[sunday_reveries] i'm terrified i can't fix this. that this is just who i am.
[Companion piece to this fic right here. Possibly triggering content, there is no happiness here; totally, totally AU.]
“I had the strangest dream,” she tells Lucky one night. The nights she slips quietly into his room to sleep with him are more common than the nights where she doesn’t. “It used to be a recurring dream back home, years ago. Before I ever came to Chicago. I stopped having it and then yesterday, it came back again. It was so strange.”
She’s stolen another one of his shirts. His arm is around her waist, tucking her against his chest. She likes it there. “What was the dream about?” he asks her, thumb resting lightly into the ink at her hip, right into the heart of the crescent moon star tattoo she has there. Whenever they kiss for hours and hours and her shirt-his shirt-rises up her waist, his thumb usually ends up there.
Lena half-wonders if he ever notices.
“I’m running along this narrow street. I can’t see where I’m headed or where the road stops because these… veils keep blocking my view.” The crescent moon is a symbol of faith. “Veils of all colors. I keep getting wrapped up in them. I can never see where I’m going. But sometimes I don’t mind.”
He doesn’t answer her immediately, but she feels his mouth hovering near her ear. She thinks the most beautiful thing about them is they are uncompromising in their determination to never hurt each other.
“I think what this means, Ms. Austen, is that we’re up for another adventure soon.”
“But not in Antarctica,” Lena reminds him, shifting in place and turning back to look at him. His fingers remain on the moon. She smiles at him and he smiles at her. She kisses him. And kisses him some more. When he speaks again, it’s whispered into her skin and it feels like a promise all over again.
“But not in Antarctica.”
---
They never get to their adventure.
Sonny and Lena are closest to a strong reset than they have been in years, and Gates must tag along with them to make sure they don’t slip-either with other people or with each other. They’re all Glaysas, they understand in a way others can’t, and the younger a Glaysa is, the more difficult to keep emotions around them from becoming too overwhelming.
It’d be so easy to crack, after all this time of fighting.
The tension has been thick at the bar lately, with their two cases opened, and it’s evidently starting to get to them.
Lena finds herself scratching at her skin without noticing when she started to do so.
Gates blacks out every other night from all the liquor bottles he’s been emptying.
Sonny’s being taunted by Jolene every which way.
It’ll be fine, she says to Lucky, placing a quick kiss on his lips. It’ll be fine, and she gets into the car along with the other two men, until Lucky, John, and Zoe are small dots in the rear view mirror, waving them off.
---
They never get to their cabin located in a remote place just outside of Cicero.
Their car is intercepted by three vans halfway there, and Gates is disarmed before the doors are forcibly opened. He’s shot in the arm and Sonny’s caught in the shoulder, the car jerking off to the side and crashing right into a tree.
Blackness swims along the edges of her vision and she only faintly remembers being hauled out of the car and tossed into a trunk.
When Lena wakes, she’s in a cage in a four-walled room. The lights are off and there aren’t any windows. She starts to lose sense of time, doesn’t know if it is day or if it is night. She isn’t given food, she isn’t told where she is, and the door doesn’t open at all for over twenty-four hours while she’s left in withdrawal.
At first, she has no idea Jolene is behind this. Jolene has zero interest in her, after all, only visits Gates and Sonny’s rooms to taunt them both at different intervals. The object they’d been after is now in their possession, stolen right from under the Crowbar’s noses, and Jolene wants to test it out on her favorite subjects. It’s only a coincidence they’re nearing a reset, really. A delicious coincidence. She wants to see how far she can push the elastic band before it snaps.
Lena violently shakes the cage as she hears their yelling.
They were only supposed to be gone for two days and it has been three.
Their phones are left in the middle of the woods, red lights blinking with the reminder of a dozen unanswered calls.
---
Lena has met all the Saints, at least in passing, throughout her twisted friendship with Kay.
She’s only ever been scared of one.
Viktor circles her cage now, kicks the bars once she fails to acknowledge his presence. He must know she wouldn’t talk willingly. She swallows past the panic rising up her throat like bile, swallows the urge to vomit as he kneels down before her, steel bars the only thing between them. She spits on his face and he backhands her with enough force her neck snaps. Every four hours, without fail, one of the goons enters the room to ‘keep her company.’
