46A/N: It shouldn't take anyone 3 months to write a 4k chapter, but apparently that's how long it takes me. If anyone's still paying attention to this weird story then sorry you had to wait so long. I got stuck on this chapter so I took a break from it and then suddenly it was December. Still not sure how it happened.
This fic really is a mess at this point though. It was always sort of an experiment, something I wanted to see if I could pull off without it being too terrible, and I still want to finish it, especially since I'm almost at the point where shit actually starts happening, but it really is kind of all over the place now.
I guess I should also warn that there's some sexual content in this chapter, in case anyone's not cool with that. I didn't want this to be a smut fic, mostly because I'm not good at writing that stuff but also cause I'm posting it here on ffn, but I realised it was necessary and that Xiola as a narrator wouldn't just skim over it.
Anyway, hope you like this chapter.
Chapter 5: Undertow
It starts raining heavily the next week. In every room in the house the sound of raindrops beating against the windows is constant and relentless. Every morning my hair is soaked during the 20 second walk from the front door to the car and when I leave Carina outside her school her eyes are shadowed by the hood of her yellow raincoat.
When I drive home I take as many detours as I can, prolonging the ride as much as possible. I speed through the river-like streets, which are so foggy and grey that I can't see a thing. Since I don't know the city, I usually end up getting lost in the grey, city-wide cloud for hours. I become nervous when I see the silhouettes of people in the fog, because maybe one of them is my mother. And sometimes I catch my own reflection in the windshield and flinch, because for a moment I mistake myself for her.
Part of me wishes I would hit something, but I never do.
During these drives, memories of Thane begin to slowly creep back into my mind. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson last time, but his immaterial presence is actually comforting. At least it's better than Hannah Shepard, or having to look Sam in the eye.
I can't help but think that if Thane had never died, if he had never left me, that things would be better. He would never have gotten me into a life like this. I wouldn't be driving through rainy Oxford at 9 in the morning, scared of my own reflection.
And still I can't bring myself to blame Sam. I know that it's because of her that I'm here in this house, watching as my life slips away from me, but she's still Sam; a different, boring Sam, but still the only person that I can hold on to so I don't fall back into the hell that is life without Thane.
I never realised how much I hated life before I met him.
When we talked, I wouldn't sound like myself. He brought something out of me and turned me into someone I didn't know I was. I only spoke with the rest of my crew when I had to, but for him I'd often leave my cabin and take the elevator up to the crew quarters, my heart beating rapidly in my chest.
He made me feel at ease. The first time his tongue slipped and called me by my name rather than "Commander," I wasn't angered. I felt happy. I began to realise that when we talked, I really was someone else; someone Hannah Shepard hadn't had any part in shaping, someone I could bring myself to like.
I knew from the start that he'd soon die, but I don't think I truly realised it before we were separated when they took me to Vancouver. Some childish part of me had clung to the hope that he'd somehow be saved, but in that cell reality started to sink in, and I began to panic.
When I saw him again on the Citadel, I first thought I was hallucinating. I had truly believed he was dead. After he finally did die, when that Chinese Cerberus bastard took his life, I started thinking that maybe I had been right. After all, he'd survived longer than any of the doctors had expected him to. Maybe he would have been the first to beat the disease and make a full recovery, had he only been given time. I began to obsess. I was in the middle of a war, but all I cared about was one dead fucking drell.
And then I met Sam.
Tonight the sound of thunder outside the bedroom window makes me realise that I'm not actually asleep. I look over my shoulder and see Sam lying next to me. I'm surprised. On nights like these Carina usually comes into our room, clutching a stuffed animal and begging Sam to come up to her room and sleep next to her. Of course, instead of telling her daughter to grow up, Sam always does.
I sit up on the side of the bed, stand up and look out the window. The fog is slightly thinner during the night. From it, raindrops emerge and hammer against the glass. I try to shut my eyes, but they won't close. I look at Sam's sleeping body on the bed. I leave the room.
Without turning any of the lights on, I walk through the house. When I walk into the living room, the dog looks up from where it's curled into a ball on the floor. When it sees me it stands up slowly and with a wet sigh lumbers out of the room. I slide open the glass door and walk out on the veranda in the backyard and stand close enough to the house so that it shields me from the rain.
I can still see her silhouette in the forest.
Five minutes later, back inside, I'm carefully ascending the stairs. The floorboards creak under my feet. I don't know why I'm going upstairs; I can't remember the last time I did. I tiptoe through the hallways, opening doors, closing them. I have no idea why Sam thought we needed such a big house. At least half of these rooms are empty.
I stand in the upstairs bathroom (which I'd forgotten we even had) and stare down into the hot tub we have there, almost identical to the one in my apartment on the Citadel, remembering how Sam and I used to fuck in it when we first moved in.
