Reconstructing Madonna - Part Five
Part Four here.
Part Five
She’s choking on her own vomit when she comes to.
There’s no air to inhale, no energy for her to prop herself up; no will to even try.
She’s terrified and useless.
Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God -
The ache is bone-deep and excruciating.
Black eventually crowds her vision, and survival instincts kick in. She rolls onto her side with supreme effort. Her emptying stomach turns again and again as self-loathing creeps up, making her heave until everything she has to give has been gone for five minutes.
At least she won’t have to wash it out of her hair.
Soft, unobtrusive tears drip from the corners of her eyes.
Eventually it’s over and she falls onto her back. Clinically inspecting the fallout as she tries to forget the hell that is her nightmares.
Singe marks decorate the fist-sized holes on either side of her comforter. The ceiling didn’t make out too well either by the looks of it. Shards of her favorite vase are tangled in her hair.
There’s no point in trying to fix any of the damage yet. She’s still too weak.
The clang of ceramic hitting wood reaches her ears. Eileen’s soft voice curses into the early morning, and Liz sighs in frustration.
She knows what the other woman is doing up. She knows that as long as they’re roommates, the chance of either of them getting a decent night’s sleep is a far-off dream.
But Eileen refuses to move out. And since her stubborn friend is nocturnal anyway and she’s terrified at the thought of being alone, Liz doesn’t say much about it.
She knows her refusal to be comforted is bewildering. She knows that Eileen just about bursts a blood vessel in her brain every time she refrains from asking questions.
There’s just no helping it.
There’s nothing Eileen could do if she knew all the gory details. Her night terrors are based in reality, and no amounts of hugs or pitying glances are going to set the past right. The only thing that could isn’t even in earth’s atmosphere anymore.
She would not use the granilith to wipe out Max and Tess’s son. She would not use it to erase the painful October night when she lost her innocence but kept her virginity.
But for Alex…
For Alex she would do it, the rest of the world be damned.
“Tell me, how does it feel to kill your best friend?”
She doesn’t even have the strength to sit up; but somehow, some bottomless, untapped source of energy deep inside her gets broken into just for this. Painful alien lightening does its customary country two-step up and down the length of her body.
For long minutes conscious thought is gone. She’s enveloped in blinding pain as she does her damnedest to break out of her near-comatose state, all without success.
And finally she simply surrenders to it.
Fire ripping through her veins.
Heart beating sluggish and loud in her chest.
Blood, and maybe she’s bitten through her tongue again or maybe some of that glass is wedged into her neck (here’s to hoping it’s nicked a vital artery).
A sick, perverse part of her enjoys this.
Right in this moment there are no reminders. She can hardly recall her own name, much less the workings of a time machine or a shapeshifter’s betrayal.
There’s no Max.
There’s no Alex.
There’s no baby; no far-off planet in need of saving; no alien queens.
The past six years don’t exist.
(Or maybe they just don’t count.)
She wants to stay here, in this world where Max can’t touch her soul (because she doesn’t have one) and regrets can’t plough through her mind (because she’s losing it). She wishes for miserable and dead and safe.
Gradually it eases up.
Liz draws in an enormous breath, and feels her throat is raw from screaming. She didn’t even hear herself.
The realization makes Max’s remembered scream echo in her head; and because it’s impossible not to in the face of such pain, she lets herself cry for another few minutes.
The shame that sound incites in her covers so many events.
Shame for leaving him after Pierce.
Shame that she and her worthless life were the reason he was abducted in the first place.
Shame for doing everything short of accusing him of murdering Alex when she knew the fault was hers and hers alone.
She does her best to push it away. Reminds herself that she never even really heard it. It’s a futile effort, though; the sound is as familiar to her as her own rasping sobs. And by now it’s part of the nightly show.
Nothing - not Alex’s dead body, not Future Max and Nicholas, not even Tess’s graphic visuals - is worse than when she’s forced to see him tortured. Over and over it happens, each time bringing him more pain and extinguishing more of the light in his eyes.
She watches it all.
The emaciated body. The broken spirit.
The heart that hardens a little more every time he is threatened, poked, prodded.
(And maybe that stings more than anything, because that gentle, near-sacred heart of his is the one thing she ever really let herself believe in.)
She’s not sure if it’ll ever get any easier to see.
Lately, it just seems to be getting harder.
For awhile she wonders at the new intensity of her nightmares, but she reaches no conclusions and eventually pushes the thoughts aside. She tends to do this a lot when faced with unalterable truths.
