II nothing like your II mother II everything like II [lethe]

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The machines fed her veins, making small blips as they went. Every now and again, a different machine would emit a high-pitched whistle and Lethe would be momentarily drawn from her slumber. She'd stir, feeling the sting of the needles in her arms, and try to rise, but, on cue, a warm substance would suddenly shoot up her right arm and she dreamt black again. 
There was no day and no night, only time passing blearily around her. She wasn't sure if the voices she heard were really there or not, if the faces were visions or solid. Patricia's fire-red hair, Jasper's soft voice, Phelix's fat fingers. 

Sometimes she did dream and in her dreams, she held her baby girl in her arms. They rocked in a sunlit room, and she cooed down at her creation, her baby girl. Eden.But every time she tried to unwrap the swaddled infant and reveal her face, the blonde curls she was born with and the greenish-blue eyes that were the perfect mix between her own and Eric's, she couldn't and she drifted back into a dark sleep. It wasn't painful. It was light. It was longing.

She tried to fight it though. There was something deeper. Something they were hiding from her. The poison in her veins fed her lies and pleasantries. On this day, she could feel red light coming through her eyelids and she could hear unfamiliar voices. "Wean her off a little," they said. "Gently, gently."

She stirred a moment and the voices faded away, but she froze under their gaze. The light around her eyelids darkened and the voices started up again as there was a soft tug of warmth at the bend of her elbow. Yet, she didn’t immediately fade. Rather, she began to drift back into her dream. 

Eden, she cooed. She reached around to pull away her daughter's blanket and to her horror, her fingers came back red. Dream Lethe shuddered, startled, and her entire body jerked. The voices, indistinguishable now, rose around her and there were hands on her own now. A hand touched her head and she was again startled to feel skin stark against her own. She moaned, flapping her red fingers, before her veins were fed with poison and she fell into darkness again.

This time, she dreamed of a grown girl. They sat with their backs to the glass of the Training Center roof. Any minute, above them, a hovercraft would silently appear and Lethe tried her hardest to hold the seconds to her chest as eagerly as she held her daughter's head there. "My darling, my Eden," she whispered into her blonde curls. "Please, you have to come home to me. You must come home. You must try your hardest. Please, baby, please live."

When she pulled away, Lethe realized she was staring into the green eyes of her own 18-year-old self, shivering in her white shift on the Training Center roof, awaiting certain death. The girl blinked back. Her face was white, unmarred by scars and both eyes worked. She cried at night, but the tears dried into nothing. And to her, Lethe spoke in a hollow voice. "The demons never leave you though." She touched the girl's chest and felt her heartbeat under skin. "They're always here. All of us are monsters when we have to be."

"But, you," she blinked and her daughter was there, her girl, now a toddler with golden curls piled like a wreath and fat legs poking out from a diaper, laughing with rosy cheeks. "But, you," she croaked out as a ladder descended from the sky and her daughter's fingers slipped from her own. "You're curing me."
Black to black. Lethe Turner, aging rapidly, slept.

Jasper's voice dragged her to the surface like a hook. "Can't you wake her?" His voice was too far away and her fingers, the only part of her hand she could move, stretched to find his. 

"Slowly," another voice said. The next rush to her veins felt like water, flushing the toxins from her. And for a moment, with a clear head, Lethe remembered.

She took to her room, a perch she occupied like always. She told the Avoxes to leave. She shut the blinds. She climbed into bed on trembling legs and marveled at the screen lit up. Then, it was a beauty, a distorted evil one. It was meant to trick her, to give her a false hope. She reached her fingers out to the screen, meaning to touch it, to reach right through and hold her daughter’s hands and then—

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Heart rate is up.”

Darkness.

When she was born, Lethe felt like she was being ripped in two. She screamed to the high heavens, to a rain-soaked rooftop as women surrounded her, pulling something from between her thighs, pushing a blanket between her teeth. Her hips were split open and she felt the pain of a thousand mothers, trying desperately to keep life alive, to bring to the world her greatest success. She spent hours pushing life into this world and felt her own blood drain from her, her own lifeline wrapped around the neck of a screaming, purple mass. She put so much life into it, felt her own drain away, that when it was placed in her arms, she promised to keep it safe. She had to. Anything worth that cost that much pain, exertion, tears and force was worth protecting.

“Come on,” a voice spoke irritably. Patricia. “Give her a little room to breathe.”

“Just a little.”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Lethe could wiggle her fingers once more. Her head turned in the pillow and her stomach lurched to feel nothing. Her blonde curls. Her baby’s curls. Gone. Bandages, only. And then, as her eyes fluttered and she caught the sight of red, she remembered—

The shadows in her room seemed to dance around her, her vision swimming in them. The screen had gone out because she’d smashed her hands through it and now she sprayed blood as she stumbled, her voice rising into a scream. She dragged the bottles from the wall, one by one. She raced to the cabinets and pulled out bottle after bottle, screaming into the voice pad. Painkillers. Vodka. Anything. She imagined it was candy, candy that would take her to a sweet place, a nice place, where Eden was, where a mass of—blood, guts, something, everything—didn’t litter the ground as easily as Lethe’s own hair that she tore from her head, blood dotting her fingernails as she dug in. She fell to her knees as they came in, white gloves, needles, stretchers, trying to hold her up as her will to live dribbled from her mouth and the darkness came quickly.

My baby.

The hands were on her again, but they didn’t seem malignant. They were her mother’s, her mother’s mother’s, all of the mothers who had lost their children. Their hips cracked, their bodies wrinkled and scarred, but they produced life and they held it close. They surrounded her, encircled her, with flaming red-hair and sunset eyes and fat fingers. They sang her name and her daughter’s name. They kissed her scarred cheeks, her stained fingers, her cracked skull. And for the first time—in how long?—Lethe heard herself speak, a soft plea, “Bring her back to me.”

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

They pushed the hands aside and filled her veins once more. They would make her sleep tonight, a black, dreamless sleep, doing whatever it took to forget her baby girl.

But, as Lethe sank and sank, feeling the water rushing in around her, filling her lungs, she knew she never could. As her womb crackled, shriveled up and retreated, she could feel her daughter’s tiny feet there, her little balled up fists. No, they couldn’t make her forget.

Eden was born from her, a part of her. And she always would be. Until her dying breath.