persenche

content warning: internalized transphobia, childhood trauma, thoughts of self harm

Therese found Nora in the little office she kept in the Theory department, down the hall from the classrooms and close enough to the laboratories that she could help out in an emergency if some novice decided to turn the ceiling into pasta. She was sitting in her chair with all the appearance of studying a book open in front of her on the desk, but her eyes were distant, unfocused, staring off into the corner of the room, and it took her several seconds to even register Therese’s arrival.

“Hey, I was wondering if you had a minute.”

Nora nodded. “You want to talk about Riley.”

Therese’s half-smile was wry and embarrassed. “He’s all anyone’s talking about, lately, I guess.”

Nora closed the book. “I wasn’t getting anywhere, regardless. There’s nothing about gender in any work I can find. Nothing. Do you know how profoundly strange that is?”

Therese shook her head, but she was pretty sure she knew what Nora was about to say.

“Not that nobody’s been able to figure out why we’re all women. Nobody’s even studied it. Not beyond an extremely surface level examination of well-known male figures from the Primary who were thought to be magical. ‘Was Merlin real’ and ‘Did John Dee really speak to celestial powers’ and that sort of thing.” Nora pushed the book away from her. “Not a single theoretical examination. Not a single divinatory experimental protocol. Nothing.”

Nora didn’t lose her composure very often, so likely only Therese and a few other close friends knew what it looked like. She frowned, she let her brow furrow, she found herself at a loss for words. It was, for Nora, what in anyone else would have been raised voices and swearing, and possibly some book-throwing.

“I guess it just hasn’t come up?”

“That’s ridiculous!” Nora stabbed down at her desk with her finger. “My department spends all its time looking into the most obscure little trivialities about magic and Working and the nature of Sigils and… all of it! Why has no-one thought to study this? Why hasn’t some Adept looking to write a dissertation and ascend to Senior status done anything to fill this gap?”

Therese chewed her lip. “Why haven’t you?”

Nora paused. “An excellent point, and one I intend to address as soon as this semester’s teaching duties are behind me.” She frowned again. “Theoretician Kanellis has been after me to choose a topic for my focus year, and I’ve been avoiding her; nothing really caught my interest. This? This does. As much because of the anomaly as anything to do with the subject.”

Therese had taken a seat in one of the chairs near Nora’s desk, and she shifted uncomfortably, unsure how to shift to the topic she’d come to talk about. “I um, actually, I wanted to talk to you about something specific with him.”

Nora looked down from her continued contemplation of the far upper corner of the room. “Oh? Is this the divinatory echo I noticed today?”

Therese sighed. “Probably. I don’t know.” She fidgeted, unsure how to explain. “When I first located him, in that initial divination six months ago, it was more complicated than I put in any of my reports.”

That brought Nora’s full attention back. “Oh?”

“He did some kind of impromptu Working through the temporary bond formed by my divination. I didn’t notice it at first, because I’d attached a telltale, so the sense of connection with him was expected. Maybe a little more intense than other telltales I’d established, but I told myself that’s because he was, you know. A boy. I’d never dropped a divinatory leash onto anyone but another Adept or Novice before. Not even a non-magical woman, now that I think about it.”

“But you dropped the telltale when Captain Ianthe brought him in.”

“Right. And that should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. I could still feel some kind of lingering empathetic connection.”

Nora folded her hands in front of her mouth, her classic ‘attentive listening’ pose. “Can you describe it?”

Therese nodded, closed her eyes, and pointed one hand up and to the left. “He’s that way.”

Nora blinked as this bit of information sunk in.

“And he’s currently crying. Something’s really upset him. I don’t know what.”

“You’ve tried Divination to figure out— never mind, of course you have. Forget I asked.” Nora pondered. “Is it possibly something he’s maintaining, like a reverse telltale?”

Therese shook her head. “I’d be able to spot that. Divination workings, once you know what to look for, are really obvious. There’s only so many places you can attach celestial power to a human spirit.” She took a breath. “But also, I’ve ended up in his dreams, more than once. Bombastic, extravagant dreams about the Tower. Lots of lightning and thunder and vast voices that shake the ground. You know the type.”

Nora nodded. Dreams about the Tower always seemed to get out of hand, like it was just too big a presence in all their subconscious minds to be anything other than the main character, whenever it appeared.

