Love Was a Kind of Emptiness
Read on AO3
Relationships: Dani & the Quell, Dani/Aubrey, Sylvain/the Quell
Rating: T
CW for body dysmorphia, disordered eating, heavy angst
For Danbrey Week 2019
"You're her."
This time, she didn't run. In the days since she had started following them, she had always skittered back into the woods whenever she got spotted. With how bone-pale she was, she shouldn't have been able to disappear into the black shadow that quickly. But she had slipped into the penumbra the way sugar in hot coffee dissolved to become a part of the amorphous dark.
Now she was still, and not. She was the potential for movement, like a frozen deer primed to spring away. Potential energy herself. Felt for miles around.
"And you're Dani," she responded. Her head inclined slowly and smoothly to one side, just a little. As always, a waist-length swath of straight and shiny black hair moved as one curtain. "Am I just 'her' now? What are my names, that you know of?"
Dani couldn't answer that, and not only because of the way her jaw had begun to lock up in fear. She didn't know how. As far back as she remembered, everyone had been loathe to give a name to this, had acknowledged this at all only with reluctance. There were names she vaguely recalled seeing in schoolbooks, with Ancient Sylvan pronunciations she couldn't have wrapped her mouth around even if she did remember them well enough. These days, even after the crisis had been averted, still people spoke obliquely. The Quell. The Storm. Hardly names at all, really. They described something that one did, not something that one was.
Those titles had seemed appropriate enough when they were all simply talking about a natural force, something that acted, and acted violently. But that wasn't what stood before Dani now. This was a woman, just like her, and also not like her at all.
"I see," she said. Dani wasn't sure what she was responding to.
"You shouldn't be here." She surprised herself at the force of her own voice. She supposed that she had some practice in speaking with gods. Just that morning, she had talked the avatar of her planet's life force out of filling an old dried-up lake with maple syrup. But it was easy to forget with Aubrey. Aubrey, whom she knew as her love first and as Sylvain second, whose presence had felt as easy and natural as breath long before they had learned everything. It wasn't easy to forget when the waves of dark power radiating from this woman overtook her. Potential energy. A fault line, a land mine, a fragile slope before a landslide. She was all of these things and much more. Dani could feel it, and she wanted to run with all she had, but already her knees had ceased to bend.
"Yes I should. We have to talk."
"Why?"
"You..." The Quell hadn't made eye-contact all this time, something for which Dani would have been grateful if she were capable of feeling anything but anxiety at the moment. She had been focused on a spot somewhere just below Dani's eyes. Now she glanced away entirely. Her eyes flashed, and not in the way people normally talked about eyes flashing. Light glinted off them as though her gray irises were made of chrome. Or like there was lightning in them. "You are always with Her."
"No."
"You are Her companion."
"No. You're not getting near Aubrey."
"You couldn't stop me if I wanted to see Her, you know." The Quell still had her head cocked, out of...what? Curiosity? Scrutiny? Did she even have feelings? "You're afraid of me. Why?"
Dani couldn't bring herself to move her mouth, even if she had had a way to reply to that. She thought of the leveling of her world. For months now, she'd been traveling around to witness it. She'd seen forests of trees gone horizontal, prostrating toward the setting sun. She'd seen mountains smeared into flatlands as if they were wet clay under a thumb. Marshland where there had been fertile valleys.
And well before any of this, she'd seen, as a young child, the refugees surging through the gates of what was today the city of Chicane and what had then been the whole of Sylvain. People who had fled the other cities overtaken by the Quell's violence. She had watched them slump in, looking as though gravity affected them more than most, with their shoulders sagging and the very skin of their faces pulled down by frowns. Seeing them, she had felt dread for maybe the first time in her life--not for herself or out of fear of them, but at the idea that an entire existence could be so easily lost. Despite her parents' reassurances that their home was safe from the Storm, she still sat alone in her bedroom for ages, eyes closed, trying to imagine what it would be like if the whole house suddenly vanished with everything she'd ever known inside it, along with every other house on every other street she'd ever seen. She couldn't, back then.
"It's because you've seen what I can do."
"Stop it," Dani managed through tight teeth. This was too much. Her brimming brain could barely process the Quell's presence, let alone her words.
"What?" There was short pause before she shrugged. "I can't help that I get impressions of what you think and feel. I can do the same for everyone born on this planet. It's like asking me not to feel the wind."
And had she felt the desperation of those she had displaced? Had she felt the panic in the half-seconds before some had been utterly consumed by the Storm's madness? Had she done it all in spite of that?