I stand on the interior balcony, looking down into the living room, remembering how I used to fuck Sam on the couch, the floor and sometimes up against the panoramic windows. I miss all that, that Sam.
Continue on like this, walk aimlessly around the house that's supposedly my own. My fingers twitch nervously and I keep trying to shove them into my pockets, only to realise I have none. I don't have to go in there; I don't have to do any of this. Why am I stalking around my house in the middle of the night like a fucking lunatic anyway? But, for some reason, I breathe in, wrap my fingers around the doorknob, and open.
The room is dark and unfamiliar, and I realise that I've only been in here a handful of times. The floor is covered by a pink carpet, the walls and ceiling are sprinkled with cartoonish stars, planets and solar systems, all glowing faintly in the blackness. All over the room are toys that have never been played with, standing in the same place they always have been, and probably always will.
And in one corner of the room is Carina, lying motionless in her bed.
I stand over her. Her eyes are shut, her black hair is spread out over her pillow and her small, six year old body is tightly tucked in under her sheets. Somehow, there's nothing peaceful about her. Isn't that what a sleeping child is supposed to be? Peaceful? She's not. There's just something about Carina that's… wrong.
"You could kill her."
At the end of the bed, at Carina's feet, stands Hannah Shepard. I don't know how she got into the house, but I'm not surprised. It's possible she's been here the whole time and I just didn't notice, I'm that used to her appearing in places she shouldn't be in by now. Or maybe the woman is me; it's getting hard for me to tell the difference between us.
She crouches by Carina's feet, putting a hand on the girl's covered leg as she looks up at me. "Don't tell me you haven't thought about it."
"I can't"
"You could do it with a pillow. Easy. It would save you a lot of trouble."
"I won't."
Her eyes ask me why.
"I'd lose Sam."
The woman stares at me blankly for a moment, then shakes her head and sighs.
"You're weak, Xiola."
I take several downers, go back to bed and lie next to Sam, clench my eyes shut and try to fall asleep. But when I do, all I see is the woman who's either Hannah or Xiola Shepard, and Carina, the adult's hand on the child's head, her fingers intertwining in the streaky black hair. Smiling.
I can't keep my eyes shut for more than 30 seconds, and I end up waiting the night out sitting on the kitchen counter, staring at the ceiling.
"Xi?"
I'm not sure what surprises me more, that Sam's face is suddenly inches away from mine, or that she's calling me 'Xi' for the first time in forever. I rub my sleepless eyes and try to get them to focus.
"Xiola?" she asks again, and after a couple of seconds I manage to mutter a response.
"Hey Sammy. What's up?"
"What are you doing on the counter?" she asks. A legitimate question.
Sam takes a step back, and Carina's small figure enters my field of vision, eyeing me with blank curiosity. The moment my eyes fall on her she directs hers to the floor. I remember last night, and shudder.
"Uh, nothing, nothing." I say as I get off.
The look I catch on Sam's face as I walk past her tells me that she doesn't want to deal with this right now. Pretending not to notice that Carina is once again staring at me, I make for the bathroom where I go through the usual motions. I study my reflection in the mirror for 5 to 10 minutes. My bloodshot eyes, the dark circles underneath them, and my much too visible ribs are all there. Everything is in its right place.
I also notice my hair is getting kind of long. It almost reaches my shoulders. Unlike Sam, I don't look very good with long hair.
After I've showered and pulled on a tank top and jeans I return to the kitchen. Carina has finished eating breakfast and Sam is brushing her hair.
When Sam sees me standing in the corner of the room she states bluntly, "It's parent/teacher night at Carina's school tonight."
"Okay," I respond, not sure why she's bothering to tell me, or what a parent/teacher night is.
"And we both need to be there."
"...Oh, okay."
I don't know what else to say to that, my body just fills with dread. As the room falls silent, I realize that Sam hasn't said anything about my therapist, even though I haven't bothered going in over a week.
"I stopped going to my therapist."
"I know." She says disinterestedly, not looking away from what she's doing.
For some reason, I thought she'd care. Maybe she's already given up on me.
7PM, in the car, on our way to the meeting. Sam is driving and I'm sitting in the passenger's seat, wearing the "business-casual" attire Sam chose for me, feeling more uncomfortable than I've ever been before in my life. I keep glancing over at her, unable to stop myself from studying her face. She's squinting at the road ahead of her, trying to make it out through the thick, grey fog. I relish moments like this. Other than in bed, it's rare that we're this close to each other for an extended period of time. I feel like I should say something, but I can't, and so we drive into the city in silence.
Pulling up in the school's parking lot, we see multiple women and men moving into the imposing stone building, all concerned parents eager for news of their children's academic progress. Sam probably wants me to imitate them, so I guess that's what I'm going to do.
