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The flashes could set her on fire, but they don't. Amy smiles and shifts and the clothes shift with her, clasped around her body like a second skeleton bent on entrapment. They ask for a pout, so she preens instead, fighting her way through the industry and leaving kiss stains from her knuckles.
Her skin is purple and shining, perhaps from makeup, perhaps from bruises. The knowledge it could be either can’t uncoalesce her; or, maybe, she wasn’t whole to begin with. In the ultra-bright studio lights it’s hard to tell anything like that. She just feels the adrenaline thrum under plastic-skin and is.
Her phone rings, after. She doesn’t pick up.
Personhood is easier when there’s not a metric ton of extensions and hairspray balanced on her head. Amy grins over at the makeup girl who throws a pack of face wipes her way and flicks at the wake/sleep key on her phone as she starts to wipe off her mask. The day keeps happening - the photographer calls her over to look at the best shots, laugh over the ones between transitions where her body was contorted like only the possessed should be capable of and her alarm rings out a reminder for the afternoon’s activities. Press. Fittings. The usual.
Opening the voicemail happens like an impulse.
You weren't the thing I was leaving behind. France is pretty, call me back.
She only listens once but it feels like she’s carrying the words inside her for weeks and weeks.
**
It’s been three months. Six, since the Yves Saint Laurent shoot. Five, since her face was splayed across every major billboard in the US as well as back home. Four since Vogue. Three since the girl who mattered smiled and left nothing but her shampoo smell all over the pillowcases. Two since her American agent had her talking - nicely, Amy, for the love of God - with Lagerfeld and company. One, since the nightmares resurfaced.
There’s waking up, and feeling unskinned and terrible, and there’s waking up with no one to press cool hands to the back of her neck, and neither is the option that feels liveable.
**
Agyness Deyn finds her at the YSL launch and twists their fingers together. Agy has the most vicious circles under her eyes, signature iciness making her all the more gaunt. They must match.
“Amelia fucking Pond, who’d ever have guessed we’d be here?” She smiles and it feels as though her fingers are pressing bruises into Amy’s bones. “You forget council estates and tumbleweed villages throw up things like us. I remember the first time a boy ever called me beautiful was after another girl broke my nose. Blood all the fuck over the place.”
It’s hard not to fall for Agyness. She’s a princess of blood and guts and latent drug habits.
Amy pulls their fingers apart and links their arms. She can feel the dress wrinkling and relishes in it. “Mine was the opposite. Once my legs grew in I spent years running into slag heaps and forests just praying to skin my knees. Oh those boys wanted so hard to hate me.” Amy flutters her lashes at Agy.
“I hear Karl liked you.” Agy rolls her eyes and flips her hair as though the length is still foreign. Amy would kill to slash hers off, but the management hate her enough as is.
“True, but Karl is a whore.” She spots a long slice of dark hair and blinks back three years in a second. It feels like homesickness, or just sickness, and her feet falter in her platforms.
The agents working the show are trying to herd everyone together for the big congratulatory ego buff. Agyness hipchecks another model and turns just slightly so they’re separate from everyone - a two person enclave - and procures two flutes of champagne without so much a flick of her fingers.
“That, miss Pond, I will drink to.”
**
Amy looks back at herself from glossy pages, porcelain and fey. She swims in sweatshirts and tiny denim shorts, her hair slicked with grease and piled up in a bun.
The television drones on in reruns in the living room, murmuring softly. She rolls off the bed and flips the light switch. Three AM arrived without permission. She orders Chinese and eats half of it - she has a fitting at noon.
It’s easy to sink into the couch and let her fingers run along of their own accord, the URL like a muscle memory, even after wiping her history.
The blog is a patchwork of runaway vibrance, ravaged polaroids scanned in nothing like the technicolour of her instagram, the short sharp little bursts of poetry that define each location and promise oncoming brilliance. There’ll be a chapbook by the end of the year, or a novel. Something that critics will wank over or defame or both, and She will laugh through it all, buying herself new lingerie for every bad review.
The Girl is smiling into her coffee in one photo, a boy’s hand just in view and Amy wonders who took the photo, and she wonders what she told him to make him do it. It’s always easy to lie to them, to make promises or to kiss them on the corner of their mouths like it could matter.
A small line at the top of the page stares out at her, as if trying to etch itself to her skin. Sometimes stilling means becoming real, and that’s the worst thing I could be.
Underneath it is a photo of Milan Cathedral and it’s dizzyingly weird to realise they’d missed each other by a only a week, that NYLON of all places wanted something on location; a soft goth revival with all the religious artifice. They titled the piece “NO SAINTS," but the term the stylists threw between themselves was runaway chic.
Clicking the x on the page is getting easier by the day.
**
I bought you a hideous hat. Pick up.
**
He looks at her with his lower lip jutting, three safety pins stuck under his tongue. It’s hard, always, to say if she loves or hates what he does for her.
“Girl trouble," he says, and nudges at her knees. Knobbly knees. Thin, never grown in right but still all those miles of ivory skin that she can hide behind as the princess in the tower. They always compliment her legs first. Want to see them touch the ceiling - not her though. She never mentioned legs. Hair - that she liked.
“Shut up, Doctor.”
He grins and almost sticks her with a pin when she kicks out. “I wish you’d actually call me that around your pretty model friends. I hate being John. What’s a better name than John? What’s a better name than Amy ? Amelia? Am I - are you? What was I saying - oh stand still for goodness’ sake.”
I hate you, she thinks. I hate you, I hate you. I. Hate. You. You, who took me from a girl with a curved spine and a sore throat from screaming and turned me into the perfect weapon. You, who taught me how to leave my own body behind. You, who taught me that I don’t ever need to sit down or still, just keep my eye on the end of the platform and walk on.
“I hate you,” She says.
“I love you too.”
**
It’s a nightmare, or its real life and waking up is just reprieve. Run, says the small voice. Fly says the louder one. Come sharp teeth and violence. Come death. Come life. Come the universe converging in the liminal space of a little girl’s mind.