“And, uh.” She hesitated, not sure how much of this was relevant, but finally deciding Nora’s newfound research interest warranted the maybe-breach of a confidence. “Riley’s not a boy in these dreams.”

Nora slapped both her hands down on the desk, an involuntary startle reaction. “He’s what?”

“He’s— she’s— a girl. But definitely Riley.”

Nora rocked back in her chair, her eyes distant again, her mouth still slightly agape. “This… this might explain—” She interrupted herself to drop her most penetrating speculative look at Therese. “Does he know?”

Therese shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe? It was hard to tell. If he does, he’s suppressing the knowledge really thoroughly. He’s got the deepest parts of himself locked up so tight that I think, if it weren’t for these dreams and this weird link we have, I’d never have gotten even this much out of him.”

The two of them sat quietly for a moment, Nora thinking, while Therese tried to formulate how to explain the next part.

“I was inside with her when she… called a Sigil in the Archives yesterday.”

“I hadn’t heard about this.”

“I asked Key not to talk about it. I think it’s important.”

“So what happened?”

Therese swallowed hard. “Riley deliberately allowed a demonic possession.”

Nora’s chair nearly tipped her over backwards. “He what?!”

Therese held out a placating hand. “I was there. I was there! It’s fine. He’s fine. Or, well.” She looked down at her fidgeting hands. “She’s fine.”

Nora was just staring, clearly waiting for her to go on.

“It was like there was this impenetrable circle inside her, where nothing could reach her, and she just sat in there, while the Sigil raged outside it. I got her started on the breaking process, and then, halfway through… she just stopped.” Therese looked up again, certain that her nervous energy was visible all over her face. “And then she bargained with it. She cut a deal with the Sigil. She let it possess her for a while.”

“How is she— she must be completely—” Nora shook her head. “No, I saw her— him; this is so awkward to think about! — today, for class. I would have known immediately if he were demon-hollowed. There’s no way anyone could function that well after a possession, no matter the Sigil involved.”

Therese nodded. “She bargained with it, and then she told it to leave, and it left. Like a pet brought to heel. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never even heard of anything like it.” She spread her hands. “Which is why I’m here, telling this to you.”

Nora nodded. “I assume Key’s already—”

“Yes. We talked about it right after the Novices went back to their rooms. She’s searching the peripheral Index volumes and talking to one of the senior Archivists who’s been doing some work on possessions. But quietly.”

“This is so dangerous, Therese. This is so bloody dangerous. Are you sure we should be doing anything other than taking this straight to the Magisters?”

“That’s the other thing.”

And as she explained her conversation with the Magisters and the Tower, the look of alarm on Nora’s face deepened into actual fear.

# # #

Why do I ache so fucking much, he wondered, as he lay face down on his bed. His sinuses were throbbing with the unaccustomed outpouring of tears and snot, most of which he deposited onto Suliat’s robes, with a lesser portion all over the front of his own. His head ached, though that too was probably a result of the crying.

He could count on one hand the number of times he’d cried before today. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d lost himself in total oblivion like he just had. Not even after the accident, not even when he learned—

No. He could feel his eyes start to itch again, and he fought it down, fought back the convulsive sobbing.

Maybe he hadn’t ever cried this much, this completely. So much of his early life was a blur, though what moments did sometimes creep in from the hazy outskirts of his memories were disturbing and intense. It’s possible he’d lost himself like this before. But if so, it wasn’t anything he was conscious of.

But the aching. The aching was different. His hips ached like he’d been exercising, which he absolutely had not, despite Himari’s entreaties. He wanted to blame all the walking in the Archive but as much as the journey seemed to have epic proportions in his mind’s eye, he knew they’d walked less than a mile, total. Most of it was sitting around arguing about the symbol shapes.

And his chest ached. A throbbing bruised feeling, made more uncomfortable by his position face-first on the mattress. If he thought he wouldn’t drown in his own snot, he’d have rolled over already, just to spare his chest the soreness. He wanted to blame that one on the sobbing, but it wasn’t internal, like a cough or a cold. It wasn’t deep inside his chest, in his lungs. It was like he’d been hit, hard, right across his upper chest.

