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English
Series:
Part 2 of if you make me feel something
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Published:
2023-04-24
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2,126
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1/1
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27
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it cannot hold

Summary:

when your mother gives you the keys to her car and says you can drive yourself to therapy today, you want to laugh, scream, cry; you want to make her understand you never need to ask permission to do anything ever again.

//

tai post rescue. how do you go from a god to a suburban teenager?!

Notes:

simone is a women’s college alum i don’t make the rules.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

The reunification room is just the hospital chapel, and there are two people you don’t recognize saying your name like a prayer. 

“Taissa, Taissa,” the woman whispers, and the man is sobbing, holding onto the woman’s shoulder like he’s going to collapse at your feet. 

Someone, probably one of the endless nurses, nudges you towards them. You hesitantly step forward, and the woman crosses the distance between you in one step, and takes you into her arms. The man holds her holding you, crying and saying your name over and over and you can’t feel anything at all. 

You think you might be the only real person left on Earth. 

/ 

Van was real too, for a little bit, until she disappeared. She had slept in your bed for three weeks, tethering you to the ground, and then one morning you wake up and she’s gone. Her clothing, her shoes, everything that made Van Palmer exist had vanished, and the only reminder that someone had once held you as you slept are a few strands of red hair in your hairbrush. 

You find yourself thinking maybe she wasn’t real either. Maybe you’ve been alone this entire time, desperately clinging to a dead girl. You call Shauna on her parents’ landline at three in the morning, and no one answers. 

You don’t speak at all for six months. 

/

July’s hot—the pavement sizzles, and you’re finally allowed to drive. You think you’ve been shaving off parts of yourself with surgical precision until you can fit back into your body, and you’re almost there, you’re almost cut down to the size Taissa Turner was before she left. 

When your mother (your mother) gives you the keys to her car and says you can drive yourself to therapy today, you want to laugh, scream, cry; you want to make her understand you never need to ask permission to do anything ever again. 

The therapist’s an older white woman, the kind of person who was fated to either be a school librarian or a child psychologist, and for the sixth week in a row, you sit in silence on her couch. 

“Taissa,” she says finally, five minutes from the end of your session. “I understand talking is difficult for you right now, but if you never speak about what happened to you, you’ll never be able to process it. I’m happy to wait as long as you need, but there might be more productive methods of therapy for you to try,” and you look at her dead in the eyes and say, “Nothing.” 

She startles a little, and grabs the pad of paper that’s been empty for weeks. 

“Nothing what, Taissa?” 

“Nothing happened to me,” and it’s the truest thing you’ve ever said. 

/

Your parents are so goddamn thankful for your miraculous recovery. They take you to church and the pastor prays over you, and the old ladies who taught you Sunday School as a kid cry and cry and cry. 

You grow your hair out until it’s long, longer than you ever had it in high school, and you enroll in as many classes as the local community college will let you take. Howard had sent your family a letter in the aftermath of the rescue, saying your senior year admission was still good, that they’d be happy to work with you to figure out a path that got you onto campus. Once you started talking again, you laser-focused on Howard, molding yourself into a college student who only ever felt power on the soccer field, in the classroom, in bed. 

You fuck a long line of faceless girls in the back of your mom’s Volvo, in the bathrooms of hole-in-the-wall bars three towns over, in the locker room of the college gym where you play pick-up soccer after class. They like it when you hiss commands at them, when you tell them how to touch themselves and when to stop, when you leave them panting and confused and desperate to come. It’s a different kind of power, and you hold it in your mouth, sharp and metallic like blood. 

Three years to the day of the plane crash, you sit down to dinner with your parents, hand them the associate’s degree you picked up earlier that day, and tell them you’ll be starting at Howard in the fall, that they’ll give you sophomore standing and guaranteed housing on campus. Your mother cries, and she’s real again for the first time in years. 

/

You spend the first semester of college remembering how to be human again. No one here knows who you are, not really, and you can really, truly breathe for the first time. It comes up sometimes, but you winnow nineteen months down to six weeks down to forty-eight hours, until it’s so small you can put it in a box and lock it away, until a year and a half becomes nothing more than a stumbling block on your ten year plan. 

Your parents require that you continue seeing a therapist, and you dutifully take the yellow line down to Arlington twice weekly to meet with the approved psychotherapist, parroting lines about growth and moving on and coming to terms with trauma.

“You’re doing so well, Taissa,” she says once, holding your hand in both of hers, and you’re overwhelmed with the urge to bite her, break her perfect, smooth skin and show her who you really are. 

Instead, you smile and your teeth are white and straight and have never done anything they shouldn’t have. 

/

School consumes you in a way you forgot it could. You stay late in the library, writing too-long papers for your philosophy classes, and wake up before sunrise for early morning soccer practice. Your therapist gently told you she was worried that throwing yourself so completely into school and soccer would hinder your healing, and you had laughed in her face. 

“This,” you had told her, “this is just who Taissa Turner is,” and she had given you a weak smile. You’re flawless, you’re hard as rock, you’re whole in a way only shattered things can be. 

/

You sleepwalk almost every night in March, and you wake up in a cemetery with dirt under your nails. You tie yourself to your headboard using the restraints you usually use on other girls, and whatever the person you become when you’re asleep wants, they’re desperate and manage to twist their wrists out of the restraints night after night after night. 

