Chapter Text
In the dark of the morning, the first thing she registered was noise. The world was loud again. Too loud for her sensitive ears. She kept her eyes closed. Face down on the tile. And tried to block out the rush of cars on the street, the buzzing of the power lines over her yard. One of the neighbors had their windows open while they got ready for their day. Viva la Gloria was blasting despite the early hour of the morning, flooding the neighborhood with the sound of pure twenty first century angst.
She groaned and spat a bit of dirt that was still in her mouth, out onto the kitchen floor.
She remembered the dagger Sorley had given her. Laying hidden beneath the bed furs, in her spot nearest the wall. Her eyes drifted past the man who held Ailios in his unyielding grip. Heart in her throat. Caught in Rupert's fist. The stench of the man holding her was astounding, unwashed and uncouth as he was. She'd worn her slippers to the ceremony. Not her boots. Without her boots, there had been no place for her dagger. Not that she'd thought she needed it. She couldn't have known, not really, but she felt the bile rise in her throat all the same.
Stupid. She'd been so st—
The second thing that hit her was the smell. Rot. Rotten fruit and spoiled food and decomposing trash. She heaved a bit and rolled over onto her back. The ceiling was the same white painted ceiling she'd been staring up at since she was a small child. The ceiling fan that usually was always spinning, was still. A dog barked outside. Birds flew by the window. They trilled at her an overly cheerful welcome. A horn sounded in the distance. Addison felt like she'd been hit by a truck.
She didn't know how she broke free. It happened in a blur. Like she was seeing it all from higher up and further back in her mind. Like she was floating, but for the heavy weight that settled deep in her belly. Floating, but for the way the little threads that bound her to Sorley pulled taut and angry, snapping and fraying every moment she was in the presence of these men. She had saved Beatie once from a wild boar. Had held her ground and helped the younger girl when their lives were in danger. Had done the right thing.
But Addison was not a hero. She was just scared.
The flames had reached the ceiling. The hut caught flame. Rupert's grip had loosened but for a second.
She didn't know how she broke away, but she had. And she left Ailios and her children behind when she ran.
Addison sat up, legs splayed, and looked down at her torn wool dress still wrapped up in Sorley's plaid. Her torn, muddy slippers. Her dirty nail beds and chipped fingernails. Her hair was still done up in the intricate braid Ailios had done before her handfasting. One lone blue flower, tucked into her hair by Sorley at the end of the night, remained woven tight into the space behind her ear.
She sucked in a breath. Closed her eyes to beat back the memories that seemed to take no heed of her grief or confusion. Addison felt hollow. Hollow and muted and aching. Like there was something deep inside of her that had bruised. Like that bruise was hiding from her. Like there were some kinds of pain that her body or mind simply refused to let her to feel.
Shock, her mind supplied. You're in shock.
Ailios had been the mute one in the end. Silent and staring. Like she'd seen a ghost. Like she'd seen her own death. Addison brought her hands up to her throat, spread her fingers wide around it as though to choke something back, but didn't squeeze. She sucked in a wild breath and did not release it. Held it in until her lungs and chest and bones and nerves all began burning.
Addison had — she had tried but it was no use. She hadn't meant to abandon them forever. Only meant to run for help. For the blacksmith. For the mason. For Sorley—
Rupert and Allistor had been ruthless, unforgiving as always, but the man they were with — she shuddered — the man they were with was like a demon straight out of hell.
The smoke had choked her even as she ran. Even as she cleared the hut and ran for the middle of the village. She could feel him behind her. Feel him as he gave chase.
Addison cringed away from the memory. Curled inward a bit so as to stop the man from catching the back of her dress as he had done. She nervously picked at her skin and tried to ignore the tears that fell. She looked around her.
This kitchen. Her kitchen. The one she grew up in. It was— well it was a wreck. She tried to remember what she was doing all those months ago — or had it been a year— when she was ripped out of this world and sent into the last. She wracked her brain, but she couldn't — couldn't remember. She remembered the buzzing, the vibrations in the ground, the — the darkness.
It had happened again.
She wrapped her arms around her abdomen and laid back down on the ground, curling around the invisible wound in her belly. She let herself cry.
--
In the light of the midday sun, she peeled off her dress. Stood naked in the middle of the living room.
She couldn't go back into the kitchen.
Her hands shook.
It smelled of rotting fruit.
There was a fermented pear in the basket on the ledge and the bug-covered stain of something else that had completely liquified and disappeared.
Addison remembered now that she had been at a café, in the evening after classes had finished at the community college on the other side of town. She remembered she'd been drinking a latte. She remembered that she had been happy.
She looked down at her body. And the way her breasts had sagged and diminished from lack of food. At how her hips jutted out too prominently. She was...she was too thin. She shook her head and left the dress on the floor. Making her way toward the back of the house, eyes passing deftly over the master bedroom, unwilling to deal with the wave of nausea that passed over her. Unable to think about her grandmother, alone in a nursing home with no one to visit her while Addison was away.