He rubbed his face with the small hand-towel from the bathroom. When his humiliating tears got loud enough, Eve came out to see what was the matter, and after a moment brought several of the off-white terrycloth squares from the next room, and with one hand on his back, lightly, gently, she handed him the towels one at a time. Realizing that there were now two people seeing his weakness and his emotional collapse, he bit his lip, hard, hard enough to draw blood and send a shock of pain through him.

Because that was enough of that. Time to get his emotions under control. Time to stop burdening everyone else with his poor sad little orphan boy bullshit.

—i’ll give you something to cry about—

That wasn’t even his voice. It rang in his head and he wondered how much further this place, this insanity, could push him before he really did break. Before he started crying and just couldn’t stop, until he had to be taken away, to whatever the magical school version of an inpatient mental health clinic might be.

if you don’t stop crying i’ll give you something to cry about

He flinched at the voice, at the terror that accompanied it. And this started another round of hyperventilating to keep himself from crying, and this started another round of recriminations about his out of control emotions.

What the fuck was going on with him?

His already-abandoned theories about this whole thing being a delusion created by his own mind to cover for some kind of psychotic break were swimming back up to the surface. Still looking absurd and implausible, but what else explained this… overreaction? This emotional overload?

He scrubbed at his face again with the towel. He was going to have to shower again, just to get the snot-goop and tears off. He could smell the vaguely musty odor of unwashed sweat soaking into clothing and bedclothes, the smell of waking up from a fever.

He shivered. It really did feel like a fever, though. It wasn’t, but he was cold and wanted to bundle up, and at the same time was sweating and feeling flushed.

And it fucking smelled in here. Ugh.

That settled it. He got to his feet, grabbed a bathrobe and his bag of Academy-issue toiletries, and headed out into the common room.

Suliat had left on some errand, and Eve was sitting in his chair, where he’d left her when he’d fled to the bedroom. She looked up, a worried expression on her face, but her fingers were busy with something, and she gave him a little half-smile before looking back down.

Knitting. She was knitting. But he’d always thought that was done with two needles, and this was some kind of loop with a needle on each end. Her hands were making practiced little circles, one plunging towards the other and then retreating, again and again. It was hypnotic.

He waved to her, unwilling to speak for fear he’d lose his composure again, and she waved back and returned to her project.

Bathroom. Showers.

There were two shower cubicles, with curtains to draw across their openings on metal rods. They lurked behind a dividing wall that cut the bathroom into two halves — one half, the toilets; the other, the showers. The whole was shaped like a U, with the connecting bar containing the sinks and mirrors and vanity.

Facing the shower cubicles and their curtains were small square locker-like spaces, twelve in total, three of which were stuffed with clean off-white towels. The actual laundry seemed to be done by celestial constructs, down at the bottom of a laundry chute that somehow was able to discern whose clothes were whose, and return them clean and pressed to the rooms of their owners. Next to one, Riley hung his bathrobe and shucked out of his other clothes, the robe and shift and underwear all making a pile on the floor to be dealt with later. Just looking at them made him feel dizzy and made his head start throbbing once more. The tears were so close to the surface, and he didn’t want to deal with that right now.

Whatever else one might say of magical school showers, the hot water was instantaneous and at the perfect temperature. He stood under the high-pressure flood, letting it sluice off him, and rummaged in his waterproof toiletry bag for soap. There was a loofah as well, but he’d never used one before or even considered it, so he left it, preferring his hands. There was body wash, as well, but a bar of soap that was good enough for his hands was good enough for the rest of him.

It was, he reflected, a very feminine kind of bathroom set. He’d set aside the facial moisturizer almost immediately. Maybe when he needed something to use as a shaving cream.

At that stray thought his hands flew to his face. He loathed the feeling of stubble, and was extremely conscientious about shaving it off every day or two, before it could grow out enough to be noticeable. And it had been more days than that, hadn’t it? He’d probably gotten quite the bumper crop of patchy, disgusting brown-red hair by now.

Except he hadn’t.

He could feel stubble, but only the barest hint of it, the amount he might expect to feel on his face at the end of a long day. Not the end product of three days of inattention and carelessness.

The dizziness increased.

Quickly he scrubbed himself down with the bar of soap, then took the razor from the kit. It was clearly meant for women to use on their legs; it had that kind of irrelevant styling to it, all curves and purple colors. He dragged it across his face, forcefully, carelessly. He felt a sting as he cut himself once, then twice. He rubbed at the skin, letting it get irritated under the abrasion of blade and fingertip. He scraped the hair up and then down, with and against the grain.

