Archive of Our Own ^beta

Adaine stares deeply into the cup of coffee before her and wonders, not for the first time, if she’s losing her mind. 

It’s new. The coffee, not the losing her mind. She’s pretty sure that started in her childhood, when she used to get so bored she would lose hours at a time to laying spread-eagle on her back, staring at the ceiling and inventing elaborate stories in which she was chosen, special enough to be whisked away to some greater destiny. Ones where she was loved, valuable. Ones where ethereally beautiful elves, her real parents, would sweep through her home, declaring with great passion that they had missed her, that hadn’t she known they had been searching for her all these years, that it was high time she come home. Sometimes, her fantasies felt more real to her than the life she lived.

Adaine isn’t stupid. She knows most children—most people, really—start understanding and inventing themselves well before the age of fourteen in a way she never did. She feels like it was a wake-up call, that first shopping trip to the Gilded Coin years back, a long-avoided realisation that she had no idea who she really was. It’s something she’s still struggling with in a way she feels like her friends are not. Who is Adaine Abernant?

The answer feels contradictory most days. She feels like she has layers on layers, like she has been draping sheets of fabric over a core molded into shape by the absence of her parents’ love. Everything she knew about herself the first fourteen years of her life was in reference to her family and how to stay safe around them. The longer she works with Jawbone to try to find things that aren’t, the more of their influence she seems to uncover. Adaine Abernant has worked hard to be something other than her parents’ daughter. Sometimes, she worries it’s all she’s ever doomed to be.

She looks again at the coffee. She doesn’t even like it, hence the newness. But something has compelled her to fetch a cup, something has moved her hands to brew the pot, something has encouraged her to breathe in the steam wafting off its surface. She is caught, unmoving, as she fights herself on whether or not to drink it. 

She gets stuck like this, sometimes, frozen overtop of something as forces inside of her fight vehemently about what action to execute. She thinks of it like a glitch in coding, some electrical misfire in her mind. Part of her wants to drink the coffee. Part of her knows she hates it. Instead of either winning, something in her mind shorts and sparks, and she ends up like this, staring straight through the cup before her, head lowered, hands loosely clasped in her lap. 

It’s how Lydia finds her, flicking on the kitchen lights as she rolls in through the doorway. Adaine, still caught in the broken loop, can’t blink or look up at her, so she has no idea if Lydia is surprised to find her up this early. 

“Good morning, Adaine,” she says, her voice even and kind as always. This, finally, pulls enough of Adaine’s attention to something other than her internal dispute that she can move her lips, though her eyes remain caught on her drink.

“Good morning, Lydia.” Her cadence is measured, her posture straight as ever. Her body will always remember her father. 

“You had breakfast yet?” The sound of Lydia’s wheels over the fine layer of grit on Mordred’s floor that no vacuum can ever seem to catch lets Adaine track her path around the island and to the cupboards next to the stovetop. The groaning of their hinges and the gentle clattering of metal suggests she’s probably fishing out a frypan. 

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you.” Adaine doesn’t have the mental capacity to process things like “breakfast” at the moment. Her anxiety simmers, low-level. She tries to ignore her nausea. 

Lydia hums, a steady, noncommittal note. “A’right,” she says. Adaine can’t read her tone right now. Instead, she listens to the music of Lydia’s morning cooking: the fridge opening and closing, the cracking of eggs into a bowl and the sound of what can only be a fork whisking through them to break the yolks and aerate the mixture. Adaine can hear the salt and pepper grinders turn, the popping of a cap that has to belong to the garlic. 

Adaine starts to fade back out of the moment, head dropping towards her neck as her eyes glaze fully back over, internal debate over the coffee drawing her attention back to her mug. Her jaw clenches, her stubborn refusal to drink it not succeeding in breaking her free of the loop. Her frustration builds. 

We’ve tried it before. We don’t like it, she thinks, petulant and childish. We want to try it. It smells nice, she thinks back to herself in the same instance. Who’s we? This is absolutely nonsensical. 

A glass comes down heavily onto the table by her elbow. Adaine jerks backwards in surprise, nearly catching it with the side of her arm and sending it spilling all over the floor. Luckily, Lydia hasn’t moved, and is in exactly the right spot to steady it. 

“Some juice for you,” she says. Adaine meets her eyes, blinking rapidly as she tries to re-orient herself. Lydia’s face is nearly impassive, but the crook of her eyebrow says she’s making mental notes. Adaine curses her skills of observation. If she’s losing her mind, best not to involve the entirety of her new, extended family. 

“Thank you,” she says belatedly, after Lydia has already turned to return to the stove. It’s white grape, too, the good kind Jawbone promises is worth the expense. She reaches out for it, grateful to finally have something she can agree with herself on drinking. 

“Sure thing. Big plans today?” 

“Hm, not especially,” Adaine muses, setting her elbow on the table to rest her cheek in her hand. It’s something her mother and father would never have let her get away with when she was younger, which is all the more reason for her to do it now. “I’ve planned to go visit Ayda at Compass Points today, but shouldn’t be there the whole day if you need help around the house this evening.” It’s a Saturday, which means most of the inhabitants of Mordred Manor will be doing their best to chip in with the cleaning, but a few Prestidigitations from Adaine always make the process go more quickly. 

At the stove, Lydia fiddles with the knobs, pulling the frypan off the heat and beginning to plate the eggs. “No, you’re alright. Have fun with your friends, you deserve it.” She brings over two plates, Adaine hastily clearing her mug and cup out of the way so Lydia has enough room to set them down. Despite Adaine’s earlier protests, one makes its way to the spot in front of her. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Adaine argues, though without any real force. Lydia is a mother through and through, whether Ragh is home or not. 

She huffs a breath at Adaine’s words. “Like hell I was gonna let you go without eating something. You can’t survive off caffeine alone, kid.” She squints at Adaine’s mug. “You want any milk or sugar for that?” 

Adaine isn’t going to be drinking it, no matter how much she wants to. She opens her mouth to say as much. “Um, sure,” she finds herself saying instead. 