It’s almost four, and in an hour she’ll be leaving for her morning shift at the hospital. She shakes her head as she considers the impossibility of managing to repair her room and shower all within an hour’s time. Groans loudly when she sees the scorch marks on her desk.
Coffee is most definitely in order.
-
“No. Friggin’. Way!”
Liz looks up as she steps out of the bathroom and sees Eileen sitting, seemingly paralyzed, on their living room couch. The boxed seventh season of Gilmore Girls rests on the coffee table, and the credits roll on the TV screen.
Hearing Liz, she turns to face her accusingly. “You should have warned me. You know I’m in love with Luke. You know I’ve been pulling for Rory and Jess ever since he joined the show. But you just let me walk into the worst, most ambiguous ending ever!”
Her face is pale, only illuminated by the light filtering from the kitchen. The green eyes so like her sister’s are round and wounded. On her the expression looks uncharacteristically innocent.
Appearances are deceiving.
Gilmore Girls is their shared fetish. Eileen spent most of last spring commuting out of state for free-lance work and missed most of the final season. She refused to be spoiled and bought the DVDs as soon as they came out. After her last job she’s finally had a chance to take a much-deserved break, and has been utilizing that time off to catch up on everything she missed.
There hasn’t been a moment of non-TV related conversation in the apartment since.
And where Liz watches for the banter between Rory and Lorelai, the latter of whom she finds strangely reminiscent of Maria, Eileen’s belief in the onscreen romances approaches religious. If she doesn’t tread carefully now, she’ll spend the morning locked in a debate.
She shrugs helplessly. “Luke and Lorelai are on the road to reconciliation… probably. And at least Rory broke up with Logan.”
“That’s true,” Eileen allows. She shudders slightly. “God, he turned out to be such an ass.” Her voice is unreasonably smug as she says this.
Her eyebrows rise to her hairline, and even though she knows she shouldn’t be prolonging this discussion, she just can’t resist. “And Jess treated her so much better?”
“At least he wasn’t a cheating, controlling, bastard,” Eileen snaps. The ire in her voice isn’t directed at her friend, but it’s intimidating all the same. Her eyes take in Liz’s disconcerted expression and she settles back into the sofa with a smirk. Then she drives in the final nail. “Besides, who else was she going to end up with? Dean?”
She contemplates this. “Well, I guess that’s why they had her end the show alone. And there’s always what’s-his-name… Tristan! There’s always Tristan.”
Her roommate looks at her as if she’s the stupidest creature on the planet. “You did not seriously just suggest that Rory hook up with Chad Michael Murray, the biggest douche bag in recent history.”
The palpitations of her heart, something she was previously able to ignore, now swing crazily out of control. Her vision rapidly becoming hazy, Liz grapples for composure. She’s chilled to the bone when it dances just beyond her reach; taunting her and making her breath come in short, panicked bursts.
It’s nothing that Eileen says or does. It’s not even a particular thought she has.
But suddenly, everything about the morning she’s been mindlessly repressing hits her between the eyes. It’s hard to breathe and her hands are practically smoking and, oh God, is that burning feeling in her stomach the start of more tears?
Eileen sees, because it’s impossible not to. Reaches out to grasp her hand.
Liz pulls away before their skin makes contact. Staring at the extended appendage like it’s a blazing hot stove, and her eyes are fearful and guilty.
She wants so badly to feel some physical expression of love right now, to be reassured that it’s still possible for someone to care about her. But she knows that her touch could seriously injure or even kill her friend.
In the end, it just isn’t worth it to be brave.
Liz hears the rustling of crimson strands rearranging themselves as the other woman looks down at the top edge of the couch. Somewhere during their conversation the sun has risen, and the weak morning light makes the black fabric look grey.
For a full ten minutes she’s able to convince herself this is actually an interesting development while she tries to calm down.
There’s strange knowing in her roommate’s face when they lock eyes: ready to impart the kind of wisdom only family or a very close friend can. “I can never figure out why you decide to hate yourself.”
The words are soft and loving. Hurtful in a way that few things are, because they do their best to violate the one recess in her mind where no one gets to go.
Liz wants to explain. Confess. But in truth she’s not really sure, either.
Tears glitter in Eileen’s eyes. “If it’s that bad, Liz, why can’t you hate him? Or her? They’re the ones who deserve it. Hell, you can even take it out on Rena or me. God knows we work our aggression off on each other and you often enough.”
She almost breaks right then.
Almost says,
‘I know, but I’m so afraid that if I yell I’ll never stop and that if I strike out I’ll break something else that’s important to me - and the two of you are so important; the only people left that I haven’t hurt.’
