World of Glass
Warnings: Potentially triggering mentions of self-harm, vague sex.
The hairs on the back of Laurie's neck stand on end, and that is how she knows Jon is there, watching her and Dan. She opens her eyes and stares at the blue highlights in Dan's hair, and the world all tilts, curves. For a brief second, she sees where she is and what she has agreed to, that she and Dan hold the burden of keeping the thin glass sphere around Adrian's utopia unmarked.
The sound of Jon's feet on the water is so delicate that she wants to cry all over again. Laurie sits up and the water's reflection ripples on her legs. She doesn't want this.
Jon pauses in front of the far wall and glances back.
Take it all away.
When he returns, she's dressed, kissing Dan's cheek. Here is what she doesn't tell him: You're so much stronger than me; you can handle this. I could have loved you. The sentiment nestles on his forehead, teardrops that Laurie bites her lips against.
Jon holds his hand out. There is no mystery to this. He knows her well enough to know what happens next.
She takes his hand. Take it away. She doesn't smile.
. . .
Laurie stops vomiting after the first week. The human body really can adapt to anything, she supposes.
. . .
They're resting on the plains of an unnamed moon for a few minutes, or maybe hours, or maybe days. Laurie doesn't have much to gauge time against. Jon is somewhere else entirely, studying the underground heat vents he claims are there. Laurie smokes from a pipe Jon created and sits in the bright crystalline habitat - and shit, that really is the best word for it - he's constructed for her. They're different every time, some opaque and some transparent, some larger than others, some plain and others furnished with strange glass fixtures. Laurie can tell how long Jon plans on staying wherever they are by what kind of home he summons up for her.
She's guessing they won't be here longer than half a day. That's all right, but she wishes he would have picked a more interesting moon. The nearby planet is a vicious blue, exactly the color of Jon's skin. It reminds her of Neptune - or was it Uranus? She can never keep this kind of stuff straight, no matter how much she learns - and it makes her homesick.
It's stupid, really. She made the choice to leave Earth, not anyone else. Laurie shuts her eyes and licks her gums, puts out her pipe with an angry flourish. Every time she shuts her eyes she sees red, all red and black and pale, ugly green. She can't stop thinking about that damn abomination, or the Comedian, or her mother, or the sweet way Dan kissed her throat.
At least it's sort of pretty out here, she tells herself, leaning back on glass floors and staring through the roof. Stars span overhead in infinite spirals; Jon explained to her the size of the universe years ago by pointing to a spot of blank, navy-blue sky and telling her just how many galaxies were in that dead space. It was overwhelming, then, and remains so now. She still can't grasp it entirely.
Out here, following Jon across the universe, Laurie understands a little better the sheer volume of it all, but that doesn't change how empty it is outside, how empty inside.
. . .
Jon, ethereal and serene, explains to her his findings, and because she has no one else to listen to, she listens, and nods, and asks him questions. She wants to take him by the throat - Don't you care? Don't you care? When she is alone, she runs her fingers against her scalp, over and over again, and tries to imagine a sudden implosion, pressure and release. She tries to imagine the excess of pain that would shut a body down. She can't. She just can't.
When she asks Jon how it felt to die, every atom ripped apart, he only looks at her with his pure white eyes, and they shine, and shine, but there is nothing in them, nothing at all.
. . .
Laurie's seen bodies that have fallen from great heights.
She never saw her father's body, but she has more than enough time and just enough imagination. She shuts out the emptiness of space, becomes an island of imagery and life - she replays his death in her head until she's ill, each imagining more vicious and less forgiving. Laurie pretends she is the one who did it, sometimes, breaking his nose and branding his face with his cigar. His weight is substantial in her arms, and she thinks she could have done it, hefted him like a stone and thrown him away.
Sometimes, sometimes, she imagines that he comes to her in secret, whispers the truth in her ear, strokes her hair, and at the end she shoots twice and the world is still made of earth, sweet soil and copper blood and there's no glass to break.
In the end, she always curses and lights up again and paces, glad she's alone, glad he's dead, glad for every misstep she's ever made.
. . .
And she wonders, in the middle-hours, if she had only aimed one more time, let her anger run its course, if she would be sleeping now with Dan's cheek in her hand, if she could still live with herself.
. . .
She's spent a lifetime watching Jon drift away. When his attention skims over her, when he forgets her for days, she doesn't care, doesn't care, doesn't care.
She's just a little girl in a world of glass, after all.