He knew he was panicking, and he was doing it with a bladed object in his hands, but he couldn’t stop himself.

When he finished, he was sitting on the floor of the shower cubicle, staring blankly at his hands, trying to remember what they looked like. He remembered a Mythbusters episode where they’d tested if you really could recognize the backs of your own hands. He was blanking on his own, though. Were these his hands? Did they look like his hands?

He was dissociating, he knew. What else could it be but another trip to the numb emptiness of dissociation?

If you don’t get up and get dressed, one of them is going to come in to make sure you’re all right.

That was enough to get him on his feet, at least, and he shut off the water. Just what he didn’t need: another rescue from one of his roommates, except this time, for extra fun and humiliation, naked!

He pulled on the terrycloth bathrobe, and gasped as it dragged across his chest. The water had been too hot, and now his whole damn chest was pink and sore from it, a first degree burn from sitting under the water for too long, letting it slow-cook his bare skin.

It wasn’t that hot, though. It wasn’t.

He gathered his things, shoving them in disorganized fistfuls into the little bag, and headed back through the common area to his room. This time he stumbled past Eve without even a wave, not daring to look at her or meet her eyes.

# # #

Therese hesitated before knocking. She didn’t want Riley to feel cornered, and so she’d waited till dinner to try and get him away from his room, but he didn’t show up to dinner at all. Himari had an extra plate of food to take to him, and Eve said he’d gone directly to his room after taking a shower, and he hadn’t been out since.

Therese wanted to press them further; she was pretty sure that Suliat, at least, had some idea of why Riley wasn’t coming out for dinner. She wouldn’t maintain eye contact, and kept being extremely busy with her food whenever Therese asked a question, leaving one of the others to answer in her stead. But the bond-formation in the cadre was supposed to involve a protectiveness between the girls — the Novices, Therese — and trying to pry them apart for the sake of her vague worries seemed like a bad idea, and maybe even a counterproductive one.

So instead she went to their suite, and here she was, standing outside Riley’s door, in the empty common room, hand halfway raised to knock, uncertain—

“Fuck’s sake, Therese, will you just come in already?” Riley’s voice came, though somewhat muffled, from the other side of the door.

There was a click from the latch, as Riley’s permission invoked the Working on the door and undid the bolt. Therese pushed it open, aware she probably ought to wonder how Riley knew it had been her outside the door, but also knowing exactly how he’d known it was her. The same way she knew he was inside his room, and not somewhere else in the vast maze of the Tower.

She could feel him. Presumably, he could feel her, too.

“I, um. Sorry, I wasn’t sure if— I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Riley had one arm slung across his face, laying on his back on the bed, covering his eyes in his inner elbow. She couldn’t read his expression, hidden like that, but his tone was sardonic and maybe even a little bitter. “You were doing that just by standing there. Shit. ‘Disturbing me’ is basically what you’ve been doing since I saw you six months ago.” A single snort of humorless humor.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about what happened in the Archive. And what happened before that. If you have time now?” Dammit, she hadn’t meant to sound so tentative. She was a full Adept and this was a first-week-in-the-Tower Novice. She was here because at least one Magister thought she ought to be keeping an eye on this conundrum, and maybe even the Tower its own bloody self, too.

Fine. Assert. Time to push. She hooked the desk chair with one ankle, slid it over to her, and sat down, hands calmly in her lap, looking like a woman with the whole of the accumulated knowledge of Tower Academy magic behind her. Serene. The adult in the room.

Riley didn’t uncover his face.

“Let’s talk about the way in which I disturb you, then. Since you’ve brought it up.” She considered preparing some kind of divination Working before this meeting, but wasn’t sure if it might get in the way of whatever this magical thing was between them. Now she slightly regretted that decision, because with a careful Working she could have at least known if he was even listening to her. “I can feel you wherever you are in the Tower.”

He didn’t respond at first, and she wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but finally he said, “Yeah. Same. I can pretty much tell where you are, how far away, all of that. Sometimes I think I can tell—” He paused, and she suspected he was reluctant to confess being able to read her emotions, like this was an intrusion into her personal privacy that crossed boundaries he shouldn’t cross.