There are loud quiet dangerous shadows slinking forward for a touch of her skin. There are fragile, beautiful things there, stars, angels, souls - all wanting to touch her and feel themselves wilt.
There is him, because there is always terrible, splendid him and then -
Oh.
Green light. A girl. The monster in the fairybook and the girl and there is something -
Something -
**
The photographer’s intern has a close-shorn undercut and glasses that fall down her face when she blushes and Amy lets her steady hands span her waist when they stumble into the cab. Her hands slip along the back of the girl’s shirt and rest there as though they crave skin.
It’s been long enough that her skin is flushing hot and cold with the risk, heart hammering both fast and slow. Her mouth is sloppier than she’d like to admit, but the girl doesn’t seem to mind. Her fingers are tickling at Amy’s ribs and her breath is coming in these sharp, short little gasps that move her chest up and down against Amy’s. It feels something like wonderful.
They go to the girl’s flat. Amy’s space has become a quarantine - nothing breathing besides herself and the Doctor can trespass there without becoming infected by it’s melancholia.
The girl presses her against the door as it falls shut, her smallness against Amy a weird disparity. Every movement they make is uncoordinated and bruising, even when they fall onto the bed. The scrabble at each other’s skin, all short-breath and frantic, fumbling towards something that was never going to be quite right.
In the end, Amy doesn’t remember her name, so it’s good, probably, that she never needs to scream it.
**
The catwalk looms out in front of her like the plank of a ship, cameras snapping like sharks at every side.
Her shoulders sink back and her hair tumbles around her spine.
Amy dares the waters to take her.
Agy stands backstage with a bag hanging from her wrist and an Absolut bottle poking from the top. She doesn’t say hello or anything so formal, she just opens the bottle and tilts her head to the side. Amy nods.
“Wow.”
A slightly smaller girl with big glasses and an english accent warped through with New York leans against Agyness, toying with the dress shirt that’s only hanging against her frame. “That was... Eloquent.”
“You know me Tenn, brevity, wit, et cetera.” She passes the open bottle to the girl who takes a long swig and passes it to Amy.
“I’m Tennesse, by the way.” She elbows Agyness hard between the ribs and to her credit, Agy doesn’t so much as blink. “I’m here for business, mostly, and pleasure if this arsehole has anything to do with it.” She grins up at Agyness, all her weight pressed up against the model’s side.
“Right," Amy says, and drinks until the moment passes.
Agyness takes back the bottle and dances it between her fingers. Even now, when she’s dressed in nothing but ripped jeans and flannel she commands attention. Amy remembers when Agy had first sought her out, before the comeback when she was hanging around a casting as a new designer’s moral support; remembers what it was like to walk beside her into a room, drawing in attention like a black hole. She still feels hopelessly celebrity, her long hair swinging, her statuesque figure towering above convention - her allure is a lot more than Rihanna’s number on her phone, and sometimes being with her makes Amy feel big as the room, a dangerous unknown quantity ready to disarm the world with one awful smile or bitten lip.
It’s all image image image, he said to her once, when she was tired and new and freshly-hurt, shock them grey and it’s almost like murder. Easy and painless.
Tennessee glances around the room, eyes catching on the models flitting around, pulling on casual clothes in a sharp disparity with the jewel-encrusted gowns yanked over their heads. “I can’t tell if anyone fits the image - too brainweird.” She touches Agyness on the arm. “You’ll be better than me; can you just get me a list of people who’ll look good? I’m a jet-lag victim today.”
Agyness nods and takes another swig from the bottle. “Now ladies, business has been pushed aside so I propose pleasure," she says, and leads them from the warehouse and into the blinding outdoors.
**
He doesn’t forgive her for hangovers. The Doctor stands over her at 8am with a jug of water in hand and smiles as he tilts his hand to let the cold onslaught commence. The water slaps against her head and chest in twin streams and Amy vaults out of bed after him, shrieking.
She kicks him in the shins and he laughs again, throwing clothes from her wardrobe at her as he dodges her claws.
“You’re late for a fitting.”
“Not late yet, you little shit!” She hurls a catalogue at him and he dodges it, but barely, and pouts at the chip it makes in her wall.
“You were going to be. I was being an enterprising individual, Amelia, most people would thank me.” He smiles as he says it, looking over his shoulder at her. It’s not surprising then, that he trips over a stiletto tipped over in the kitchen and goes crashing into the floor.
“Most people would have murdered you by now, Doctor. Remind me why I haven’t.” Her naked foot presses down on the small of his back, heel digging in far enough to cause and aching up his ribs.
“I make a fantastic spitfire cocktail and no other stylist slash agent slash bestest friend would put up with this kind of assault,” he harrumphs and blows a strand of hair from his reddened face.
She withdraws her foot from his spine. “You do know how to mix a drink. So make me some coffee before my bloody head explodes? And remind me to never speak to Agyness again.”
He scrambles up and pulls her into a hug. He’s warm and soft and for a moment Amy’s chest seems to quiver, then every bone throughout her body and she sobs as her armour begins to crumble. When she lets herself fall into his arms, things so often do. “No way am I standing up to Agyness," he whispers, running his fingers through her hair. “I’m quite afraid she may eat me.”
**
The dreams aren’t detailing an aftermath.
Amy could blame her problems on the girl-shaped hole in her bedroom wall, but it would be a lie, and that’s fine in all circumstances but one. If she has one consistent creed it’s this: don’t lie to yourself.
Where they do come from is murkier. Sometimes, she’s worked out, Amy is a girl with a ten foot reflection across from her flat, glossed up and airbrushed to hell and back. Other times she’s gasping a final-tasting breath in places without sense or logic and everything hangs on knowing whether she’s awake or asleep.
The times when the dreams aren't dreams, are soundscapes and viscera of car crashes and fast draining life are worse than any fiction. The cold dark when she wakes up and there is nothing but her breaths in the space around her feels shakier and far too real and worse than any black hole could be.
