Chapter 45 A Story of Perseverance
A Story of Perseverance
On the three-month anniversary of the Battle of Feathers, Sascia wakes from a midafternoon nap and finds a note on the kitchen table: Dinner upstairs today.
Aunt Rania must be trying a new recipe for the restaurant.
Sascia takes a whiff of her armpits, then forces herself to take a long, scalding hot shower.
Wiping a palm on the bathroom mirror, she stands there and looks at herself as the steam slowly reclaims the edges of the glass.
She is a splinter of her old self. Her usually neat short bob has grown almost to her shoulders.
The scars left by Ktren’s teeth have taken on a dark gray quality against her olive skin.
If she stares too long, her reflection becomes someone else, a fragment of essence that lives only in the sheen of a looking glass.
She throws the cupboard open and fishes out the comb and scissors. She begins cutting in neat straight lines, as she’s done for the past four years. By the end, the white sink is marbled with tufts of her sandy brown hair.
There. Much better. At least she knows who she’s looking at now.
Ruffling a towel through her hair, she shuffles to her room and pulls on a pair of black jeans and her oversized “home” sweater. She doesn’t bother with shoes; she climbs the stairs to her aunt’s apartment in the pitter-patter of her slippers.
Danny opens the door.
Behind him, on the mismatched furniture of Aunt Rania’s living room, sits a whole array of people.
Her parents and aunt are on the sofa, Andres is slumped in the armchair while Shivani perches on its arm, Tae rests cross-legged on the floor next to a laptop from where Crow must be watching.
Even Ksenya is here, leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed over her chest.
Sascia drags her gaze down to Danny. “Is this an intervention?”
“Damn right it is,” he answers, closing the door behind her. “Long overdue, in my opinion.”
“Fantastic,” Sascia says tonelessly, and takes her clearly assigned seat on the dining chair pulled into the center of the room.
She. Is not. Heartless. She knows they’re here because they care, because they worry, because they think something is wrong with her.
Sascia just has to listen and appease them and it will all be over in a jiffy.
This isn’t her first rodeo, after all. There was another intervention, almost a year ago now, the dreaded get-your-life-together shebang, and Sascia very much doesn’t want to repeat that.
“Andres,” she says, “is that a new tattoo? And Shiv, you wear glasses now?”
Shiv gives her a smile and Andres nods, rolling his sleeve up. A lithe Darkbloom is inked around the tight muscles of his forearm.
“Hiya, Crow,” Sascia says to the screen.
“Hiya right back at you, S.”
“Mom, Dad, do you know everyone?” Sascia asks, forcing chirpiness into her voice.
“Yes, we’ve been introduced,” her mother replies. “Lovely kids. They all care about you very much.”
Oh no. Sascia doesn’t want to hear about that. She wants to keep things light, calm, reassuring, the smoothest intervention there ever was. She swivels her attention to her sister at the back of the room. “When did you get here, Ksenya?”
“This morning,” Ksenya replies, uncharacteristically icy.
“Don’t you have exams in like a week?”
“I do.” Two short, clipped words.
Oh god. Even her sweetheart of a sister is upset?
Sascia falls quiet. Let them do the talking, as per the rules of intervention.
Danny wheels himself next to Tae. “As I tried to mention yesterday,” her cousin begins, “Chapter XI is holding a board meeting this week. Insiders are saying the purpose of the meeting is to set up the first global action to limit the Dark. They’re calling it border control.”
Yes, Danny did say something of the sort during Final Fantasy VII last night.
Sascia didn’t reply because it was an entirely unnecessary conversation.
Chapter XI is going to do what Chapter XI is going to do.
The world will keep turning (an endless ouroboros devouring its own tail and all that), but Sascia is not a part of it any longer.
“We think,” Danny says, emphasis on the we, “you need to talk to them.”
“I have talked to them. Six whole days of interrogation, to be exact. It was very successful, as you all know, and I even came away with a little parting gift.” She waves her hand to the window, outside which the monitoring van is always stationed.
“No snark,” her father gruffs out from the sofa. Then, softer: “Listen to your friends, kardia mou. They’re here to help.”
“I know that,” she whispers. “I just don’t think there’s any help to be had.”
“Sascia, the Chapter is discussing sending a nuclear apocalypse worth of missiles into every host of Dark in the world,” Andres says. “It would obliterate everything: fauna, flora, all the harmless creatures we’ve been fighting for all these years.”
“All the big beasts too,” Shiv adds, “the ones that just don’t know any better.”
“And according to you,” Crow adds, “some of these bombs will end up in Itkalin.”
Sascia presses her lips together. “And how exactly do you expect me to stop them?”
“Tell them what you told me,” Danny says passionately. “About the aesin and their culture, their history and customs, their values and beauty.”
