so all of the concrete dates that we get in midnighters books point towards the series taking place in 2005, which means that it's officially been 13 years since jessica day was sucked into the blue time! which is a good a time as any for me to post this fic, because i reread these books a while ago and guess what? i still have LOTS OF FEELINGS about them because i'm permanently 12 years old, and i wanted to write some fix-it wherein the characters actually feel some kind of way about their friend throwing herself into a lightning bolt.
notes and stuff: this is slightly AU, because i thought it made more sense for jess to stay in bixby. also i actually got carried away doing ~research~ on the various locations of this series, and as we know, the bixby of the books is nothing like the bixby of reality. i tried to balance the books' world with actual real geography as well as i could. also i'm terrible at math irl so like, if i fuck up any of dess's calculations, please just roll with it, idk what i'm doing dudes.
fic title is from "16 shades of blue" by tori amos. in honor of the series' setting and also of my teenage self, i'm naming as many chapters as possible after mid-2000s alternative songs, and this chapter title is from "love like winter" by AFI.
one: warn your warmth to turn away
Dess sighs, rubbing her eyes, trying to push sleep away. It's after midnight — way past her usual bedtime — but she's still awake.
This isn't so unusual, these days. She's always been a night owl, but usually she manages to hit the sack before sunrise. Lately, though, even when she can see the sky turning pink in the distance, Dess just chugs more coffee and keeps going.
Good for research. Not so good for her ability to pay attention in school.
Dess has been skipping class more than ever, but she knows she has to at least occasionally attend, to keep her parents off her back. That's more important than ever, now that the cops are poking around, asking about Jessica Day. Plus, polymath or not, a bunch of absences will not look good to colleges, which would really put a damper on the whole "getting the hell out of here" thing.
And if she's right, and the blue time's spread beyond Bixby — that's more important than ever now, too.
Dess downs the last of her coffee, then goes to get dressed. Rex had told them about how the darklings kept saying that winter was coming. Well, it's definitely nearly here. Dad doesn't like putting the heat on unless it's absolutely necessary — Dess guesses when their lips actually start turning blue — so the cold penetrates the walls of the house, the wind making it creak more than usual. It's a good thing black absorbs heat.
Dess has it nearly down to a routine, now — she pulls on wool tights, a long skirt, and a top. Then she sets her alarm to go off in an hour, and throws herself onto her bed to get some sleep. An hour of sleep a day is nobody's friend, she knows, but what's the worst that could happen? She won't be able to pay attention in trig?
Besides, the more she sleeps, the more she dreams. Of Samhain, of Jessica.
Sleep deprivation really isn't that bad, in comparison.
Her alarm is set to blare at maximum volume, which it does all too soon. Dess fumbles around to slap the off button, then rises with a heavy groan. She can't afford to miss the bus.
She rakes her fingers through her hair to brush it and throws on her jacket. Boots, bag — she nearly forgets to lock the door when she leaves, and has to double back. The likelihood of anything being stolen from her house, here on the ass-end of town, is low — but she can't exactly jack another soldering gun from shop, so she doesn't want to risk it.
The bus rolls through town, stopping every few blocks with a pneumatic hiss. Dess watches the houses go by, with their same driveways, same lawns. It's weird how everything looks different, in the world after the long midnight. It shouldn't. Everything should look the same, should be the same. They closed the rip, all the darkling bodies were burned away by the sunrise, and the entirety of Tulsa County quietly agreed to forget about that night.
Dess will never forget — watching Jess and Jonathan fly to the top of Pegasus, their silhouettes lit up by the fork of lightning striking the horse. She remembers seeing Jess turn to the lightning, and then a flash so blinding that covering her eyes wasn't enough, and she'd curled up into herself, nearly fetal.
When she had looked up again, Jess was gone.
She'd run down the stairs of the office building where they'd set up the bomb, then up to the Mobil Building, her sides screaming in pain. For the first time in her life, Dess regretted not participating more in gym class. She'd practically had to haul Jonathan away from the roof while he babbled about Jess and the lightning, the words coming out so fast and broken that Dess hadn't been able to make any sense of it.
It wasn't until they had driven out to Jenks and picked up Rex and Melissa that Jonathan had managed to get it all out — how Jess had disappeared off the roof, into the lightning. There was no body — no proof that she had ever been there. Melissa had tipped her head back and then, after a long minute, whispered that she couldn't feel Jessica at all.
Dess didn't cry there, in the car. None of them did. Instead they had all sat there, blank with shock.
"What did we just do?" Flyboy had whispered. Then, stronger: "Rex, what did you do?"
"We saved Bixby," Rex said, but his voice broke. "She had to do it. She had to."
Dess had tried to do the math, leaning against the car window, feeling grief expand in her chest. They must have saved hundreds — maybe even thousands — of people. Jessica is one person. You don't have to be a polymath to know that 1000 is greater than 1, that even just Cassie Flinders and Beth Day are greater...
"Stop it, Dess!" Melissa cried. "Don't think like that! You know that's not — it's not —"
Then her voice choked, and she covered her mouth with a shaking hand.
The sight of Melissa grieving had cracked something open in all of them. Whatever fight Jonathan had wanted to pick with Rex was silenced. He drove them home, one by one, the silence only broken by Melissa murmuring when they were about to run into the cops.
