Wilde Card, page 52
“If you’re going to lecture me, I already had that from Jay.”
Her words broke Talia’s haze. She blinked, slowly, thick lashes brushing her cheekbones as though they were made up of more than lengthened gossamer. That one act took so long Tia thought for a moment that she had fallen asleep whilst standing, like a child who had just had enough. But no, they opened, and she folded her long frame into one of the chairs. The tie was thrown onto the bed, elbows placed not too far from it and sinking not one bit into the hard mattress. Talia’s bones would hurt just as much as Tia’s back did when she finally brought herself to stand. Talia sighed, and sank a heavy head into her open palms. She let out a protracted, shuddering breath between her fingers. Through the gaps, between scarred knuckles and calluses, Tia could see her mouth squashed into a pout.
“I didn’t come to lecture you.” Talia finally looked up and Tia saw pure exhaustion settling into the lines of her face. It was the first time she had ever let Tia see her like this. Not even when she was on the verge of tears, heart smashed into pieces, had Tia ever seen her so drained. “I wanted to see you...I was worried.”
Her sincerity caused Tia to double take. Fatigue obviously brought out both the boldness and the kindness in Talia. They hadn’t had a real conversation in weeks, however, and Tia wasn’t about to fall for her words. She ignored the churning sensation in the pit of her stomach and clutched the sheet closer, protecting both her head and her heart. Wasn’t she vulnerable right now? It would be easy to misinterpret anything Talia said.
Automatically, a smirk of tender proportions fell into place. “There’s a hole in my shoulder. I’m okay, all things considered.”
The edge of Talia’s mouth quirked up and if Tia wasn’t half-delirious with blood loss, she would have sworn she was smiling. “Always a joke, with you, isn’t it?”
It was rhetorical, if her tone was anything to go by. Tia stayed quiet, watched her as she played with a corner of the blanket, flipping it over with one of her thumbs. She seemed to be thinking, or weighing up her points, or maybe she just wanted to play with the blanket. The problem with her, Tia thought, was that she was impossible to read. She said one thing, did another, thought something completely different. She was prickly where she was supposed to be smooth, and smooth where she was supposed to be prickly. As soon as Tia had grasped some semblance of understanding, Talia did a complete 180 and left her confused again.
Talia had, however, come through for her - for all of them - at the party. Without her quick thinking and confidence, they would have turned around with their tails between their legs. Then again, Tia would also still have most of her blood inside her body, instead of outside it. She sighed, a sound that Talia heard but didn’t comment on. She shared her sentiment, presumably. The silence in the infirmary was comforting, if she ignored the din of her own heart beating in her ears. It had been playing up ever since Talia’s scent, underlaid with faint traces of sweat, had drifted over into her nose.
“What time is it, anyway?” she finally asked.
Talia glanced at her watch. “It’s nearly 4am.”
She choked on her own oxygen. “What? Natalia, you must be tired!”
The look she shot Tia was sardonic. “How can I possibly sleep when you’re in here?” She shook her head, ignoring Tia’s exclamation and the following look of tentative surprise. “I would have been here sooner but Summer wanted me to stay with her, claiming that it was unsafe for me to go home. She finally agreed to let me accompany her to the house and then refused to let me leave. I had to wait for her to fall asleep.”
She rolled her eyes but the mention of Summer brought a bad taste to Tia’s mouth - on top of the one that was already taking up residence there. Discomfort forced her voice to shake. “You should have stayed. You could do with the sleep, and I’m hardly going anywhere, am I?”
“You just-” Talia sighed. “You just don’t get it.”
Tia stared back, preparing herself for an argument. She was exhausted, dizzy and hungry. But she wanted to know why Talia had gone over her head on a mission that had been her idea in the first place.
“What I do get is that you went behind my back and stationed Raghida and Zeta at that party.”
“For good reason.”