**
Note to Doctor - fitting moved to 9:30 GMT
Note to Rory - I got your messages, fuck, I will call back, I will I will I will
Note to self - no more falling asleep
**
The sky is purple and green in short flashes and Amy’s voice box is a small silver cube in her hand and the girl is speaking with the threads of the universe quickly unravelling in her fingers and she is saying “I need to leave before I shatter” and Amy’s mouth is moving and the silver box is trembling in her palms.
“I have never been still and I can’t ever be.”
Amy touches her ribcage and the skin of it is pulling like the thread of the universe like everything she is is a quickly disintegrating piece of fabric and she doesn’t follow the girl even when she cries, even when she says “come with me," even when she tries to grab Amy’s hand and it just falls straight through.
When Amy is alone the box is gone from between her cold fingers and she can scream but she doesn’t. She doesn’t.
**
The flat is small like London is always small where it counts. Millions mean nothing but a bay window and a ground floor, one bedroom and a garden if you bloody yourself for it. It’s small, and it’s still blank after three years of country-hopping and dumped down suitcases. The walls are still magnolia, but there’s not much she’d rather change it for.
So she’s an internationally booked model and her bedroom is the size of a rabbit hutch. It’s a decent life. She keeps enough mementos to clutter the space, though. She’s pulling off her thigh highs when she trips over the shoes from her first YSL shoot, a gift for the time, or a promise of future reward - and knowing now that her face is slicked up along roadsides, either may still be true. Her bedroom is a collage of these things, the dress she bought for the gala where Lagerfeld had leant up against her and tucked in a loose thread, laughing that his designs would never fail a girl at such a dire time; the scrapbook of plane tickets, event passes, copies of proofs from the more elaborate shoots and even the first tryptic of black and white headshots the Doctor had stapled to a resume and called a portfolio, using Wonderland-speak to land her the ridiculous jobs that made her exciting, gave her that Amelia Fucking Pond edge.
She has all these things hung up around her blank canvass space, elaborate clothes and technicolour photographs and still, she sits in the dark with a sleep shirt thrown on and a cup of herbal tea cooling on the bedside table thinking where does the real-world me live, and, where is she - is she at all - running?
**
She wakes up on the plane and can’t remember where she’s going. Shaky and sick, she brings her hand to her face and sees Barcelona scrawled in black ink across her forearm. The Doctor leans over the aisle and laces their fingers.
The plane ride is short but dizzying, her body still full of shocked sleep. It takes a lot of breaths to make sense of the trip. Valentino’s newest line is heavily stylised on religious artifact; yellow-golds and powder blue. Spain’s old Bari Gotic cathedrals have the right balance of modern architecture and ancient piety. The clothes and the art hardly seem like separate entities in places like that. Amy wonders if, for a moment, it might make her feel holy.
The car ride to the first church takes long enough that her headphones need to be rediscovered from the depths of her carry-on and she fishes her phone out, noticing the tiny airplane on the screen staring at her like she must have switched modes unconsciously then forgot to switch back. When she does a voicemail arrives, and her headphones are already in when her thumb begins to twitch.
She looked so much like you, I couldn't stop myself. I miss your morning breath.
When the car stops, her inbox is empty, and her headphones deal out nothing but white noise
**
Sleeping in seems like a good idea until it’s impossible, her body trained to startle awake lest it’s held captive too long. Sleep has become a dangerous thing.
Her calendar says she’s free for the next week or so, then it’s all meetings with the heads of design houses, dreamy lunches of panic-sweats and lost jobs. The week off is a blessing for her gnawed nerves but less for the the settled emptiness threaded through her ribs.
May makes it twelve years, makes it Happy Birthday , makes it Happy Anniversary , makes it Grow Up Already.
Aunt Sharon calls around ten that morning - she was up at eight, which is unthinkable - and offers to come down for the weekend. To sit, and talk, and let the world happen outside for a moment.
It’s touching. She hasn’t sat down and done the family thing for too long but that doesn’t mean she wants it now.
The thought of it makes her nauseous. Her vision is all fractured by memories for a moment or a minute or an hour. Can't think don’t think.
“I’ve got a job tonight," she says into the phone. “I wish I could but I just… need the distraction. I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah, love you too.”
The kitchen is a quite place, after. She turns her phone off.
**
She thinks the ride could have been good for her, stumbling across this country and the next and finding her feet on solid ground. She thinks she could have gone with her . Amy thinks perhaps the world will fold out in front of her with no intention of dragging her into constriction or into bathroom stalls feeling ugly and guilty about her last two meals.
There’s an alternative freedom to border hopping, and she loves what she does enough of the time that the real world is desensitised and foreign but that , to run aimlessly for once and pull her skin off with no further intention to bind herself up, seems like a frightening thing to yearn for.
She checks her phone and this time there are no new messages.
**
When the director of the shoot gives the okay, Ashley Moore gets down into a running crouch and stretches out all feline, every inch of her long and athletic and photo-perfect. Amy is stood behind stretching her leg upwards, holding it by the ankle it bends somewhere between ballerina-esque and a yoga pose. She holds it, stomach muscles quivering, heart shaking, nothing moving but her head to get the right angle as though cheekbones are a mark of athleticism.
When she can drop the pose her legs seem to be screaming in relief and Ashley jumps up easy with energy dripping from her. Amy leans against her and tries to loosen her muscles.
There are other girls around, swinging from gymnast rings and holding themselves on pullup bars and everything looks entirely easy except for the way her own muscles seem to be knotting up. She’s not unfit but keeping still has never been a virtue and her body is desperate to rebel.
“We’re doing jumps next. Lots of sweat. LA women want to look like they work hard, ladies.” The sun is beating hot on her skin and she’s already feeling lightheaded, moving too much too fast in the California heat. It’s the wrong edge of too much but she goes on anyway scissor jumps cutting through the still air with a sharp woosh. Jobs are jobs, and she won’t complain.
LA was never a second home, and she will never let it become one.
**
Amy treads the balance sometimes. Most of her peers are a few years younger, no haunted dreams to scrape down their bones and tear them apart. Some of them, like Agyness, are a few - crucial - years older, and have died and been reborn a few times over; enough that being jaded has been and gone and now they’re just along for the ride.