She starts to think she’ll go mad here.
Sonny isn’t cooperating, Jolene informs Viktor. She is in the room next door with him, and she’s a bit sore he isn’t playing her game, you see. It’s the first glimpse Lena catches of the woman, and the sheer hatred that boils inside of Lena has her shaking with it.
Viktor’s piercing blue eyes stare right into Lena, lip curling disdainfully.
Jolene is a Wanderer, but she’s more valuable than she is disgusting in his eyes-and for the time being, their alliance is a necessary evil. Lena isn’t valuable in his eyes. She’s merely Wanderer and they have no place in this world. In his world. He yanks her arm out of the cage and rolls up the sleeve of her shirt. He asks Andrei to bring him one of his sharpest knives and starts carving a message for Sonny, for the world, into her arm. Filth.
That’s all Wanderers are.
Filth.
She resists making a noise, conscious of the fact it’s for Sonny to hear, and Viktor digs the blade deep enough to cut to the bone.
Blood spills out of her arm and drips down to the floor.
Lena screams and Sonny folds.
---
Whenever they want them quiet, they keep them sedated.
They aren’t ever allowed to see each other, only hear the other scream.
Sonny is the one less messed with in that sense, appealing to his greater sense of guilt. Jolene knows him well enough to know nothing will drive him crazy more than having his family ripped apart around him while he, himself, remains untouched. Lena’s only thrown into Sonny’s room once the Calling is too strong to deny and he’s begging her to give into it.
She uses her powers for the first time in ten years, nails digging into his arm as if punishing them both for it.
Sonny tells Viktor he’ll rip his heart out.
Before the week is over, he does.
---
They don’t manage to escape.
Instead, once they’re on the brink of losing it completely, Jolene decides to let them go. They won’t be any more fun if they’re broken completely, and she is the one with the upper hand now. She doesn’t lose anything by releasing them. They can’t come after her-not while she’s in possession of the object, not while she has the society backing her up.
The great and all-knowing Sonny has been reduced to nothing more than her play thing.
How does it feel? she asks before they’re sent off by her goons.
Sonny’s never scared Lena until that weekend.
She’s never scared herself until that weekend, either.
---
When they find a phone booth, all Lena wants to do is hear Lucky’s voice.
She ends up hearing John’s instead, and he’s delivering bad news before they can deliver their own. It’s the first time she sees Gates cry. It’s not the first time she sees Sonny struggle with the demon, always, always struggling. Her reaction should be screaming. Somewhere inside her, she is, but on the outside, it’s as if she does not react at all.
She hates this world. She hates Jolene. She hates herself. She hates.
The rest is a haze. Lena doesn’t know how they get home, or what Sonny and Gates both said to her on the way over. Reassuring words, most likely. Concerned words, most likely. She can’t remember. It’s all sucked in by the dull ache in her chest, by the dull ache in her mind, and the rest is just pieces.
She wanted to hear Lucky’s voice. She wanted to see him but she wasn’t prepared for what she was met with. He looks the way she feels. He feels the way she knows. He helps her into the shower and she cries in the crook of his neck, scalding water hot on her back.
Her heart’s left torn open on the ground of the bathroom floor, and there’s the distinct understanding that what has been lost is never going to be found again.
---
“I was dreaming,” she says to Lou, eyes half-closed. The room spins, colors looping around each other until she’s blocking the harsh light of the room with an arm on her face. “If you can call it that.”
Lou turns the lights off. The only light remaining is the one in the corridor. Lena can make out his shadow from where she lays, hears the shuffling of his movements as he walks back and forth, picking up her things. He sits down beside her. He picks up her arm. She doesn’t protest.
It’s been weeks. Tonight, she doesn’t know where Lucky is.
“What was the dream about?”
“I dreamed of the fire again.” Her voice is glassy, distant. Almost not there. She can feel it. Feel the cracks in her mind. Rasping, rasping, rasping. “Only we were the trees. All of us. The trees were screaming. The fire spread throughout the forest. The trees were screaming but no one could hear them. So they kept burning.”
His fingers trace the letters carved into her arm. He healed the wounds but he couldn’t make that disappear.
“What was left of the forest?”