"I do wish you wouldn't fear me, though." The Quell stepped closer again. There was a twinge of what might have been a smile on her face. The chuckle that came out of her sounded quiet and ragged as the crunch of dead leaves underfoot. Everything she said sounded like that. It was assault to Dani's ears. "You know, you're just as much my child as you are Hers."
"No." She forced just enough air through her slowly constricting chest to say it. At the Quell's words, anger had started up somewhere just behind her sternum and started to spread through her body like a drop of ink in water. The adrenaline was almost enough to break the hold her nerves had over her. "You just...you wreck."
"What of it?”
"I'm an artist." She pushed past the quiver in her voice, in her legs. "I create, just...just like Her and j-just like Aubrey. N...none of us are like you."
"Do not try to tell me about Her."
"Stay away from Aubrey."
"Don't tell me--"
It was only three words, but the three had been enough to knock her down. The quiet voice had exploded suddenly into a multitude. Some flat. Some screeching with static. Some so deep that they were more felt than heard. Some glitching and skipping like a scratched record. It hurt. Physically, it hurt. Dani felt the noise tear through her as it tore through the air, felt the cacophony.
Dani dropped to the ground, or, rather, her body finally went totally stiff and carried her down with it. She stared at the grass with her hands over her ears and her fingers in her hair, and she tried to regulate her breathing, but she hardly had control over even the expansion of her chest. She was a soul bumping around inside a sack. It felt as though she had pulled herself out of her limbs, that her consciousness had retreated to somewhere deep within the core of her body to protect itself.
"I'm sorry. I'm..." The Quell trailed off. Her voice had returned to normal, and yet had not. Her tone was more hushed. Frailer.
All the same, any sound right now made her shrivel deeper into herself. It was one more input out of far too many, and it made it harder to focus on regaining control of her body again.
And anyway, how dare she be sorry? There was plenty to be sorry for before now. So many lifetimes of things lost. Did she feel the weight of it? Did it bend her spine like a punishment, the way it did Dani's? Or was she even corporeal?
The color began to fade from her vision. By the time the mist had rolled in entirely, everything was blank and gray, blotting out the world. It wasn't too unusual--fog often rolled in among the trees of this forest. Except that this fog muffled not only her sight but her hearing. The whoosh of the wind in the leaves seemed less obtrusive now. Everything did. And while she likely should have been nervous, she couldn't help but be glad for this cloud cocooning her from her surroundings for awhile.
When she finally felt her heart beating rather than vibrating, she slowly glanced to her left to see the dark silhouette of a woman kneeling on the ground beside her. She, too, had not moved the whole time.
"Is that helping?" the Quell quietly asked. "Good," she said before Dani could reply. That should have made her angry, but she was too tired for anything beyond dull irritation now. Even the fear was muted.
"You would rather not speak out loud right now, I take it?"
Dani shook her head a little.
"May I say something, then?"
She waited for a long while before she shrugged. To her credit, the Quell waited for that.
"I..." She came to a halt. "I'm not good at apologizing."
Dani looked her way and felt her eyebrows raise before she could stop herself.
The Quell huffed and said quickly, "Thacker claimed that I shouldn't try to hold power over people or try making them afraid simply because I feel afraid, so I apologize that I did that to you. Is that right?"
She was too distracted to give an answer to that, as she questioned what could make the embodiment of destruction afraid.
"I've just missed Her," she murmured. The mist had nearly dissipated now, and Dani could see her arms crossed over her knees.
And if she felt any sympathy for the Quell in that moment, it left her like a dying breath when she thought of the tree that used to stand in the center of town when she was growing up. Itslong, willowy branches hung heavy with tear-shaped purple seed pods strung along them, she could sometimes see it from the window of her house waving at her in a strong wind. It had waved, too, when she had been kept at sword- and wand- and spear-point, backed up against Sylvain's gate. She'd seen the slow lift of the thread-like branches over the heads of the crowd gathered to see her disappeared for good. She didn't see her parents or her brother in the crowd. She hadn't known why, and she hadn't had much time to think about it before being shoved through the portal. Maybe they had just gotten lost in the throng. She hoped so. She hoped that they had at least shown up, that the moment she had been dragged from the house and arrested wasn't the last they had seen of her.
For the brief time between when she was brought into custody and when she was sentenced to banishment, they didn't really explain what it was, exactly, that had done her in--someone reporting her bad-mouthing the Minister of Preservation and his bad sideburns, is what she had always assumed, but it could have been something else. Maybe one of the new laws. There were new laws made all the time back in those days, so quickly that hardly anyone could keep track of them all. Ignorance of the law, naturally, was not considered an excuse.
