Heather Chandler, not herself, stared at her grandmother wearing her body like a hand puppet.
"Change us back," Heather ordered. The words were slow and difficult in coming out of her grandmother's mouth, but they came. She reached with all the power she had, and yet all her strength met a newer and stronger force. Her grandmother only smiled - more of a smirk, like and unlike Heather had seen on her own face in countless mall-booth photos.
She planned this. The old bitch planned this all along. She used Martha to bring me to where she could steal my body.
"Not the ... first," Heather insisted. Her grandmother had done this too skillfully for it to be the first. Some of the old puzzle pieces she'd had in her mind came together, all too late.
You're me. You're her. You could never be anything but cruel, said the ghost girl, looking like Heather's grandmother might've done sixty years ago. Her own mother sold her to the trees. Accustomed from birth to obeying orders, she'd given in.
"Not my grandmother," Heather insisted, mumbling. "Great-grandmother. You did this before."
When Great-Grandmother used her powers too much, she was killed by her own servants. She found a way back to the world through her child.
"Call me your grandmother; I spent seventeen hours giving birth to your father. A highly unpleasant memory," Heather's body said, the words incongruous coming from Heather's own mouth.
Maybe she'd even done this many times before. Generations of Heather Chandlers, made to order to hold and host power and eternal life for their matriarch.
"Give up, Heather," her grandmother said. "It's not as if you deserve anything you once held. Loving parents who'd get a 'fuck you' before a thank you. Friends and enemies who both rejoiced at the news of your death. You drove Martha Dunnstock to her death because it amused you, and how many other classmates have you made to want to destroy themselves? You know perfectly well the great harm you did to your friend Heather Duke. Even for your friend Heather McNamara, you'd give up nothing you couldn't spare already. The place between worlds generally teaches something about one's true self. For you, that's a selfish, unpleasant, and very childish bully, a tiny piranha in a small and stagnant pond.
"You don't deserve to live."
Heather felt her own power fighting her, forcing the poison to do its work. She could barely breathe. She tried to croak out for help; whatever sounds she made, her sleeping friends didn't wake. No, fuck you too, Grandma, she thought, I don't deserve to die.
She didn't have a choice.
Heather felt herself ripped away from her body again, against her will. She screamed her despair.
She found herself once more in Betwixt-and-Between, standing next to the Fire Woman.
There was the battered Paladin and Martha Dunnstock, J.D. next to them with folded arms, his black coat moving in some dramatically convenient wind. "Realized I had something to trade," he snarled at the Fire Woman. "You knew Grey Willows wanted to feel things, so you set me up. But a connection goes both ways. He used me; I can use him. I traded him to the Star."
"For re-education," the Star said calmly. The wizened grey man sat on a padded chair next to the Star's throne; he already looked slightly more sanitary.
The Fire Woman shrugged. She had changed. This time she burned an incandescent white-hot, as impossible to look at directly as staring into the sun. More powerful than her red-gold before. Heather understood why that was. She could feel it inside her: the power there was a sputtering, weak flop compared to the searing and sure fire it had been.
Her grandmother hadn't just made a deal to swap bodies with her. She'd swapped abilities. Heather hadn't been wrong: In a choice between beauty, riches, and wisdom, Grandma Chandler would always choose riches.
"You stole my power," Heather accused.
"I traded you mine. Not that you understand how to use it," her grandmother said.
"I'll figure it out." Heather raised the fire inside her. "Don't think you're leaving so easily this time."
"You've seen too much, Heather. It seems I'll have to kill you personally before changing into something more comfortable," her grandmother said. "I'll take no pleasure in it."
A gout of white fire flew at Heather. It was too late to respond; she was paralyzed in place. Then there was a burning pain in her shoulder, in her arm. Too sharp to be a burn. Heather smelt feathers and flesh. She was flying, falling through the air. A giant sharp beak tossed her up, brutally fast, then on her way down she was caught by a wide feathered back.
It was the eagle she'd seen at a distance, the one who'd snapped up the golden apple she'd thrown. Heather rode astride the giant eagle's back, clinging to the tips of brown feathers edged with gold.
"America is beautiful?" she said.
Heather looked back. Martha Dunnstock was missing in action. Run away like some coward, or doesn't care to rescue me. J.D. was useless; the Fire Woman put him down without bothering to kill, bowled him over on his back with a single blow of flung fire. But he'd survived a similar wound of late, and slowly rose to his feet.
