disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to alma. uh. again.
notes: okay uh. so. i'm wading into foreign territory here—the myth of Thunderbird and Whale is not anywhere close to my own creation; it's in the tradition of the Pacific Northwest indigenous tribes, and even though i HC that alex and michael are both full-blood Quileute who grew up with the stories—i'm an italian white girl. if i've said anything insensitive, spray me with cold water and tell me to shut the fuck up, okay? this isn't my sandbox, and i don't wanna overstep.

title: oceans in the mind
summary: Alex, stumbling through the time-stream. — Alex/Jonas.

.

.

.

.

.

As for me, I'm—

[—pause; didn't you ever learn to sit still?]

The Towhee Woods are never quiet.

Even in this hellscape of night, there are birds chirping, the soft shh-hh of the waves against the island's jagged edges, the haunting jangles of her nerves. And there is the human element, too.

Tonight, it goes like this:

"JESUS CHRIST, ALEX," Jonas squawks, voice echoing off the canyon walls.

Alex spins on her heel to look back at him, teeth a white flash in the night, and she waves brightly. Defying death continues to be thrilling in the way that only casually dominating gravity can be. Her heart bottoms out in her stomach, the wind's through her hair, and god, it feels like she can breathe for the first time in a hundred years. "Come on, it's not so bad if you run at it!"

"You are going to be the death of me!" he shouts after her.

"Probably!" Alex calls back, and it echoes between them: probably, probably, probably. "You coming?"

"I—what—no, are you crazy?!"

"Probably!" she calls again, louder this time and laughing, dizzy from the rush and she very nearly collapses where she stands, swaying back and forth. The echoes double in on themselves until the night is nothing but a cacophony of her voice, probably, probably, probably bouncing up into the sky.

Jonas stares at her across the gorge, gaping unattractively. Alex waves. She used to know how to do the flirting thing. Used to be good at it, even, but that was a long time ago. Before Michael drowned. Before the ghosts.

She waits for the wisps of giggle, phantom lips against her cheek, and comes up with nothing but an unnerving quiet.

(Alex suspects that Ana is the one forcing the silence. Alex suspects that Ana misses Maggie. Alex suspects a lot of things.)

"Well?!" she calls again.

"I hate you!" Jonas shouts, rolls his shoulders.

"No, you don't!"

Jonas grumbles something that she can't hear, and she watches his face. He goes very still when he's thinking seriously about something, and he does it now. It's all over him, the hunch of his shoulders beneath the leather of his jacket, the way he's got his hands shoved in his pockets. It's the slow roll of a body doing something unwilling.

They stare at each for too-long moments. Alex wonders what he sees.

(Here is what Jonas sees: a girl in a red jacket. A girl with blue hair. A girl who wears her mystery like a second skin, a girl who hides a lion inside her skin like a roar in her chest, a girl who drinks distilled nightmares for breakfast and comes out alright. She thinks she's broken but he's has been half in love with her since the first second he saw her, but he'll never tell her that. She's got enough to worry about, never mind his feelings.)

He makes the decision to jump just like he does everything else: solid and easy and following her lead whether he wants to or not.

He takes off the toque. It's actually kind of cute, all messy hair and sharp green eyes underneath. "If I die, I'm coming back to haunt you!"

"Get in line!"

The laughter chokes off. Alex opens her mouth to cheer him through it—

And he jumps.

There is a frozen moment of fear before Jonas hits the ground next to her like a wound in the world where she thinks he might not make it, and her heart stops in her chest. But he's tall and strong and when he scrabbles at the edge to pull himself up, Alex has never loved anyone so much.

She grins out of the corner of her mouth, reaches down to help him up. "Not so bad, see?"

Jonas makes a sound like a dying goat, clutching at his knees as he bends over panting. It is a very real sound! His pulse pounds in in his throat, and it is only adrenaline and the head rush from doing something stupid that keeps Alex on her feet. The gorge is different now that she's older: dangerous, deeper, darker. Once upon a time, her mother had told her a story about a great battle between the gods, Thunderbird diving into the ocean to pull Whale up onto land because Whale had been starving the people out, killing the other whales. The ocean receded and then rose again and the battle resumed; Thunderbird eventually won, but cleaved the ground apart in doing so, and the people were scattered.

Alex knows the story like she knows her bones. Looking down into the gorge's vertical drop makes her think of it, that endless consuming gloom. It sticks in her throat, in her ribs, and she remembers that this was sacred land, once.

But a genocide and a half later, it's only a haunted island that she can't quite escape no matter how hard she tries. There's something about the island that bites at the back of her eyes, but she can't put her finger on it. She thinks of the ghosts, and remembers: part of a long and glorious history, Alex!

God, there's something there, but what?

Alex turns her attention back outwards to the boy still gulping down air like he's drowned for it.

Not funny, Alex, she tells herself.

"Not so bad," Jonas gasps, gasps, gargling through the last syllable like he's got water in his lungs. "That—that was beyond bad, Jesus, I thought I was gonna die."

"I grew up doing that, you big baby," Alex says, sort of fond, sort of not. It's early enough in the night that things aren't so close, and the woods are still the kind of peaceful that all wild places tend to be when the sky unfurls brilliant with stars. She tips her head back, the ground so solid beneath her feet. "It's faster."

It's not, but whatever. Jonas stares up at her, hands still on his knees, his face flushed all the way down to his crew neck and further, down past the weird flappy lapel of his jacket. And for some reason, Alex thinks about Michael. About how he'd been the first to jump the gorge, fingers scrabbling over the skitter of pebbles down into the dark as he'd pulled himself up, crowing all the while. About drowning, and gauzy white sunlight in through the window, and the attic bedroom with the warped-out ceiling where the roof had sprung a leak.

