An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Three special women from Tom Heyworth's past visit him on Christmas Eve - the older woman who saved him, the surrogate mom who loved him, and the sister whose living spirit haunts him. But what are they trying to tell him? A loose retelling of A Christmas Carol that takes place several years after the Chemical main story.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
The look that settled on Tom's face was a lot of things - confused, nervous, irritated - but the emotion that sat the heaviest between his dark brows was sadness. Pop sighed. "Look son, when you get a message like that you don't take it lightly. You pay attention and you do what you're told. If they want you to know something they'll make sure you understand it. Remember Scrooge McDuck?"
"Are we talking Disney or Dickens?"
"Either. Both. The takeaway here is that these things don't usually mess around, they operate on a tight schedule and they use their time wisely, so if they're spending any of that time on you, then...something's up. Pay attention, mahihkan." He slid off his barstool and turned around in time to see Kady hurriedly putting his mug back on the table. "Goddammit woman, you're killin' me." A finger came up to point with a heavy finality in Tom's face, so close to his nose he could have bitten the deep indigo tattoo that snaked around it. "You listen to them night spirits, son. Scrooge McDuck tried to blow 'em off and look at what happened to him."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Your mouth, geezus.”
“Yeah, you love what I do with my mouth.”
“Curse and smoke and eat those awful calimari tentacly things? Pass.”
“The cursing shocks you out of your comfortable little shell, the smoking keeps you on your toes policing my lung health, and the calimari is a reminder that I will put literally anything in my mouth. It’s all for you, bitch pudding.” He tossed the plates into the back seat and reached over to take my hand, pulling it into his lap. “But you know good and well that’s not what I’m talking about.”
This time I met Chem!Tom, and he’d very decidedly escaped the stories I’ve written him into - just like I escaped the cult but with more determination to be what he chose, not what was chosen for him. He was very much an AU of himself and even though I recognized him the moment I saw him, I knew one thing with a chilling certainty.
I didn’t know this version of him.
But he knew me.
.
Under the cut for length
Had a dream last night. Not unusual, but my dreams had started getting scarce in the weeks before we moved, and now that we’re here I’m dreaming again every night. Anxiety? Elation? Finally being able to relax? Who knows. But the last dream I had before the new year set in revolved around Hozier releasing his new album, which I heard in its entirety in the context of the dream.
It was good, and I said This is a brilliant omen, this means things are going to be great soon.
And then his voice cracked and I stared at the record, wondering if he was reminding me not to get too cocky.
That was the last dream of 2021.
So far in 2022 I’ve had a lot of what feel like precognitive dreams, though whether or not I buy into that entirely is still up in the air. Losing one’s religion tends to open you up to accepting things you were programmed to disbelieve, but that hesitance to fully embrace the unexplainable is still there. And so I jokingly tell myself “This is a sign” and then just...wait and see.
Last night’s dream was unsettling in a dangerous sort of way and I’m not sure I liked it much.
I was back in my old life, I suppose. A quasi-missionary, the kind the cult used to send out all over the place pre-covid, a position I filled at the time simply because it was expected of me and I was allowed to do not much else with my life. That sense of trapped despair was there, palpable, in the dream - I had an in-sleep awareness of I got out of this, why am I here again? that I shrugged off, following the script to see where it went. Usually when I dream of being back in the cult I see my dad or my brothers, and they tell me it’s okay somehow.
Not this time.
This time I met Chem!Tom, and he’d very decidedly escaped the stories I’ve written him into - just like I escaped the cult but with more determination to be what he chose, not what was chosen for him. He was very much an AU of himself and even though I recognized him the moment I saw him, I knew one thing with a chilling certainty.
I don’t know this version of him.
But he knew me.
.
My Pioneer partner (that’s what we were called, the part-time missionaries of the cult, Pioneers) and I are in a car - my dad’s vintage Valiant, the one I smashed up in New Mexico during a weird transitional time in my old life - and we pull up at a farm far out in the Texas panhandle (another thing from my past, a location I spent a lot of time at during many babystep attempts to get away from my controlling mother). We get out and I take the lead, speaking to an old Native man on the front porch of a dilapidated house. He waves us toward an open-sided structure behind the house and we head for it, brave and bold like we were taught to be In The Service Of God, and when the man inside makes his presence known by raising a shotgun to aim at us I throw my hands up but keep walking. My partner does the same.
Brave and bold = stupid and brainwashed, and in the dream I’m aware of it...but I’ve been in this situation before, unfortunately for real in the real awake world, and I know how to defuse angry householders who don’t want us on their property.
I talk quietly and quickly, explaining why we’re there, and eventually he puts the gun down and resumes his business of repairing...something. It’s never clear what it is but he’s laying things out on a ragged table in a very particular order, picking one piece up to replace it with another, ignoring us as I speak to him.