We get out of the car and follow the other parents up the stairs leading to the school's entrance. When I show one of the armed guards (hired to prevent school shootings) my ID, he raises his eyebrows and looks questioningly at me. He then orders me and Sam to wait while he goes to exchange a few words with one of his colleagues. This only seems to add to Sam's stress, and she shoots me a couple annoyed, accusing glances while we wait.
Initially, the guard's colleague's reaction is similar to his, but then she checks something on her Omni-Tool and, all while giving me a very inquisitive look, waves us inside.
In the building, parents flock through the maze of hallways and classrooms. Sam leads me through the crowd. When we finally reach the correct classroom, we're introduced to other parents as well as teachers. They all look at me weird and it makes me realise that I'm Xiola Shepard, the only reason any of these people are still alive. It can be so easy to forget that. For some reason, this thought doesn't make me anymore confident.
Sam is handling the situation better than me. She's doing a good job of conversing with the teachers about miscellaneous subjects, but I can tell from the subtleties in her behaviour, the forced smiles and loose handshakes, that she's nervous. She really cares about this. It's important to her that these meaningless people accept her, and I'm left wondering why she needs anyone else but me.
After a while we're seated in small, uncomfortable chairs meant for people much smaller than us to watch the teachers hold a presentation about… something. Five minutes in I excuse myself to Sam, who seems a little annoyed but at the same time happy to not have me there, and stand up to exit the room. I can feel everyone's eyes on me as I walk through the door, and for the first time since childhood, I think I feel insecure.
I search the school's hallways for a bathroom for about 10 minutes. When I find one, it's the men's, but I'm beyond caring. As soon as I'm inside a stall and the door is locked behind me my hands dive into my pockets, searching for a hallex. They find nothing.
Fuck. Panic grips me and I start kicking the stall door, yelling "Fuck" over and over. Then I exhale and fall back down onto the toilet lid, defeated. I stare at the muddy imprint of my shoe on the wall. I just really don't want to be here right now.
When I return to the hallway where Carina's classroom is located, there's someone there. It's one of the security guards, a man, probably in his twenties, leaning awkwardly against one of the walls. His green uniform is too big and he's unconsciously touching the gun strapped to his waist with his index finger. When he sees me he stops spacing out, looks at me, blinks a few times and stares.
I start walking faster, when he starts approaching me I try to think of non-violent ways to avoid a confrontation. Behind him I see the classroom door open and people starting to stream out into the hallway.
"Excuse me ma'am, but… are you Xiola Shepard?" he asks timidly.
"Yes."
He stares at me for another moment, like he doesn't really believe me. "I'm sorry, this is really unprofessional, but could I get our autograph?"
As I remember shooting Conrad Verner in the leg in some bar on Illium, I look back at the people flowing out into the hallway. I see Sam among them, and I think she sees me. I want to be over there, next to her.
I give up.
I turn back to the guard. "Sure."
After the meeting, every family is given ten minutes to talk with the teachers in private in the classroom. For some reason, Sam and I are last in the queue and we sit on one of the benches in the hallway for an hour and a half, silently waiting.
Twice, Sam calls home to check in on Carina and to make sure she's eaten the dinner Sam left for her and that she'll go to bed soon. Somehow, the child's face is even less expressive as a hologram than it is in real life. When all the other parents have gone home, it's finally our turn. The two teachers, a man and a woman, look tired and beat when they welcome us into the classroom, but when they read the names Xiola Shepard and Samantha Shepard on one of their documents, you can almost see the cogs start to move in their heads.
They sit us down at a table made out of a few desks in the middle of the classroom. "So, Carina…" the woman mumbles with fake intrigue as she begins to look for something on her omni-tool. While she does this, I take my first proper look around the room. The walls are a bright, bright green and are covered in poor crayon drawings. It's unnerving.
"Carina is a very special girl." The woman says, apparently having found what she was looking for. Sam raises an eyebrow.
"Very quiet." The man clarifies.
"Carina suffered serious trauma in the war." Sam says.
"We know, and we're providing her with all the additional support she needs to handle her schoolwork." The man says. Sam looks him up and down calculatingly, she reminds me of myself and how I was. How I still should be.
As the conversation starts crawling forward, Sam seems to become tenser and tenser with every word the teachers say about our child. They voice their concern for her, saying she has difficulty understanding and following instructions, that her passivity is a "continuous source of problems in the classroom." I remain silent through the entire meeting. Sam is staying calm, but I can tell that she's not happy.
"This," the man says as he holds up a drawing of a space cow Carina made in art class, "is not a healthy space cow."
They tell us that she's unresponsive, that her reading comprehension is lacking even for a six year old. She doesn't socialize, barely even looks at people when they talk to her, and has problems showing displays of empathy. As they tell us this, I feel something grab my hand. I look over to my left and see Sam, looking straight ahead with a painful expression on her face. She squeezes my hand hard, her nails deep into my skin. It's calming.