“They already know. I told the Chapter everything I could think of that would convince them the Battle of Feathers was not an act of aggression but of defense, and they didn’t care to listen—”
“Tell it to the rest of the world, then. News channels have been reaching out for months for an interview. Go on TV and convince the rest of the world the Dark is worth saving.”
“Danny,” she snaps, getting worked up now. “I can’t. I’ll just make things worse, like I always do—”
“Oh, will you get over yourself, Sascia!”
The outburst comes from the very back of the room, where Ksenya has unfolded from the wall. It is so unlike her—the raised voice, the scowling face, the finger stabbing in Sascia’s direction—that the entire room swivels to gawk at her.
“You sit there and roll out your little snarky comments and dismiss your friends when they’re literally begging you to help stop a war,” Ksenya continues, “when all your life you’ve been the one begging, you’ve been the one caring for every Darkcreature you come upon.
You’ve been the one marching into every host of Dark you can find, with not a care in the world about the people you leave behind worrying if you’ll ever come back or if you’re lying in some pit, torn and lifeless. ”
“I know,” Sascia snaps, because now she’s angry too, livid with the unfairness of it all.
“Do you think I don’t know, Ksenya? Do you think I didn’t hear our parents argue about the stress I was putting on the family, on Danny, on you?
Do you think I don’t know I’m the reason you left home to live in sunny, safe Greece?
” Her chest rattles with crackling breaths, like logs left too long in a too-hot fire.
“I have tried to be different, Ksenya. I have tried to be what you guys wanted, what you needed from me, but I failed every single time. Dad is right: I can’t get my life together, so I might as well stop trying, because then, at least, I will cause no more pain. ”
From the sofa, her father whispers, “When did I say that?”
“You said that,” Ksenya snaps at him, “in that horrid speech you made after Sascia got her Columbia rejection. All that that-is-not-a-life nonsense, because god forbid your kids ever do something you don’t completely understand, right?
Like move to another country and turn their passion into their work and fall in love with someone they weren’t supposed to. Right, Dad? Right, Mom?”
Sascia’s mouth hangs open. Never before has she heard her sister raise her voice at their parents, and never before has she heard a callout so on point.
Because that’s exactly what her parents did, isn’t it?
They fell in love, her mother dropped out of law school to turn her passion of cooking into a job, her father moved here to the US to be with her, and they secretly eloped despite their families’ explicit objections.
“That’s different—” their father starts, but his wife lays a hand over his.
“Honey,” their mother tells him, “hush. Listen.”
Ksenya’s voice sugars into gentleness as she turns back to Sascia. “I can see you carry those words on your shoulders, day after day. But, Sascia, it was just a foolish thing our fool of a dad said in a moment of worry. It is not who you are.”
The words hit Sascia like a fist to the stomach. Out of nowhere, her lashes are filled with tears, thick and briny with salt.
“But it is,” she whispers to her sister.
“I’m the girl who couldn’t deal with her grandma’s death and made up a hallucination for years and years.
I’m the girl who risked her life and her cousin’s life to build a moth garden.
I’m the girl who had a golden ticket to an Ivy League education and wasted it all because she preferred to care for her moths instead of study.
I’m the girl who jumped into the Maw to stop a war yet ended up doing the exact opposite.
I’m the girl obsessed with the Dark, in love with its princet”—god, is this really the first time she’s said it out loud, in front of her parents, no less? —“and still, I betrayed them.”
She stops to heave a few panting breaths, then whispers, “I have tried to be more, to be better, all my damned life. But nothing ever changes. No one ever believes in me.”
Her plea falls heavy into the quietude of the room.
They don’t move, eight somber statues of pity.
But then the silence is broken—by Tae, of all people. “When have you ever cared, Sascia?”
The question is so startling, she can only mouth, “What?”
“I said,” Tae repeats, raising a haughty eyebrow, “when have you ever cared about what people think of you?”
Sascia is too stunned to speak.
“Over the past two years, I’ve sat in countless meetings at the Umbra where Professor Carr dismissed your research and belittled your wits.
You never faltered. Never backed down. I used to judge you for it.
But when Nugau first came out of the Maw, I watched you jump right in to save them, unafraid, armed only with my sword, one of the dozens of weapons I have crafted, yet never had the courage to wield myself.
It made me think of what it means to truly fight for what you believe in. ”
His gaze tenses, wrinkling at the corners.
“What we just heard,” Tae says, “all the things you and your family have gone through and survived…They don’t make up a story of failure, Sascia. Life has knocked you sideways in a hundred different ways and yet, every time, you get back up again. Yours is a story of perseverance.”
The whole room watches, breath held, as Tae unfolds from the floor and thrusts a hand at her.
“So get over yourself,” he says, “get back up, and let’s save the goddamn world.”