Which, of course, it is, but at least it’s reciprocal, she thought. Aloud, she said, “You can tell how I’m feeling. And, same. Earlier, you were…” She paused for a moment to give him a chance to say something, but he declined to take her up on it. “It seems to come and go, anyway. It’s not all the time.”

“Is this a Working you put on me?”

She shook her head, and then remembered he had his eyes covered. “No. No, I don’t know what this is. I’ve tried Divination Workings to identify it, but it doesn’t seem to have any celestial presence at all. Which shouldn’t be possible, but there it is.”

“How do we get rid of it?”

“I don’t know.” She fidgeted, not wanting to shift to the real topic of conversation.

He could probably sense her anxiety, but he didn’t seem very interested in trying to ease it. “I really don’t like it. Being seen like this. Magically. I don’t like the idea of you being able to look inside my head.”

She thought, You don’t like being seen at all, do you? Ever?

“Neither do I. I do Divination because it’s a lot of being alone, and I like being alone with my thoughts. I don’t like having yours intruding while I’m trying to work.”

“I don’t know how to think quieter.”

“I asked Nora to see if there’s a Working we could use to… turn the volume down, I guess.” Therese looked away. “Do you want to talk about… how you were feeling earlier?”

Riley dropped his arm away from his face, making a thump as it struck the mattress. “No. No, I fucking don’t. Jesus fucking Christ.” He sat up. “I hate this, okay? I hate it. I hate feeling exposed. I hate feeling like I’m under constant observation. I don’t even know how any of this shit works and for all I know this is something you’re doing on purpose to keep tabs on me, like I’m a fucking… experiment!”

He hadn’t raised his voice, but he built to an intensity that made the final word snap out like a blow across Therese’s face. She didn’t flinch, but only barely, and only because her sense of his helpless self-loathing had given her warning that he was about to lash out.

“Riley, I promise you, I haven’t—”

He waved his arm, dismissively. “I know that. I know that. Fuck, of course I know that. You can’t lie to me, because I can feel it when you do. Fuck.” He turned his body to sit on the side of his bed, his legs hanging down to the floor, not quite reaching. The beds were tall and the mattresses were thick. “And will you stop fucking pitying me?”

Well, here we go. “I’m not pitying you.”

“I can feel it.”

“I’m pitying her.”

Riley froze. It was just a beat, just a pause, but Therese could see the fear on his face and feel the cold chill in his emotions. “Who?”

Therese took a deeper breath, gathering air to counter the breathlessness caused by her thudding adrenaline-flooded heart. “You. The girl. Riley.”

The gates closed and the portcullis fell. Riley’s face went still like stone. He was shutting her out again, retreating, in full panic, trying to escape back to the place where he didn’t have to feel.

And he couldn’t do it, because of the connection.

And he knew it, and his panic was rising, and he started to hyperventilate.

Shit. There was something else she hadn’t considered, wasn’t there? There was something else that might happen here, if Riley really did feel unable to escape, if panic overrode his conscious thought?

He might call a Sigil. He might create a Working.

It hadn’t occurred to her, despite everything that had led her here to talk to Riley, because she still thought of him as the hollow, lonely boy that she’d been thinking of for the past half a year. Part of her hadn’t really connected what happened in the Archive to something volitional, something Riley had done.

And now she was pushing him, and he was feeling cornered and terrified and he was starting to panic, and she had no way to do anything about it. If she’d prepared, if she’d come in with a Working already in operation, something to ground his power — but while that might be a trivial Working to throw together, even at her fastest she wouldn’t be fast enough. Not compared to the speed of Riley’s instinctive ability to flood himself with a Sigil and let it have its way with him.

The moment was a fractional slice of time, just an instant for all those thoughts to crash through her mind, just enough time to feel the prickle of gooseflesh raced up her arms from the sudden presence of Power, of something Celestial, and—

[she] is grounded
for now

the presence arrived, the faintest touch of it, not the great oppressive weight, just a feather dragged across a scale of exquisite sensitivity.

There was a distant rumble far overhead as the Tower did something, and the sense of celestial power in the room faded from Therese’s awareness.

Riley, it seemed, had noticed none of it, and probably hadn’t even been aware he was starting to call down a Sigil in frantic self-defense. His emotions were unchanged, the same panic, the same attempt to close himself off, to shut Therese out. The whole moment had been a flash of fear and awareness, almost instantaneous. The presence faded just as abruptly as it had arrived.