It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell her that she hated Tess for a long time and it only made her characterize everything she despised in the other woman. That trying to hate Max eats away at her soul until all the good parts are gone.
At least hating herself is something she can control. The only thing, these days.
If she’s killing herself it’s because she’s dying slowly anyway.
“Please,” she begs.
She just can’t do this right now.
Eileen must hear the sob catching in her throat, because she relents. It’s an abnormally unproblematic truce.
Liz pads into the kitchen and quickly retrieves a mug and their thick glass carafe. Pours her coffee with shaking hands.
The first sip is acid in her mouth.
“You spiked our morning caffeine dosage?” she says incredulously.
Eileen is unrepentant as she tosses her hair over her shoulder. The usual shine in her eyes is still shadowed by something deeper and more melancholy, but the simple gesture seems to help chase away the darkness.
For a moment Liz is incredibly grateful that she’s the only one whose demons stay with her every step of the day.
“I was in the mood for something stronger. Sue me.”
Liz rolls her eyes and swallows the brew almost convulsively.
“Besides,” Eileen adds as an afterthought, pointing out the obvious, “it’s not as if you couldn’t use some yourself.”
-
Liz carpools to work with a middle-aged RN named Shanna.
Shanna has bottle-blond hair, shockingly noticeable laugh lines, and a maternal nature that has always made Liz a point of interest to her.
Because normal twenty-four-year-olds don’t have a strong aversion to social events and lab technicians usually aren’t capable of more than freshly-minted nurses. And most normal people don’t blink back tears when you invite them to a family Thanksgiving.
Most people tend to ignore the abundance of little things that make Liz such an oddity, but Shanna sees them as a sign of some great, underlying loneliness and is constantly going out of her way for the younger woman. This includes, among other things, “saving” Liz from public transportation.
It’s similar to having a nosy aunt.
Her compact grey Camry pulls up at the entrance to Liz and Eileen’s apartment building. She smiles cheerily and opens the passenger door. “Hey, sweetheart. How are you this morning?”
Liz walks around the front of the car and settles into her usual seat. The safety belt cuts into her collarbone when she draws it across her lap. “Hey, Shanna. I’m doing okay. What about you? Didn’t you say yesterday that Harry was visiting?”
They pull away from the curb. Shanna chatters cheerfully, not mentioning Liz’s pallor or tired tone if she notices them. “He’s as gangly as ever. I was hoping when I sent him away to college he’d take up a sport or two, but of course from the sound of things he’s been holed up with his Playstation ever since we dropped him off in the fall.”
Liz laughs lightly. “Give him time. I’m sure he’ll meet some people soon.”
“Oh, he’s met people all right. He’s in some sort of video game club or something. He’s even thinking about switching his major to game programming.”
Alex’s face flashes across her mind before she can stop it.
The older woman doesn’t notice her sudden silence. “Actually, sweetie, I noticed the other day that the local college is taking applications for the spring semester. If you were hoping to take a few nursing courses, I’d be more than happy to help you study or lend you some money.”
Shanna doesn’t know that all three of her best friends are worth millions.
She also doesn’t understand why, when she’s so dead-set on working in the hospital, Liz won’t even consider getting her RN.
“Thanks for the offer, but I don’t think it’ll work out,” she says uncomfortably.
“If you say so. I just don’t understand what you’re doing with us when you should probably be off in some high-end hospital working as a doctor or researcher.”
She’s startlingly close to the mark. That had been Liz’s original intent after leaving Roswell.
But she couldn’t focus in classes. Her powers were always out of whack, and more often than not she missed 95% of her lectures. Without photographic memory or any working study skills to speak of, she quickly ruined her remaining chances of getting into any decent school, never mind Harvard.
She was lucky she lasted long enough to make it through her program and get certified.
To Shanna she says, “I’m really horrible with tests. You know, performance anxiety and all.”
They pull up in front of the hospital, trading a puzzled glance at the sight of news cameras swarming out front. Shanna smiles brightly at her. “Well, regardless, a lab tech or a nurse isn’t a bad thing to be by any means. I just wonder sometimes if your heart is really in this.”
Liz wonders that too.
But just the fact that she’s never once been wrong, never once promised a barely-hanging-in-there parent that their child will be all right and then watched that baby die, tells her that there’s some reason for her to be here.
She opens the car door and grabs her purse before stepping into the parking lot.
Nearly loses her footing.
Blood rushes to her head.
Ringing in her ears and panic and hope and only one word making its way to the surface -
Max.
Part Six