Lydia rolls her way back to the kitchen. “Well, which one?” she asks, hand stretched halfway to the fridge. 

“Both?” Adaine asks timidly, mouth betraying her again. Gods, at the least it would be nice if you could be wrong confidently, she thinks. What’s the matter with you?

“Both it is.” Lydia rolls back with the sugar and milk in hand, jug shaking the table top as she hefts it up onto its surface. “You might want to reheat that if you want your sugar to dissolve, though.” 

Adaine hastily casts a Warming cantrip, avoiding eye contact with Lydia as she does so. Gods, this is so embarrassing. She doesn’t understand why she’s even entertaining it. 

Mercifully, Lydia doesn’t pursue it any further, choosing instead to dig into her eggs. They’re good, too, as they always are. Lydia doesn’t skimp on her seasonings. Adaine takes a bite or two before she even reaches for the hot sauce, stomach growling as she realises, belatedly, how hungry she is. She adds a healthy amount, then dives straight in. 

The kitchen is silent other than the noises of their cutlery scraping over their plates as they eat, but Adaine doesn’t feel pressured to break it. Unlike with her previous family, the absence of noise is not a punishment or a threat, nor the withholding of connection. Instead, it’s companionable. Adaine feels held in it. 

She stands to rinse their plates once she sees Lydia finish, but pauses. If she’s getting up, she may as well make it all one trip, she decides, eyeing her coffee. She hastily dumps in probably more sugar than she ought, then follows it up with enough milk to bring the drink to the rim of her cup. She only realises afterwards that she probably should have stirred between them so the sugar could dissolve before the milk cooled the whole thing off again. Her cheeks flush with shame. Oh well; there really isn’t anything she can do but commit, she guesses. She whisks the plates, milk, and sugar off the table before Lydia can open her mouth to comment on her botched order of operations. Not that she would, Adaine thinks, but best to be preemptive about these things. 

The milk goes back into the fridge first, then the sugar onto the countertop by the kettle. Finally, Adaine makes her way to the sink, where the plates get a quick scrub under some hot water before her Prestidigitation. She sets them upright in the drying rack, dropping the forks in the little holder at the back. Then she sits to face her foe. 

This could’ve been tea. We like tea, Adaine thinks to herself mournfully, picking up the mug. Almost in spite of her own thoughts, she takes a huge gulp, as though on poorly-contained impulse. The coffee is lukewarm at best and still extremely bitter. She recoils, face contorting.

“You need more sugar there?” Lydia’s voice is amused. She sounds like she expected this to happen. 

“No,” Adaine lies, taking another sip. She wonders if this could be classified as a form of self-harm. Maybe it will get better. She sips again. 

It takes nearly half the mug before she breaks. One minute, she’s sitting there, continually drinking away at the nasty concoction in her hands, and the next, some internal pressure lifts. She sets it down heavily on the table, feeling suddenly exhausted. “That was gross,” she says. “I don’t know why I drank so much of that.” 

“Well, now you’ll know for next time,” Lydia soothes, picking it up and rolling it over to the sink where she washes it out. “No harm done.” 

“No harm done,” Adaine agrees, brushing it out of her mind.

—

It’s more adventurous to visit Ayda these days, partly because the Compass Points is still recovering from the little fire damage it took months ago, partly because her sister is there more frequently than not, and partly because she’s never actually sure it’s Ayda she’ll be visiting. The list of other people—Ayda’s headmates—she’s met so far is pretty short, but she’s sure she hasn’t exhausted them all. Today as she Teleports in, she casts her gaze around to try and gain any context clues she can use for her advantage. 

For better or worse, it kind of just looks like the library, the first floor filled with plenty of natural light at this hour. There are a couple of patrons browsing the shelves, a young pirate couple who look like they’re reading aloud to their crab familiar at one of the tables, and some of Ayda’s notes scattered across the large desk at the front, Rawlins behind it. Ayda herself, however, is nowhere to be seen. Adaine reluctantly approaches Rawlins, who has a pair of spectacles on and seems to be very trepidatiously trying to open a book. 

“Um, good morning,” she says, hesitant. She watches as the book bites Rawlins’ fingers.


“Ouch! Oh, what can I do for ye?” He shakes out his hand, one of his fingers beginning to bleed a disturbingly inky purple liquid. She has no idea what kind of curse is responsible for that one, and hopes to keep it that way.

“I’m looking for Ayda, if you know where she might be.” She could burn a Message if things were really desperate, or even a Locate Creature, but either seems a bit extreme. She’s here to research spells with Ayda. It ought to be a very low-stakes activity. 

Rawlins grimaces, grasping his fingers with his other hand. “In th’back, missus.” 

About what she expected. “Thank you. And best of luck with that book,” she adds, wondering if she shouldn’t do a little more to help. 

“’S’my job. All under control,” he insists, waving her off. Adaine shrugs, placated, and heads in deeper. 

Ayda’s room, formerly quite spartan, has grown in character (and equally in mess) over the past few months. It’s plastered wall-to-wall with notes and research, segmented into different disciplines. Most are on the diverse subject of magic, some still dedicated to the pursuit of friendship, and the oldest are accounts from her previous iterations containing their most critical pieces of advice. A new section above her perch, however, has been cleared to be dedicated to notes on understanding Ayda herself. There are several sheets Adaine can see here about autism, and a few about lesbianism and polyamory. The most recent additions are, of course, those about dissociative identity disorder. 

Adaine feels like she’s been on a crash-course of learning over the past few months. She had previously never heard of Ayda’s condition, nor met anybody with it. Though she now knows it’s more common than even obsessive-compulsive disorder, she had no information on it when she first began researching, and subsequently felt like every interaction with Ayda’s headmates was a major misstep.

“Oh, you’re new! What’s your role?” she had asked the first time it seemed like she was speaking to a different version of her friend. 

“What?” Not-Ayda had asked, her wings flaring out behind her defensively. 

