Work Text:
Her life is like their language.
Not a straight line, but a circle.
Louise clutches tightly to Ian’s hand as the helicopter takes off, the wind whipping her hair around her face, turning in her seat to keep the shell in her sight for as long as possible.
When it finally disappears into the distance, she turns her gaze forward.
“What happens now?” Ian shouts to her. She’s forgotten to put on her headset again.
“We change the world,” Louise says.
He can’t hear her. But his eyes don’t leave hers.
“We are made of star-stuff.”
She hears Ian’s voice, echoing through the years. A nickname. A prophecy. Folding in and over itself. Hannah lives. Will live. Lived. All at once. A möbius strip of a life. She exists because she existed.
Louise supposes that goes for all of them, now.
It can be overwhelming.
Sometimes she tests herself. Different colored socks. Sushi instead of Indian.
Her classes have waiting lists to get onto the waiting lists. She has to stop herself from finishing sentences, when someone's searching for a word.
“I love you,” Ian says. “I don't know what I would have done if I'd never met you.”
Louise smiles, a secret smile. A sad smile.
But there’s joy too.
“It’s like sitting next to your best friend,” she tells Hannah, who’s too young to understand complex sentences, much less literal alien concepts. “Where you’ve seen the movie already, but they’re watching it for the first time with you. And you’re experiencing their experience, and it’s so much better than watching it alone for the first time.”
“Alice,” Hannah says, because she heard the word movie.
“Alice,” Louise agrees, and puts it on.
Louise dreams of Costello, but in the dream, they converse out loud. She doesn’t know if Costello speaks English, or if she’s speaking their language, which she names a few years down the road. She can’t remember what she calls it. She’ll get there eventually.
You won’t be there, Costello says. In three thousand years.
No. But I see that future too.
Then Ian is there and Louise laughs to herself, remembering how they’d switched places before.
“You were Costello,” she tells him.
“Where’d you hide the bottle, anyway?” he asks.
“In the clean room,” she says, like it’s obvious.
They drink, the water misting over their heads, the canary chirping next to them. Louise pours it some whiskey.
When she opens her eyes, she prods Ian in the back. He jerks awake with a start, turning over and placing his hands on her, where Hannah rests between them.
“Is it time?”
“I had a dream,” she says.
It goes the other way, too. She never loses anything. She remembers exactly where she put her keys the night before.
And Hannah’s excuses, “I definitely told you already, Mom,” don't work. Louise lets her get away with it sometimes. She deserves a normal life, a normal mother.
Louise knows the minute it happens, three months and two days after she breathed a yes into Ian’s ear. Flutters down her spine, down her legs. A drop of sweat, sliding along his clavicle.
It feels like both a beginning and an end.
Watching her grow, going from all elbows and knees to the strong, sturdy girl that stands before her, sometimes Louise forgets. She gets caught up in her love. It's better that way. But it makes the fall harder.
Their first official date is awkward, stiff, starched white napkins and candlelit elegance. Louise starts to question if what she sees is actually even going to happen (she hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet) when Ian stands up and holds his hand out to her, before their food even arrives. “This is ridiculous, come on.”
They get burgers and spend the rest of the evening sitting on the hood of his truck in an empty field. (Ian owns a truck. Louise can’t stop giggling, because it makes no sense.) He points out constellations and she translates, when it applies. They talk about Montana, and Ian demonstrates his fluency in Pig Latin.
"Did you know language affects your physicality?" Louise says, leaning back against the windshield.
"Do tell."
"Where's your tongue, right now?"
"In my mouth?"
"The position, where is it? I'm guessing pressed against your top front teeth? If your first language was Russian, it'd be flat against the bottom of your mouth."
Ian looks alarmed. She's right, of course.
“What happened?” he asks, when he walks her to her door. “When you went back. I mean, I know, in the end, what happened, but what did you see?”
“Everything,” she replies, and pulls him inside.
“Why'd you let me go?” Ian asks on the doorstep one night, Hannah already sitting in the back seat of his car, nose in a book. “Why didn't you fight me?”
Because you come back.
Louise stays silent.
When Hannah slips away, Ian is shattered into pieces. Louise breathes out, her face wan, her eyes dry. There’s an accusation in the way he looks at her. You should be broken, like me. She'd meant to make it easier. “I am,” she says out loud. He says it in two weeks. She is, still. Has always been.
But oh, the time they had together.
She spends most of her time in the past, reliving the days by the lake, her teenage years. Until one day she wakes up and doesn’t look in either direction. Pulling on purple socks, because it was her favorite color. She goes to work. She teaches the heptagram for the girl kicks the ball and her voice doesn’t wobble, not once.
“Mom. Dad. They’re palindromes too. Hannah. You're just like me.”
“Yes, we are.”
It takes three years.
Ian finds her waiting with the door open.
"She was worth it."
Louise pulls him to her.
“What happens now?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she replies.