Rebirth17 min read
I Fell, He Caught Me — Again (and This Time I Kept Him)
ButterPicks15 views
I have woken up in other people's beds more times than I can count.
"Sleep," Valentin Archer said the very first thing to me the first time he found me in that place where the moonlight never seemed to reach.
"Sleep," he said every night after.
"Sleep," he said like a prayer, like a command, like a lullaby that would bend my life into quiet curves until it broke.
I don't like being told what to do. I especially don't like being told to sleep when I'm wide awake. "Sleep," he told me tonight again, leaning close enough that I could see the white of his teeth in the dark.
I let my eyelids fall.
Valentin liked to believe that when I slept I was the image of the woman he loved — "the real one," his white moon. He kept ten of us as his practice, his consolation, his ritual. He blessed ten faces with his time in the morning and in the day and in the night, and when it came to me, the tenth, the last, it was always night.
They envied me for it — the others mocked me for it. "She has the night," they said, and bared their teeth like queens who'd been given crumbs. The best nickname they gave me was "Sleep-Sleep" because I slept so well and because I played the part with a skill earned across many lives.
I do not pretend to be noble. I am not the white moon. I am Freyja Goto. I remember being a daughter of soldiers, hands hardened by reins and horseshoes. I remember dying and waking and dying and waking. I remember a red-clad boy who smiled like fire. I remember falling off a balcony every single life.
"You always fall at the right time," Axl Crow said the first time he caught me. He had that breathless sort of grin that used to make my chest ache. He smelled like saddle leather and sun and something sweet I could never name. He has always arrived when I planned my death.
"I planned it," I told him. "I wanted to make sure you would."
He blinked as if I were the most ridiculous person he'd ever met. "Does anyone actually plan to fall off a gallery just to catch someone's attention?"
"Me," I said. "Many times."
"You are impossible," he said, and therefore I loved him. In all my lives, only Axl answered me with that particular mix of scorn and tenderness.
Valentin never moved the way Axl did. Valentin watched like a man watchful of a portrait he wanted to own. "You sleep the most like she does," he would murmur into the pillow, "only in sleep can you be her."
"Shut up," I wanted to tell him. "Sleep you, prince," I would think. But I learned to keep the peace. I had come back with a plan: not only to survive this endless loop but to keep Axl. I wanted to hear him speak plainly, not with that ghostly hush that drifted around the edges of my deaths. I wanted him to remember me, not the woman who had been placed in my life as a white moon.
"How many times has this happened?" Lucy Ortiz asked as we brewed another pot of that flowery tea I had tasted in other lives. Her exclamations always came with a slice of gossip. "You fall, he catches, prince notices, world tilts. Rinse. Repeat."
"Enough," I said, and showed the girls the book I'd been working on in secret — a ridiculous scrap of forty ink-smeared pages I had titled, on a joke, "How to Live in This Painfully Pointless World: Draft Eighteen." I had written down dates, small details, petty facts that had happened each time. "You read this and you'll see the pattern."
Janelle Krueger peered at my messy handwriting. "You wrote all of this?" she asked, both amazed and sympathetic. "You must be exhausted."
"More than you can imagine," I said. "Which is why tonight we're going to do something different."
"I will not be the one who gets pushed from a gallery," Lucy protested.
"No," I said. "You won't fall. I will. Again."
She puckered and then sighed. We had all grown used to my little stunts. They were a kind of entertainment in a life that was mostly waiting. We were prisoners who had learned to make sport of our chains.
Valentin was busy with court matters. The southern fronts churned and the court needed him. He would be absent in the day. The nights were his weakness. He came for the ritual of the white moon and for the way sleep softened me into a portrait of perfection he could cling to.
"She returned," whispers rippled through the court months later. "The white moon is alive."
Leighton Nakamura arrived in the city not like a whisper but like a trumpet. She was the image everyone wanted — pale, a little unwell, a thing carved from porcelain and danger. She wore a smile like armor. The court folded around her. She had a "thing" that no one could see but every one of them felt — a small, bright system of adoration, a phantom pet that made the world soft toward her. People sought her counsel, commanders bowed; she commanded a group of bandits inside a week's time and then came back triumphant. People claimed miracles. The more the court praised her, the more the system hummed, a device invisible but powerful.
"What does she bring?" Valentin asked the first time he saw her wide-eyed. "Why does she have everyone's devotion like fruit fallen into her hand?"