And then they had found Jess again, the next midnight. Trapped there.
She's not gone, and you'd think that would make things easier. Dess thought it would, that first night they saw her. Thought that once midnight ended, she would walk away without the heaviness in her chest.
But she was wrong. She walked into Bixby High School on Monday, and went to study hall before lunch, and Jessica wasn't there. She's not there to steal Dess's math notes, or to do that weird scrunchy thing with her nose when she can't figure out the homework. In trig, Dess has to keep her smartass comments to herself, because she has no one to whisper them to. She only sees Jessica for one hour a day — not even that, sometimes, when Dess can't make it out to Madeleine's house. Jessica more or less "lives" there now.
This is why getting close to people sucks, Dess thinks.
It sucks even more, because if she's being honest — if she's being really honest —
Yeah, fine, she misses Flyboy and Melissa, too. They have the decency to call her or Rex whenever they run into a pay phone — although they always call collect, thanks guys — but she's gotten so used to having them around, that the past couple of weeks without them is just...weird.
Rex isn't as bad as he was, though. At least, he hasn't shown any signs of wanting to eat anyone lately. Samhain was pretty much peak darkling for him, or so he says. Dess has to admit that he seems almost normal these days — the routine of school, watching over his dad and crazy Maddy, and doing homework with Dess seems to have a kind of soothing effect on him.
That's what Melissa had said, anyway, before she'd left. And then she'd said to Dess, "Look, I know I shouldn't be asking this —"
But you're going to anyway, Dess had thought, trying not to roll her eyes.
Melissa either didn't hear that, or just chose to ignore it. "But Rex needs someone. Caring about people is what's keeping him sane, you know? It's all that kept him from eating us, when he was first transformed."
"Oh, great," Dess said. "And you guys are ditching me with him?"
Melissa gave her a dirty look. "Don't leave him alone, Dess. Please?"
Dess can count the number of times Melissa's said please — non-sarcastically — on one hand. And she doesn't have to use all her fingers.
"Fine," she had said, with a sigh.
Again with the being totally honest thing — which she can afford to do now, at least, with Melissa out of town — she hadn't been planning on ditching Rex, anyway. With the rest of the living — such as it is — midnighters gone, he's basically her only friend.
Well, that's just depressing.
They're closer into town, passing 7-Elevens and QuikTrips. At one of the stops, Rex gets on.
Despite everything, Dess smirks. The world might have nearly ended, but it would take more than the apocalypse for Rex to drive his mom's pink Cadillac to school. And without Melissa to drive him around, he's been demoted to riding the bus with the rest of the plebes, a.k.a underclassmen. Dess lets herself take just a little bit of pleasure in his suffering.
"Hey, Rex," she says, moving her bag so he can drop down next to her.
"Hey, Dess," he says, sounding tired. He has to fold up his long frame to fit into the bus seat, knees almost up to his chin. "How's it going?"
Dess shrugs. "Well, I'm officially cleared of suspicion in Jessica's disappearance. I mean, for now. St. Claire said he'd be back if they found anything new. He was trying pretty hard to sound like the Terminator."
Rex shakes his head. "I'd say he's almost happy about Jessica disappearing. This must be the most action the cops have seen in years."
"They're going to be so sad when they finally have to drop the case," Dess says. "Do you think St. Claire will cry?"
Rex chuckles.
"So I've been looking at the maps," Dess says, changing the subject. "And — I mean, I've figured out the places, where midnight is stronger and weaker, where our powers might work differently. But I don't know what to do with that information. Yet," she says, pointedly, raising her eyebrows at Rex.
He gives a defeated sigh. "I'll keep looking," he says. "But this has never happened before, Dess. Midnight breaking down, going beyond Bixby. And with all the darklings gone, I can't even ask them."
"How much time do you think we have?" Dess asks. "The Days aren't going to wait forever. And the cops are going to have to close their case eventually."
Rex rubs a hand over his buzzed hair. It's grown out a little, but Dess still isn't used to seeing him like this. She'd forgotten that his hair is naturally light brown, or that he has a mole on his temple, right next to his ear.
Sometimes it feels like she's living in some kind of alternate universe, like the long midnight broke time down completely and snapped them back to before Jessica and Jonathan even came to Bixby — before Melissa got her license, when she and Rex took the bus with Dess. Before things between them had gotten so fraught and complex, when things had almost been...easy.
"I know," Rex says. "We have to keep looking. There has to be something. And maybe Melissa will taste another talent out there, someone who can fix this."
It doesn't seem like much to go on.
God, wasn't there a time when midnight was easy; when it was an extra hour to read or do calculations or hell, even just sleep? When they had a world all to themselves, and they would bike to the park and climb onto the jungle gym that only cool kids were allowed to sit on, in the daylight hours? Dess remembers the thrill of hanging upside down on the monkey bars, where just twelve hours before Lauren Keller had told her to go back to Transylvania, freak.
Well, that was middle school. That was a long time ago. Midnight's not that easy anymore. Nothing's that easy anymore.
How much time do we have? Dess had asked, and it doesn't escape her that Rex didn't quite answer the question.