She went into her bedroom. It was in chaos, and it smelled of dust, but at least there were no vermin here that she could tell. She was the only thing that carried a stench in this room. She picked up an old pair of sweats and a hoodie. Holding them with a limp hand, she turned back. Away from the overwhelming reminders of her past life. Addison made her way to the bathroom.
She stood there in a daze. Taking in the clean white walls of the shower, and the mat at the bottom of the tub intended to keep her from slipping. A bit of rust and mold had collected at the bottom near the drain, but she didn't much care at this point.
She wanted to wash the smoke from her hair and the grime from her skin. She was pretty sure between her and the mold, she was the more fearsome creature right now anyway.
She reached down and felt another bout of surrealness sweep over her. Her mind flashed to the well. To the unending buckets of water, up and down staircase after spiral staircase. Burning her hands on the hot handles of boiling pots, and the steam licking up her face and neck as she poured a bath for Sorley.
Her heart ached to feel something at the memory of the tawny haired knight with his warm eyes and kind smile, his gentle hands. But despite his kindness, and her care for him. Despite the kiss they shared just hours ago or the way he held her in the dark at the base of their tree. Despite the fact he was her— he was her husband, and she was his wife. Addison couldn't feel a thing. She didn't even feel attached to her own body. She felt— she wasn't sure what to do about—
Shock.
Addison was in shock.
Her mind's reminder was a gentle one, but still just as jarring. She shook her head to clear it but couldn't shake the numbness that threatened to consume her whole.
He likely thought she was dead by now.
Her gut twisted. She turned the faucet on the tub. After a moment, water flowed out. Brown and spitting. There was air trapped in the pipes, she noted absently.
The sun reflected off the stainless steel of the faucet. She flinched away from it. Too bright. The sun — it — the sun had been warm, or had it been his arms as he held her at the beginning of spring? The sun had been warm. Sorley had been... warm.
She hoped he'd be able to move on without too much heartache over her. It had only been one day. Just a few hours, really. Hadn’t even been a day.
She bit her lip and waited for the water to come out clear before stepping in. Addison hissed. Too hot. She watched her foot. Waited for it to blister. To darken in pain. To swell. To bleed. She gritted her teeth. Why didn't it show any pain?
She sucked in another ragged breath. Wiped a hand over her face to clear her anger. Reaching over to adjust the temperature on the faucet and sitting down instead, she relished the burn that overwhelmed her skin.
It cleared her mind a bit, the pain. Broke her out of her stupor. She clenched her teeth through it and brought her knees up to her chest. Closed her eyes as the water filled the tub.
--
In the clarity of the afternoon sun, she wore her sweats and hoodie. Her hair had been washed, towel dried and was now tied up in a knot on the top of her head. She'd left the last blue forget-me-not resting next to the bathroom sink, unable to throw it away.
Addison didn't know what to do.
She didn't know what the next step was or how to exist in this world now. With an empty pit in her belly where the spool had run out of thread, she fell back into the one thing that had kept her alive thus far.
Addison became Malvina.
And Malvina cleaned.
She cleaned as though it was the only thing keeping her alive. She started in the bedroom — still too scarred by the chaos of the kitchen. She picked up all her blankets and sheets and moved them out and into the laundry room.
Immensely grateful for her grandmother's neurologist. Grateful he had suggested they automate all their household payments when Lala's memory started to go. It had been a godsend when she was seventeen, and now she could weep that it had worked so seamlessly through her disappearance as well. She couldn't quite remember which buttons to press but when the water started flowing, she figured it was good enough for her. Addison dumped her bedclothes into the wash and poured the detergent in. Eyeing it nervously and closing the lid. She wasn't entirely sure it wouldn't overflow or something dramatic like that, but she walked away anyway.
Next, she picked up all the junk that had accumulated, and straightened up her mess. She decided to start a trash pile in the garage and dumped anything that was beyond recovery.
The car was gone. Her brain had filtered this absently. She didn't spend too much time thinking about the fact that it was probably gone for good. Abandoned months ago in a coffee shop parking lot. She grimaced. Her wallet had been at that café too.
She was just shuffling through her now dirty pile of once-clean laundry when a small black notebook caught her eye. She stared down at it. Frozen.
Her hand itched to snatch it up, but she held back.
Instead, Addison sorted through her clothes, determining what could be folded and what needed rewashing, but she kept her eye on the notebook as she did. Once the clothes were done, she picked it up.
Plopped herself down at her desk and opened her laptop. Fingers crossed that it would still work, she held her breath as she waited for it to power up. Watched nervously to see if she would have a connection. Crying out in success when her desktop appeared and showed her the date.
15 April 2011
Addison didn't know what she felt about her impossible luck so far. Didn't know if she felt like laughing or crying or taking her laptop and slamming it hard against the floor. She felt almost betrayed by how easy it was, to come back to the modern world and have everything at her feet. She felt a little relieved too, despite her anger. Despite the fact that the universe seemed to be mocking her. She clenched her fist and held her breath until her fingers went numb and her lungs begged for air. Then she picked up her pen.
The pen felt...wrong in her hand. It rubbed her thumb and index finger the wrong way. She had calluses on her hands and feet now from months of hard labor, but the exact spots on her fingers that the pen rubbed against were like a final holdout from her sheltered 'before.' The last holdout from the Addison of old, the Addison who had only ever known life in the twenty-first century.
