well behaved women

Title: once a dreamer
Author: shiegra
Rating: R for implications
Warnings: Jaenelle's childhood, which included Briarwood.
Summary: She does not fit right in her girlskin.



Witch comes from all the dreamers.

Jaenelle could have been just a song in the dark. She would have been happier there, swift-forgotten, a soft murmur between the shadows of one world in the next. It might have been kinder--not in the long run, perhaps, but certainly in the days when a child fragile of flesh and mind lay sleepless in a mire of stifling sterile blankets and remembered how to bleed.

Sometimes, when she went down to Saetan--Papa, she thought, turning the word over in her mind, afraid to ask but treasuring it nonetheless like a pearl on her tongue--he would smile and raise his eyebrows over his glasses and she would read, propping big books open on her knees, absorbed in their wisdom, sinking into their fragile intricately scripted pages. And she would forget, for a time, the pain. There the world lay open to her, and she could select one jewel or the next for her perusal; Scelt, Glacia, Dea Al Mon, and they would smile at her and greet her like a friend, and she could fold up all the dark secrets and forget whose hands had been on her skin.

Then she came home. She came home and their eyes branded her, their mouths condemned her, and Jaenelle had to be strong again. She must be brave for Wilhelmina, fragile and lovely and so afraid; she could not falter, for they would close in like jhinka, more monstrous than any beast of fur and fang.

Sick girl. Philip, a strained smile, mired in his own lust and resentment. Liar. So he turned his face, because he wouldn't deal with her. He called her a liar when she begged him to save her; don't say those things oh poor Dr. Carvay he touches me and it hurts!

Uncle Bobby's smiles. Alexandra's thin lips and distaste. Graff's sourness. Leland's fluttering.

They didn't want to see her. They packaged her up and shipped her away, wrapped in their discomfort and fear, tied off with the bow of their indifference. She will never be human enough for them. They will never love her enough to think to save her.



Once she cried, help me help me mother help me please it hurts. And Alexandra turned her face away.

Leland never looked her in the eyes anyway.



Jaenelle can't lie right.

She knows how to mouth the words, shape the face. She knows to be empty-eyed and smiling, a polite and docile doll. But she can't make the lie work right. She can't smooth down all of Witch's darkness, can't fold all the strange corners of herself into the blindly smiling girl. Can't do it well enough. Can't make Alexandra stop frowning, can't jarr Leland's insipid unease, can't smooth away Philip's patronizing, cloying, officious frown. There are too many edges to her; she doesn't fit right in her girlskin. Witch is full of shadows and some of them--the sweet ones, the kind ones the maybe-not-real ones--tell her it's beautiful but it's not--

--not enough--

And her family, so good at lying and ignoring all that lies beneath the surface of Briarwood, of the uncle's parties, of each harmless touch, cannot resist staring beneath the surface of the girl, and cannot feel anything but revulsion at the abyss.

No one can face what she is. She is the shadow in the room, the piece they cannot handle, the monstrous heart to desire what they will not give. They'll only love her if she is no longer Witch but Jaenelle, but Jaenelle cannot find the seam between them, cannot see the difference.

But each time she tries. It is too much to accept they will never love her at all.



She remembers Danni; crying at night, a soft frightened sound. They are so alone here, not because there are none among them who care for each other, but because there are none among them that can save each other. Jaenelle is all they have, and Jaenelle is not enough. There are the drugs and there are the lies until she does not know what is whole and what she has fragmented together just for some dream of escape.

It's your imagination, Philip tells her, and they walk away. Uncle Bobby is smiling.

Danni cried at night until they took her away, carved her up like a roast, like a mute animal, though Jaenelle knows she screamed. Danni told her so. Now she cries by the vegetable garden and that night Jaenelle retched until her throat was raw to bleeding.

Rose didn't cry. Some of the girls are just shells for the hatred, and it burns them glassy-bright like diamond, like the cruellest Jewel of all. Jaenelle knows she's not brave enough for that. She'll just break in messy splinters, shatter the chalice and shatter her world, and sometimes she yearns for the deadly soft oblivion of the Twisted Kingdom more than she wants to breathe.



She has to protect Wilhelmina. She has to protect the other girls. She's not enough but she has more than them. She has Saetan. She has dreams.

Sometimes she wakes sick with the drugs and the harshness of Alexandra's words and imagines she has dreamed Witch; that she has no soul after all. It is the deepest nightmare they ever scar her with, and there is a plethora of their cruelties to choose from.



Sometimes in the midst of the pain and terror she can almost become what fills up Rose; the hatred, diamond-bright, flawless and endless, a storm ravenous to swallow the world. There is only the cold, glorious Black, and the quiet of the world in the space below the dreams.

And Witch swallows Jaenelle, when she could never find a way for Jaenelle to swallow Witch; all Jaenelle's cautious faith and hope and her soft-sheltered love, like a crippled bird in the gilded cage of her fragile bones. The abyss swallows it, and there is only the promise of death.

She remembers Saetan's voice. She remembers Wilhelmina's tears. She remembers Ladvarian's wagging tail and Kaelas's big paws and Kaetian's horn. She remembers the dreams in the webs.

She steps back from the abyss, and lets the pain take her; on nothing more than hope.

This is her bravery, and the scars will never fade.



What is the sum of her being? The sum of her being is her love, and her fear, and all the ways in which she breaks. She is Witch; she is only mortal. She is so afraid.

She dreams of unicorns. She dreams of people who love her.

On the whole they have managed to convince her, with fewer words than they devote to the former, that the latter is less likely.