Kaldoras after Aven Dalmarta’s defeat in a hospital.
People are more familiar with her now. When she’d first arrived, there’d been an unrelenting sea of affronted stares and shameless questions, people instantly recognising her stark white hair and the Claiming scars sketched over from the palm of her hand, or from the old wanted or valuable person, missing in action posters that had been issued throughout the continent by Aven’s campaign or the mortal kingdoms respectively. The psych ward is segregated by gender, run for individuals they decide were directly rather than indirectly impacted by Aven Dalmarta, which is a little bullshit in Alex’s opinion. The women and girls here are a slew of Warden vets, former members of Aven’s Claimed legion of gifted humans, or the Claimed survivors who’d been sent into Meyarin brothels rather than the army. Most of them hated her, but so had a lot of kids at the academy, and Alex understood — she really did. She was an easy target, a scapegoat that Aven had personally volunteered as justification for committing genocide.
The nurses and shrinks were more sympathetic, or maybe that was because they had to be, moreso interested in the scars that weren’t the result of mental enslavement but rather self harm.
Kaldoras was one of those mornings where Alex avoided her own reflection. She skirted around eating breakfast, despite that she’d probably regret it for the next week once the ward nurses caught on that she’d skipped a meal, and spent the early hours of the morning in the Institute’s shared garden, wrestling shoots of weeds away from the silverwood saplings Kyia had sent her when she’d first been admitted to the ward. She’s expecting visitors; they’re only ever allowed one at a time, but they were permitted as many one-hour slots on Kaldoras as they wanted, as long as the visitors did all the right paperwork and said all the right things.
Her first visitor is Jordan, who sits in the garden with her and pretends to know what he’s doing. He’s been more or less forced into a rehab program by Hunter in the last few weeks; before that, Alex hadn’t been able to remember the last time his breath didn’t stink of spirits.
“This time last year I was Claimed,” he admits as he passes her a trowel. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Alex shoves it into the snow half heartedly. “Maybe consider seeing a shrink, Sparky.”
“I don’t need a shrink to tell me what my issues are, moron,” he rebuts. When Alex makes a rather crude gesture to her wrists, he sighs, effectively guilt-tripped. “I’ll think about it.”
The next visitor technically isn’t authorised, but nobody’s going to try and tell that to a Meyarin king. Roka brings her a basket of fresh baked goods from his palace’s kitchens, as decadent and unbelievable as Alex remembers them to be. They sit on the stairs overlooking Kyia’s saplings and sharing the pastries.
“I miss having you in on the diplomatic meetings,” Roka admits. “You were never supposed to in the first place, of course, but nobody else tells some of those more stuck-up Shadow Walkers to shove it up their ass as brazenly as you do.”
“I can still make an appearance once they let me out of here,” Alex offers as she demolishes whatever the equivalent of a Danish is.
“Absolutely not,” he dismisses. “Must I pull the war declaration threat again?”
Bear brings her food as well, a very generous wedge of his grandmother’s apple pie and a large heated flask. “I’m not supposed to have alcohol in here,” Alex says, purposefully loudly as she accepts the flask.
“Shut up and drink the hot chocolate Evie made for you.” He sweeps her up into — well, a bear hug, pun entirely intended.
A few hours after Bear, Kaiden comes to see her. They’re more or less dating again; he visits her as much as the hospital admin will let him. Taking him back had been fairly dramatic. Turns out on the night she’d called Darrius instead — when he hadn’t answered her Coms — as per his summertime coping mechanism, he’d already been out cold from gift overuse. Alex isn’t too sure on all the details — Jordan called him in the morning, which was about as calm and non-confrontational as you could expect, and apparently one of them ended up in the Med Ward with a broken nose; nobody’s actually told her who did the job. He spent the next week or so demanding that he see her, to pretty much anybody who would listen, and somehow talked his way into it in the end.
Made good use of the big scary Conduit privileges, did you? Alex had said to him at the time.
If I recall correctly, you’ve done the same thing , he’d said wryly, sitting across from her and holding her hand, thumb stroking idly over the medical bandages that still braceleted her wrists.