Talia didn’t try to lie or deny it and that shocked Tia into another silence. Worse still, she believed that she believed it was justifiable. Talia took on a certain stance whenever she lied to Tia, a kind of haughtiness in her shoulders that Tia would recognise even with her eyes closed. There was no trace of that right now, just the usual arrogance - which was nothing that she couldn’t handle.
“How can you possibly have done any of that for ‘good reason’? You jeopardised my mission. Even worse, you lied to me and made a fool out of me.”
“It was for your own protection,” Talia insisted. “They were supposed to keep an eye on you.”
She gaped, almost laughing in her incredulity. “Natalia, I have a hole in my shoulder. You cannot be serious!”
“No one was supposed to bloody stab you!” she glared. “The girls were just there to trail you, an extra line of defence in the crowd, to blend in and keep an eye out for trouble. I couldn’t do it myself because of Summer.”
An extra line of defence? Tia paused, seeing that she was earnest. She had honestly gone behind Tia’s back to plant backup within the party. The idea of it, of her thinking Tia so weak, so vulnerable, made her angry. Suddenly, Talia’s sincerity meant nothing at all to her. The audacity, not just of her but of Jay, to assume Tia was a weak and frail thing, to be protected and coddled as such. Never mind that she had proven herself time after time. Never mind that she could wipe the floor with both of them. It was downright insulting. And okay, maybe the pounding in her head could also be attributed to the fury she felt, but they deserved to know that she was a strong woman. Natalia would find that out now. Jay, later.
“You wouldn’t dare undermine anyone else with that shit,” she hissed. “You want to make my life a misery so much, huh?”
That comment shocked Talia. She raised her eyes to Tia’s, wide with surprise and confusion. “Tia, no-”
“You think I’m that weak? You distrust me that much? My judgement?” Tia continued to rant. Her chest was hurting, and warm teardrops were falling from her eyes onto her chest. She was crying out of anger, she thought. Still, she continued, unable to stop the rush of words now even if she wanted to. They had been building up for a while. “You always assume I’m going to fail, and tonight was no exception. You went behind my back, and not just embarrassed me but endangered the whole mission, for what? Your own satisfaction? You hate me that much? Is that how badly you want me out of your hair?”
Natalia’s face grew hard, like the marble in Banner’s house - so hard it could have been carved from the stone itself. Her eyes were a dark blue, a storm barely restrained behind glass, as she glowered back at Tia. “I wanted to protect you. Because I love you, Tia. And someone has to look out for you, if you won’t do it yourself.”
Tia’s words were strangled in her mouth and fell dead on her lips. She stared back, sure she had heard Talia wrong. Sure that the blood loss had finally driven her mad. Sure that she was hallucinating. Because Natalia Archer hadn’t just told her that she loved her after weeks of ignoring her, hating her, shouting at her. She surely couldn’t feel that way about her anymore. Didn’t feel that way about her anymore. Tia pressed trembling fingers to her forehead, clammy and warm with sweat. She should never have let her stay this long. She was wrung out - they both were. They were just saying things now, as one did when they felt weary to their bones.
“I think you need to go now. I need to rest,” Tia breathed.
Talia didn’t reply for a very long time. Her elbows remained firmly planted on the bed, even when she slid forward to pick at her tie with the tips of her nails. From underneath Tia’s hand, she could see her head bent over the blanket. Sweat had released Talia’s hair from its waxy prison and it fell forward onto her forehead. She didn’t look young in that moment; in fact, she looked almost twice her age. With a jolt Tia realised that there were aspects of Matthew, her cruel uncle, in Talia’s features. The arch of her brows, the line of her nose...but especially that downturned mouth. Tia tried to bring her heart rate back under control, it was unhealthy to excite herself too much - although Talia had already taken care of that.
