Wordsworth – Chapter 25

Stories rhyme.

It’s an old truth. Endings that echo beginnings, middles that resonate somewhere in between. Patterns that reemerge time and again.

There’re dragons to slay, princesses to save, old homes to leave behind.

Because stories rhyme.

So I find myself standing on a rooftop, contemplating a villain’s gathering. Like I did when I set out to fight the ugly man with a nice smile, and I discovered that the Knight of the Sad Countenance could fell giants still. Like I did when I found an old snake’s cave and turned it into the beauty of The Fall of the House of Usher.

And this, this third time, as the cadence shifts, as the world once again finds this beat I’ve twice stumbled upon…

“Tay…” the Clever Fox whispers in my ear, her voice prodding me, trying to see if the white rabbit will jump out of its burrow.

I don’t answer.

I watch.

Because this is not me preparing for a battle, readying my stories as if honing my blades. This is not me contemplating what I’m about to do, what I should do, what a hero should do.

This is me.

And what I’ve done.

On the other side of the street, a bar lies in ruins, the whole front of it scattered across black pavement after Storm Tiger’s winds and the Charge of the Light Brigade went through it. Amid the wreckage, the splintered planks and powdered concrete, the shards of glass glinting under a moonlight that would’ve made Chekov proud, there are bodies.

Broken bodies.

Living bodies, yet… suffering ones.

I can see a man whose shin I cracked in two, whimpering and trying to hold still. Another that I slammed against a wall, only his chest moving, just enough to assuage the worst of my fears.

Storm Tiger…

He’s…

He lives. He will live. And he will be healed, and all of this will become nothing more than a short nightmare. A thrill of horror while huddled under warm blankets.

“Tay, talk to me,” the Clever Fox says.

I lick my lips, my tongue gliding across unsaid words.

And answer.

“I am sorry,” I tell her. Them. The world.

“I know. You shouldn’t be, though,” she says, almost cheerfully cruel, her glee only restrained by her care and concern.

For me.

That’s what fairies are dangerous for, I remember. Because they have their own rules. Their own sense of what’s right and wrong.

Yet they still can care.

And how terrible could be a love that cares for naught but itself?

“I’m not a damn fairy, Tay,” the fairy huffs and lies.

Like fairies do.

“You’re being rude. You’re being insufferably rude. I only tolerated the fox thing because foxes are neat, but if you think you’re about to get me into a Tinkerbell outfit—”

“Do you remember the movie? When Peter Pan needs some fairy dust, and Tinkerbell refuses to give it to him?” I say, trusting in her perfect memory for minutia.

… I’m one to talk, aren’t I?

“… Don’t. Please,” she whimpers.

Despite the situation, despite echoes and rhymes, I feel a grin spreading.

“Oh? Are you thinking about something very vivid, Liz?”

“You’re unfair. You’re so unfair. You and your stupidly sexy power are so incredibly unfair.”

“Oh my, what could you be imagining?”

There’s a loud swallowing sound coming from my earpiece.

“Please, Tay, don’t miniaturize me with a passage from Gulliver’s Travels, pick me up by the hem of my mini-skirt, and spank me with the tip of your fingers as I dangle helplessly from your grasp and try to muffle my gasps and moans with both hands covering my mouth,” she says.

And I just discovered that my words do some pretty interesting things over my cheeks when my body tries to blush.

“That is far more detailed than what I had in mind,” I squeak out.

And she laughs.

…

Of course she does.

“Okay, ready to talk now?” she asks, deftly sidestepping a line of conversation I’m suddenly hesitant to pursue.

And I…

I close my eyes. Sigh.

And open them to look at the wounded, broken men below me, on the other side of the street, waiting for someone who’s taking too long to arrive.

“I suppose I am, yes,” I say, taking a step back from the ledge, resting my back on the narrow, beige wall guarding the staircase that leads to this roof tiled with red, unglazed clay.

“Do you know why you were so angry?” she asks.

I hesitate to answer. Just for a moment.

But it’s still there.

“Emma,” I say.

“What about Emma?” she prods. Because that’s what she does. Because the Fox needs to see if the rabbit will jump.

“Her… defining me. It’s… It’s what she did. What she did for so long, so cruelly, so… thoroughly. I am on the path I chose for myself. I am being who I want to be. And then she comes and takes even that away, turning me yet again into what she decides I am.”

“A hero,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not what she turns me into that matters, but that she does it. That she makes me feel like…”

I drift off, memories of another Emma flitting by, of a Red Sister that was always beside me, who also defined me. As her friend, her sister, her other self. As the girl who made up the stories for us to play with, as the girl she consoled when a mother was lost, as the girl she left behind.

The girl she made me.

And then she remade me.

She turned me into what I am today. Who I am today. She got that… She got them to make me drink from the bottle with a label Alice couldn’t have read, to have them turn my skin to paper, my blood to ink, my mind to stories.

And then, when they erased my pages, when they took away all the girls I’d been, all the girls she’d have me be…

She turned me into her villain to defeat.

Months lost, forever lost, drifting with no memories, barely any self. Just a handful of stories whispering to me, calling to me, sometimes offering me a glimpse of the girls I could still be.

Months until the Clever Fox led the Lost Girl out of the Dark Forest.

Months until I could look at myself, learn about myself.

Define myself.

Point to the other side of the Looking Glass and whisper: ‘Wordsworth.’

And to have Wordsworth answer me with a smile.

“She doesn’t have that power. Not anymore,” the Clever fox says. Maybe lying.

Maybe not.

That’s why lies are dangerous. Because you can’t know. Because, once they take hold, truth is no more, and only doubt remains.

“Tay… I can’t promise I won’t ever lie to you. I can’t promise I won’t ever hurt you. But I can promise I’ll never want to harm you. That I’ll always care. That I’ll… damn it!”