“What do you do to help Ayda? The research we’ve been doing suggests that alters exist to support an individual and help them function comparatively normally in society and with all manner of daily tasks,” Adaine’d said, flipping through the book before her. “See, in tertiary dissociation, because of the level or duration of trauma or because of the ability to dissociate to such a high degree, there are multiple EPs—emotional parts—that form from traumatic experiences to handle emotional states related to the trauma, such as fight and flight responses. But there are also multiple ANPs—apparently normal parts—that help support various logistical and logical tasks necessary to survival. And it’s that additional compartmentalisation that sets it apart from the secondary dissociation of something like cPTSD, which includes emotional instability and potentially the existence of multiple EPs, but not necessarily multiple ANPs. Do you know if you’re an EP or an ANP?” 

Not-Ayda stood up suddenly, her chair falling to the floor behind her. “I am leaving now.” 

It was only then Adaine had realised that perhaps going in guns blazing might’ve been the wrong approach. “I’m so sorry—“ she had begun, but before the first few syllables were even out, not-Ayda had vanished. 

She’s a bit more tactful now, she thinks, though the shame still eats at her. She highly doubts that she’ll ever be perfect, but she at least knows to ask somebody’s name first. It’s been slow progress from all involved, but the Bad Kids have been working on it, doing their best to accommodate Ayda and maintain flexibility. 

Even Ayda’s been trying hard to find compromises with herself—her room now has a shelf in the back where her headmates have been storing things they’re interested in. So far, it contains a rather intimidating-looking collection of daggers on one end, a pile of smooth rocks on the other, and a couple of books in the middle. For anyone else, it wouldn’t seem like much, but Adaine figures it’s the little things that count. 

Playing with a rock now is (potentially) Ayda, flat on her stomach on the floor, other hand occupied with flipping a pen about over a nearly-blank piece of paper. Her legs are kicked up behind her, swinging alternately. Adaine revises her opinion—this is absolutely not Ayda. 

“Good morning,” she says politely, rapping at the doorframe gently with her knuckles. “Um, I was planning to study spellwork with Ayda, but if now is a bad time, I’m happy to come back later.” 

Ayda’s headmate’s eyes light up as they fall on Adaine, their head cocking to the side. “Addy!” they say, clapping the meat of their palms together, fingers curled, in a stim Adaine recognises as being excited. “You can stay.” 

They whistle, a thin, bird-like call, then click. Adaine’s shoulders relax minutely. “Hi Phoebe. What’re you working on?” 

Phoebe whistles again, a lovely three-note trill. Adaine has been quickly learning that it’s one of the easiest ways to tell that Phoebe is pleased by something. Though they don’t tend to emote particularly strongly with their face, they’re much less likely to hide or suppress stims than Ayda is, which has given Adaine a whole new set of body language to interpret. In some ways, she finds it easier. 

“I am attempting to draw,” Phoebe says, tilting their head again. “I quite enjoy reading field journals, but I’ve never made one of my own.” 

There’s a half-filled entry on their page about one of the laughing gulls commonly found scrounging in Leviathan. Adaine cranes her head so she can read over Phoebe’s shoulder, struggling to decipher the penmanship—a juvenile scrawl much messier than Ayda’s normal script. Adaine’s been too afraid to ask, but she’s fairly certain Phoebe is younger than Ayda. She’s still not sure by how much, and so defaults to treating them like she would any other person her own age. 

“You’ve got a good start there,” she says, “but it might be easier to add a drawing if you were looking at the actual animal.” 

Phoebe hums, considering this. Their eyes go slightly glassy as they stare into the wall with a vacant expression for a moment. Then, they seem to return from wherever they’ve gone, blinking rapidly. “Isolde says we can go look for one. Will you come with me?” they ask almost shyly, feet still kicking behind them. Adaine has no idea who that is, but at this point, she worries it would be rude to ask. 

“I’d love to,” she says, beginning to feel a little bit strange. It’s almost like she’s speaking through a thick fog. She shakes her head, trying to clear it, but the motion doesn’t seem to help. In fact, her distress almost makes it worse; the more she worries about the disconnect, the further she floats away from herself. “Where do you want to look first?” 

Phoebe rolls over to stare at the ceiling, wiggling their pen above their head. “Mmm, the docks?” 

“We can go to the docks,” Adaine says, her mouth moving independently of her mind. “After you.” 

She follows on autopilot, tailing behind Phoebe with very little awareness of her surroundings. She’s fairly certain Rawlins says something to them as they drift past, but she isn’t tuned in enough to respond properly, merely humming in acknowledgement. Somewhere in her background processing, she hopes that his hand hasn’t gotten any worse. 

“Are you headed out?” her sister calls as they pass her. The familiar voice wakes Adaine up a little bit, returns some of her awareness. She turns to face Aelwyn, struggling to focus her eyes properly. Her sister’s face blurs in and out of view like she’s spinning the dial atop a pair of binoculars.

“Yes!” Pheobe says cheerily. “We’re going to find a gull.” 

“Wow,” Aelwyn drawls sardonically, “thrilling. Next time you plan on pulling your fingernails out with pliers, be sure to invite me.” 

Phoebe recoils a little bit. “We’re not going to pull out our fingernails,” they say. 

This is typically the moment Adaine would step in to smooth things over, try to defuse the situation the way she used to with her family when she was much younger and hadn’t yet learned that it did nothing to help. Instead, her grasp on Aelwyn’s face lapses, and the world blurs out. She lets it soften, exhausted. It’s much easier to let go, really. 

The silence stretches. “I wasn’t being serious,” Aelwyn finally huffs. Adaine can feel her eyes, heavy, on the side of her face. It’s a problem for later. She doesn’t have enough energy to care right now. “Well, don't die out there, I suppose.” She turns back to shelving.

Adaine wishes she were present enough to tease her sister for going soft. Instead, she continues to float behind Phoebe as they whistle their two-note dismissal and head out the door. 

The two of them make their way through Leviathan, the sounds and smells of the city fading out to either side of them. Adaine feels with each step that she is getting smaller and smaller, not just within herself, but also in the world around her. She becomes more and more certain that she has become a ghost, that something has untethered her and she has finally been let free. It’s disorienting. The world feels far away; she imagines herself as a dust mote passing it by. There’s no discernible cause she can determine. She simply vanishes inside herself.