Alex looks at Jonas and thinks of Michael, and wonders what part of herself she's going to have to sacrifice this time.

Her personality, maybe. Who knows, anymore.

"Are you okay?" Jonas asks, so quiet. He's pushed into standing, but there's still a flush to his cheeks. He looks at her, and Alex can feel it like a bad case of soul transference, the way it seeps out of him and sets her on fire instead.

"No," Alex says, because she's not, god, she's really fucking not, and pretending otherwise takes too much energy anymore. She can't count the number of times he's asked her that, are you okay, always under his breath and out of the corner of his mouth and it's just—there are so many things that Alex wishes she could take back, but none of them are Jonas. "Are you?"

"Not even a little bit," he says, slinging an arm around her neck to drag her in close. Her mouth brushes his jaw. It's almost a kiss but not quite, so Alex doesn't think it'll count.

(It doesn't, and she chokes around the panic clogging up her lungs. What's the point of starting again except to torture her? One day she's going to shatter, and there will be nothing left. The ghosts won't like that. Alex won't like that.)

"Hey," she says, "you should probably lemme go."

"Probably," Jonas agrees, but he doesn't let her go at all. They stand there like closed parenthesis, two curled halves of a whole with arms around each other. Because that's the thing, isn't it, they're just like that, the beginning and the end without the middle to keep them apart. They're going to break into the radio tower and Alex is going to let him break down the door because it makes Jonas feel like she needs him, and then they're going to find Nona and they'll all be sick with each other, won't they, too hot and too close and way too damaged. All their stars will have gone out, and that'll only be the beginning. What is the future, when time is a circle?

"We have to go find Ren," Alex says into his shoulder, breathes in cigarette smoke and spice and unfamiliar laundry detergent.

"And Clarissa," Jonas says, not that Alex needs the reminder. The image of Clarissa falling flashes across her mind's eye, but never the aftermath. Alex doesn't know what a broken bone looks like, and god, she never wants to, but she can imagine, can imagine the sick jagged white and the dark slick blood and the red

Wow, morbid, that's enough of that. Dial it back, Alex.

"And Clarissa," she says, swallowing around sudden nausea. "C'mon, garbage snowman, we have to do this."

"One more minute isn't gonna hurt, Als," he says, and it's so easy is the thing, Jonas makes it look so easy. And it's not like he's in it for himself, because god, he knows that she needs just one more minute to put herself back together; the only thing he ever asks for is his mom, and like. What even is that? Who even does that? He's so selfless that sometimes it's ugly.

"One more minute," Alex says, presses her face right back into his shoulder where it's beginning to feel like it belongs and gulps down air.

One minute becomes two becomes five. Five would become ten, but Jonas gently pulls away before they get there. For a minute, Alex wishes that adrenaline was something that could last—the laughter from earlier would definitely be appreciated right now, okay—because the comedown is always the killer, bleak and swift.

And the light in the Catbird Station is on. It's just up the stupid hill, a stupid blinking beacon in the stupid dark night. Ren's freaking out up there, Alex just knows it, because that's what Ren does. He freaks out.

Except about big things, like who she falls in love with and how she's totally dealing with her dead brother in a healthy way, i.e. not at all. He never freaks out about those things, which is unhelpful in every single way except all the important ones.

And falling in love is like the jumping the gorge, Alex thinks.

A great big breath of air into the lungs, legs pumping, flexing, pushing away from the earth—and then you're flying, and falling, and gravity inverts and there's the giddy rush of what happens if I don't reach the other side—and then you hit the ground running, and you laugh until it hurts because you're alive. You're alive.

You're alive.

Alex looks up at Jonas, mouth pulling weird and wonky to one side, kind of like a fish. Probably looks like one, too, with her hair the way it is. His jacket's all crinkled and smeared with eyeliner from where she was not-crying into it and she smooths it out, the action a little like muscle memory.

"We're probably not gonna get out of here," she says, slowly, feels like a frayed hem or picking at a seam. A little thing, coming undone. "You know that, right?"

"Not this time," Jonas says. "Not unless I kiss you again."

"That's not getting out," Alex stresses, a line of poetry in her mouth: I kissed you, I witched you, I laughed at the afterlife's dark. Poetry was Michael's secret shame, his love and his sorrow because he was—is—actually a fucking nerd. Jonas isn't much better, if she's honest. Different flavours of it, but a fucking nerd is a fucking nerd no matter how you cut it.

"Then what is?" Jonas asks, raises an eyebrow at her. "Getting out, what's getting out?"

"Turning twenty," Alex says, decides. Turning twenty will be her benchmark, her sweet far thing, her base and her reach and her end fucking goal. Turning twenty won't be a celebration; it'll be a sigh of relief. Twenty will be an old beginning. She wants it so much that it could make her sick.

"You've never turned twenty?"

"Not once."

He doesn't ask how many times she's done this, which is good only because she doesn't really have an answer for him. Alex nudges her elbow into his side to get Jonas going, or maybe he nudges her, or maybe it's neither of those things. The timelines are beginning to blur. Blurring. Blurred.

You have and you do and you will, whisper the ghosts for the first time all night.

A chill runs down Alex's spine.

Oh, god.

.

.

.

.

.

tbc.

notes2: getting there now, son. three more to go.
notes3: the line of poetry is paraphrased from Marina Tsvetaeva's In The Inmost Hour of the Soul; the actual phrase is "I kissed you! I witched you! I laugh at the afterlife's dark."