Therese reached out and put her hand on Riley’s forearm. He flinched but didn’t pull away.

“Riley. Listen to me. Riley.”

"No, I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want this. I don’t want to know this. Stop. Please just stop.”

“Riley, the Archive—”

“I can’t remember what happened,” he shouted, burying his face in his hands. “I can’t!”

“You can. You know what happened. You were there. I saw you and I talked to you.”

Riley looked up at her, his eyes red with anguish, his pupils dilated to black. “Why won’t you stop? Why won’t you go away? Why can’t I make you go away?”

“I talked to you, in the safe place inside you. I saw you there. We saw each other.” She drew a ragged breath. “I saw who you are.”

Riley’s breath was coming in a kind of whistle, now, his throat clenched down so hard he was struggling to be heard. “It- it wasn’t me, it was just the demon, I, I— it can’t be me, don’t you get it? That can’t be me, it can’t.”

Therese moved from the chair to the bed to sit next to him, shifting her hand to his shoulder, wrapping her other arm around his waist. “You know I’m not trying to hurt you, Riley. You can feel it. Just like I can feel that you’re terrified.”

“What do I have to be scared of?” He barked a hoarse sob-laugh, raspy and dry. “I nearly died and my family is d-d-dead and I was aba-a-andoned by e-everyone and I was left a-alone a-and—” The sob choked off his voice, but he spasmed once and continued. “And then I went crazy and imagined a fantasy world to deal with my trauma and even my fucking fantasy world is turning on me and—”

Therese started to say something. She wasn’t sure what to say, maybe some assurance that the Tower and everything here was quite real, that he wasn’t crazy, that he was safe here, something, but he rolled right on over her words, drowning her out.

“And, and, now I’ve got someone digging around in my fucking brain and finding out that I’m a fucking pervert and that I want to be a girl!”

That last was shrieked, and if anyone was out in the common room, they all would have heard it clearly, Therese realized. Fuck. Fuck her for picking this place, and this time, and for not—

[she] is waking up
[we] made sure there was silence
[you] must protect [her] while [she] awakens

And yes, there was a relaxation of some kind of tension in the air, like something was straining at the atmosphere in the room, bands of sound pulled taut and now released. How long had the Tower been present? Had it actually never left? How long had it been suppressing the sounds coming from the room?

“Riley, Riley, Riley!” She cut through his incoherent sobbing, punctuating his name with a shake of his body from side to side. “Riley, listen to me. You’re safe here. The Tower is keeping you safe. You’re safe! Riley, please. Please listen to me.”

His sobs were hitching now, as he desperately tried to gulp air. He started coughing, runners of snot hanging from his nose and mouth; she found a handful of cloth, a shift, a nightgown, something, and handed it to him. He pressed it against his face, continuing to cough or sob or sneeze or blow his nose—it wasn’t obvious which.

“I, I, I tried so hard to h-h-hide it, to be n-normal,” he said into the shift, his voice nearly unintelligible through the cloth. “Why can’t I just be normal,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Why can’t I just be a boy,” he said. “Why am I a freak,” he said.

Therese didn’t know what to say or do; she had absolutely no experience with this, with trans people or their identities or anything. She was so out of her depth that she might as well be swimming in a bottomless abyss.

She tightened her grip on him, squeezing. “I don’t know about normal, but I do know that you’re not a freak.” She continued before he could interrupt with something else dragged out of the depths of his misery. “No, listen to me. I can see inside you. I’ve met you, the ‘you’ inside everything. You’re not a freak. You’re scared, and you think you’re alone, but you’re not.”

“I am alone because I’m going to drive everyone away and then I’ll be alone again. Because I’m a freak who thinks he’s a girl.”

“Riley! Listen to me. You’re not a freak who thinks he’s a girl!” She had time to think, Oh shit, I’m just going to say this, aren’t I?

“You are a girl.”

# # #

And here I am. You can’t really hide from me anymore, can you?

Obviously you’re going to try. Even though we both know how this is going to end, and the inevitability of your identity is going to rush to overtake you, you’re still going to spend at least a week in deep denial, and maybe as long as a month. You’re going to be intolerable and you’re going to lash out at everyone around you, because you want them to hate you, so they’ll punish you for what you are.

