#insight.

content warnings: childhood abuse/neglect, violence, implied homophobia, sexual themes, substance abuse, injury & death !!

⸻ e i g h t.

Another year staggered to its death in a shroud of snow. Cold dead earth. Light that fleeted—even for a child who couldn’t stay in her bed long enough for a full night's sleep. Her mother had kept her for three weeks. A record. Not that anyone was counting.

Frances had only a dry bowl of cereal to pick at here: a mouthful of sawdust. She swallowed it drily—the lump in her throat too. There was nothing else; she knew not to waste it. Tidied it away immediately. Almost, she let herself hunger for dry toast and a solitary egg in a drafty canteen. At least the world was quiet there; the nuns certainly ensured that. A simple and sterile life, one of iron bunk beds and a single stack of precious library books.

Her mother had always chosen loud and dirty places to call home—hostile wreckages where unsettled people built short and violent lives. The clamouring neighbours were her only company in the dwindling light. Now throwing something, most likely each other, against the wall. Steady thuds against her shoulder, Frances turned the radio up a little more—never too loud, never too present. The static got louder. Outside: the sun had been swallowed.

Darker now, Frances flipped a light switch. Darkness still. The floorboards above creaked.

“Happy New Year, Cricket.”

Her mother had tripped into the afternoon. Stood and presented herself to her, or at least the room, already falling over in heels. There was no real affection to be found, just a show. Quite the cruelty for a child who could see it but couldn’t have it. Always out of reach. She could disappear. Sometimes, Frances lay under her bed until the slats, just inches above her nose would blur into nothingness. There, she imagined what it might be like to be dead. Thought of pained saints and their fierce deaths. Of the gorier diagrams in her history books.

“You’re always so jumpy. Agitated like a cricket.” Her mother had shuddered. Sniffed. “Horrible creatures.”

Frances dug her nails into the flesh of her thigh, live and resistant under her touch; it did nothing to stop the violent shake in them. She wondered, then, if her mother even remembered the name she gave her or if it was just another forgotten thing.

Eleanore Carrow was in rare good spirits. A small mercy that her daughter would not linger on. The stench of perfume and alcohol choked the air completely as she stumbled around, uninterested in the lack of electricity or the hastily silenced radio. Frances knew not to so much as wrinkle her nose. She smiled instead, small and quivering. Appeasement. Pacification. It was always the knife at her throat. Don’t beg; let the rot in. Allow the anniversary of their meeting to pass unnoticed; it had never been a celebration. Frances had been dragged into this world by a stranger. A mother no more than a jittery blur. 

A sudden screech of car wheels, a horn cutting through the void. Another man with crude hands. Her mother had kissed into the air, not her.

⸻ s i x t e e n.

Smoking was not a vice that she found much sanctuary in. It singed her throat still, even with a practised hand, the cigarette was often discarded as quickly as it had been lit. Something stronger given to her readily by the troubled-looking boys in the park was much more palpable. It softened the edges of the world but never recollections of her mother, nearly a corpse on the sofa, the help that never came—a warning against further indulgence.

This night would not be hers as she wished. As it usually was. The light was obnoxious, the gatherings of people even more so. Jude blinked, sighed—smoke-stung eyes. New Year. She had forgotten again.

An oversized jumper pulled out of a charity bin and scuffed boots, she was a jarring shadow against the merry gatherings dressed for celebration. It was a diverting spectacle but not enough to stop her from noticing someone walking in step with her. Always on guard, she could be haunted by an empty room.

“I’m looking for your mommy. She owes me a lot of money.”

Jude didn’t look at the owner of the voice. She knew it. She recognised disembodied voices like others knew their loved one's footsteps on floorboards. Her pace was steady as she continued. She flicked the blunt away. Shot her venom over her shoulder:

“You and me both, dickhead.”

Jude always had to push it. She did not flirt with harm but dug it out. It was an anger, perhaps, that could only be known by a teenage girl. A fire so fervent that it only burned so the inescapable sorrow underneath would never be uncovered. This was her mind, her body—it was this exact life she was stuck with. In. She would be nothing forever.

The awaited brutality came in the form of a shove against the wall of an alleyway. It was swift, her bones rattled with the force of air let out of lungs. With a forearm against her throat, she was forced to meet the hungry eyes in the half-light. She was told she was still mouthy, still wrong. That there were many ways for a debt to be paid. Somewhere, further in the dark, there was a drip. The other way, a racket now dulled, people laughing and cheering. Living. The drip became louder. Blood in her ears. She didn’t tell him that she had not seen her mother for years now. The words slipped away, he was closer, smiling, leaning in, she didn’t like to be touched. The story was always the same. Her mother left and men—they took and took.