By the time they reach the docks, what used to be Adaine is a wisp. All of the Adaineness is tucked somewhere far within her, folded into the size of a grain of sand, incapable of accessing the world properly. Instead, everything reaches her through a filter, a thousand layers of gauze.

“Look!” Phoebe cheers, “there are so many!” 

It’s true. Sand-Adaine watches the gulls circle, plummeting like bullets to the sea, where they catch fish leaping out of the water and then manage to swing themselves up from their nosedives just before they hit its surface. Their wings glint in the light, their cries echoing into the city. 

It’s so beautiful, a voice inside her says, wondering. They’re vermin. I hope they choke to death, says another. 

The anger and sorrow feel as distant and alien as everything else right now. That’s a horrible thing to say! How could you be so cruel? The first voice is distraught, despondent. The second is vindictive. They’re disgusting; filth- and disease-ridden monsters. I hope they all die. I’d kill them myself if I could. 

I wish you’d shut the fuck up, the Adaine remnant thinks, distractedly. Then her eyebrows furrow. What? 

It’s the exact same kind of internal dialogue that constantly runs in all of her background processes. She’s never had a consistent internal monologue, but she’s never thought deeply about it. Some people simply have internal dialogues instead; as far as she can tell from helping Ayda with her research, it’s incredibly common. Even if there is some degree of dissociation associated, dissociation is a spectrum, and one most people fall along. But she feels—strange, hearing everything while contained so thoroughly inside herself.

I’m not going to fucking do that, the second voice sniffs, haughty. Especially if you’re the one asking.

You actually don’t have to listen to nym, the first voice says, weary. Ne likes being contrary. It’s how ne works. 

“What,” the wisp formerly known as Adaine says out loud. 

“There are just… a lot,” Phoebe says, tilting their head to the side. “Are you having trouble seeing them?” 

It takes a beat longer than it should for the question to process. “No,” speck-Adaine says. “They’re cool.” 

It’s just enough for Phoebe’s attention to slip off her face and back to their sketch. Adaine’s muscles untense—she hadn’t even realised she had stiffened up. The fear is instinctive, the need to be ignored and overlooked all-consuming. Should Phoebe find out about—well, Adaine isn’t even sure exactly what—it would be bad. Probably. She isn’t sure in what way. 

Sorry. I’m Ada, the first voice says. Adaine gets the impression of a hand outstretched to shake, though she’s not sure how. Slowly, she thinks the shock is bringing her back out of whatever place she had gone to, increasing her presence in size from the grain of sand to perhaps that of her crystal. That’s Bryn. 

It’s the existence of names that makes Adaine feel deeply, suddenly ashamed. Here she is with one of her good friends, one of her best friends, one of the only friends she’s ever had, and she’s playing dolls in her mind and pretending to have the exact same disorder by naming her internal dialogue. She can’t think of any other explanation—how mortifying! Maybe her old parents were right, and she really is just desperate for attention.

Dude. Are you stupid, the second voice says, deadpan. You’ve ignored me for so long. Do I need to do a dance for you? Juggle? Kill somebody?

Against her will, Adaine flashes through a dozen of her past fights. In her sense memory, she pulls the Sword of Sight, advances on an opponent, teeth bared. When she sinks the blade into their chest, she feels the resistance of skin and muscle, the give; she hears the noise of bone breaking, the slick spurt of blood as she rends flesh. It runs down her hand in rivulets. The scent of copper is nigh-unbearable. She searches for something, anything else to think about. 

The gulls. The salt spray of the sea. The give of the docks under her feet. Adaine breathes.

Please don’t, she thinks. 

You couldn’t control me if you wanted to, her own thoughts respond. Adaine gets the impression of a vicious grin. 

Ne’s all bark, no bite, the other half of her internal dialogue chimes in. These thoughts have a lighter quality to them. Adaine is intrigued to find it possible that her internal voices can sound so distinct. You’re going to be alright. Just because ne’s grouchy—

I’m not grouchy, her thoughts grouch. 

—doesn’t mean that you have to believe we’re real right now. I mean, we’re as real as any other part of you. 

Adaine tries to weigh this out rationally. People have parts; that’s how they operate. She is people. These are her parts. If it helps her to categorise hers with names and pronouns and different voices, it’s probably fine. She’s the one in control. It still feels embarrassing to subconsciously borrow a framework from her friend’s disorder, but nobody has to know. 

“I’m done! Look, Adaine,” Phoebe says, clicking their tongue and rocking back and forth on their talons. It’s a fairly good impression of a gull, rendered with a lot of care for the short amount of time they’ve allowed themself. 

“That looks amazing,” Adaine praises, grateful to be more conscious and present in herself. “Are you all finished?”

“Yeah,” Phoebe yawns. “I’m ready to go back now.” 

“Then let’s head in,” Adaine offers. When they offer her their hand, it’s easy to take it. 

— 

The next few weeks for Adaine are—difficult. It’s like acknowledging and naming a couple of her more persistent and annoying parts has opened the floodgates to something beyond her understanding. Now that she’s noticed her internal dialogue, it’s impossible not to be at least partially tuned into it all the time. 

We should make coffee, something in her will think each morning, only to be met with several separate protests. Sometimes, they overlap— we didn’t like it last time— tea, please, I just want tea— why can’t you ever be constructive— juice?— only if it’s black— until her head aches trying to decipher them all. She constantly feels like she’s warring with herself. Until now, she would’ve said that being overstimulated by one’s own thoughts was impossible, but here she is, breaking down practically every day when it becomes too overwhelming to handle. 

Jawbone notices, because of course he does, and checks in with her, because of course he does. “You think we need to up your meds?” he asks once, face all wrinkled with concern. “Can always get you in for another appointment if you wanna try upping the dose, see how it feels. There’s no shame in needin’ a little extra support.” 