For Amy, it’s neither new, nor newly exciting. For her, it’s a pounding in her head saying walk tall, keep going, never stop, an inescapable part of her so sewn into her nerves it aches to see herself framed up in art like somebody else’s creation - but it also aches to be anything less.
Amy knows she’s something else, something other, an unlovely, godly thing. She knows her dreams christen her something monstrous, and her blood makes her mortal and somehow, parts are missing, the union of the two leaving her unwhole.
The snapshots she lets them keep of her, every little part of her soul, she lets those things fill her gaps.
**
I still don't sleep at night, even when I can see the stars. Leave me a message, I miss your voice.
Amy almost presses call, then doesn't all at once.
The photographer calls the end of break and the world spins on.
**
It’s being awake, but not, and asleep but not and all that matters is that Amy is full of death and hunger and her bones need her to move. The dress is sewn straight into her skin and the threads pull and bleed down her legs as she runs. The woodland cracks under her feet, then the earth, then the sky.
Amy treads the sky with her ravaged feet, burning on the touch of stars and her lungs swelling and swelling and never bursting and the girl is laughing and her body is big as the sun except when it is small as the curled nail on Amy’s bloody fingers and everything splits down the middle. It cracks from the girl’s chest outward and green light spills out and everything that belongs in the dark begins screaming from inside of her and another universe unfolds.
**
She lines the pills up on the table, seven blobs of white against the mahogany grain. She pours out a glass of vodka, tall and still and transparent. Her phone lights up from behind the glass, recolours the liquid in a blue-green haze.
Don't fall asleep without me
Amy pours the vodka down the sink.
**
Rory picks up after one ring.
“Did I fuck up letting Dawn leave without a goodbye? She asked me to go with her, Ror, and I was a bitch about it, didn’t try to listen and God! I miss her.”
“Hello to you too, Amy, I’m fine thanks.” The other side of the line is loud and fuzzy. He’s probably still at work. Amy feels a stab in her gut - she moves around and flits from place to place without even a thought, goes weeks without human contact and lets herself become a sheltered alien thing but he always picks up for her. Months of radio silence have never fazed him. His friendship cred vastly outweighs hers, most of the time.
She hops up onto the kitchen counter and touches the lines so deep set into her skin from the bone corset she wore on last night’s shoot that they haven’t begun to fade. The taller she stood the less it dug in.
The Doctor had called her ‘queenly’, after, as he peeled her free, and she’d grinned back and whispered precisely back, nipping at his cheek.
“Right," she says to Rory, “how’s the mysterious city - no, wait. How is the mysterious lady?”
Rory laughs and she can see him there, the fingers of his left hand running through his hair, his right gripping his coffee cup, phone balanced by the grace of God on his shoulder. “I’ve told you before, Ames, she’s lovely and sweet and absolutely none of your business .”
Amy grins at the phone, pulling her sleepshirt down over the marks on her belly. “You’re really missing the point of having a gay friend, mister. Imagine the tips I could give you.”
She can feel his grimace over the phone line. “I’ll live.”
Amy laughs and pulls her mug out of the draining board, spooning coffee into the bottom, feeling easy and at home for the first time, perhaps, in months.
**
Imaan Hammam is lovely, and she’s real, and her weight is a solid pressure against Amy’s side when the photographer calls for her to jump. They slide down in the harness together, cut-and-paste necklaces slamming against their chests as they swing like trapeze artists in the pursuit of artistic integrity.
Their colouring has them seeming immortal in the photos, Amy’s hair shining bronze and the thin layer of glitter over Imaan’s skin framing her in gold. When the tech lowers them to the ground and unhooks the harnesses, Imaan trips over her own feet and laughs so filthily it shatters the illusion.
“Next time a guy gives me the ‘fell from heaven’ line I’m telling him I twisted my ankle.”
Amy toes off her shoes and cackles. “I prefer, ‘I was rising from Hell for the Spring’, but that’s just me.”
Imaan cocks her head, “I may steal that.”
“It’s free.” The velvet dress pants feel soft and more comfortable than any dress they’ve stuck her in this trip and God, she could melt away right there on the edge of the hangar but Imaan is still talking, eying her like she knows her voice is a grounding force and she’s used to keeping people on the ground.
Amy shrugs off the silver blouse and pulls on her own sweatshirt and holds out her arm. “We should lunch, like now. The jumping off stuff gets a girl hungry.” Imaan pulls off her own clothes and shrugs on a sweater dress, grinning her agreement as Amy frowns down at her pants. “Do you think if I just walked out of here with the pants they’d notice?”
“I will pay to see you try.”
“Oh babe, you are on. ”
**
Amy gets home and there's a body in her doorway, snoring into the sleeve of their hoodie.
Amy leans down to the floor and wakes them up with a kiss on the cheek and an awfully sour look on her face..
Dawn rubs her eyes until sleep falls away, blinking away Amy’s stare with the unearthly ease she has. "Can I smoke in here? I'm literally gasping."
Amy sinks her key into the door, and Dawn follows her in.
**
“Home," says the girl in the dream, mouth soft and open for Amy’s. “It’s the magic word.”
She laughs, and laughs, and laughs.
**
Dawn is sitting naked and smoking in the kitchen when Amy wakes up. She has her book open face down on the counter, looking out into the neighbourhood as she sips on a cold cup of coffee. “Was the couch always that lumpy?”
Amy yawns. “New couch.”
“Right," Dawn says, bringing the cup to her lips. “I, uh. I missed you. You never picked up any of my calls.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want to speak to you?” Amy flicks the kettle on, shifting the dressing gown she shrugged on when she crawled out of bed so it covers her shoulders and the outermost edge of her collarbone. She sees naked women every day, more or less; enough that breasts have lost most of the taboo. Still, this is Dawn, and this is a played-out situation that feels like a memory or fantasy on her skin and it’s weird that Dawn Summers is sitting naked in her kitchen three months after she ran off to find the world.
“No, actually, should it have?”
Amy sighs. “That’s my copy of your novel you’re reading, you tell me.”