The Paladin stood in her battered armour, her shield and sword already destroyed, and made as if she'd rush the Fire Woman anyway. But the Star held up a hand. "Defend, but you cannot attack," she was commanded. The Star's a useless old fuck, Heather thought. "She bears no stain. Not yet, anyway."
The Paladin pushed J.D. behind her, impersonally, as if she'd have done the same for any mortal. Heather gasped and clung tight when the giant eagle buckled under her. She burrowed into the feathers against her will. The eagle dived down to the Fire Woman and raked her with beak and claws. She punched back, hard. Flames spiralled around them as the eagle fled into the air, dashing and dodging. Then back down the eagle went to try and wound Heather's grandmother.
Heather reached for the power her grandmother had forced her to trade. It was smaller and weaker than her own, but fire nonetheless met fire. She aimed like she wanted to kill. She gave cover to the eagle's attacks.
But she couldn't keep it up. The eagle screamed in pain. Feathers in its right flank smouldered and burned. It rolled in mid-air. Heather fell and landed hard. She knocked against the Paladin's hard armor and rolled around in the dirt.
Fire bloomed around Heather. She reached out to hold it off. She couldn't hold. Smelt like they'd soon have crackling roasted Paladin in its own shell. The Fire Woman's power reached closer and closer to swallow them up.
Heather looked up for the eagle, hoping it'd save her again. But there was nothing in the sky. "Fuck it. Ungrateful beast," Heather cursed.
"Call grim Boreas and brother Zephyr, call balmy Eurus and weeping Notus. The four brothers loose and take to the sky. So too let wind scatter fire!"
It seemed just a children's rhyme. The voice was Martha Dunnstock's. She held what looked like an old piece of sacking in her hands. A chill tempest for the moment scattered the flames.
"Just be glad the eagle gave you that much, Heather," Martha lectured. Oh, you just had to nag and gloat, Heather thought. "Normally that kind of creature eats food that looks like us."
The Fire Woman wasn't defeated by Martha; she looked like she was only just getting started. Martha locked glances with her old tutor. Then she stepped aside. Behind her was a wholly black figure of ashes and dust. Heather knew it as the creature that had chased her from Dean's house, had menaced and threatened her as an utterly inhuman being.
"Ash-and-Cinder came in quest of one of those who killed it," Martha told the Fire Woman. She gestured to thin strands of what might have been dark hair, clutched greedily in a black hand. "Veronica left something of herself behind. I should have warned her. I remember that you warned me away from Ash-and-Cinder when we saw it at a great distance.
"You were truly warning yourself away from it."
"One of them feels nothing," said J.D. He looked pale and weak again. "The other feels too much, and it's all bad. Destruction and the aftermath of fire. Death and black charred bones before and behind it. Lust and greed and thwarted fury - and all those true feelings that are too gross and icky to deal with. Looks like she found a way. Ash is what's left after a fire burns ... "
"Ash-and-Cinder is the stain on your soul," Martha said to her teacher. "You separated yourself from what you did to gain your power, you broke yourself into fire and ash. No wonder you feel nothing and the Star senses you as guiltless. Now let's get you back together again."
Ash-and-Cinder needed no encouragement. It had searched for Veronica, but let the strands of hair slip easily away from its fingers as it faced the Fire Woman. In her it saw everything it had yearned for and searched, the other half of its soul and the one being in any world that could fill its bottomless cravings.
Ash-and-Cinder flung itself upon the Fire Woman. The two became one. It was as if they wrestled for dominance, battled in a hell between darkness and red-flaring light. Ash-and-Cinder's black tendrils wrapped around and within the Fire Woman's glowing limbs. They faded down into black lesions, holes like scars in the Fire Woman's skin. Her features became more defined, more human looking. She was a creature of fire and darkness now, a whole being once more.
Fuck, Heather thought. She knew what had happened. The Fire Woman confirmed it the next moment. She raised a hand and the inferno from it opened a chasm along the Thorn Lady's grounds. Heather kissed the ground again, her mouth full of the taste of ashes and dust, scrambling backward and knowing she'd never make it in time. Fucking great move there, Martha.
The first Heather Chandler had only become more powerful than before.
—
There are officially three Heathers and three Heather Chandlers in this fic, making a total of five Heathers.