She couldn't stop her hand from shaking as she pressed the pen to paper. Her chest felt unsteady. Like something essential inside it was teetering on a ledge. Addison was holding herself up to something she didn't know the name of, and she was terrified she wouldn't measure up.
The date she inscribed at the top of the page was...juvenile. Her handwriting had suffered in her absence. She chewed on her lip while she tried to concentrate on steadying her hand.
The words that flowed from her next felt clunky and wrong. It had been so long since she'd had to fully articulate something. She'd spent so much time as the foreign serf girl; the one who didn't speak the language. To be honest, Addison had never fully recovered from her long winter months as Malvina, the mute. Even with her stolen moments with Sorley, she had spent most of the last six months with her mouth shut and her head down. She never thought she would write again. Let alone write about what she'd experienced in the past.
Her pen scratched tremulously over the page.
She didn't know when or where she had been, just that it had been feudal and that it had been far away. That the language was not of the Americas. She detailed everything. Old Man Macphearson. Ailios and her brood. Castle Sween and Sorley. She had a lot to say about Sorley she discovered and bit down on the inside of her cheek to replace the numb feeling that overcame her at the thought of him. He didn't deserve that place, and he didn't deserve to lose her the way he did. Sorley was the one good thing there. God, she hoped he was okay.
So caught up in the flow of memories that poured out of her in a panic inducing rush of ink and bottled emotion, Addison felt herself jolt when a scream broke the silence that had fallen around her. Ripped violently from her reverie, mind flashing back to Ailios and her children, nose burning with the smell of fire and smoke. Addison shot up out of her seat. Heart pounding. She grabbed the cord in front of her. Ripped open the blinds. Light flooded the room.
Outside of her window, a little boy ran from his father. Laughing and screaming as he did. Addison felt something in her stutter. Felt her hands shake. She sucked in something of a sob or a laugh. She choked on a hard gulp of air and saliva as she did. The little boy's mother followed behind the pair with warm smile on her face. They were happy. Happy and safe. Safe and content.
Not like Ailios.
Not like her children.
The family outside her window were the picture of the modern world. They were — they were normal. Addison looked back down at her journal and the crazed writing there, and she felt herself seethe. White hot, boiling rage burned through her. Her tears ran down her face in angry tracks, joining the snot that flowed freely from her nose and collected in the ridges of her chapped lips. Her hands shook and she tensed them over journal as though to tear pages out.
She was insane.
None of it had happened.
She was out of her mind.
She couldn't cope with the world and her brain checked out. That was all.
Sorley wasn't real.
Ailios wasn't real.
There had never been a secret language made of hand gestures and meaningful looks. There had never been a past world. Never been a castle or a village. It was all in her head. If anyone were to read this — Addison shook her head and bit back a scream of her own.
She was crazy.
No, she wasn’t.
She was— she was — Addison snatched up a sharpie from the desk drawer and blacked out her words on both sides of the page so there was no way anyone could read the evidence of her psychosis.
She left the bedroom with the journal on the desk and made her way into the trashed kitchen. She took a sponge from beneath the sink, a large bowl from one of the cabinets, and vinegar from the pantry. She filled the bowl with vinegar and hot water and got down on her hands and knees. She scrubbed for hours. Killing bugs, tackling mold, and erasing all evidence of any grime. By the end of it she was dizzy from the fumes of her work but couldn't bring herself to open any windows or doors.
Shadows had stretched long across the walls when Addison realized the day was soon to be gone.
--
When the sky turned pink and the sun dipped too low for her to see, the kitchen had been fully scrubbed. All traces of rotten fruit, erased. The trash had been relegated to the garage. And the mold had all but disappeared for now.
She decided to leave the fridge for another day. The laundry had been completed. Her bed, remade. The surfaces had been dusted and the rust, and mold, at the bottom of the bathtub had been removed as well.
She stood quietly in her abandoned house. Her childhood home. The home her grandmother had left her in the early stages of her disease. She stood there, quiet, and traced the disappearance of the sun by the shadows on the wall.
When it was too dark for her to see properly, Addison went back into her bedroom. She sat back down at her desk and picked up her pen.
15 April 2011 - what the fuck.
She wrote this and felt a pressure valve release in her chest. Felt her breath come a little easier.
Of course it was real.
She couldn't have made it up if she tried.
Addison opened her laptop, wincing at the too bright glow of it in the too dark room. She'd been gone for six months according to her calculations. And she had not used artificial lighting in all that time. It burned her retinas, made her face feel wan and dry in its harshness.
Her stomach rumbled but she ignored it, choosing instead to open her web browser.
When it loaded, she typed her best spelling of the word she had used so often in the past. The word that felt, for some reason, more important than all the rest. Addison typed one word and felt the stirrings of that old invisible spool. The spool she had thought damaged beyond repair, replaced by some gaping wound only hours ago.
Gallowglass
The only word that mattered. Meant only for him. It was a question posed. An answer given. Addison settled deeper into her chair. She settled in and recorded what she found.