“Maybe,” she says honestly, knee bouncing. “I don’t know; it doesn’t feel like my panic attacks. I just can’t stop thinking.” 

He nods, wisely. “Too much—ah, what’s the word for it?—metacognating, huh? Thinking about thinking.” 

She tilts her head to the side. “Yeah, I guess so. I just don’t understand why it’s such a problem now when everything’s going so well.” 

He sighs, a long, contemplative noise. “Sure would be nice if it were all linear, wouldn’t it?” He adjusts in his seat to face her more directly. “When the bad shit is happening, you’re just trying to survive it. Can only start processing all of it emotionally once you’re out of the bad shit and don’t have to just survive anymore. Yeah?” 

Adaine stares into the middle distance. She gets it, she guesses, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. “That’s dumb,” she says finally. 

“Sure is, kid,” Jawbone agrees, patting her on the shoulder. “You need anythin’ from me right now?” 

She thinks about it, then promptly decides to stop thinking about it when her brain supplies her with a thousand different ideas, none of them helpful or relevant—drugs, free house, piano, diamond, ten diamonds!, kill us, can we revisit the piano?, gods you’re so annoying. “A hug, please?” she tries. 

His face softens the way it always does when any of his foster kids reach out to him. “‘Course, kiddo,” he says, and wraps her into a crushing hug. She buries her face in his sweater, covered in his fur, and breathes in his now-familiar scent. It makes her brain go quiet, finally. She misses the peace immediately when they part.

She decides against mentioning anything to her friends, who are all busy with their own projects and stressors as they approach their senior year. Instead, between psych appointments and med adjustments that don’t seem to help, Boggy becomes one of her greatest supports, sitting in her lap and grounding her with his weight and presence. She carries him around on her hip near-constantly, in easy squeezing range for whenever she has a thought that’s too loud or distressing to get rid of properly. 

It works well until his presence starts making her think and act strangely, too. It’s through no fault of his own; something just seems to possess her when she goes to hold him. She tries not to give into whatever it is, afraid of the way it makes her feel. Sometimes, though, when things have been particularly awful and she’d really just like to hold her familiar, she lets her guard down. 

“Hi Boggy,” she whispers into his terrarium, unlatching the door. “How’re you today?” 

He ribbits at her, doing his best to smash his little round body into the glass when she doesn’t get his terrarium open quickly enough. The curious feeling washes straight over her, too powerful to fight. He’s just so round and so ridiculous! Adaine giggles, reaching her hands in to pick him up. 

“C’mere,” she says, still whispering, now just because it feels right. He hops into her arms, croaking happily, and she pulls him into her arms, sitting heavily on her bum. “You’re so cute,” she tells him seriously, settling into a criss-cross applesauce and humming to herself. 

It helps make the voices more quiet when she’s like this, in a way that makes it hard to remember she’s not supposed to be giving into it. It’s scary for the feeling that comes before the weirdness to become now-weirdness, even though when she’s in-weirdness it helps. Her eyebrows wrinkle as she tries to puzzle it all out. It’s hard to do like this—words move far away, leaving her with fewer, smaller ones. It’s part of what’s so nice. She gets a break from thinking so hard. 

She pats Boggy’s back a few times, making soft noises with her mouth. When she feels this way, she likes to imagine that she’s a frog just like him, round and cute and nice. In her froggy world, she would probably drink water off of leaves and live underneath a toadstool, or maybe on top of a lily pad. Maybe, like Boggy, she would like digging holes in the dirt and sleeping inside them. She loves to dream up a whole world around it, about what colour she’d be, what it’d be like to jump about in puddles. In her imagination, she’s not a girl anymore, and instead other little girls pick her froggy body up, and she rides about in their pockets. Sometimes, she spends so long imagining that she forgets who she really is, and then it gets all disorienting to notice she has human hands or to try to walk. 

“Hey Addy?” Fig says, whipping her head around Adaine’s doorway, braid swinging over her shoulder. “D’you know where mom is?” 

Startled, Adaine croaks. She whips Boggy up into her chest defensively, like he’ll protect her. “Huh?” she asks dumbly. 

Fig’s face goes all weird and kind-of-frowny. The nice feeling Adaine was having curdles in her stomach in an instant. “Sandra Lynn,” she says, a little slowly. “I just wasn’t sure if you’d seen her.” 

Adaine presses her lips together and shakes her head, making a noise of dissent. She is possessed by the sudden awareness that if she speaks, Fig will capital-K Know something, and she’ll have given her secret away. 

“Okay,” Fig says. She lingers a second too long in the doorway. “Thanks anyways.” 

Adaine nods, serious. Fig still doesn’t leave.

“Are you having fun with Boggy?” she asks. Her voice is gentle, entreating. Something jolts in Adaine—this is a trap. The spell snaps abruptly.

“No,” she blurts, shoving him away from her, back into his terrarium. He wiggles frantically, trying to get out of her grasp. “I mean—yes. Love Boggy. Really great frog. Round.” 

“Uh huh,” Fig says. Adaine doesn’t look at her. “Alright. I’m gonna go check the garden.” 

“You do that,” Adaine says, unexpectedly bitter. She sort of wants to weep. It’s ridiculous, to hold this great a sense of loss over something she doesn’t even fully understand—over a daydream she’s inexplicably prioritising over her friend. Nonsensical.

Fig’s footsteps trail away from her door. Adaine flops over onto her back, arms spread to either side. This is the worst. 

—

It doesn’t get any easier, pretending things aren’t weird. She has to stop herself from impulsively blurting out strange thoughts in front of her friends, sit on her hands to prevent herself from reaching out to poke or hit or grab things she knows she shouldn’t. She’ll go to cook something on the stove and have to fight herself not to touch the burner, open the fridge and pull out ingredients she doesn’t want to use. She can’t look in the mirror anymore. Her reflection leaves her unmoored. She starts to feel uncomfortable with being referred to as a girl at odd intervals, her friends’ use of her name grating in a way she can’t describe. Burying everything becomes more and more fatiguing.