Dawn flicks the ash from the end of her cigarette and looks up at Amy. “You did make me sleep on the couch," she points out.
Amy rolls her eyes. “That’s because I’m prissy.”
That earns her a smile. A real, gorgeous, dangerous smile and Amy’s stomach seems to fall away and she turns out of the room without a word, willing herself not to throw up.
There’s a new cup of coffee on the counter waiting for her when she comes back in. Dawn says nothing, just reads on, correcting passages in the book as she goes.
**
If she tilts her head the right way her jaw is diamond-sharp, dressing up the hipster jumper that’s the closest thing to hers she’s modelled in months. It’s scratchy, and uncomfortable, and woven in seven clashing colours and Marc Jacobs is grinning at her over the photographer’s shoulder.
“Sell me ugly," he says in her ear as they break, swigging water like whiskey, heads bent together over the clothing rack. He’s a pretentious fuck, but that’s something Amy can deal with. “Sell me monstrous.”
Amy tilts her head back, makes her neck nice and long, and snarls.
**
She goes to the cafe alone. Dawn is still asleep on the couch but her clothes are migrating into the empty crevices of the flat as though sentiently staking ownership. Amy has politely ignored the progression.
The muffin she’s snacking on is good but overly-sweet; not enough bitterness from the lemon or depth from the poppyseeds. She flicks through the photos on her phone as she picks at it; her and other models cuddled together on cold sets, three second snapchat videos of them dizzily getting dressed backstage at shows, Rory’s feet on her lap from the last time he visited, the Doctor cuddling in close and smacking wet kisses on her cheeks. In retrospectives it’s easy to be sure she wouldn’t trade this life for anything.
The green tea is weirdly floral and potent but still burns just right when it goes down. A couple of girls keep glancing at her like they know the face but can’t place her. A hazard of the profession has made her that; ghostly faces searching her as less a girl and more a walking sense of deja vu.
Her phone lights up and when she checks it, Dawn has left three comments on her last instagram photo of La Sagrada Familia, each one more a nomad’s view of the city, not a business one. It makes her starving for a chance to go anywhere without a production crew stepping on her heels.
It’s a whole system shock to realise that she is so without a country.
**
After weeks of cohabitation, he finally walks in and finds Dawn on the floor of the hall wearing nothing but a Def Leppard shirt with the collar ripped out, painting her toenails. An abrupt, high-pitched noise tears out of his throat.
Amy vaults out of the bath and rushes into the hall just in time to find the Doctor and Dawn holding each other by the hair, almost snarling. Their knuckles are as white as the bubbles stuck to her chest.
“What is she doing here?” He winces as Dawn twists on his hair.
“I’m back from purgatory, what the holy hell are you doing barging into my house and trying to scalp me?”
“Your house?”
Dawn’s fingers twist deeper, scraping down his scalp and the Doctor winces, letting Dawn go and batting her away as he rights his hair. “Ow, truce.”
Amy stands in the centre of the room, soapsuds dripping down her inner thigh, exposed and cold and pissed off. “Well, that was dumb.”
Dawn cocks her head, eyes glittering as she scans the drops of water along Amy’s skin, bare and fragile; raw. “Even stupid things have their benefits.” The corner of her mouth twitches.
“Oh you ridiculous lesbians.” The Doctor flaps a hand between them and throws a cotton dress from his bag at Amy. “Cover up for goodness’ sake, we need to run, literally, in the next five minutes if we're to make the meeting I was only told about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Meeting?” Amy pulls the dress over her head and Dawn is still staring at her, documenting every shift of her muscles, tongue poking from between her teeth.
“Management. You're popular so they want to mess with your earnings because life is hard for beautiful people. They’ll also want to book more jobs, because of course we're not overworked already.” He sneers and pouts in swift transition then fixes his shirt. “Can't be helped!” He claps then brushes Dawn aside in search of Amy’s regular canvass bag and the items supposed to live in it but somehow tend to find themselves under her bed or down between the sofa cushions.
Amy steps forward, skin still wet and sensitive to the air and when she reaches Dawn it's a task to not shiver, the hairs on her arms straining to touch. “Do you want to come see the glamorous world of being a clothes hanger?” Her voice is low, quiet, and the faint noise of traffic outside is a buffer against the softness.
Dawn leans into her space, fingers along the hem of her dress and skirting against the damp skin on her thighs and this is what it was before, the terrifying mysticism of touch and Amy can almost understand why Dawn had to go running off when something could swell so dangerously sentient between two people. Two huge and small points in the universe both sure of their imminent destruction.
“I'm gonna stay,” Dawn says, and Amy forgets that they were talking, forgets that the words from her mouth aren’t intended as a vow. “I have some ideas I need to get down. Writer problems.”
“I get it.” She thinks of the scrawled notes in her bedside draw, the logs of her dreams as tone poems that crawl off the page unless she slams it shut fast enough.
“But I’ll be here when you get back,” Dawn whispers, pressing her cheek against Amy’s, lips brushing against her ear.
“Break it up, ladies I have a cab driver to yell at.” The Doctor throws the bag against Amy’s chest and tugs her towards the door before she can process the moment and it slips away from her when the door slams shut.
“What are you doing?” He asks her, holding her hand in the back of the taxi for no real reason but to frown at her chipped nail polish.
“Following you into the meeting from hell, it looks like.”
He pokes her cheek. “Not that. Her. What are you doing to yourself, Amelia?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve worked it out.”
With a sigh he tugs on her chin until her cheek is resting on his shoulder. “If she hurts you I’ll do something horrible. I’ll put hair removal cream in her conditioner or something that smells really vile in her deodorant.”
“I love you,” she says. She won’t is what she doesn’t let herself think.
**
Amy lets her neck roll back and bounce against the pillow, Dawn’s lips on her throat like a vampire, sucking the essence straight out of her.
Her body could melt back into the sheets and disappear, except for the fingers tugging at her nipple, the tongue licking inside hotwetsoft, sucking and tasting places she used to keep so safely hidden and now bares fearlessly.
