I am altered now for good (Rachel, Zoe)

[lightningseed.insanejournal.com]

Rachel was not sentimental enough to have bought her own pillow from home, though that would have gone some ways toward making her feel less like a guest and more like a person who might really live here.

On the other hand, her own pillow against the sheets of the Kemp's guest bed might make her feel more like a runaway. Rachel was trying not to feel like a runaway, and for the most part she was succeeding. It wasn't like last time she'd run away, where she had nowhere and no one to run to, just the single minded determination to escape her life. She'd just turned fourteen, and life was bad. Her Grandma was dying. School was bad. Her dad had just become involved in a public fight against her bullies which had made everything worse, because all the cruelty went underground.

So she'd run. No plan, little money. Just a bag full of clothes and food and a phone with no charger and a will to escape that had lasted two days before a policewoman recognised her and took her home. By that time she'd started to come down, and the reality of running away had sunk into her skin like the grit and the cold.

This time was different. She was eighteen now, and had Zoe, and Zoe's family, and a room to sleep in, and beyond the walls of the mansion she had Danny. Compared to her fourteen year old self, the bag of ammunition she carried now was enormous.

She flung Zoe's bedroom windows open to let in the summer heat. It was the smallest freedom, to be able to open the windows in a bedroom, but the feeling was another weapon against the dark.

Rachel leaned right out, her palm outstretched and the phone her father had given her balanced precariously on her fingers.

"Really?" asked Zoe sceptically, sitting on her bed as she watched her friend.

"Really," Rachel said. "This is Elaine's phone, and the era of Elaine is over. I've got my secret phone, I don't need this one any more." And her secret phone didn't need its ghost accounts on it any longer, either. She could delete those, replace them with her real profile. This phone - the pink one in her hand, represented her old self, the one worth discarding.

"So you're chucking it out my window?" Zoe asked, her dark eyebrow a perfectly derisive curve.

Without ceremony, Rachel tipped her fingers onto an angle, and the phone slipped off her hand, and tumbled into the darkness below.

"I hope you're going to pick up the pieces afterward," Zoe said.

Rachel spun around from the window, the night wind catching her hair. "I'll get it in the morning," she said. "You can delete that old number."

"You're loving this," Zoe observed, and Rachel lifted her arms and grinned.

"I'm loving this!" she agreed. "No more Elaine! Not ever! I'm just Rachel now, just Rachel and only ever Rachel. Rach, Rae. Maybe sometimes Dawn..." Rae and Dawn, she liked those names. They were names of sunlight and morning, the banishment of the dark.

Zoe should have been happy for her - she was happy for her, but it wasn't without reservations. Last time a friend had stayed in her house it had been Silva, the night Gloria had snatched her from her window.

Silva had changed her name back to her real name that night, too.

The synchronicity felt... wrong. The wrongness pressed Zoe to climb off her bed and close her windows, but it wasn't as if Gloria, or anyone else, was going to fly in Zoe's window and snatch her. They might try (would they try?) but Aleto would feel them coming.

So Zoe kept her urges to herself, and left the window open. "What's your real name?" Zoe asked, as Rachel was mouthing the words Rae and Dawn to herself. She stopped, dropped her arms a little, looked at Zoe.

"I don't mean 'real name'," Zoe said. "Rachel is your real name, I get that. I just wondered what your first one was."

Rachel tucked her hands up under her arms, though it was far from cold. "I kind of think of it like Voldemort," she said. "Like, saying it will summon... something."

Zoe didn't say anything, just tilted her head slightly to the side and waiting for Rachel to elaborate.

Almost any other time, Rachel would have stopped talking there. She might have said No, Zoe, if you're allowed to have rules about me not climbing on rooftops and kissing people who hate themselves, I'm allowed to have rules about you not asking me questions like that.

But Rachel had her bag of ammunition slung over her shoulders tonight; the Kemp manor and Danny and the freedom of an open window. "One reason," she said. "One reason was that Dad used to say, we had to leave our old names behind in case anyone was looking for us. My mother's family, I think he meant. But. I don't know. I was happy to leave that name behind. I didn't want to be a little broken girl on the floor any more."

Well - that was a package worth unraveling. "He thought someone was looking for you?" Zoe asked, eyes narrowing. "Who were your mother's family?"

"I don't know," Rachel said. "Honestly I don't!" she added, because the look on Zoe's face was incredulous. She'd only mentioned it to prove that it wasn't the reason she'd left the name behind; because real memories were way scarier than imaginary family.

"Dad said she ran away from them when she was a teenager; changed her name and never went back. So even my first surname wasn't even real to begin with cos she made it up! And I never met anyone, grandparents or aunts or anything. Just my Dad's mum whose house we lived in for a bit, but she died when I was fourteenish. She's dead, and my mum's dead, and her parents are probably dead, it's probably like thirty years or something since she left them anyway - why'd they even be looking for me? Who'd be able to find me even if they wanted to? Dad was just saying that to freak me out." This wasn't like when she'd told the others that she wasn't in danger from Indigo, downplaying the risk like that would make it go away - Rachel really believed this danger was an imaginary one, years and years behind her, and harmless now even if it ever had been real.

The real harm in speaking her old name would be what it would do to her, and what paralysing memories it would unleash from the face down Tarot cards in her mind.

Zoe unfolded her legs from beneath her, lay her feet flat on the floor. "Why would your dad want to freak out you?" Zoe demanded.

"I don't know," Rachel rolled her eyes, shrugging. "Cos he does that sometimes. And I believed him for a bit till I realised no one was gonna be looking for us and he was just being paranoid. But that wasn't why I wanted to change my name. That's not why I don't want to say it now. I wanted to cos I was making a whole new me. Which was fine I guess till Elaine turned out to be a bit crap, and I'm not even going to mention the Voldemort name because she is so, so not me and I will never let myself be her again. Rachel's better, don't you reckon?"

Zoe ran her tongue over her lips, her mouth suddenly dry. "I do reckon," she said, moving to stand in front of Rachel, look her right in her eyes. "But if there's any chance that your crazy mum's family is looking for you, if you ever feel like anyone is following you, you tell me immediately right? Even if you think you're just being paranoid. Even if you think you might be crazy - because we already proved you weren't crazy when it came to Indigo, didn't we?"

Rachel nodded, lips sucked into her mouth.

"So you ever feel followed, you say. Promise?"

Rachel looked at her with a look in her eyes, and Zoe had a sudden flash of dread, a sudden premonition because she felt, in her bones, that she knew what Rachel was going to say.

But she also knew that Rachel was going to be just fine, and Zoe was never going to let her get away with calling herself stupid again.

Clever conniving bitch.

"I'll promise," Rachel said, with a curl of her lips like she was the smartest fucking person on the planet. "If you promise to come to prom."