"Sorry." The word was nearly soundless this time. Dani wasn't sure to whom she was speaking. The Quell's next sentence, though, was certainly directed at her. "How did you bear it?"
Stop asking leading questions, Dani thought at her in the most deliberate way she could manage. She focused on the words and her own aggravation, trying to keep the memory from creeping up on her. You know I can't help trying to think of the answer. It's not fair.
"I am not used to communicating with someone who can't hear my thoughts too. Even just speaking is still strange to me." She paused. "Your kind...Brightfangs, isn't that what you're called up here? You're some of the closest to Us, you know. To She and I both. I felt you come together in the soil from where I rested in the center of the planet, before you rose fully formed from the ground."
She didn't know what to think of that. Instead, she thought, My family used to tell me that. Though, to be honest, I'm still getting used to the term 'Brightfang' again. Humans called me a vampire for so long. And I think they thought we rose out of graves or something.
"Goodness," she said, with a soft sound that was suspiciously similar to a chuckle. She rubbed her foot through the grass but stopped just before the scrape of it became enough to bother Dani. "Was it difficult to put up with them? Humans, I mean."
No, she thought.
"That's not how you really feel. And don't be upset. I can't help it."
Dani felt herself frown. She wanted to think about anything else other than the early days in the lodge. Those memories came on anyway. She felt the approach of them the way one feels oncoming nausea, and she was back to the first moment that she had taken on a human form. She had looked down at herself, at this new body attached to her like a tick, and had not seen the familiar glow of her skin like the glow of the Crystal, and had felt blunt teeth behind her lips instead of the sharp points she had liked to tap her fingertips against, and it had felt too short and too warm and too much of everything after everything had already been too much.
She had cried, and sometimes she had screamed, and even though Mama never flinched while patiently waiting for her to calm each time, she had felt shame that only made the tears fall hotter onto the foreign flesh of that new body.
In the earliest days, she remembered wearing that form like an ill-fitting rubber suit. Maybe it wasn't as bad as she remembered, or maybe it was even worse. But looking back on it, she recalled hell. Everyone had said that there would be an adjustment period, and they had turned out to be right, but even two years on she had still felt how much it was not her own. This body needed food, and it felt a hunger that couldn't be satisfied by the hot springs or by Sylvain's light. At seventeen, she started skipping meals and would just wait to feel the scrape of pain deep in her belly, just so she could feel some measure of control over this form that she had been forced into. That was until Mama noticed and, after a drawn-out scolding, made her eat dinners with her for awhile. That might have saved her. She knew that, but still felt a twinge of bitterness nonetheless.
And if she were to be truly honest with herself, maybe some of it did have to do with how she thought about humans. She didn't particularly want to be one. There were their strange traditions, the rapid speed at which their lives progressed. Mama, at the start, trying to explain that humans assumed things like gender based on appearance--that while no one at the lodge would ever judge her for how she decided to look, Dani had to be prepared for strangers to do so, wrong as they were. And of course, everyone on Sylvain knew about the missing shard of the Crystal, but she had never really considered that if the piece were still where it belonged instead of on Earth, then she would still be where she belonged instead of on Earth. For the first months, on the rare occasion that she got out of the lodge or otherwise saw an unfamiliar human, she had to suppress the urge to hiss and show her now-blunted teeth. That instinct left her, slowly. Over time, the anger completely dissipated. Truly, it did, albeit more gradually than she would have liked to admit. But years later, she never stopped making excuses to stay and draw or garden whenever Jake asked her to hang out with him in downtown Kepler. Sometimes she looked sideways even at the humans she knew and trusted and loved, and she would feel only lonely looking at them, thinking that they would never quite comprehend what it was like. Not even Mama, and certainly not Jake's friends or the park rangers or Leo or Duck or Ned--
Ned.
Sometimes she had wondered whether she could trust Ned. Everyone had on some level, she guessed. Now, every night after Aubrey had gone to sleep beside her, she lay awake for awhile and shivered with the knowledge that she should never have wondered.
"You can't blame yourself for hating them.” The Quell had been quiet up until now. "You felt like they had taken your home from you. Like you wouldn't have been on Earth if it hadn't been for them destroying the Crystal." It wasn't a question.
I didn't hate them. I loved some of them. I love them now. She hoped the Quell felt a new force to her thoughts. What? Are you going to tell me that's how you felt, too? About Sylphs taking...Her away from you?