Dawn makes a rough sound in the back of her throat as her nose brushes against the soft curls. Amy never shaves - trimmed but never bare; not the plastic doll they ask of her but the real girl tangled up in her own mess.
Dawn’s fingers are deft and they remember the curves of her body so well, easing inside and pressing up and dragging sounds from deep in Amy’s chest. Her tongue flicks around the edges like sweet little flames winding her up. Her mouth finds Amy’s clit and wraps around it licking and sucking in smooth motions, warmth bleeding from there and all the way through her. Her body lifts and shudders, grinding and wanting and god, it’s been too long since this.
Amy’s body starts to quiver immediately, overwhelmed and overstimulated. Everything’s too much and too close, so fierce she’s sure it can never crest just keep building and building until she ceases to be.
Amy comes quietly, and Dawn yells. It’s a change in roles but not in sentiment.
For the first time in what seems some phantom lifetime, Amy falls asleep in another girl’s arms.
**
“I had nightmares about you.” She’s wearing a sleepshirt liberated from Dawn - no doubt stolen from a boy with an easy smile and pretty hands because those are always the easiest to leave.
Dawn yawns and pads into the kitchen, barefoot. “Same as before?”
She is. She’s exactly the same, spare energy seeping out and soaking up the dead space of Amy’s life, slotting herself in thoughtlessly.
“No.” Amy surprises herself with the sharpness in her voice, let's her mouth hang slightly open in case it comes to tear its way out of her. “In the old dreams you were the thing holding the monsters inside and I knew if I could touch you everything would spill out and you would smile and let them.” She taps her fingers on the counter and waits for Dawn to look up from the paper. She doesn't. “In this one you were running and I was chasing after you like an animal and you laughed the whole time even as I dragged you down into the filth. I caught you with my hands on your waist and my teeth in your throat and I bit down and tore the flesh right off.”
“Oh,” Dawn says, standing and spooning coffee grinds into her I Heart Librarians mug. “Neat.”
**
Between the rooms of Agyness’ Hampstead flat, a Vivian Westwood cape hangs in place of a door. The bay window light has the sequins casting spots of colour along her exposed skin. A weight over her legs shifts and Amy can see Tennessee sitting up and drinking tea, staring at a newspaper over the top of her glasses. She fits the decor well enough, messy hair and haphazard dress prettied up with glasses and sense, but she’s also sliding a cup of coffee along the table which makes her entirely too good to associate with any of them.
“Agy,” Amy yells, throat catching on the sound, “I’m stealing your girlfriend, she’s too good for you.” Tenn’s brow furrows and she stares into her cup, but she says nothing.
Agyness, meanwhile, stumbles into the room with Dawn’s legs around her waist, fingers sunk into the skin of her shoulders, both of them furiously dishevelled and the better for it. “Whatever, have her, yours is more fun.”
“Oh, because I have a real-person job I’m no fun?” Tennessee throws a couch cushion at Agyness and Dawn falls off her back, landing on the floor with a jarring thud. “Oh goodness, I’m sorry.”
“Since when is lapsed rockstar a real-person job?” Laughter erupts from Agyness and she drops her head on Tennessee’s shoulder. “I’m your girlfriend now, huh?”
“Bugger off. I’m only here until the end of the month, bask in my presence or I’ll go live on Alexa’s sofa instead.”
The two stare each other out for a while Dawn scrambles onto her knees and crawls over to Amy. They don’t say anything, but Amy’s hand rests on Dawn’s shoulder, playing with the collar of her shirt, calm and comfortable despite the gross feeling in her stomach, almost quelled by the warmth of the coffee.
Agyness picks up a guitar from the corner of the room and plucks at it for a moment, no one speaking, just letting the disjointed melody swim around them. Tennessee taps out a soft rhythm on the side of the couch, as though this is a regular occurrence. The two of them sing something vaguely familiar and Amy’s fingers begin to go slack, her body lulled and delicate and suddenly, with Dawn invading her space and Agy’s soft voice melting through her, sleep comes up to consume.
**
The shirt folds over her like a shadow of skin, hair ruffled with machinated dishevelment. The bulb flashes in fleeting bursts, brilliant seconds of gratification that fade as fast as they burn. The shots are easy, the clothes are comfy, and it’s dream of a shoot except for how tired she is, how off guard.
Dawn snaps two photos from behind the curtain, where the photographer can’t see her crouching. She’s grinning even as she does it, eyes alight, mouth twitching in that way that means there are words hiding under her tongue and she needs to scribble them out somewhere before it’s too late.
This goes on for an hour, almost. Dawn taking selfies with the camera flashes and Amy’s stretched out body invading the background. The photographer never notices, and after a while Dawn crawls out from her enclave and out the back door, breezing into the studio a minute later to act as the supportive girlfriend.
The blog post goes viral, Amy smiling down with sparkling eyes and Dawn’s words - some borrowed from Amy’s lips in some polemic de- or re-constructing the modelling world in five hundred words or less.
Her life becomes this: Plastic Amy pouts in Marie Claire, Real Amy smirks into Dawn’s pillow.
**
She is giant, bigbigbig like the star burning away her ribs and the girl is nothing but green light around her that lays these kisses on her skin which melt the flesh there, a body as a connect the dots.
They move like one thing, becoming formless, bodiless, ruined by or for one another.
Amy says, she says, she says, but nothing comes out of her. She is nothing but space. Free, and utterly terrified.
**
“Things have been bad," she says, stealing a dumpling from Dawn’s plate. “I thought it was you for a while but no, it’s just.” Me, me, me, batshit awful me.
Dawn curls up into Amy’s space, head ducked to rest on Amy’s collarbone, and Amy shivers at the warm touch of breath there when she speaks. “Is it the dreams again?”
“Not just that, no.”
“I would suggest a therapist but I remember the stories.” Dawn taps her fork on the rim of the plate. “When was the last time you saw your aunt? I know the uh, anniversary was recent. I know that when it’s my Mom I do anything I can to be with Buffy. Just for a day.”