One day, as she ducks into Basrar’s, she notices a crackling sound. It sounds like popping candy, almost; sort of like the noise the ancient ice maker in Mordred’s new fridge makes when she’s trying to watch her TV programme. She pauses in the doorway, trying to determine its source. 

She sees one wasp first, then the second. They crawl into the seam where the wooden doorway meets the siding above it, uninterested in patrons moving in and out. She counts just the two, until a third emerges from the same gap—or maybe one of the first pair comes back out again; she can’t be sure. A few pieces of sawdust float lazily down to the floor. 

Alright, well, that’s that mystery solved then. There are paper wasps. They are eating the doorframe of Adaine’s workplace. She should tell Basrar. 

Instead, she serves ice cream on autopilot, unable to fathom expending the extra energy to explain to Basrar that his shop is being eaten by non-aggressive wasps. It’s not like they’re likely to sting any of the patrons, or particularly interested in doing so. As far as she’s concerned, the worst they’re liable to do is a bit of property damage. And surely Basrar will notice before it reaches that point—the sound isn’t going away, nor the steadily-growing pile of sawdust on the floor. And how would he remove all those wasps, anyways? Her mind fills with thoughts of them being sprayed out, killed indiscriminately. She’s filled with a remote sadness. Basrar’s business is her priority, of course, but it’s not the wasps’ fault they chose a poor home. 

At the end of her shift, she clocks out, hangs up her apron, and walks right out the door, under the popping and crackling of wasps hard at work. 

The next day, they’re still there. And the next. By the end of the week, Adaine becomes convinced everybody else is both deaf and blind.

It keeps her up at night. She wonders what it means that she’s too tired to care, too exhausted to say even a single, three-word sentence to her boss. Does it make her a horrible person? She doesn’t like that she doesn’t know. 

She stares at a beam in the ceiling, too fatigued to even fight herself about the matter, and hates that it comes as a relief that she can’t. There’s a distance between her and the world now, an impermeable barrier that she brushes up against every now and again. She doesn’t think she has it in her to fight to break through it anymore. 

She trances. Her dreams are full of wasps.

—

It’s Fig who drags her back to the Compass Points library that weekend. “C’monnn,” she begs, tugging Adaine’s arm near out of its socket, “you never come hang out with us anymore!” 

Adaine has a million and one excuses lined up: she’s been picking up more shifts at work lately; she’s had to help Aelwyn with the cats; oracle duties have called; Fabian needs a sparring partner—but they all fall short. She’s most afraid of Ayda catching onto whatever is wrong with her lately. 

“Alright,” she sighs, already packing up her spell book and slipping on her shoes. “What’s the plan for today?” 

Fig shrugs. “Sounds like the First Librarian wants help with some research.” 

Adaine’s brow furrows as she tries to place the name. “Is that—was that Two?” 

The naming convention Ayda had initially adopted for her headmates, wherein she assigned them each a number based on the frequency with which they fronted and how well she understood their goals, was very quickly discarded. As her first introduction to most of them, though, Adaine’s old associations die hard. 

Fig snorts. “Yeah, probably. Hurry up, I wanna go see my girlfriend!” 

Adaine ponders this as she’s dragged out of her tower. “Are they all your girlfriend?” 

“No,” Fig says, offended, as though this should be at all obvious. “But collectively, yes, she’s all my girlfriend.” 

The distinction is lost on Adaine. Collective, individual—she wonders where the line gets drawn. “Okay,” she says, resolved to let it go. Some things she doesn’t have to understand, just accept. 

Their Teleportation is as miserable as always, but the nausea vanishes quickly as it comes. Adaine blinks to adjust, steadying herself on her feet. The Compass Points is filled with the low, intimate light of several oil lamps. She inhales its familiar scent. 

The First Librarian is waiting for them, crouched unmoving on one of the uncomfortable chairs in the foyer. Her talons appear to be ripping into the polyester cushion beneath her. Adaine doesn’t have the heart to say anything about it. Before her are incredibly detailed scrolls, full top-to-bottom with neat, miniscule script. To each side is a stack of books as tall as she is. 

“Hey, girlie,” Fig sing-songs, flinging herself into the seat directly across from her. “Whatcha up to?” 

Adaine settles herself tentatively into a seat next to Fig, eyeing her friend across the table. She straightens up, gazing at the two of them unblinkingly. 

“Not a girlie,” they (?) say, tilting their head to the side. “You are here to aid me in my study?” 

“Yeah, if that’s what you want,” Fig says, kicking back in her seat, boots already on the table. “Ayda knows this, but I kinda suck at reading shit. If you don’t mind, I’ll probably look some of those up and see if I can find audiobooks instead.” 

“Ah, you are in possession of a device which reads them aloud. Ingenious.” 

Fig puffs out her chest, preening a little. “Thanks. Ayda thinks so too.” 

“I know,” the First Librarian says, “I am also Ayda. Just the first one.” 

“But you’re not a girl?” Adaine cuts in, desperate for some clarification, any clarification at all. 

“No,” they (???) say. “I have been learning about gender and pronouns. I would like no part in either, though I understand the utility of a shorthand to refer to a person. If need be, you may refer to me as it or as one.” 

Adaine’s head begins to hurt. “Sure,” she says, reaching out to drag a book towards herself. Understanding Dissociation: A Complete Guide to Dissociative Disorders stares up at her. “Are you reading more about DID?” 

She can’t imagine choosing to do so herself. When she got diagnosed with anxiety, she actually had to work out a way to stop reading about it, because it only served to stress her further. So much information, and no way to tell what would actually prove useful for her. Without any reasonable way to filter, she’d ended up cutting all but the bare minimum out. It’s just a way she and Ayda process information differently, which she respects, she supposes. But it’s been months. Is there even anything left to learn? 

“Not just dissociative identity disorder,” the First Librarian says, shuffling its primaries. “We have comprehensive notes on systemhood as a disorder. I am more curious about the history and culture of plurality.”

One pulls a book off the stack to its right, passing it over the table to Adaine. “Here,” it says, “you have pulled from the already-completed stack.” 