I also used to toss in the word boyfriend in there somewhere , she’d retorted. If it’s not too late, can I please have those privileges back?
“I’m not going to lie, I’m not impressed about this ‘no presents’ policy they’re running today,” Kaiden murmurs as he plays with her hair. He’s been here less than three minutes and Alex is already coaxed into his lap, which probably isn’t great for her street cred. “You’re telling me I can’t spoil my girl rotten on Kaldoras? Ridiculous.”
Alex rolls her eyes a little, but tangles her fingers with his and squeezes. She’s slightly annoyed when Declan barges in right on time for his visitation slot, but he makes up for it soon enough with a positively hilarious anecdote concerning Johnny and Blake ambushing him with the shovel talk and Jeera immediately running off to give Bear one while they were at it.
“She never gave me one,” she recalls triumphantly.
Declan tosses up his hands. “Hey, the last time you tried dumping Kaid, you ended up in a mental hospital. Says a lot if you ask me.”
“It was unrelated , dickhead!” Alex exclaims indignantly, ignoring the sudden sting in her chest.
But after weeks of sitting around in the Institute, Alex is restless. She wants to see her friends, her boyfriend, and spend time around people who didn’t feel like they were just constantly holding a mirror up to her. There are a lot of days where she still feels like she’s making no progress in the way that they all expect her to, but the nurses insist she has, usually pointing out the healthy weight she’d regained or the charts of her improved sleep patterns thanks to medication and therapy.
Maybe once she’d be able to look at her own reflection without having an existential crisis, Alex might start to believe them.
january
For the first time in history, Medora has its first series of electoral campaigns for presidential office. Alex watches the speeches with the other women and girls, making notes in her head and explains the concept of democracy more than once, accentuating her Freyan accent a little more than necessary just to prove she actually knows what she’s talking about.
To her surprise, one of the candidates is none other than Alan Drock. Considering all of the other candidates are socialites who were rich enough to weather the storm of Aven Dalmarta without too many scrapes, high court judges or random public officials who Alex has never heard of in her life, the choice is obvious.
Less than a week later, one of the nurses comes to collect her, saying she has a new visitor.
“I know you’re not well, kid,” the general tells her, sitting across from her in one of the visitation rooms. “I know this is a dick move, and the Commander would probably have my neck for asking you this but —“
Alex taps her foot on the floor. “You already had my vote, General. Now you just need me to say that out loud in public, don’t you?”
He visibly deflates with relief. “Well, uh — yes. Please.”
“Should I get changed?” Alex jokes. “Not sure I’m going to be the most convincing supporter if I’m wearing psych ward pyjamas and grippy socks.”
“Elections aren’t until May, and you won’t be in here for much longer,” the General shrugs off. “I’ll get my PR bloke to contact you once you’ve gone back to your life.”
January thirty-first also marks the one-year anniversary since the Battle at Graevale and Aven’s attempted genocide against the mortals of Medora formally began. Alex watches the days draw closely with an impending sense of dread, hands trembling more and more. She dreams of Niyx every night — dreams of his death, dreams of digging his grave with her own bare hands, dreams of his letter — and she’s suddenly more prone than ever to tears at the drop of a hat. The nurses note her constant state of distress, the data evidence that she’s regressing now instead of improving, and promptly increases her medication dosage.
“I need you guys to sedate me on the thirty-first,” she declares to one of the nurses, Viv, in a rather undignified moment. Despite that she’s not in a state of mind that is neither sober or stable, they take her words to heart, and Alex wakes on the second of February to find that she’s been drugged into unconsciousness for the better half of the last four days.
She didn’t get the chance to mourn as she intended to, as messy and painful as she’d known it would be. For hours Alex sits there, trapped in a spiral of indecision, trying to work out whether or not she has the right to be insulted. But they knew her by this point. They’d known she wasn’t in a reasonable state of mind to be making those sort of demands. It doesn’t feel so much a misinterpretation as it does a betrayal , and Alex sweet talks one of the security guards for access to their ComTCD so she can contact the academy headmaster for the second time in several months.