Lena is quiet as she shifts to her side and regards the empty space beside her. “Nothing.”
“I had the strangest dream,” she tells Lucky one night. The nights she slips quietly into his room to sleep with him are more common than the nights where she doesn’t. “It used to be a recurring dream back home, years ago. Before I ever came to Chicago. I stopped having it and then yesterday, it came back again. It was so strange.”
She’s stolen another one of his shirts. His arm is around her waist, tucking her against his chest. She likes it there. “What was the dream about?” he asks her, thumb resting lightly into the ink at her hip, right into the heart of the crescent moon star tattoo she has there. Whenever they kiss for hours and hours and her shirt-his shirt-rises up her waist, his thumb usually ends up there.
Lena half-wonders if he ever notices.
“I’m running along this narrow street. I can’t see where I’m headed or where the road stops because these… veils keep blocking my view.” The crescent moon is a symbol of faith. “Veils of all colors. I keep getting wrapped up in them. I can never see where I’m going. But sometimes I don’t mind.”
He doesn’t answer her immediately, but she feels his mouth hovering near her ear. She thinks the most beautiful thing about them is they are uncompromising in their determination to never hurt each other.
“I think what this means, Ms. Austen, is that we’re up for another adventure soon.”
“But not in Antarctica,” Lena reminds him, shifting in place and turning back to look at him. His fingers remain on the moon. She smiles at him and he smiles at her. She kisses him. And kisses him some more. When he speaks again, it’s whispered into her skin and it feels like a promise all over again.
“But not in Antarctica.”
---
They never get to their adventure.
Sonny and Lena are closest to a strong reset than they have been in years, and Gates must tag along with them to make sure they don’t slip-either with other people or with each other. They’re all Glaysas, they understand in a way others can’t, and the younger a Glaysa is, the more difficult to keep emotions around them from becoming too overwhelming.
It’d be so easy to crack, after all this time of fighting.
The tension has been thick at the bar lately, with their two cases opened, and it’s evidently starting to get to them.
Lena finds herself scratching at her skin without noticing when she started to do so.
Gates blacks out every other night from all the liquor bottles he’s been emptying.
Sonny’s being taunted by Jolene every which way.
It’ll be fine, she says to Lucky, placing a quick kiss on his lips. It’ll be fine, and she gets into the car along with the other two men, until Lucky, John, and Zoe are small dots in the rear view mirror, waving them off.
---
They never get to their cabin located in a remote place just outside of Cicero.
Their car is intercepted by three vans halfway there, and Gates is disarmed before the doors are forcibly opened. He’s shot in the arm and Sonny’s caught in the shoulder, the car jerking off to the side and crashing right into a tree.
Blackness swims along the edges of her vision and she only faintly remembers being hauled out of the car and tossed into a trunk.
When Lena wakes, she’s in a cage in a four-walled room. The lights are off and there aren’t any windows. She starts to lose sense of time, doesn’t know if it is day or if it is night. She isn’t given food, she isn’t told where she is, and the door doesn’t open at all for over twenty-four hours while she’s left in withdrawal.
At first, she has no idea Jolene is behind this. Jolene has zero interest in her, after all, only visits Gates and Sonny’s rooms to taunt them both at different intervals. The object they’d been after is now in their possession, stolen right from under the Crowbar’s noses, and Jolene wants to test it out on her favorite subjects. It’s only a coincidence they’re nearing a reset, really. A delicious coincidence. She wants to see how far she can push the elastic band before it snaps.
Lena violently shakes the cage as she hears their yelling.
They were only supposed to be gone for two days and it has been three.
Their phones are left in the middle of the woods, red lights blinking with the reminder of a dozen unanswered calls.
---
Lena has met all the Saints, at least in passing, throughout her twisted friendship with Kay.
She’s only ever been scared of one.
Viktor circles her cage now, kicks the bars once she fails to acknowledge his presence. He must know she wouldn’t talk willingly. She swallows past the panic rising up her throat like bile, swallows the urge to vomit as he kneels down before her, steel bars the only thing between them. She spits on his face and he backhands her with enough force her neck snaps. Every four hours, without fail, one of the goons enters the room to ‘keep her company.’
She starts to think she’ll go mad here.