Her temper flares and abates in waves.
After an indeterminate time that feels like months but could be years, Laurie stops crying.
When she shuts her eyes, she sees red, and black, and pale, ugly green. When she is alone, she runs her hands through her hair.
Blood collects under her fingernails.
. . .
Before they meet the Others and after Laurie has started to laugh, she corners Jon, puts her pipe in his shining eyes, and the starlight glances off her arms, runs through her. He holds her arms in exactly the way a human would, watches her like she's a rat and not his (ex-) lover, like she's not the only person tying him down by a thread, like he's not sending her out, a wild thing pinwheeling away from herself.
Laurie throws back her head and laughs. Nothing's changed, nothing at all.
. . .
She writes letters home to Sally in her head when she's trying to sleep.
Dear Mom -
We passed through a supernova today. I had another dream about New York, Adrian was there this time, here's the kicker Mom he did it he did it ADRIAN KILLED THEM MOTHER PLEASE HE
She rips at her hair and opens her mouth and her screams are loud enough to crack the glass, but it doesn't kill her and she wishes it would and wishes it wouldn't and god, Jon, where's Jon she needs him so much right now and
. . .
She doesn't sleep.
. . .
The Others invade her mind without seeing it as an action at all, and she should hate it but she doesn't. Their spindly, black fingers - tendrils - whatever - feel her hair and they coo at her, call her gentle things, and she melts under their affection, crying and crying until her throat hurts because oh, God, how long has it been, and she would give anything, anything at all for Jon to touch her with the same wonder as they are. They tell her without words that they pity her, soft fingers touching her face, and she should be terrified but she's enraptured.
Jon is unconcerned with them, standing leagues above them (above them all), and their dual moons make their blackened bodies glisten. Laurie should be terrified, she should, but Jon hasn't let anything happen to her body yet and they are so damn gentle with her; they try to soothe her distress with images of bright flowers that they find further back in her memories, and it's so, so damn sweet.
"Thank you," she says, kneeling in a circle of them, and they stroke her hair and face, "thank you, oh, shit. Shit. Thank you."
. . .
With the Others nearby, she dreams of Dan curling his arm around her shoulders, of her mother leaning against her on their porch swing, of cold soda in sweating glasses and everything is a deep green, green and beautiful and real.
. . .
Jon tells her that it is time to go.
. . .
She holds onto the feeling of their kindness, overwhelming and bizarre, like a precious salve.
But it's only a few days before she's surrounded by blue, and black, and when she shuts her eyes it's only red and there's nothing she can do about it, not a damn thing. She can't go back. She can't.
. . .
Laurie smokes with shaking hands and smiles at the arc of a galaxy's arm, all those condensed stars shining, shining, with nothing there at all.
. . .
Jon returns to her, after a time, and he sits at the foot of her expansive bed. They do not touch. They're not even close. Laurie tries, and fails, to remember the blessed rush of feelings the Others provided her. The feelings Earth provided her. All she can summon is half-moons in her palms and blood under her fingernails.
"I hate you," she says, and doesn't mean it. Her teeth flash bright in the darkness and she pulls Jon by his shoulders, digging and digging and nothing gives; he's untouched, ultimately untouchable.
'I'm sorry," he says, and means it.
It's so fucking pathetic. He was never able to take anything away from her, never able to impart some great wisdom to her, and she should've known that from the start. "I hate you," she repeats, with more feeling. To stave off the lump in her throat, she laughs and shoves him down, claws at his chest and face. Kisses him, fiercely, trying to take something, a little of his emptiness, or maybe to give something of hers to him. He tastes like the aftermath of a lightning strike. The hairs on the back of her neck rise.
His hands run up her spine, and she knows he is studying the electrical impulses running from her brain to her body, and it's so fucking Jon. With her but not really there. He's probably spent this entire time as two, hell, three of him, all over the universe, only one with her as a token of the fragile thread connecting them.
He hardens, and she bites his mouth, hating that it's obligatory, hating that it turns her on anyway to feel his electric pulse grinding at her vagina through her clothes.
"I hate you, and that's the funniest fucking -" she can't finish it, sinking her teeth into his neck. She tries to remember Dan's face. She can't.
They have perfunctory sex, and Jon leaves, and Laurie stares out at the emptiness of space and it leeches her away.
. . .
Laurie breaks her habitat, just to see what will happen, and here is what happens:
Nothing. Nothing at is what happens:
Nothing. Nothing at all.