Amy presses her cheek against Dawn’s head. “I’m not sure if I’m ready right now. But I will.” She feels sick, less from the greasy food and more from the way everything looks like police lights and sirens behind her eyes. “Sometimes it’s easier to forget about home.”
Dawn stretches out under her and puts the plate on the table. Her head comes back up to sit against Amy’s chest; every inch of her height utilised to cradle Dawn’s body and she’s okay.
Everything is okay.
“You wanna go for a run?”
Yes, she thinks. “No.”
**
The photographer is asking a lot of her, and the editor is staring soullessly into her and past her into the blue-walled abyss.
Every nerve in Amy’s body is quivering. She’s sweating all over the Gucci dress her hair is pulled tight enough to feel like the slowest scalping and tears are clawing forward from the back of her skull desperate to unleash.
Her soul hurts.
“You gotta give me what I’m asking for you’re not getting it. Lunge with it.”
The director steps up and starts moving her limbs to where he wants her even when she winces that the dress is cutting into her ribs.
It hurts, and the day has been three hours too long and she’s still not fucking getting it and her brain is in cataclysm. Her fingers shake, the dress shaking with her, her mouth still pursed and her jaw strong as ever. He tells her it’s wrong. It’s not working. The photographer isn’t getting the shots either.
It’s just that kind of day.
Amy pulls off the dress and sits in the toilet not crying. Not anything. She splashes water over her face and watches herself in the mirror, make up leaking down in rainbow streaks from her cheeks to her throat like a Munch painting.
She pulls her phone out of her jeans pocket and sits on the sink as she taps out the message.
No more jobs. I’m taking a break. Fuck this.
The Doctor takes a long time to reply but she has time.
Finally, he shoots back.
Relief floods through her like a tiredness. She thinks that perhaps tonight she’ll sleep through; no stress dreams to drag her back.
**
She says the wrong thing.
It's mid afternoon, it's cold and bitter in the apartment and the radiator is broken and Dawn is watching her with quiet eyes over a mug of too-cold tea.
Dawn offers to find someone to fix the heating, and Amy feels the pain in her head supernova, her mouth open and verbal viscera spilling out.
Dawn leaves and Amy - Amy goes to bed. She doesn't eat. She doesn't do anything much at all.
**
The world is fire but the bad kind of fire, the fire that isn’t red, or green, but some chaotic amalgam of things that feel like they might shred her skin and bone to ash. The girl is running and she can almost feel her bloody feet tear and she can almost see the supernova bursting like emeralds beyond the clouds and she thinks - she used to touch that, she used to burn, she is still burning.
The girl is running. And so is the other one.
**
She has the Doctor field her calls.
Dawn's blogs are cryptic but clockwork, they imply she's somewhere in New York, but New York is just London with a smokey pretentiousness holding it together.
Rory comes to babysit her until she can act like a person, calling her pathetic exactly when she needs to hear it, and stroking her back when they collapse together on the sofa with much more sincerity.
“What have they done to you, Ames?” He's a solid thing, the real boy in her rollercoaster fairytale, holding her together with nothing more than his body and embrace. “Where’s my monster girl? The one that punched Jenna Carlton in the jaw right on the school steps?”
“The world hit back.” She hides her face deep into his chest.
“It is killing me not to make a Libertines reference, just so you're aware.”
Amy kicks her legs up so they lie over his. “Met Pete once. He offered to buy the shirt off my back in vodka and peach schnapps.”
“Of course he did.”
They fall asleep together, and she wonders about the other world, the one where Rory was the right kind of nice boy and she was the right kind of straight girl and they clung together from childhood onward, sleepy and satisfied. She wonders if that Amy ever needed to run. She wonders if in some universe she might be happy more often than she’s crumbling. Rory drools all over her belly button.
Dawn comes by after two weeks, looking the same, still smelling like London rain. She pushes Rory out of the way and goes into the bathroom to shower.
She kisses Amy when she comes out and nothing is different, not really.
**
Dawn positions her in front of the mirror, close enough behind that her breaths ghost warmly over Amy’s throat. Her hips feel like flint under Dawn's fingers and they rest there, holding her stable, perfectly centre and displayed for herself.
They don't speak. Dawn's hands flit along her skin and trace the edges of her soft clothes less as a question of permission and more to feel the tension swell and dissipate around them.
She touches the bare patch of skin at her hip where her shirt lifts and leaves her exposed and Amy lifts her arms, letting Dawn pull the vest off. It’s so easy to watch Dawn be so familiar with her skin, familiar in the way someone can only be when they love something but don’t live inside it. Slowly her clothes come off, unbuttoned and unravelled. Amy’s breath leaves her body with every pass of Dawn’s hands, every lost slip of fabric. It feels like some goddless ritual, practised and careful and unlike jobs, her body new all over again - Dawn has this way of looking at her, something bright and green shining from beyond her pupils that render Amy more than naked. More than anything she has perhaps ever been.
Dawn’s fingers trace the outline of her breasts, finger passing quick and teasingly over her nipples then straying to brush her hair away from her shoulders, uncovering every pale inch of skin. They pass down, curving around her waist, holding her hips tight and in place, squeezing all the way down to the bone so she feels herself anchored.
Amy shivers, and she is still.
Dawn’s fingers are cold and they pinch her skin, Amy watching the skin go pink-white-pink, her thighs getting bruised up under Dawn’s deft, writer’s fingers. (She knows Dawn traces words sometimes; her fingers, her mouth, tiny lines of poetry in looping cursive written in invisible ink all over Amy’s body.)
As her fingers drift, Dawn presses her mouth to Amy’s neck and her head rolls forward.
“No,” Dawn says, sharp and quiet. “Watch.” Her fingers slide up Amy’s thighs, drawing quick little patterns that make Amy’s breath catch. When she swipes up and glances over Amy’s core, her legs quiver.
“I want you to see how you really are. How you look to me.” Every word is a breathy exhale in her ear, complimented by Dawn’s fingers slipping against Amy’s wetness. Amy gasps quietly, something that twines with her own breaths as she moves against Dawn’s fingers, eyes drifting -
“Eyes open,” Dawn whispers. “Come on, let go.” One hand drifts across Amy’s ribs, cupping her breast and pinching. She pushes two fingers inside, pressing up and forward, her palm grinding in just the right way to make Amy shudder all the way through her body.