Sonny isn’t cooperating, Jolene informs Viktor. She is in the room next door with him, and she’s a bit sore he isn’t playing her game, you see. It’s the first glimpse Lena catches of the woman, and the sheer hatred that boils inside of Lena has her shaking with it.
Viktor’s piercing blue eyes stare right into Lena, lip curling disdainfully.
Jolene is a Wanderer, but she’s more valuable than she is disgusting in his eyes-and for the time being, their alliance is a necessary evil. Lena isn’t valuable in his eyes. She’s merely Wanderer and they have no place in this world. In his world. He yanks her arm out of the cage and rolls up the sleeve of her shirt. He asks Andrei to bring him one of his sharpest knives and starts carving a message for Sonny, for the world, into her arm. Filth.
That’s all Wanderers are.
Filth.
She resists making a noise, conscious of the fact it’s for Sonny to hear, and Viktor digs the blade deep enough to cut to the bone.
Blood spills out of her arm and drips down to the floor.
Lena screams and Sonny folds.
---
Whenever they want them quiet, they keep them sedated.
They aren’t ever allowed to see each other, only hear the other scream.
Sonny is the one less messed with in that sense, appealing to his greater sense of guilt. Jolene knows him well enough to know nothing will drive him crazy more than having his family ripped apart around him while he, himself, remains untouched. Lena’s only thrown into Sonny’s room once the Calling is too strong to deny and he’s begging her to give into it.
She uses her powers for the first time in ten years, nails digging into his arm as if punishing them both for it.
Sonny tells Viktor he’ll rip his heart out.
Before the week is over, he does.
---
They don’t manage to escape.
Instead, once they’re on the brink of losing it completely, Jolene decides to let them go. They won’t be any more fun if they’re broken completely, and she is the one with the upper hand now. She doesn’t lose anything by releasing them. They can’t come after her-not while she’s in possession of the object, not while she has the society backing her up.
The great and all-knowing Sonny has been reduced to nothing more than her play thing.
How does it feel? she asks before they’re sent off by her goons.
Sonny’s never scared Lena until that weekend.
She’s never scared herself until that weekend, either.
---
When they find a phone booth, all Lena wants to do is hear Lucky’s voice.
She ends up hearing John’s instead, and he’s delivering bad news before they can deliver their own. It’s the first time she sees Gates cry. It’s not the first time she sees Sonny struggle with the demon, always, always struggling. Her reaction should be screaming. Somewhere inside her, she is, but on the outside, it’s as if she does not react at all.
She hates this world. She hates Jolene. She hates herself. She hates.
The rest is a haze. Lena doesn’t know how they get home, or what Sonny and Gates both said to her on the way over. Reassuring words, most likely. Concerned words, most likely. She can’t remember. It’s all sucked in by the dull ache in her chest, by the dull ache in her mind, and the rest is just pieces.
She wanted to hear Lucky’s voice. She wanted to see him but she wasn’t prepared for what she was met with. He looks the way she feels. He feels the way she knows. He helps her into the shower and she cries in the crook of his neck, scalding water hot on her back.
Her heart’s left torn open on the ground of the bathroom floor, and there’s the distinct understanding that what has been lost is never going to be found again.
---
“I was dreaming,” she says to Lou, eyes half-closed. The room spins, colors looping around each other until she’s blocking the harsh light of the room with an arm on her face. “If you can call it that.”
Lou turns the lights off. The only light remaining is the one in the corridor. Lena can make out his shadow from where she lays, hears the shuffling of his movements as he walks back and forth, picking up her things. He sits down beside her. He picks up her arm. She doesn’t protest.
It’s been weeks. Tonight, she doesn’t know where Lucky is.
“What was the dream about?”
“I dreamed of the fire again.” Her voice is glassy, distant. Almost not there. She can feel it. Feel the cracks in her mind. Rasping, rasping, rasping. “Only we were the trees. All of us. The trees were screaming. The fire spread throughout the forest. The trees were screaming but no one could hear them. So they kept burning.”
His fingers trace the letters carved into her arm. He healed the wounds but he couldn’t make that disappear.
“What was left of the forest?”
Lena is quiet as she shifts to her side and regards the empty space beside her. “Nothing.”