Finally, she pushed the chair back and stood up to leave. But not before pressing a soft kiss to Tia’s temple, just above her pale fingertips, her laboured breath feathering across Tia’s skin. Talia remained calm despite being anything but. Tia didn’t know what to say, so she just watched her leave, her limp more pronounced in her exit. She left her tie on the bed and Tia couldn’t find the energy to call her back. Between Natalia and Jay, the nightmare and the hole in her shoulder, she was a hollowed out shell. If she tapped her arm, she was almost certain that she would ring. She leaned forward to snag the scrap of silk on her finger. And then the blood loss really did catch up with Tia. She fell back into the darkness, already an old friend she was relieved to meet.
30 - Duty and Happiness
When Tia was young - at an age where her growth spurt was just kicking in and her own legs were almost two foreign objects - she experienced what a mother’s wrath actually was. A small, horrible boy by the name of Toby had called her a beanpole. At the time, she was a lot more upset by the comment than was appropriate, but she had always thought that they were friends. Jessie, of course, was furious that her daughter was crying at the hand of someone else. Storming through the playground, she accosted the small boy, demanding he answer for his insults. His mother stood to the side, stunned - too surprised to step in. Jessie was only small, with the sweetest face and a ready smile, so the idea of her yelling was almost inconceivable. It was impossible to reconcile this image with her friendly eyes.
That day, Tia learnt what the real definition of a mother’s love was. Jessie wasn’t allowed on the school’s premises again after that but she laughed and hugged Tia anyway. “Nobody messes with my little girl,” she grinned. “And lives to tell the tale.” She made it seem so easy, to defend honour with no regard for the rules. The spark of the Rebellion, Tia knew now, but a spark that Jessie nourished within her own daughter nonetheless. It was the kind of fight that one could choose to pick, but she always seemed to pick the ones that mattered. In fact, she argued a lot as Tia grew up clumsy and curious. The whole world was seen as a danger until her daughter was old enough to learn the different ways she could barrel through it.
The fierceness with which Jessie had always protected her should have prepared Tia. But she was half asleep, waking out of a drugged stupor, and thoroughly shocked when her mother barrelled into the infirmary. Oh, shit, she thought. In all the confusion, she had completely forgotten about her. Someone else had remembered, however, and judging from the nurses’ scrubs and the hastily tied bun, Jessie had come straight from a night shift. She was jacked up on nerves, panicked, wild-eyed. She zeroed in on the wound and blinked.
“Tia!”
“Mum-” Tia groaned. “What are you doing here?”
Jessie’s eyebrows were pulled together in one fierce move. It made her look older, or maybe that was her actual age - in the haze, Tia couldn't figure out which. “What am I doing here? What the hell are you doing here? Are you insane? Do you know how distraught I’ve been, the whole way here?”
“I’m fine-”
“Like hell you are! You get stabbed and I have to find out from Talia almost six hours later?”
Tia narrowed her eyes, focusing them on one of Jessie’s heads. If she would just stay still for a moment... “Talia told you? No, she went home.”
“She came to the hospital, looking like a zombie, dead on her feet,” Jessie said and looked at her watch. ”Not even three hours ago.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s almost 8 in the morning.”
The cogs tried to whirl in Tia’s mind but she was only just surfacing from the heavy smog of prescription medication. Her whole body was burning and her tongue was so thick that she felt like she was disturbing it. She had to focus. If Talia got to the hospital three hours ago, it would mean that she had gone straight from Tia’s bedside. Exhausted, she had gone all that way to find Jessie, and probably then had to wait for her to finish morning rounds.
Jessie disturbed Tia’s slow thought process by sitting on the foot of the cot. She was taking survey of the damage, her eyes tracking the same pathways everyone else had. She seemed to find most issue with the blood coating Tia’s skin, if the pursing of her mouth was anything to go by. A stickler for correct hospital procedures, she was faulting everything she saw. “They couldn’t clean you up better than this?”