“Liz?” I ask, unsure of her tone. Of her rise and fall, from murmur, to rushed speech, to sharp curse.

“I didn’t want to break this out, you know? Not today. Maybe not ever. But you may need it now.”

“Liz, I really don’t know what you’re talking about—”

“To think your name now poisons my dreams,” she whispers. Sings.

And words flow.

A man talking about his lost homeland. About exile. About being lost.

About the winners, triumphant. Everlasting. Cains.

A poem not about war, not about what the broken men below me revered, but about what came after. Not about brothers killing one another, but about a survivor who lost. Who left.

Who remembers all that was good before. All that he loved. All that he still longs for.

“One day, you’ll be free from their lies; you’ll seek me. What will then have a dead man to say?” she recites, ending the poem and leaving only…

Resignation.

That things… change. That lost battles cannot be fought anew. That the attachment to what is no longer there is only pain.

Pain that endures, maybe until the time of death.

It’s a beautiful poem. Heartfelt, with a sadness so genuine that it becomes admirable. That it becomes tragedy, yet one that takes our breath away.

Like looking at the light falling through a stained glass window made of tears, each one glittering with their own shade of misery, longing, and melancholy. Like standing in the middle of the rain, each droplet echoing the last words of a play that was never written. Like being alive, able to move forward, to take that last step you desperately need to reach your goal…

And not doing so.

“That’s unfair,” I whisper.

“I am me,” she answers. As if that explained everything.

It does.

And that makes me smile.

“What was the point of it? Of dragging me along with out-of-order verses?” I question, sliding down the wall at my back, briefly tempted to recite a comfortable chair into being, maybe one from a tea party where all the attendants were mad.

“Tay… you and Emma… You have history. You always will. But that doesn’t define you. You’re the most stubborn person I’ll ever meet.”

“Likewise,” I intrude with unavoidable snark as I fold my arms over my bent knees and feel rough support on my back.

“Flattery will get you everywhere.” She laughs, and it’s as beautiful as it’s ever been. “But really, I… You are you. You’ll always be. But you also will never stop being the girl Emma loved and betrayed. And now you’re the girl I love and want. You are my girlfriend. Is that something that defines you? Is that me having power over you? Or is it just a little detail, a footnote in Wordsworth’s story?”

I look at the sky above. At a night that my power tells me should be filled with more stars, with a moon that was either round and full or barely a sliver of glinting silver, and not just a tad beyond a half-circle. At lazy, dark clouds drifting by, their uneven whorls tinted gray and blue by the city lights below them.

At the night sky of Brockton Bay not being half as beautiful as it could be, but being, nonetheless, what is here. Now.

In front of me.

“You brought me out of the dark. You gave me my self back. You set me free. And I love you. You’ll never be a footnote, Liz.”

Her breath catches, her adroitness with words and manipulation still not ready to deal with…

With us, I guess.

“And you say I’m unfair…” she tells me, her voice caressing me like it did this morning when she woke up under shared blankets, sun kissing her hair, bleary eyes smiling up at me.

“You are,” I breathe out. “You most certainly are.”

We hold our silence for brief moments as I take in the night sky, and she looks at it through the camera hidden in my hair.

I can picture her, back at her apartment, reclining on her white sofa, right hand hanging lazily off the yellowed, pine armrest, the city lights coming at her from the windows to her right that she ignores just so she can look at a small screen set in her lap, showing her what she’d be looking at if she were right here.

With me.

By my side.

Like a part of me hopes she’ll always be.

We still wait for the ones who have to come. The ones that will pick up their comrades and carry them to safety and healing. We wait for the second part of her plan to come together, for this third beat of my story to continue.

Because I’m on a rooftop, above villains.

Villains I’ve vanquished.

But, like the two times before, I’m still waiting for villains to defeat.

“Tay?” she asks, a note of mischief on her tone.

“Liz?” I answer, my left eyebrow rising a tad in cautious alarm.

“Do you want to know why you were really so angry?”

I blink, repressing the urge to turn to my right and stare into her eyes when she’s not there for me to do so.

“Didn’t we just go over that?” I say.

“Nope. We just went over why you were angry to start with, not why you went full videogame levels of violence.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“And that’s why I love you.”

I close my eyes and don’trub the bridge of my nose. Not when she can guess what I’m doing just by the slight motion of my hidden camera.

“Get to the point, Liz,” I mutter. Possibly due to self-destructive urges.

“You’re no fun,” she says, her tone giving lie to her words.

“Liz,” I say, my own tone giving her no lie at all.

“Well, if you insist…” She pauses, drawing it out until I huff, and she cackles. “Nazis, Tay! They are Nazis!”

I… blink.

“I am… aware?”

“Nope. No, you’re definitely not aware of why you, of all people, would have reason to hate Nazis with a passion.”

“I feel like I’m being judged.”

“Not at all. It’s just another adorable quirk of your delightfully neuroatypical mindset.”

“Are you… are you saying my power makes me hate Nazis?”

This time, the cackle is loud enough that I wince.

Note to self: my Brute rating does nothing for my hearing.

“You are a book¸Tay. What do Nazis do with books?”

I blink.

Her words echo inside my head as if all the books inside of it just slammed their covers shut.

And I recall the very vivid image of my mother sitting by my side on our old sofa, clenching her fists during a movie scene, when an archaeologist with very little respect for the proper procedures of historical digs stood in front of a pile of burning books—

“Motherfu—!” I start to say before I slam my mouth shut like heavy leather over old paper.

My words yet again crawl over my tingling cheeks.

Liz’s cackles get, somehow, louder.

And I resign myself to waiting for the next villains to show up while enduring my girlfriend’s obnoxious laughter and my newly discovered urge to break Nazi fingers.