the careless knot (the magnus archives | sasha/helen, tim)

[fiachairecht]

the careless knot. the magnus archives, sasha/helen!distortion, tim. sasha walks into the spiral, sasha returns from the spiral. 1k words, rated m. for clementina in WDLF4.

Sasha is dreaming again.

It will take her a very long time to understand this, because in her dream everything is familiar and nothing is quite where it should be and both of those things have been true of her waking life for some time now. It takes practise, separating out the dreams when life has twisted so, and Sasha has not been back long enough that it's an easy task.

Sasha is dreaming of a library, almost like the one she remembers from uni. The lights are flickering in the way they always do, because it is two in the morning and most of the students have gone home, but she can see perfectly regardless.

Sasha is lost in the stacks again, though she is not sure she would call it lost since she can't remember what she was looking for. She trails her hand along the shelf as she walks, taking every right turn. There's more shelves, fewer tables, and still she walks, kilometres of books spilling out in front of her and her shadow.

When she reaches the door — the one that she has never seen before — Helen is there, long fingers wrapped around the handle.

"Do you want to leave?" Helen asks, and the possibility of refusal sits heavily on Sasha's tongue. "I can protect you here."

There is another world waiting outside, full of straight lines and sunlight and spaces without any doors, and Sasha is terrified. But she opens her eyes as Helen opens the door.

**

"Nice ink," Tim says, tapping the four-part spiral curling around her elbow. "Didn't it hurt?"

Sasha remembers Helen's long needle-thin teeth, the way they bled multicoloured ink into fractals that covered every surface in the house. She remembers Helen laughing, saying, I'll kiss it, and it won't make anything better, except she lied — it was better, with Helen.

"Don't remember," she says. Doesn't like returning to that memory, to the one that feels like going too far back to the start. 

She wants to think she's getting better at choosing which times to visit, but Helen doesn't tell her either way. Maybe it's for the best.

**

Later, Sasha will open a door. It will be a very familiar door, not in the sense that all the doors in Helen's world are becoming familiar, but familiar in the sense that it is the door to her childhood bedroom. She will not open it because she thinks it is safe, but rather, because she is tired, and it does not seem, in the moment, to be any worse than any other door.

She will be wrong, but she will have to forgive herself for that, because she is still learning and because if she does not, she will lose the chance to try it again.

Inside her childhood bedroom she will find not herself but the thing that is Not Herself, Not Sasha. This is the Sasha with very long arms and very sharp teeth, the one who, when faced sideways, is thinner than a sheet of paper. Helen will wrap her arms around the real Sasha then, will say, just like she says every time, do not think too hard about it. Do not tell it how to get better.

The thing that is Not Sasha does not particularly want to be Sasha, any more than it wants to be anyone else. But the better it gets at being Sasha, Helen says, the less it will want to be someone else.

**

Go outside, Helen murmurs, resting between Sasha's spread legs. They're in Helen's room now — they've always been in Helen's room. It doesn't matter if you remember who you are, you'll always come back here.

Sasha does not always want to leave. The bed is warm, Helen's mouth is warm. Helen's fingers are too long, but they fit inside Sasha like she was made for them — like they were made for her. There was a difference, once.

Come back soon, Helen says, and Sasha's body arcs off the bed, strange pleasure spiraling through her, following the trails Helen's other hand leaves across her bare skin.

Sasha falls down, still shaking, falls through the doorway that has replaced their bed.

**

The world outside — the real world, she used to think, but what could be more real than the things Helen makes for her? — has not changed. 

"Nice ink," Tim says, jerking his chin at the triskelion swirling over her wrist. "Don't you think it's a bit — morbid, though, given the whole ... Michael, doors, thing?" 

Covering it now would just make him more suspicious. "Yeah, well. I survived it, didn't I?"

He stalks off, shaking his head in disgust, and Sasha pulls her sleeve down as far as she can, makes her way down to Artefact Storage.

The ink is pale blue, the knotwork intricate. "Helen," she says, pressing her lips to her wrist. It doesn't taste like anything. Why had she imagined it would taste like something, other than the salt of her skin? "Helen, why can they see this too?"

Helen waits until Sasha is dreaming again to answer: because you want them to.

**

Sasha is backed up against a wall, Helen's paper-thin body crowding against her as the walls move in and out, in and out, pulsing like a heartbeat — like Sasha's body as Helen presses inside again. All her knives are in her fingers, but it doesn't hurt.

Nothing hurts, when she's with Helen, not even the things that should.

I don't like it when you leave, Helen admits, and Sasha shivers over and over again, until Helen's fingers come away slick and bloodless. Her arms slide around Sasha, wrap around her waist once, twice, three times, fingers knotting together at the small of her back.

Sasha isn't dreaming now. This is Helen — what Helen gives her every time. I want fewer doors, she says, I want this — I want this forever.

The door at her back swings open, or it vanishes. Helen's arms tighten around her, and they both fall.

**

Sasha opens her eyes, lifts her head from the desk. She rubs her neck, stiff from sleeping in her chair.

"Nice ink," Tim says, as the motion lifts her hair from the back of her neck. The labyrinth between her shoulder blades is beginning to spiral up, enough to be visible.

She shouldn't be surprised, that it's different every time.

"Helen does good work," she says, and watches the wrong question light up his eyes.

Sasha nudges the tip of her boot against the trapdoor latch under her desk. Time to try again.