“I think there were other injuries to attend to...” Tia began but her words were dismissed just as quickly. Jessie moved from one end to the other, reaching out to unwind the pink bandage. It fell to the bed with barely a whisper but it managed to seem so loud in the startling silence. Even though there was no window and no daylight here - nothing to signify the rising of the sun - Tia’s internal clock seemed to recognise that it was. Her eyes were no longer drooping, although her body was infinitely drained. She was tempted to take more medication for the pain but she didn't want to sleep anymore. So she just had to grit her teeth.
She watched as her mother ran a light fingertip over the stitching, analysed the technique, looking for infection. She peered as if Tia was a handbag she was inspecting for bad handiwork. Tia felt as though she wasn't far off from shaking her to see what fell out.
“Who did this?”
“I think Anya stitched me up-”
“Who stabbed you?” Jessie turned burning eyes up to Tia’s. It was that look: the look.
“Oh.” Tia caught herself before she could shrug. Indifference wouldn't go down too well right now. “A guard. I didn’t see it coming.”
Jessie wanted to hit something. Tia could recognise the frustration, pent up and trapped beneath her mother’s pale skin. She wanted to hit something but she couldn't. Long gone were the days where she could rush to her daughter’s side, threatening bodily harm and lawsuits. Tia was a part of a living, breathing revolution and a consequence of that was injury. She was no doubt shocked that her own warning had come true so quickly; a bad omen for the future to come. Danger was a symptom of the system. She glared down at her hands, her slim fingers - pianist fingers, Andy always called them - tapering into practical, square nails.
“You’re all over the news, you know? Did you know that? Has a single one of these delinquents told you that yet?”
Tia did a double take. “The message I recorded?” In all the chaos, she had assumed the footage wouldn’t have survived. She certainly hadn’t thought about it surfacing, especially so soon after the night’s events. The government were usually very good at suppressing what they deemed terrorism. They didn't want the public to know it was happening, or how, or by who. If they kept it quiet for long enough, it would go away. Right? Wrong. Not this time. Not under her watch. She hoped that whoever saw their call, knew what was coming. The government couldn't protect anyone, least of all themself.
“As well as the brief shot of you being stabbed, stumbling back, and the room descending into madness.”
She felt a swell of pride. Misplaced, perhaps, but well received anyway. The night had not been a complete waste of resources, if their message was being broadcasted. She stuttered on something Jessie had said with palpable distaste. “You can’t call them delinquents, mum. You were one of them. You and...dad.”
There was a pause and Jessie’s fingers stilled on the edge of Tia’s jaw. She was thinking of more, beyond the Rebellion, the night. Her face went slack. “Will you ever trust me again?”
Tia was more awake now, sharper for the sleep, though certainly not less confused. Still, she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, hard enough to see stars. Why did everyone want to ask her so many questions when she could barely focus on staying conscious? She sighed, rubbed again for good measure, before looking up. “I don’t know. I have so much to deal with, I’ve not really thought about your little affair.”
Tia was lying, but Jessie didn’t know that. The comment caused her to flinch, a blow that was equal parts physical and mental. It was the term ‘little affair’ that got her, no doubt. “I’m not asking you to accept it. I’m just asking you: will you forgive me? I miss you.”
Not once since Tia had found out about Harry, had her hatred for the situation waned. She was clinging onto the image of her parents’ happy marriage with a desperation even she couldn’t explain. When it came to Andy, she was six years old again, clambering into his lap as he did late night research. Eyes squinting from fatigue, hands warm from mugs of the coffee he smuggled from the bloc. He read aloud for her, words that she didn’t understand lulling her to sleep. Hypothesis - placebo - fluctuating - combustion rate. That was her favourite: combustion. He always said it slowly, enunciating every letter, blowing his lips out in a mini explosion. Sometimes, if Jessie was home early or on her day off, she would come and scoop Tia into her arms, kiss Andy goodnight and put her to bed. There was a sweet innocence about the memory, fondness for a family dynamic that didn’t exist anymore.