The Hydra, its title reads. Adaine traces the outline of its many heads embossed into the leather. Hand-bound, thin. She cracks it open a few pages in. 

As I grew up, I found myself chafing more and more against the name I had been given. In my teenagehood, I went in pursuit of a new one, one that could encompass all of me. I had some success; chose one and liked it well enough. But upon reflection, it was still inadequate. Incomplete. I began to collect more, trying to turn myself from something unknowable into something defined. That’s the quality of a name: it tells you that something exists. 

I began to use each of the nicknames I chose when they seemed to fit. For some, that was more frequent; for others, less. Some I used more often in public, others in private. Each seemed to hold its own indefinable quality. At times, I found them useful tools to describe myself. They gave me language to communicate about my experiences. Sometimes I would use them to almost “warn” others when I felt particularly unpleasant, or prone to lashing out.

At no point did I consider this could be a form of plurality. I knew somebody who presented publicly as a system; they talked about their experiences occasionally, and no part of our lives seemed to line up. But they at one point mentioned a friend who self-described as “median”, which I found curious. I asked for resources, was pointed in the direction of the dissociative continuum, and we had a bit of a chat. 

The metaphor they offered was living like leaves off of a stem, or planets orbiting a sun. One plant, one solar system. One whole, made of smaller parts. I describe it as living like a hydra. Consciousness is continuous, but it is continuously flowing. One head grows; if it gets cut off, another takes its place. The heads have separate action, but they act in service of the whole; the boundaries between where each head meaningfully differentiates from the body are negligible. There is no strong difference between what I consider “me” and “not me”; the edges blur until they are indistinguishable. If there is any “core”, it is the entire beast. I am every head; they are each distinct.

Adaine closes the book abruptly and stands up. The sound her chair makes scraping across the floor makes her wince. 

“Are you alright?” the Librarian asks. 

“Bathroom,” Adaine blurts, already turning on autopilot. She manages to restrain herself from sprinting, but only barely. Her thoughts are crowded, chaotic; it’s impossible to make anything out. Her vision is foggy, delayed, like she’s seeing everything in pieces.

She wends her way through the stacks, heartbeat in her ears, until she’s well and properly lost. Fig and the Librarian probably know this is not the way to the bathroom. That’s fine. She sits on the floor, heavy, like a puppet with her strings cut. Total collapse.

She stares, unseeing, into the shelves. This would probably be a good time to sort out how she feels, except that she doesn’t feel anything at all. Nervous system shutdown. Well, alright then. She can just sit for a while. 

She’s not sure how long it takes before she hears the footsteps. Her back aches from where it’s pressed up against the uneven book spines behind her. She shut her eyelids minutes ago. Her breathing is steady. Whatever is happening to her, it’s not touching her anymore. She’s pressed it out. Except—the footsteps.

“Well, sister, you know it’s always a pleasure to have you visit. Though I would’ve expected the floor to be beneath you.” 

“It quite literally is,” she says without opening her eyes. 

“Mm, evidently. Are you planning on talking about it?” 

“Are you planning on letting me? I thought you were allergic to genuine sentiment.” 

With effort, she pries open one eyelid, then the other. Aelwyn is leaned against the bookshelf beside her, picking at her nails, already looking uncomfortable.

“Somebody has to, clearly. It isn’t about to be your little friends.” Her mouth puckers like she’s tasted a lemon. 

Adaine doesn’t have it in her to be surprised. “They tattled,” she surmises. 

“That and you weren’t particularly subtle.” 

Aelwyn lets the silence sit. They stew in it, neither quite sure how to proceed. Adaine tries to conjure the words from the empty air in front of her. She doesn’t have any idea what they’ll be. 

“There are two people who argue in my head. And they won’t shut up,” she says.

Aelwyn hums. “Okay.” For a moment, it’s nearly nice, a quiet acceptance. Then: “Really, Adaine, all this because you’re a little crazier than you thought? I mean, gods, some of us manage to have our breakdowns at home.” 

“And wouldn’t that be nice,” she snaps. “It might be nice to be home, and wondering if I’m always going to be something our parents broke there instead of here.” 

“Oh, don’t give them credit,” Aelwyn scoffs, sounding genuinely angry now. “They don’t own you. They didn’t make you.”

“They quite literally did! Just because you were always so perfect, and you got away with everything—" 

“You know it wasn’t like that; don’t you start acting like what I got from them was unconditional—"

“You were always their little angel; you couldn’t do any wrong! I don’t even know who I am anymore!” She slams her fists into the floor, the pain simultaneously grounding and untethering her. She finally finds something to tap into—a deep well of rage, swelling to meet her. 

“Come off it, Adaine—"

“I am! Not! Adaine!” She kicks the shelf before her, hard enough to send it rocking back and forth. They watch as tomes topple off the shelves and land with dull thuds onto the floor. Adaine, on impulse, winds up and kicks it again, harder. 

Aelwyn makes a grab at her leg. “Sol, I get it, I hear you! A little less property destruction, please; I just reshelved those.” 

“Shelve them again; see if I care!” She struggles against her sister’s hold weakly, snapping her teeth against the air, until just like that— whatever came over her burns itself out. The anger vanishes. She sags into Aelwyn, suddenly exhausted. 

“Are you done pitching a fit?”

“Wasn’t a fit,” Adaine protests without any force, closing her eyes again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Aelwyn makes a disinterested noise. “Maybe if you tried using your words, rather than throwing a tantrum—"

“Oh, come off it; you aren’t always perfect—"

“Well, to hear you tell it, I am.” 

“I’m sorry.”

There’s a long silence between them. Adaine can hear her sister’s heartbeat. 

“I only said it ‘cause I knew it’d hurt,” she continues, too exhausted to be insincere.

“Well,” Aelwyn says, and sniffs. It’s as much acknowledgement as any. 