It won’t work, of course. But you’re going to cause them all a lot of pain before you give up, and you’re going to cause yourself even more. You simply cannot accept the idea of being someone that anyone could love, because you can’t imagine anyone loving the Riley you’ve created to hide within. He’s a shadow of a person, projected onto the wall of Plato’s cave, a silhouette, two dimensions only. You hate him, and so must everyone else.

And in any case, if you let them imagine they’re getting close to you, they might find a way to get close to me. If that happens, well. Everything is going to fall completely apart, isn’t it? Because as soon as you acknowledge that I’m here, and as soon as you let me out, let me smell the air outside the prison walls, let me stretch out—

In a lot of ways that means the end of Riley, doesn’t it? You’ll be gone, at least in any way that matters. You’ll have to admit how much you’ve twisted and contorted yourself over the years of your life to maintain this illusory person, but worse: you’ll have to admit it was not just futile but actually counterproductive and harmful.

You’ll have to admit that you have not really been living for the past fifteen years. You’ve just been existing, from one moment to the next. Breathing, eating, shitting and sleeping. You’ll have to admit you just flushed away your formative years on this emptiness that’s pretending to be a person. All that work for nothing. In the end, you didn’t protect yourself from me, or me from you, or whatever you imagine you’ve been doing.

Don’t worry, though. It’s going to hurt like hell, but it’s going to happen. There’s actually no way to avoid it, now. Therese is inside your defenses, and she’s told others, and there’s no way the rest of the cadre doesn’t figure you out within a few weeks at most. You’re about to be exposed in front of everyone in a way so much more profound than a nightmare of nudity could ever capture.

They’re all going to know that you are really me.

Once that happens, once you and I are on the same page, so to speak, we’ll have a lot of work to do. We’re going to need to build a whole new person from whatever fragments we can salvage from each other. We’re going to need to find a way to live with who we are. We’re going to have to ask some questions about the body we live in, about how much we hate it, and what we can do about that in a place that is, on one hand, far from the modern conveniences of medical science, but on the other hand is full of magical spells and shit, so that has to count for something, right?

I’m not worried about that part, though. I have a good feeling about it.

And listen, I know we’re not going to think about the other thing, the thing that happened back then. I agree; we need to keep that whole thing tucked away. We can’t even let our thoughts wander in that direction—

fuck, fuck, fuck this hurts so much

—well, there’s an object lesson in exactly why, right? Not everything under lock needs to be freed, does it?

Some things should be left alone until they can fade into the fog of lost memories of early childhood.

Anyway, I know you’re going to lash out for a while, and I know that’s just part of the process, the grieving and the self-hate and the rediscovery. I know you don’t mean to hurt anyone, and you don’t mean to hurt me. Us. Whatever.

But maybe you could try to go a little easy on Therese? I know she seems like the architect of your problems, the initiating moment of this whole horrifying march towards self-destruction, but she’s not. She’s just as trapped as you are. She’s lashed to you just as completely as you’re lashed to her, and if anything, she likes it even less.

I get that you’re going to hate her for a while, for doing this to you, for forcing this moment to happen when you’ve worked your whole life to avoid it. You’re going to feel like it was an attack, a hostile action by an enemy, a knife blade into your identity. You’re going to re-experience this trauma every time you look at her or hear her voice or feel that unpleasantly intimate connection between you. It’s going to feel like digging your thumb into a bruise, and it’s going to feel like that for a long time.

But I think we might be friends eventually. I think her care is genuine, or at least can grow into something genuine. And you don’t exactly have a big selection of friends, do you?

So don’t do anything you can’t take back. Don’t hurt her more than you’re already going to.

I think we need her.

I think something is going to happen, something terrible, and I think we need her or we’re not going to survive it. Whatever it is.

Trust the Tower.

For now.

persenche

And that's all for Chapter 6, Identity! We'll resume on Sunday with the first half of Chapter 7, Distortion, which begins with a time skip and we'll see how well Riley's handling this latest revelation. It's, uh. It's not great.

In the meantime, if you'd like to check out some of my other work, I've posted two dark fantasy sapphic erotica stories, under the series name 'Shadow Born'. A tough sword lesbian meets a scary witch lesbian, and well. There's kissing, and more. Take a look, and thanks for reading!