1Nightmares gripped Jaime Fleming. She was not the sort to go thrashing around in her sleep; rather, she went rigid, and her thoughts, undisturbed by physical motion, kept whirling and whirling around and around, never abating, never stilling, revolving around the same question she had asked herself over and over and over...
Do you love me, Daddy?
It was a thought she'd never allowed herself to think, growing up. Of course he loved her. She was his daughter. He told her that he loved her. "Bye Dad, love you." "Love you too, bye." So of course he loved her. She knew that he loved her.
But... she was never sure if she was enough. Good enough, right enough, strong enough. She remembered the recitals he had come to watch, the plays he had come to see; each one shone in her memory, outshining the numerous others to which he hadn't come. The excuses he had made. Tired. Business. Can't make it, honey, I'm sorry. "Okay, Dad. It's okay. I understand."
But she didn't, not really. Oh, in her head, yeah. He had important things to do. He really was tired, anyone could see that. And it wasn't really that important, anyway. Why should he care, after all? She shouldn't either. It wasn't that big a deal.
Except that it was. She realized it later, much later, but it was important. He'd never once said to a client, "Sorry, I can't meet then, it's my daughter's play." Or, "Okay, I was a bit tired, but let me just take a quick shower to wake myself up and then we can go to your concert." She shouldn't feel so... so hurt by it, all these years later. Really, she shouldn't. She hadn't thought about those things for years. She'd become reconciled to it. She'd thought. Been mature and adult and let the hurts of a little girl change, be resolved, become a woman's past, buried and reconciled memories.
So why were they bothering her now all of a sudden? Each little pain hit her again, and she felt her spirit bleed afresh. Did you ever love me, daddy? Did you ever love me more than yourself? Or was I always just a drain on your time, your resources? Was I ever good enough?
There. That was the heart of it. Was I ever good enough that you could love me without reservations?
He'd always had to fix her. Room not clean enough, he'd straighten it for her. Posture not correct, he'd lend a hand in fixing the straightness of this arm or that leg to achieve the perfect pose. She would run to him with a drawing, and he would point out her errors, places where she could have done better, and she would nod, because he was right, it would look better with the changes he suggested, but her heart would be crying inside because she hadn't wanted him to critique her work, she'd wanted him to admire it, to tell her he was proud.
I loved you, Daddy, so much. Why couldn't you have said just one word to me? Just one word?
Well, no. She'd have needed more than one word. But damn it! Why could she never let her father go? Her whole life revolved around him. She couldn't look for love, couldn't focus on anyone or anything else, she was just so obsessed with proving to her father that she was...
Good. Better than him. Worthy. Worth it.
In the dark of the night, when she was just a little girl and her heart's deepest thoughts crept out to play, no, she didn't want to defeat her father. She wanted him to be proud of her. I did it. What you thought no one could do, I did. Me. Are you proud of me now, Father? Are you proud of me now?
Jaime Fleming forced herself to unfold from the fetal position, sitting up on the side of her bed, her posture still somewhat curled up on itself for protection. Protection from what?
Red, sandpapery eyes squinted around the room, all painted white in her furious attempt to blot out the door, the door, always the door that tempted, that mocked, that seduced, that threatened, her sanity, her world, her reality...
No!
She ground her palms into her temples, thrusting it away, shoving hard against the thoughts that were not her own, were never her own, that only existed to drown her own self and set her adrift in this sea of madness, awash in the detritus of a thousand fears and terrors that grew from the depths of her mind, of her soul, of the deepest darkest blackness that a human being can face...
The girl found herself on her knees beside her bed, on the only spot of artificial color in the room, the black circle that surrounded her bed. Scrabbling hands found the can of paint, abandoned after her arms could no longer lift the brush. She pried the lid off and dipped her hand inside, touching her index finger to the thick, slippery liquid, and then stopped, considering the canvas before her.
"My father is crazy," she wrote on the boards, then sat back to consider the statement. "And I'm not too sane, myself," she added, for honesty's sake.
"My father never had time for me." No, that wasn't true. "My father rarely had time for me," she amended.
"Never did right. Never enough then. Not enough now. Who am I?"
"Was I ever loved? Has anyone ever loved me?" she wrote, the paint smearing under her fingers. Her letters were large, of necessity, and she had to dip her finger often.
"What is wrong with me?" she asked. "What is wrong with me?"
"Why do I hate myself?" she wrote, letters smearing, drying up as she went faster and faster. "I hate myself, I hate myself!"
"I hate myself," she whispered. "I hate myself..." She dragged a fist across her face, and was vaguely surprised to find that it was wet, and that she was sniffling hard.
She stared at the words she had scrawled. The image of the door shimmered under the paint, just above the floorboards. Give up, give in... it beckoned. It's not hard. Give up. Give in. Come to me...
"No."
Jaime read her words again, the despair, the self-pitying, the self-loathing. She bared her teeth at it. That wasn't her. She wasn't so weak. With a feral snarl, she upended the paint can across the black boards, smearing it around with her bare hands, obscuring the words, erasing them, whiting them out until no one could ever read them, ever know her secret weakness, her secret terror.
By the time she was finished, the floor was solid, pure white. There was nothing left to even hint that there had ever been anything underneath it. Her confession was gone.
It was a soul-weary Jaime that poured herself into the shower, scrubbing slowly at the paint streaks that had taken over her knees, gathered in the creasy bits of her elbows, liberally coated her hair. Her nightgown was a total loss, and she let the soaked thing slither from her shoulders to splat in a corner of the tub, to slowly leak water and cloudy white streamers down the drain. She lifted her hands high, into the strongest stream of the water pouring out of the shower head, and turned them over and over, washing, washing, washing, until the last trace of white was gone, from under her nails, from inside her fingerprints, until only in her memory did her plaster-white hands remain.
It was Jaime who went into the tub, but it was Orwell who emerged, slim shoulders squared, jaw set, head high. She would not succumb to despair again.
She paused at the bathroom door, though. A white handprint marred the brass of the doorknob.
And, try as she might, the paint never did come completely off.
*Edit - Thanks, wtchcool, for pointing out yet another spelling error. *sigh* Maybe I ought to hire a full-time beta, eh?
I don't own The Cape, try as I might to get the rights. This was just a little something that happened in between writing sessions with Dana and "Keeping Faith" - Dana's being stubborn, but Jaime wanted to talk, and Vanessa Carlton's song "White Houses" was playing while I was trying to write, and... I don't know, it just seemed apropos.
"Maybe you were all faster than me
We gave each other up so easily
These silly little wounds will never mend
I feel so far from where I've been
So I go, and I will not be back here again
I'm gone as the day is fading on white houses
I lied, wrote my injuries all in the dust
In my heart is the five of us
In white houses."