“Fuck you.” Jude spat.

The push-off was fierce. Her hands were on his arms, his chest. He stumbled, twisted by the force of the shove. A dull thud as he clattered into the other wall. Jude could taste it, his surprise. It had always been a mistake to underestimate her. When he moved back off the wall, his grin was wild and wide. The eyes empty of anything human. A creature. It was always with teeth that they came at her with first.

He tutted at her as if she had spoken too loudly in a library. Stepped towards her only to look back out at the world. The light. Even as they came to wound her, she was still no more than an afterthought.

“Be a shame to miss the party, wouldn’t it?”

Threat or acquittal Jude couldn’t be sure. Her fingers curled into fists. She would bite if she needed to, run if she could. She had learnt quickly that no one was coming to save her. They only fed her dirt by the fist full. Laughed when she choked—scorned her when she was cruel.

He left but promised to return. She’d survive but never know why.

⸻ t w e n t y - o n e. 

It was a skill long mastered, to be able to leave another in twisted bed sheets before dawn without waking them. It had been a night of noise, too bright—festivity that she observed rather than partook in. The other girl was older, a college student who spoke passionately with her hands. She had found Jude against a wall, hunched and unfocused. Jude had touched her, not let her return it. That served no purpose. It was easy to leave untouched, unnoticed.

She trod her way through the shadows, a cluttered and disorderly dorm room. A pang of something, then, in the dark. It could be envy, perhaps, a feeling she had never allowed when abundance would never be known. A simmering bitterness, maybe, that others were allowed to sit in rooms and talk about their passions, waste days in the pursuit of something more. That they could be something more.

Jude caught herself in a mirror between bed and exit. Propped between plants and stacks of books, she looked unchanged, a little tired. Hair short and uneven, cut with blunt kitchen scissors. She was captured for just a moment in the orange slither of an invading street lamp. Staring back at herself. It was not her mother’s face, or even that of the unknown—her father’s. She couldn’t find either stranger’s features on her. Leaving. That was hereditary. The eyes, cold and sharp must be hers alone now. So she left, scratched off the phone number written shakily in ballpoint on her arm. Forgot about it.

There had been other girls before, and there would be more after, but in the suffocating small towns with church spires and slaughterhouses, they kissed her and then married boys their parents liked.

You might be fine all on your own but this is no life, Jude.

⸻ f o r t y - t h r e e.

“How did you break your rib?”

“Horse. Terrible dance partners.”

Jude had always dealt with her own injuries. She avoided hospitals, learnt to patch herself up just to avoid conversations. Being touched. The care of animals and land was a perilous occupation, worse in Arcadia. That’s why she had first compelled herself to the clinic. To them. Shaw. The countless times after, well, that was something less straightforward. Less chaste. Jude studied their hands while they explained that they would have to examine it. The cracked rib.

“You know you only have to ask if you want me to take my clothes off for you, Doc.”

“Shirt.”

Jude shoved off her overshirt, pulled up her vest. Didn't need to be asked twice. It was more purple than she remembered it, angrier now under the stark light of the clinic. Then, hands obscured her sight of the bruise and nothing mattered. All thought vanished when Shaw touched her.

“Have you strained it?”

“Oh, no more than necessary.” A beat as she looked at Shaw. Eyes that met in dense air. A dare, perhaps, she could swear she saw the lightest shade of red on them. She was instructed to breathe, the doctor’s hands around her, on her. Fingers gentle and knowing, Jude’s body stuttered, unsure how to breathe naturally under them. It stretched, the time, she forgot to mind it, she even—

“There’s nothing too major to concern yourself with.”

Wait for it to heal. They told her. Wait and wait and wait. To recover. To get better.

Shaw moved away and she wanted to tell them to wait. Ask them to dig their fingers in the bruise. “I could have told you that half an hour ago.” Jude sucked her bottom lip through her teeth and rolled her eyes.

The pen launched at her collided with her arm and then dropped to the floor. Jude scoffed with mock outrage, smiled with something unstoppable. Something terrifying. “Very unprofessional, Doctor Liebowitz.”

//

Drunk, pathetically, on something that tasted not quite like beer. Jude wanted to go upstairs. Stumble her way into her bedroom and sleep it away but once her knees bent, she was swayed. The sofa, then. An uncoordinated dive. Fabric scratchy against her face. The ranch creaked in disapproval. Just her and a slight breeze that was not stilled by locked doors or shuttered windows.

And Them. Outside.