Everything is wet and slick and dizzying, her heartbeat picking up Dawn’s tempo - not hard, not soft, just this relentless thing, dextrous as she pumps in and out and curling into her so good it makes her keen. Once stilled and stiff it’s like her body starts to loosen in sequence, Dawn holding her close to her body so they’re sharing heat and stability when Amy could fall, an arm around her chest and calloused fingers still teasing working in counterbalance to the fingers inside her.
She is struck by herself.
This endless, fluid image of her open mouth and her naked skin, her body twitching in reaction to every movement of Dawn’s fingers and every tiny jerk of her own hips. She looks pornographic. She looks savage and desperate, gasping for any spare oxygen - her eyes straying to where Dawn’s fingers tease at her breasts in quick little circles she can hardly feel because everything else is on fire, roaring in her head that might be silence or that might be the embarrassing sounds spilling from her mouth and she’s grinding down and needing so much more and it’s so slick it’s almost aching, God, fingers not pumping but rubbing and -
“Let go,” Dawn says.
Amy arches up, watching her own skin flush and dapple, pale pink flooding across her throat and chest, and her body turns to liquid before her eyes.
**
“Amy?” The phone is resting on her shoulder, her hands busy finding warmth around her coffee cup. “Amy, it’s Tennessee.”
Dawn is looking at her over the arm of the couch, laptop on her crossed legs, tapping out a proof for some magazine.
“Hey Tenn, what’s up?”
Dawn’s back straightens and she mouths something over the laptop but Amy can’t tell what she says.
“I’m back in New York so this has got to be quick, but I can’t for the life of me find someone else.” She sounds flustered and far away and far more serious than should be fitting of her with her old-lady glasses and Pretty In Pink fashion sense.
“Tenn, calm down. What do you want me to do?” She shifts a little and some coffee sloshes over the side of her cup on onto her leg burning through and staining her jeans. Fuck .
“I want you to help promote the shop’s next line. All I want is some genuine casual pictures that I can shove on instagram until I’m ready to put the clothes out. Just get Dawn or Mr Smith to take some for you when you’re out and about.” She pauses and Amy can hear keys clicking over the line. “I’ll email some of the designs and if you wanna do it I’ll have someone send you the clothes.”
Dawn pulls the coffee from Amy’s hand and takes a long drink, grimacing at the taste. NASTY she mouths and shoves the mug on the table.
“Tenn, I’ll do it. Just send me the clothes. What are acquaintances for blah blah blah.” She rolls her neck, trying to make it click and reaches for the coffee again, which Dawn slides across the table by nudging it with her foot.
“Oh, thank goodness! I have to restock the colouring books and then I’m gonna open some champagne in your honor. The dj’ll want some anyway…” She pauses, “It’s a weird store.”
“Any time, Tenn. Go have fun or whatever.” When she puts the phone down Dawn’s foot has stilled with the cup at the very edge of the table, her eyes glittering. “You wouldn't dare.”
“Wouldn’t I?” Dawn asks, putting the laptop aside.
“Don’t play this game with me," Amy says, and vaults for the mug, elbowing Dawn in the side and spilling everything when laughter bubbles at her throat.
**
The Doctor is an awful diva and worse photographer, but sometimes he can dig around in the strange head of his and find some semblance of style. Tenn’s clothes are casual and Amy was happy to just pull on some t-shirts and pose but he insisted on decking out the flat to look like an indoor festival, throwing her grandmother’s knitted blankets across the room and pinning up fairylights.
She’s loathe to admit she likes it. Dawn takes the photos, some more intimate than should be comfortable, lingering shots of her throat to emphasise the necklines, her body lain prostrate across the sofa to set the scene.
She coaxes a few pictures out of Dawn, too, just a t-shirt, no pants, her head thrown back in laughter and lit up by the window and it looks so irresistibly Dawn she almost doesn’t send it.
In the end, the email reads we’re keeping the shirts. And they end up sleeping in one another’s, the Doctor grumbling on the sofa wearing one they never got to use.
**
Amy wakes up crying.
It happens the way it always does, no a dream but -
Not a memory, either. It’s like a glass shattering that she’s never even touched, a fire from an unlit candle; she is devastated without logic or reason. Amy is awake, and painfully sad.
She climbs out of bed before Dawn can wake up, and sits in the bathroom. The toilet seat lid is cold and the cold settles into her body like anesthetic. The shitty council-ordered strip light washes her skin to nothing and she is so unsolid and sad in that moment she feels like she might blow away, collecting into a pile of dust. She slowly gets up, blowing her nose hard enough her eardrums pop and then strips off all her clothes.
The shower-tiles are cold but the water is warm, overriding her every sense and pushing them away. Everything is just water, unfeeling and fluid. She washes meticulously, trying to focus on the sensation of each thing, the precise smell of her shampoo and how it differs from the shower gel. By the time she’s done everything is scrubbed away, her tears vanished from her cleansed face. Amy uses her finger to write call aunt Sharon onto the steamed up mirror and towels herself dry.
“Why is your hair wet?” Dawn asks when she climbs gently back into bed, letting the warmth of her body sink in.
“Dealt with something,” she says. “Shut up. Go to sleep.”
**
“I rented a minivan.”
Dawn’s voice comes over the breakfast bar, where she’s bent over the toaster and Amy’s trying to tangle their legs. Amy peers up at her from beneath the rim of her hideous hat.
“Well, I rented a minivan, bought a new notebook and fixed my camera. It was a productive day. And that chapbook last summer gave my bank balance a well deserved boost so I don’t even care.” Dawn’s toast is burning and the smoke is filtering all the way through the kitchen, Amy can feel it sinking into her clothes and nesting in her hair. She’s barely awake and feels strange with sleep still, a zombie in tiny cotton sleep shorts.
“Where are we going?”
Amy can’t be sure if the words come out or if they just settle low in her guts like anchored butterflies.