For a second I think I see tears in her eyes, but Sam keeps her stare firmly fixed on the two idiots in front of us, who don't seem to have noticed anything.
"We think you might want to look into finding professional help for her, a therapist who specializes in this sort of thing." They conclude after several minutes of criticising Sam's daughter. I can't help but agree. Why was I, who was completely fine when all of this started, the one who was sent to therapy instead of the scarred, fucked up child?
Sam just looks at them and says, "There's nothing wrong with my daughter."
Outside, the fog and the rain are even worse than before and halfway home the road just disappears in front of us, and we're forced to stop. "Fuck!" Sam screams, slamming her hands down on the steering controls.
She falls back into her seat and starts breathing heavily. I look straight ahead and stare out the windows and see nothing but grey surrounding the car. Next to me I hear sobs starting to make their way into Sam's voice. I still don't look. When she starts crying I start to get scared, because I've never heard her cry before and it's making me realise that she's a lot stronger than I am.
After a few minutes she stops. The weather still isn't letting up so we just sit there and wait.
"Did you call me Sammy this morning?" Sam's voice says. It catches me off guard, just like it did this morning. She suddenly sounds so casual.
"Yeah?"
"You know I hate that." There are still tears in her eyes, but I think she smiles a little when she says this. Maybe.
"Well you fucking called me Xi."
Now I'm sure she's smiling. We're both letting the backs of our heads sink into our respective headrests. Sam is looking intently at me and I finally gather enough strength to look back. There's nothing to fear in her eyes and I look into them for a long time. It's been long since I was able to do that.
I feel her slender fingers wrap themselves around my left hand, which lies limp and dead on the passenger's seat. Her touch brings it, and the rest of my body, to life, and I lean in and kiss her. She responds by sucking on my lips while she lets my tongue ravish her mouth. I bite her bottom lip, making her moan into my mouth.
My free hand captures hers and pushes her up against the window with her hands at the sides of her head. I've left my seat and am now on top of Sam, straddling her. She wriggles underneath me, finally managing to push me back into my seat so that she can release her hair from its bun. I take the opportunity to unbutton her blouse. My hands reach into it, slide up her back and unhook her bra. Like this, with her hair down and messy and with her tits out, she looks like the Sam I'm in love with.
She climbs into my lap. I bury my face in her chest and begin to suck on her right nipple. Her hand grabs mine, guiding it in under her waistband and into her wet panties. I rub her clit, hearing her breaths getting louder above my head. My middle finger traces her lips while Sam presses her body harder against me with every lap.
When I slide two fingers into her cunt I hear Sam whisper my name.
As my fingers start moving inside her my name slips from her tongue more frequently in breathless little quips. My teeth scrape against her nipple, bruising the skin and earning a high-pitched squeal from Sam. Her hands cup my chin and direct my gaze upward. Her lips crash into mine, demanding to be kissed back.
When she breaks the kiss I slip a third finger inside her, thrusting even harder. Sam's utterings have become completely unintelligible. The way she's moving on my lap now she's going to hit her head against the car roof, but from the way she's crying out I know she's going to come any moment now. As her secretions wash over my hand she dives face first into the crook of my neck, moaning out her pleasure into my skin.
Her body slumps against mine. I turn my head and look out the window, Sam's hair tickling my nose. The night is black and through the darkness cars zoom by, their headlights flickering over us. The grey cloud is gone.
When Sam walks through the front door she's still somewhat dishevelled from getting fucked in the car. I follow her inside, closing the door behind her. Sam immediately starts searching for Carina, calling her name. I force myself to follow her.
We find Carina sitting on the living room couch, staring out into the backyard. Her back is straight and her eyes are wide and open. She doesn't look tired at all. "Hi, Mommy." She mumbles as Sam scoops her up in a big hug, apologizing for coming home so late, not questioning why Sam's still up. After a few more questions to make sure Carina has been fine she leads our daughter upstairs. I trace their footsteps.
They go into the bathroom. Sam places Carina on the toilet lid. She takes the kid-size Cision Mark Pro 5 from the bathroom cabinet and sits down on the rim of the hot tub so that she can help Carina brush her teeth. I lean against the doorway, watching them. I feel out of place, Carina's constant stare is making me uncomfortable, but I get the sense that Sam wants me here, so I stay.
When they're done Sam leads Carina into her bedroom. She helps the girl into her pyjamas, the girl doing little to speed up the process. As Sam tucks her into bed, I stand in the same spot I did last night, deliberating whether or not I should smother her or not. I push the memory into the back of my mind. I say goodnight to Carina and follow Sam downstairs.