“Hey, Darrius,” she mutters down the connection. Her tongue still tastes a little sour from whatever shit they’d put in her bloodstream. “I know this might seem like a bit of a contradiction, but I really need you to get me out of here.”
february
The hospital discharges her on the seventh, mostly because a very long list of objectively ‘important people’ send the board of directors threats to sue or press charges when word gets out about the whole sedating incident .
“Legally we need a parent or guardian to take you home when we discharge you,” one of the nurses tells Alex as she hands her toiletries and the first civvy outfit she’ll put on in several months. It’s her usual staples — the presence of Converse convinces Alex they must have requested a parcel from the academy — and they’ll finally give back her confiscated jewellery when she’s properly signed out. “Which family member do you want to nominate?”
Alex clears her throat. “You remember who you’re talking to, right? You remember where I’m from ?”
The nurse looks embarrassed and Alex immediately feels guilty. “My mistake, Miss Jennings. I’ll see what I can do.”
Turns out the nurse’s idea of I’ll see what I can do comes in the form of Dorothy Ronnigan. Considering that it’s less than a week since the first year anniversary of her husband’s death, she’s in fairly high spirits. “You don’t have to go straight back to the academy, you can stay with us for a few days and I’ll get it smoothed out with Headmaster Marselle,” Dorothy tells her firmly as she fusses over Alex’s winter layers. “I’ve spoken to Bear, he’ll bring the other boys around in an hour or so. I expect they’ll be very keen to see you.”
Alex smiles, tremulously. “You didn’t have to pick me up.”
“Oh, nonsense . Don’t give me that horseshit.” Dorothy hands her the package of Alex’s newly prescribed medication — it’s slightly concerning how many different types of boxes she can see — and pulls out a Bubbledoor vial. “Gammy and Evie are getting the house ready, and you’ll bring Soraya, won’t you? What meat does she like? I can ask Johnny —“
“That idiot wolf would eat a manky corpse that’s been rotting for half a summer,” Alex intervenes with a laugh. “I can assure you she’s not picky.”
And it’s — nice , to be out, especially the first few days when she’s slouching around Woodhaven. Jordan and Bear refuse to let her out of their sight and Kaiden’s hardly any better — she’s fairly certain the only time he’s not holding her hand or hasn’t got an arm around her or stubbornly at her side is when she nips off to pee. Declan’s probably the first to get the ridiculous overprotectiveness out of his system, but he’s also the first person to send somebody to the Med Ward after they make a distasteful comment when Alex feels steady enough to rejoin academy life, so he seems determined to balance things out.
Once again, like when she was first in the hospital, she feels like people have to get used to her presence all over again. The student population seems staunchly divided between putting a ten foot gap between themselves and her, as if being mentally unstable is now infectious, or blatantly getting up in her face to ask all kinds of invasive questions they have absolutely no right to. The scars on her wrist are a frequent source of interest; she never got her old collection of bracelets back, since the nurses had had to cut them off to properly heal the cuts she’d put there, so she wears long sleeves for the first few days to help hide them until Kaiden appears at her dorm one morning with a bundle of brand new bracelets.
She’s more or less on a sort of probation; Darrius sits her down with a long list of conditions since her discharge from the psych ward was premature, to say the least. She’s got to take her meds twice a day, still go to her weekly checkups with Ephraim, clearly communicate whenever she leaves campus on one of her little Library excursions, and — you guessed it — start seeing a therapist. He’s practically got an entire PowerPoint presentation prepared for the last condition; Alex can’t help but laugh her ass off despite her objections.
“Just give the first session a chance with this person,” Darrius argues. “You can talk about how mean and nasty and horrible I am for all I care.”
Alex spares the psychologist’s profile a glance. She looks back down at her wrists and grimaces, before hesitantly nodding. “You’re giving me permission to talk shit, sir?”
“Whatever gets you sitting in that damned room in the first place,” Darrius agrees with a long suffering sigh.
march
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, kid,” Drock reminds her for about the hundredth time.