I know him.
He’s Native too, like the old man we met at the house. He doesn’t seem terribly tall but he has long straight black hair and dark eyes, and though his face is different, I know who he is. He doesn’t seem happy to see me.
Does he know who I am?
I keep talking to him for what seems like a very long time, until finally he leaves us standing there and goes into the house without a word. I know he wants us to leave, but I’m stupidly stubborn about having a conversation with this man and I send my partner back to the car on the assumption that maybe he’ll feel less anxious without two of us there. She leaves, and while I’m waiting for the man to return, that weird in-dream awareness takes on another layer of realization.
I know what I’m doing.
I have a very deliberate plan.
I’m off the script, filling in the stage instructions as I go. And I know something that neither my partner nor the cult know, and it’s my secret MarySue power.
I’ve left the cult. I’m only using it as a means of getting here so that I can reach this man...because he’s in a place I can’t get to without an excuse, and people have been using God and Religion as an excuse for literally every bad thing they’ve done since the dawn of time.
That’s when I know I’m about to do something bad.
Bad according to them, anyway.
He comes back, and for the first time he makes eye contact with me, and I’m made painfully aware that this man’s life hasn’t gone well. I’m also aware that I can fix it for him. But in that indeterminate time when things haven’t gone according to the script, he’s become something other than what I wrote. Angry, dangerous, violent, full of hate and a complete lack of conscience. And then I realize that I did write him that way. His story, the story I wrote, flashes back so many times to the angry, dangerous, violent boy who became The Saved Man. I wrote this. I wrote him this way. But in my story he didn’t stay that way...why is he still like this? The man staring at me through narrowed dark eyes is older, maybe 40, or maybe younger than that and hard-lived, it’s difficult to tell. And he’s still the angry boy whose life was snatched away by darkness, without the light at the end of the road to head toward.
My god, something went so wrong somewhere.
And I have no way of knowing where.
I set out to fix it, because that’s what I do. I create problems...and then I fix them.
.
I visit him several times in a vignette of changing scenes, often, approaching him slowly and quietly like you would a feral animal that’s been warning you off with snarling growls for weeks before it finally begins to sniff your outstretched hand. He starts to talk to me, though not much. I sit on the end of his bed in the open walled barn and eventually he sits beside me. Finally he touches me, just fingertips on my jaw, but it’s a touch. Another time it’s a palm against my cheek. He learns eye contact. He’s becoming something else, something close to the story, but there’s a darkness in him that won’t be tamed out no matter how softly I urge him to let it take over. He accepts my presence and stops ignoring me, and finally he expresses something other than contempt when I appear in his world.
But he refuses to let himself go, this version of himself. I can see it in his eyes. That isn’t me. That’s another person. That’s a book I haven’t read.
His eyes are dark and show no sign of becoming the turquoise I described so prosaically in the pages of his story.
It’s then that I know I’ve got to let him be who he is.
He’s a new character, and he’s written himself.
.
I’ve come to him many times, but this time he knows I’ve finally accepted what he is, and I watch from outside myself as he pushes me back on the bed with his mouth to mine, a forceful kiss that I don’t feel any need to push back against. I’m not scared of him anymore, and I know that he knows it, and that it’s the only thing keeping him from ending the dream. Because ending the dream would be ending me, sending me out of his world, killing me off and detouring away from whatever version of a happy ending he’s decided he wants.
I won’t take that away from him. And so I let him do as he pleases, and as the dream ends I know it’s what I please as well.
.
I was a character in someone else’s story for the first time. I know now what it feels like to live in fear that the writer, your Creator, will decide you aren’t what they want and simply...delete you.
I also know as I sit here typing this out that it’s an allegory for my relationship with religion.
Walking away allowed me to get rid of that fear, and now I’m in a story that can go whatever way I choose.
Huh. Seems I wrote Chem!Tom for a reason, all those years ago. I saved him, and now he’s made sure I know I saved myself in the process. I know I don’t have to be what someone else wants me to be. I’m myself regardless of what I’m “supposed” to be. And even though that version of myself might look feral and dangerous to someone else, in the end all it takes is patience and acceptance to see the truth.
Or something like that.
Or maybe it was just a dream.
.
The second part of the dream was me, sitting in a recliner in front of the fireplace, trying to get my editing program to open on my tablet so I could work on something. It refused to open, and I was left hoping I wouldn’t forget the story before I had a chance to write it down.
There was also a version where Anja didn’t exist. She was imaginary, she lived completely inside Emma’s head. She’d created her as a “perfect mate” for her brother, who was (in this version) one of two potential things:
1) dead
or 2) drug addicted, sick, and dying slowly on the street somewhere
In this version the entire story happened inside Emma’s head as a way to give her brother the good life she felt like he deserved, but never got.