When you come back into yourself, you find yourself missing her. The way she followed you deep into the woods. The way she would crouch in front of you, telling you everything the other person told her. The way she trusted so blindly, the way she’d do anything you’d ask. 

But Van lives in a locked box in your mind, and even as her hands beg you to unlock her, to let her take your hand and lead you back into the woods, you can’t. You couldn’t even if you wanted to, and you scrub the dirt out from under your nails in a dorm bathroom with your eyes closed. 

/

“Taissa!” someone shouts from behind you, and you walk a little faster. You don’t know anyone well enough for them to call out your name, and two weeks ago was the anniversary of the plane crash, and the reporters had finally found you. 

“Taissa!” they shout again. “Taissa Turner!” and finally you spin around and spit out, “Don’t you motherfuckers have anything better to do with your time?” 

Except it’s not a reporter. It’s a woman with long braids piled on her head in a messy bun, holding what looks like your wallet. 

“If you don’t want it back, I’m happy to keep it,” she says, holding it out to you. “I actually do have better things to do with my time.” 

“Oh shit,” you say. “I thought you were...” and she waves a hand. 

“No worries. In retrospect, following a stranger and yelling their name was probably a bad idea,” and you manage a small laugh. 

“I’m not a stalker,” she adds. “Your ID’s in the wallet.” 

“Shit,” you say again. “Thanks. I don’t even know how I’d get a New Jersey license replaced down here. Can I get you a coffee or something?” 

She looks at you, and it takes a moment but you’re almost positive she’s checking you out. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. I’m Simone,” and she sticks her hand out for you to shake, like she’s some kind of politician. 

“Taissa,” you say. “But you already know that,” and you take her hand. 

/

Simone’s a junior at Spelman and she’s visiting her high school ex-boyfriend for the week (“Turns out we were both gay,” she says. “Made the breakup super easy”). For approximately twenty-four minutes, you’re a normal girl having a normal coffee with a hot girl who laughs at the deeply unfunny jokes you make. 

And then—of course—there’s an explosion like a lightning bolt in your face, and someone’s shouting your name, asking you to turn towards the cameras. You fought back once, and it made the front page of an international tabloid, so now you just hide your face and dig your nails into your palms as hard as you can bear. 

But: “Hey, fuck you,” Simone yells, standing and putting herself between the camera and you. “Get the fuck out of here before I break your motherfucking camera, leave her the fuck alone.” And then Simone’s shoving the man with the camera hard , and the shocked barista behind the counter shakes himself awake and scrambles to get the man out before the second-best coffee shop on campus becomes the site of a full out brawl.  

She sits back down, breathing hard, and looks carefully at you. 

“You okay?” she says quietly. “We can like  … leave if you want, get the coffees to go or whatever.” 

You’re a little shellshocked, and just stare at her for a moment, before asking “Did you know the whole time?” 

She takes a sip of her coffee, and shrugs a little. 

“Kinda,” she says. “I recognized your name, and realized why like five minutes ago. But like, I’m not in the business of asking about someone’s worst memories when trying to ask them out on a date,” and her voice gets a little strangled at the end. 

You desperately don’t want to talk about the rest of it, so you say, “A date?” 

“If you want,” she says, and she’s trying so hard to play it cool that you can’t help smiling. “I’m here for the week, and there’s only so long I can spend in various bars listening to my ex wax poetic about every single guy he’s hooked up with since high school.” 

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, I’d like that,” and she grins so wide you feel something soft and tender inside yourself wake up. 

/ 

Even after she goes back to Atlanta, you keep talking with her, sending her long emails about summer classes, and pre-season training for soccer, and endless mean observations about the RA on your hall whose daily emails asking for anyone to join the floor programming borders on desperation. 

You keep fucking other girls, pinning them against your mattress with one arm and waiting until they’re entire unspooled, begging for anything, until they’re soft and pliant in your hands. There’s something in you that needs this, needs the way they look at you with some simulacrum of worship, needs to hold their fluttering pulse under your fingers. 

And there’s something in you that can’t do this to Simone. 

/

In the November of your junior year, your therapist calls you to let you know she’ll be moving her practice to Chicago, and she can help you get settled with a new therapist to ease the transition. 

“No,” you say, smiling like she can see it over the phone. “That’s okay, if it’s all the same to you, I can find someone on my own.” 

She pauses for a moment, and hesitantly agrees. 

“Wait, Taissa,” she says. “You’ve made such incredible progress, I’d hate to see you lose that,” and still smiling, you hang up. 

/

Simone moves to New York for a master’s in German literature, and you follow her a year later to Columbia Law. She gently wakes you up when you’re sleepwalking, and guides you back to bed, kisses you on the temple. She never thinks to talk to the other person, never thinks that they’re anyone but you. 

“It’s okay, baby,” she says gently, and it’s not, but you hold her words tight in your lungs, your heart, your hands. Maybe if you imprint them deeply enough on yourself, they’ll come true. 

Notes:

whyyyy are there not a THOUSAND post rescue tai fics. how’d that girl go from sleepwalking off cliffs and seeing eyeless men to graduating from columbia law. this is also part of my taissa antler queen turner propaganda.

anyways. comments & kudos sooo appreciated

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