Alex scratches Soraya’s ears thoughtfully as she shrugs off the general’s concern. It’s close to twelve months since the siege of Meya and somehow she’s managed to worm her way out of press conferences and media interviews — up until now. The Medoran equivalent of the internet has gone slightly berserk without any attempt at PR on her behalf. Most of the rumours are clearly speculation or sensation, so she’s never really minded, even if plenty of others in her life usually have a thing or three to say about it. She’s chosen the journalist interviewing her from a carefully curated list with both Drock’s and Darrius’ input. They’ve promised to only ask her a set list of questions she’s already perused. It won’t be live, so they can edit anything idiotic Alex says. She’s allowed to have Soraya next to her — for the visuals, if anything — and they’ve dressed her up not in armour or gear but just her ordinary clothes. Corduroy jacket, jeans, high-tops, her usual abundance of hippie-style jewellery. She’s even splurged on a bit of kohl and mascara.
The plan is simple. The journalist will ask a few questions, they’ll hopefully diffuse a few ( many ) rumours flying around the country, and at the end Alex is supposed to put her support for Alan Drock’s presidential campaign on blast.
“No. I want to.” Alex encourages her wolf to settle on the floor next to the armchair. She watches members of Drock’s admin team scuttle about with tablets and headsets, fussing over the broadcasting equipment. The lady interviewing her is still getting pampered by her prep team. “I don’t care what they say about me, but some of the rumours are downright dangerous, and I’m sick of everyone talking shit about Kaiden when we probably won’t be all still alive if it wasn’t for him.”
“If you’re doing this for your boyfriend’s sake —“
“You know who raised him, right?”
Drock shrugs. “Fair point. Got everything you need?”
“Feel like giving me another tattoo?” Alex quips.
“You can do that in your own time,” he tells her. He digs into his pocket and fishes out a dog treat for Soraya. “Though I hear you won’t think anything of getting stabbed but shriek at the sight of a needle.”
Alex glowers at him, mockingly. “I’m just special , all right?”
The interview gets officially broadcast about two weeks later, at exactly six o’clock on a Friday night. She watches it on the couch with Kaiden and his family. Declan and Bear are slung over one another on the next couch across and provide silly commentary. Soraya’s sulking in the corner because Kaiden’s the one half on top of Alex, her fingers scratching absently through his hair as he alternates between smiling and frowning up at the broadcast. Jordan sulks along with her because he’s apparently seventh wheeling. Jeera is drinking beer and has brought both her new girlfriend, Ryn, and little handmade signs she holds up at appropriate intervals. Alex’s personal favourite is the one that says WELL THAT WAS A CUNTY MOVE . Nisha has her tablet open on the candidates’ popularity polls. It goes completely viral within the space of about fifteen minutes and by about six thirty she’s made Bear remove the battery from her ComTCD so they can have some bloody peace and quiet.
The next morning, when she braces herself and fits the battery back into the device, the first message she actually opens is from Alan Drock. Apparently his popularity ratings have skyrocketed overnight.
Thanks kid. I’ll shout your next tattoo .
and april (again)
It’s April twenty-third.
It’s been an entire year since the siege of Meya, since Aven Dalmarta died at his brother’s sword after losing to first her and then Kaiden. It’s been a year since Dix died. It’s been a year since the world was dragged onto its knees, perhaps only sheer days away from total and final annihilation, saved entirely by a belt of explosives, a teenage girl with a particular gift for strength of will, and an army of draekons.
It’s been a year .
It doesn’t fucking feel like it.
All around the world, there’s ceremonies and memorials held everywhere. Little kids sing songs and people lay wreaths and light candles in fond memory of their loved ones. Men and women give speeches and everyone expects Alex to be one of them; she’s certainly never been one for public speeches, but she’s grown up more in the last year than she could have ever expected to. She knows there’s a time and a place for her own bullshit, and for when she should really step into the mold that the world expects her to fill. So she dons a bit of armour and makeup and carries a weapon for the first time in weeks and follows Roka around podiums and ceremonies that day, parroting the same script she’d written mostly herself, with the help of Blake Ronnigan’s diplomatic expertise, making some tactful variation depending on her audience.
When she finally goes to bed in the bleak hours of the early morning, Alex doesn’t dream of slaughter and starfire and screaming like she expects to.
She doesn’t dream of anything terrible at all, and takes it as a good omen.