A thud against the door to announce Their arrival. A voice piercing the dark, her mother’s. Jude had no one else to assume but her. The conclusion was only rational: that a monster in the night could only hope to lure her to its teeth if it had had her mother’s voice. Feast not on a person who had learnt to endure but a child who still wanted only to be loved.

Let me in, Cricket. It’s cold out here.

They hadn't attempted it much, granted but They never quite got the voice right. There wasn’t a place on earth where her mother would beg to be with her. Jude’s eyes stopped fighting the light. She produced nothing to devour.

In the rarer, kinder moments, where she found the last lingering grace in her, she thought of a woman of sixty or so. She had long hair and still wore dresses that floated carelessly on the breeze but her smile reached her eyes now. Perhaps she cradled her children, grandchildren. A real life for her mother that had required the destruction of her own. The pain and dirt finally exalted. Explained. It would have been worth it then, wouldn't it?

That was what she thought of as she sunk into the sofa, hazy from liquor and impending sleep. Still burning from being touched. No thoughts of the likelihood of the one thing that had finally brought them together—unremarkable deaths for unmissed people. Jude had been born at the moment a year died—when time ran out—ruined one party, then forty. Just tonight, she would keep her monster company.

An exhale, something curved like a smile.

She died on June 1st. She’d felt it, that moment of no return. But, much like the fabled Lazarus, someone else– some greater being than herself– came along and displayed their awesome powers in front of the masses and brought her back to a state that was far better than simply alive. But unlike the story that John told, Stevie’s savior didn’t walk away from the miracle she’d performed. Theodora only traded her life for everyone else’s.

When they first realized what she could do with her gifts, Stevie’s father sat her down to explain the responsibilities that came with a gift like hers– a conversation guided by the principle of reciprocity; That the universe or its ilk gave her something great, and she must put that greatness back out into the world to keep the cycle going. And so she would, and so she had thus far in her life.

Eurynome had fucked around with the fates’ design– given so many a second chance– and then had left those who benefitted from her sacrifice to figure out what to do with it. Time continued without care or acknowledgement of all of the moments of still and silence that the city observed. Without so much as a thought of stopping for the broken and damaged to catch up. Stevie’s only wound left, the puncture in her gut, was stitched and healed and she still wasn’t sure how she’d ever put this gift back into the world. But she’d make Theo’s sacrifice worth it, somehow.

She had to.

June 2nd-30th

The aftermath of the events at Bergen Street saw the worst fight between Stevie and Levi that the siblings have ever had. While it’s true, and known by those relevant to the information, that Stevie has never approved of Levi being in the Brotherhood– disapproval was too weak a word for what she felt now: betrayed.

Levi had chosen them.

Even after she’d told him about what she’d seen first-hand, what she’d experienced– He’d chosen a stance of neutrality?! It didn’t matter that the one that had done it, stabbed her and successfully left her to die, ‘didn’t represent them anymore’. He had. And in her mind, he always would. They’re murderer’s, Levi’s enrollment was proof of that. But maybe that didn’t even matter. All that did was that Levi had chosen a group of murders and terrorists, over his own sister. He’d chosen her murderers over her.

She kicked him out. Shut the door in his face. And lied to her mother at the weekly check-in phone call.

The siblings haven’t spoken since.

–

Come the official start of summer, Stevie takes her first real vacation ever. A week of fun and relaxation with ███ ██████████ stranded out in a little hut over the ocean in Bora Bora proves to be exactly what she needs to get out of the funk the fight with her brother had left her in.█████ ██████████ ██████████ ███ █████ ████ ███ ██████ ███████ ████ ███ █████ ███ ███ █████ ████ always knows ████ ██ ███ ███ ████████ grateful. ████ ███ █████ ███ ████ ███ █████ ███ █████ allergic ███ ████ █████ ██████

–

It wasn’t long after she’d gone back to work full time that she was approached by a young mutant that she’d met under less than ideal circumstances with August in Bergen Street. Milla had a special ask of her: erase evidence of her being there on the day of the attacks. 

She told her some meshed story of not having a valid ID and there were people that would know how to look for her. In all honesty, Stevie wasn’t sure she followed it completely, but there was something about the look in Milla’s eyes as she spoke too quickly– something desperate and scared– that made Stevie’s resolve hitch. If Milla was as in trouble as her story made her seem to be, well.. Call it a traumatic bias but, Stevie’s never trusted ‘The Authorities’, or known them to do any sort of justice. So even though she knows she doesn’t have to do it, that she owes this mutant nothing, she promises Milla that she’ll take care of it.

And on the later half of the double she covers that night, she does. She finds the original paper reports amongst all the other still-waiting-to-be-entered physical reports from the day of the attacks, and shreds them before taking them out back to the smoking area behind the hospital and burns them.