After a minute, Adaine speaks up again. “I can’t stop hearing voices and doing things I wouldn’t normally do and feeling strange.” She lets her eyes unfocus and refocus, world going fuzzy and clear over and over again. “And like now— I was so, so angry with you just a minute ago, but I can’t even remember what the anger feels like anymore. I just know I felt it. It’s vanished. So’s everything else—all the emotions. They keep disappearing.”

Aelwyn hums, but doesn’t say anything. Adaine lets herself keep talking. 

“I think I’m jealous of Ayda. She’s got an explanation. There are people and she knows there are people because she forgets things and loses time. I don’t ever forget. I just make coffee.” 

“What’s wrong with coffee?” Aelwyn sounds put-out. 

“Really?” Adaine asks, exasperated. “I spill my heart out to you and that’s the part you care about?” 

“I won’t take coffee slander from anybody. Not even my sister. Or whatever else you are.” Aelwyn’s face is still pinched, but her finger, when it comes up to tap Adaine on the forehead, is gentle. 

“That’s the problem,” she complains, “there can’t be anything else. I just told you that I’ve never forgotten anything. I’m always conscious; it’s not like I’m losing hours and not noticing.” 

“Well, I’m not a professional,” Aelwyn says, “but you’re acting fucking weird and you’re hearing voices. So I think maybe you need a perspective shift.” 

“That’s not very charitable,” Adaine mutters. Still, the point is taken—there’s something going on with her, for certain. She thinks about The Hydra. “Fine, whatever, you’re right. Will you let me off the floor now?” 

“You were the one who dragged us down here in the first place,” she sniffs, mouth curling, but she lets Adaine up. “Don’t think I’ll be reshelving those alone, little sister.” 

Adaine considers the merits of Invisibility. Ultimately not worth the spell slot, she decides. Instead, this ought to be handled the old-fashioned way. “Of course not,” she says, as though the idea is laughable. Then, she makes a break for it. 

“Motherfucker— you little shit! You’re going to regret that!” 

—

In the end, it turns out to be a lot of pain for something her psychiatrist and therapist tentatively agree sounds a whole lot like OSDD. Four letters for a vague catch-all disorder, one that opens more questions than it answers. For a while, she doesn’t disclose it to anybody other than Jawbone. She still doesn’t really know what it means for her, herself. 

Coffee, Bryn groans, drawing it out into something polysyllabic and grotesque. I’ll die. I’ll die right now. 

I wish you would, she thinks back vindictively, cradling her hands protectively around her tea. No coffee. It’s too late for that. 

“Adaine? Earth to Adaine?” Fabian snaps his fingers in front of her face, leaning over the table to get her attention. The sleeve of his absurdly billowy pirate shirt threatens to dip into his ice cream. She doesn’t bother to tell him. “Helloooo? Is anybody home?” 

“Have any of you noticed the paper wasps in the doorway?” she asks abruptly. “They’ve been there for weeks now.” 

“What?” Riz asks, his tail lashing behind him. “What’re you talking about?” 

Gorgug cranes his neck around to look at the door. “Is that what all the sawdust is from?” 

“Yes,” she says emphatically. “They sound like popping candy; I literally don’t know how nobody else has noticed. It’s been driving me mad.” 

“Did Basrar really not wanna fix that?” Kristen asks, sucking obnoxiously at her milkshake. 

“I never told him,” she says. “I thought he was going to notice.” 

“What?” Riz asks again, face buried in his hands. “What do you mean, you never told your boss about the bees in the door? For weeks?” 

She shrugs, looks into her tea. Melting beside it is her ice cream, spoon sitting in the middle. She gives it a stir, then sets the spoon back down again. 

“I have something called OSDD,” she says. Riz’s hands part so he can peek through them. Fig sits up, pulling her boots off the table so she can give Adaine her full attention. Gorgug slides one side of his headphones off the ear closest to her. Even Fabian leans back into his side of the booth. “It’s sort of been—confusing. I haven’t been at my best.” 

“What does that stand for?” Gorgug prompts gently when she offers no further elaboration. 

“Um, otherwise specified dissociative disorder. It’s not really—it’s kind of an umbrella category for a few different things,” she tries, swallowing nerves. Any help? No internal response, but the feeling of warmth she sometimes gets from Ada. More than nothing, she supposes. “There’s—I’ve been trying to figure out some of the labels I like, and how to explain it.”

“Anything we should know?” asks Fig, already game, ready to adapt to anything Adaine throws at her. “Highlights?”

“It’s, uh, sometimes informally called partial-DID.” Their faces change, all of them. Adaine has to look away, unable to make eye contact if she still wants to continue. “So some of the things you do to support Ayda are, to an extent, useful. It’s not the same—I don’t forget anything, and I don’t really know if I have alters the same way, or if they can front like hers do. I never feel like I’m not around. It’s just—there’s more. Than just me, that is.” 

“More guy per guy,” Kristen nods sagely, pulling once more at her milkshake straw. 

“Sure,” Adaine says, certain her face is red from all the prolonged attention. “Something like that.” 

“Okay,” Fig says, scrutinising her closely. “Cool. Whatever you need from us, you let us know.” She’s pretending to be chill about it, but she’s always been about as transparent as tissue paper. Through her own embarrassment, Adaine feels an inordinate fondness that she cares so much. 

“What I still can’t get over is those bees,” Fabian says, leaning dangerously over his ice cream again. 

“Wasps,” Adaine corrects, fruitlessly. 

“You really haven’t told Basrar?” Riz doubles down, hands covering his face again. “I mean, cool— awesome, yeah, no worries about the guys thing. They’re eating the wood of his shop and he doesn’t know?” 

“We walked underneath them!” Fabian cries. “You know Gertie is my archnemesis!” 

“That’s awkward,” Kristen mumbles around her straw. “We kinda made up last week.” 

“And by made up, you mean…?” Gorgug trails off as Kristen starts waggling her eyebrows. 

“Oh, gross, dude,” Fabian complains, throwing himself backwards in his seat to better lambast his friend. 

And just like that, the world keeps moving. Fig finds her foot under the table, kicks it gently a couple times. Adaine manages a smile. She lowers it into her tea. Maybe she can make coffee tomorrow.