Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I see you”.

The funny thing was that, if someone had asked Sasha what her last words were going to be…those three wouldn’t have been such a wild answer.

The even funnier thing: she wasn’t seeing whatever was launching at her, because there was absolutely nothing in front of her. There had been, yes, for a long exacerbating time; approaching steadily, with such absence of sound as they stepped towards her that the silence had become deafening for the archival assistant. Then, they were gone. They didn’t even disappear; her brain simply knew they were there, and, then, they weren’t; or, maybe, they had never been, though she recalled it vividly (it had been only a few seconds ago, after all).

She screamed, as she had done instances before, when she had believed that not-person, that… thing was going to frontally attack her; though this time it was because her very own legs stopped working, stopped being felt. There was nothingness below her knees.

She gasped for air and looked down… she couldn’t process what had become of her lower half; the entanglement of being that was partially elongating as what looked like a hand, a perfectly normal hand, caressed her face.

She shivered.

The hand was smiling and she felt as her lips became nothing but a thin line, almost a draft, in a face that had begun aching as if a thousand of small scalpels were making their way from the inside.

She screamed again.

And no noise left her mouth.

After what felt like hours, Sasha began to wish the physical pain had endured. Now, all her body was able to process was a bizarre numbness, as if she was floating on a stream that was diluting her ever so gently.

Her skin was being bleached, her bones polished to a size and shape much more expected of a woman (she almost threw up in her not-truly-hers mouth at the mere concept), her guts reduced and expanded into a much more conventionally pretty figure, her features and hair completely morphed…but it didn’t hurt, it simply…occurred.

And, what was far worse, something inside of her, of the inside that kept being hers, began to acknowledge that the one Sasha James had always been this poster-perfect-normative woman and that what she was…

…what was she?

Who was she?

Realizing she should be acknowledging something dreadful, yet incapable of actually doing so, she wept and the tears she produced tasted different than the ones she had been used to, their shape ever so slightly wrong for teardrops.

She tried breathing, but it only brought her pain (though she almost thanked it, seeing she could still hurt in some capacity) and she just began panicking. She panicked as she had never done before and, still noticing how she was being erased from within herself, she chose to fight. Physical violence wasn’t going to work; especially because she was deeply afraid to even try, almost completely convinced she would be unable to do so and that it would be her last step onto her very undoing. Alas, fighting with her mind was.

A little girl, trying to make people around her understand her name was Sasha, not whatever thing they had chosen, and didn’t truly match her. She first became interested in the supernatural because most of it was also about people misnaming things they didn’t understand.

Her first actual ghost, in the forest that shouldn’t have existed in the riverbank nearby her grandparents’ place, trying to lure her into the cold lonely water so they would be free of the emptiness of their existence and how, when everything felt lost, she had found the question needed to make the ghost-kid so confused they had accidentally set her free.

She should do the same now to whatever was in the process of possessing her, of twisting her (which was currently being extremely petty about her retaining facts from the very beginning), making their enterprise of erasure far more difficult…

…she couldn’t, though, for this wasn’t a cursed dead child; there was absolute no personality behind the force destroying her (“trying to destroy me” she forced herself to remember; she had to endure, she hadn’t been destroyed yet, she ought to remain combative, even though it was only within figments of her mind); even their cruelty felt down-played, as if the joy from what it was bestowing upon her was purely performative.

“Focus Sasha” she tried to tell herself, and it sounded as a million of small crystal shards scratched porcelain simultaneously.

There she was, fresh out of college, surrounded by friends only by convenience, with whom she knew she would very likely never speak again; except for the girl with the vintage clothing and spider-web-like body modification, the one that had only shared a class with, but felt genuinely attached to nonetheless

What was her name?

She tried not to spiral; maybe she had never known it. Yes, it had to be that, indeed.

Her very last trivia night with her actual long-time friends; before all of them scurried out of London, leaving their meetings secluded to an unavoidable online monthly video call. She recalled fighting so they would take her field of expertise seriously. She remembered trying not to be upset by how condescending their comments were, when they told her how she was “ruining her smarts with pure spooks and nonsense”.

She tried to enjoy just the good, never saying out loud how wrong they were; how she wasn’t that smart to begin with; how the spooks, even when proven a hoax, were still fascinating and worth having a look at. How she was actually great at her job and, hey, a job is a job, and she would rather be (unfairly) a mere archival assistant thanks to years of study in what she actually liked than top of the chain in a fancy office job she had never been keen on.

Ugh, she could be as pedantic as Jon, couldn’t she?

“JON!” acid through the remains of her brain; that was what she felt when she pushed a single word through it all, an almost out-spoken thought. Still, she forced it again; she forced every name that came into her mind: Jon, Gertrude, Michael, Melanie, Elias, Martin, Rosie…

…Tim.

Tim Bloody Stoker; she was still figuring out what on Earth they were, as much as she put on a face of knowing exactly what he was to her…though she was almost certain it would have been quite a while before she would have had a clear answer before this all began, this nightmare she was being pulled through; and now…now she just knew he would be the one most broken when the…

…IF the thing trying to get her won; if he had an entire relationship build-up that matched her memories, but with this vanilla person being created from scratch...it would destroy him beyond words.

“Stop mopping around, you cannot save yourself for one person, you have to do it for you. You know that much!” and, as she was finishing scolding herself, she realized something: that thought hadn’t really hurt.

She kept bringing back memories: her encounter with Michael, her mother’s poor apology for years of mistreatment, the case that had given her the chance to spend hours in the allegedly inexistent secret part of The British Library with the beautiful Saint Pancras as background landscape…

…and she brought herself back too: her lack of self-preservation when she could find out the truth by putting herself in danger (as currently), her disposal of always being ready to jump into an intellectual challenge, her fear of getting far too close (mostly because she had no clue what that might truly entail, even in a mere friendship), her quick wits, her very enthusiasms for the job that had put her there in that very moment…a fascination that, not even in her current state, she wouldn’t have changed for anything in the entire word.

She began to feel her fingers again, as the new nails felt half-way in the making, causing her a brutal yet welcomed pain.

She smiled only with the gums and teeth currently available: she was going to make it through.

She would win whatever on Earth had tried to erase Sasha James.

Sasha James was unforgettable.

Who on Earth was Sasha James?

The woman, no, the girl in the corridor was more scared than she had ever been before. At least, she believed so; for she could not really recall who she was or what she was doing in there, laying on the floor as her body was entirely non-respondent.

The girl had heard that name in her head instances ago, almost glorious, and was quite certain it had something to do with how sick and dizzy she felt at the moment.

She tried to stand up, but she couldn’t and fell once again, catching her reflection; she would have sworn she had had long hair minutes before…

…for a mere second, Sasha came back and, realizing by the dull watch on her wrist that it had only been a second since everything had started, yelled once again.

Joining her previous scream, that had actually never ceased.

And, then, Sasha James had never been.

“I see you,” Sasha James said, grinning with ever so slightly difficulty.

The smiles were always the hardest thing to get right.

Written by a human in Ellipsus.