"I'm not saying it was right to think so." She stared at the ground. The mist circled her now, and her image wavered slightly. "But you tell me, mortal, what was I supposed to do when for centuries on end I had felt only Her absence? Of course I was going to want to feel anything else, even if it was anger, or hunger. What would I have done without anger, or hunger?"
It was still your decision to act on it.
"Was it?"
Before she could swallow it down, the thought of the sarcophagus bubbled up from her stomach. By the time she had emerged from that bright tomb, whatever small part of her had remained lucid felt only the fear. Felt her body hurtling unstoppably forward. And then there was the blood, and the bang, and the flesh giving way to her now sharp teeth. And through it all, hunger, hunger like an engine as she plowed into the man who had put himself in her way to save her, and not knowing what she had done, and then the terrible knowing after she had woken up again--
And then Aubrey. Aubrey being there even when Dani felt not all there herself, even when she couldn't bring herself to speak for hours on end. Aubrey never smothering her, but never far either. Aubrey warming her even when they were apart. Aubrey holding her when she finally broke and carefully kissing the tears from her cheeks. Aubrey murmuring against her skin, skin that had felt more sacred to her than it ever had before, because it had been touched in this way. Aubrey crying herself and still whispering to her, "You didn't kill him. I know that wasn't you."
Who are you, really?
For all the Quell claimed to know her mind, she apparently hadn't been expecting Dani to say that. It was some time before she answered, slowly, "I am this planet's force of destruction. I clear things away. It is Her role to create them."
That's what you do. Well, no, it's what you have done, I should say. Destroying, I mean. That doesn't have to be all of you. Wouldn't you rather be something else?
"What sort of a question is that?"
It wasn't the familiar feeling of home that had drawn her to Aubrey at the very start, though that sensation would come in full force soon after. Instead, she had seen this woman walk in and immediately thought that she was seeing someone who knew herself. She took up space--not just with her wide stance and the thick poof of candy-red hair standing high on top of her head, but also with the way her voice filled the room without her trying, the heat of the flames she made filling every empty corner. She was utterly herself, and she wanted everyone to know about it, to see her. And Dani saw her, alright.
How comfortable she seemed in her own skin. It was sort of contagious. The more she was around Aubrey, the more she wanted to feel that way, too. At times, she almost did. That was usually when Aubrey would do things like kiss her all over under the covers and count out each one, claiming she was giving her a kiss for every one of her freckles. She would never reach the end of the count--they would both either dissolve into giggles or into sleep, but either way, Dani would be left grateful for her form, for the freckles that covered it.
She had also thought, at first, that Aubrey would be the last person capable of understanding what foreignness felt like. It appeared that she, the traveling entertainer, could make a home anywhere she pleased, could be comfortable anywhere. And anyway, she just felt so familiar. Dani eventually found herself to be wrong about many things, of course. The knowledge of all she had gotten wrong started with the night that Aubrey sat on the bed, hands folded between her knees, speaking quietly about her mother and the empty lot where her house had been.
And it turned out that she didn't know herself as well as Dani had assumed, either. She didn't know how good she was. She spent so much time worrying about how her fire could destroy that sometimes she hardly seemed to see how much light she gave off. Dani wasn't sure how best to make her see it. She tried to show her anyway, where she could.
The Quell cut in, "Well, of course She was full of light. She is the Life-Giver. She is not capable of making anything that is not beautiful."
Sylvain is inside her, but Aubrey is herself. She's all human. She thought a bit more. Humans are all so different. They're kind of...flexible, I would say. They have to spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of people they want to be. I don't think that's a bad thing.
The Quell let out a hum.
By the way, is that really what you think now?
"What? Oh, about the beauty of the surface, you mean."
Yeah. You think so? After all you did to it?
The Quell faced the sky, eyes wide open. "I believe...before, I simply rolled over the surface of this planet. I saw all of it as only obstacles. Now that I'm made to just...just be, I see that it was all Hers. I was so busy searching for Her that I could not see Her in everything she had done, in front of me."
Dani hated to admit how much she understood.
"I...I feel ashamed." Her head snapped in Dani's direction as if she had just recalled something. Then she sighed once more. "You still don't want me to see Her."
"No, I don't." Dani finally managed to speak aloud, albeit shakily. "And I...I don't forgive you either, yet."
"I see."
"But I might, sometime. She might."
The Quell smiled, really, for the first time. "Then I will speak to you again."
I didn't say I wanted that, she thought. Talking to her, Dani found, was still sort of exhausting.
"You didn't have to." She did not move, but the long shadow of a tree stretched to blanket her, and she seemed to have never been there to begin with.