#lucienne ash

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Starless Sky/Boolean Emma Celeste/Lucienne as a bird with a behavioral disorder hits different when you remember that main Celeste tugs at her hair often (not to the point of pulling it out, but often enough that it’s notable), that cutting it barely past her scalp prevented her and Thomas from pulling it (a stage direction from the main timeline fight: Almost accidentally, his foot lands atop her hair and tugs it sharply to the side), that she would probably like to grow it back after she's left him, and that feather-plucking is called pterotillomania and bears similarities to trichotillomania.

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Constructed-Emma tries to goad Celeste into returning to Thomas. Celeste argues and argues and fights as hard as she can by appealing to Emma’s self-interest, but Emma won’t have it. She's never consistent in what she cares about, but it seems that at this moment, she cares more that Celeste is adequately punished than that her loyalties are to her alone.

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Starless Sky Celeste whose therapist has her write Emma's letter apologizing and expressing love to her.

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I mentioned that Starless Sky Celeste doesn’t need to keep her hair from growing back in the sense that Thomas no longer cares about how she wears it, but she absolutely needs to keep her hair from growing back so that it can’t get long enough for him to pull. I raise you the idea that after she’s away from him, she starts to let it grow, but she does something wrong and has a panic attack as she goes looking for the scissors. I’m not sure whether she actually finds them. If she does, the idea of her cutting it all back against her scalp in a moment of impulsive terror hits really hard (especially if her shaky hands make the blade go places it shouldn’t). If she doesn’t, she’s stuck with her desperation building and building.

My guess as to what exactly she did wrong to go looking for the scissors is that it's late February or early March and she blew up because it's all so raw. (Maybe in timelines where she crashes her car, she was set off when she was told she couldn't have the keys.) Elaine has to assure her she's not mad.

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Starless Sky Celeste has not wanted to celebrate her birthday since Emma died, though I'm wondering if Thomas has attempted to do it because he wants her to at least appear happy. (In iterations longer than a year, maybe he started trying and stopped or tapered the effort when she didn't take to it. Maybe he always does something and then weaponizes her refusal as a way to paint her as ungrateful.) I'd like to see her celebrating it with the Gardners after she leaves him.

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After Thomas, Starless Sky Celeste/Lucienne needs to see the door no matter where she is. Probably the first thing she does in her new room at the Gardners’ house is angle the bed to face the door.

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"What does it feel like to see her?"

“It’s a sickness unparalleled. The knowing, it knocks at your stomach, at your heart. No, not knocks—it thrashes, it pounds, it demands. You know what you did and it demands to escape where it is stored and permeate you. And then she’s there. She is radiant and how dare you deprive the world of someone so beautiful and pure. You can’t even ask the question anymore; it turns into a statement. She opens her mouth and there’s the knowing, knocking again, but now it’s screaming, it’s screaming and it’s wearing her voice and it wants to break your bones and you know that if someone so loving wants that for you, you deserve every bit of it and more. It’s the searing pain of being torn apart limb from limb and set on fire all at once. It’s white-hot, it’s blazing, it’s when you’re ill in flames but you don’t even know that they’re going to defend you. It’s an ache unceasing and the way I see it, I’d be crazy if I didn’t lose touch with reality like that.”

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If Celeste was with Thomas all twenty-four years projected, she’s forty or forty-one when the Gardners are in their seventies, and she is terrified of hurting or even killing them in their fragility by accident when she loses her composure. Killing Emma was bad enough. This would be worse. She tries to seclude herself in the shed or the garage, but she can’t always help herself.