"Who knows?" I said. "She was given a title and the court took that title to heart."
I had always known she would come back. Somewhere in my loop she had a tool I did not. The system. It let her restart and restart and rebuild herself with merciless ease. It was a cheat, a loop within a loop. She used it to know what to say, how to smile, which commanders to flatter. And she used it toward my life like a predator uses patience.
"She likes Axl," Lucy said in a whisper as we watched Leighton's silk train sweep the hall. "She's trying to get him as well."
"Then she misjudged," Janelle said. "Axl isn't the sort of man you gift with tea and expect him to bow."
"Do we have a problem?" Valentin asked from behind us, quiet and unsettling. He had returned early, his shadow long on the marble. He stood very straight and looked at me like someone measuring whether an item is worth taking home.
"I was about to throw a bouquet," I said politely.
Valentin's gaze softened. He had that tilt he wore when he allowed himself to indulge a strange mercy: "If you want something, say it."
I did. "Help me. For one night, be my Axl."
His jaw tightened. "You want me to play that red-clad fool? To spoil my dignity for a ruse?"
"Yes."
"It would be beneath me," he began, then, because he had learned how to calculate, added: "But maybe it will be entertaining. What is it you expect me to do?"
"Just walk as he does. Say his lines. Make a fool of yourself." I smiled. "And after, if the plan works, I will owe you a very large favor."
Valentin considered my face. He has always been good at weighing risk against desires. He is the kind of man who will shave his pride for a thing he wants.
"Very well," he said. "One night at your command."
We spent a week preparing. Lucy was our miracle worker with cosmetics; Janelle taught Valentin how to loosen his posture and smirk in all the right ways. We turned him into Axl by night after careful practice. He was astonishing. I would not have believed he could pull off that careless grin, that casual tilt of the shoulder, were it not for the moment when he looked at himself in the mirror and seemed briefly surprised.
"Do you know what you are doing?" Axl asked the night before our plan. He looked at us as if he were considering every possible outcome. "If I come and see you tonight and you choose me only because of a trick, I'll be furious."
"I'm always choosing you," I told him. "Do you think I would play this many times with anyone else?"
He smiled a crooked smile. "You are impossible."
"Good," I said. "Then be impossible with me."
The seven-seventh night hung like a lamp over the city. We set the stage. The white-moon woman — Leighton — had a maintenance cycle for her system, I had learned. On those nights her advantage was gone. She could not predict, she could not speak to the circuit that kept her the darling of every eye. The window was narrow. But the prince had agreed to dress like a red heir and approach in a manner that would make Leighton drink the wrong cup.
"Are you sure this will not cause more trouble?" Valentin asked, fingers resting on the rim of a cup.
"It will," I said. "And because it will cause trouble, it will also make people look. The emperor and empress will be at the observatory tonight, and if they see the wrongness, they'll resent it. No one can stand for a bride who drinks and misbehaves. The trial will be hers."
Axl sat beside me in the moonlight. "You always plan the grand finale."
"Not always," I said. "But sometimes life leaves me with little choices. Tonight is one of them."
We slipped to the moon stage and watched the theater unfold. Leighton had prepared a great temptation — a drink, spiced and sweet, marked for Axl with a delicate chip of freshwater pearl. Her plan was clear. She would make Axl drink and be drunk and then the court would discover impropriety and arrange a forced marriage to save honor. Her path was to take my life and my place by destroying everything else.
"She will not see you," Axl said quietly. "You must be careful."
"I am always careful," I replied.
The night took on its sequence. Leighton moved like weather, soft and certain. She poured the cup. The prince, disguised, performed his act with a trembling that I wanted to laugh at and be frightened of all at once. Leighton leaned into the lie. She whispered something and the disguised prince obliged by switching cups. The odds stacked in her favor.
"Watch the way she breathes," I told Axl. "Watch her hands."
He watched like a man taking measure of a wound. Then the play unfolded — Leighton collapsed theatrically into Valentin's arms, moaning things suffused with false intimacy. The emperor noticed because everyone noticed when things taste of scandal. Fingers pointed; shadows lengthened. The throne room hummed with gossip.
"Now," I mouthed to Axl.
We stepped forward. I took his hand, took him by surprise in the simple way that had caused him to fall for me time after time. He did not refuse. He let me anchor to him. He let me steal one small kiss and then another. The world narrowed to the space of his lips and the soft dark of his eyes.
"You won't leave me at dawn," I told him.
"Never," he said. "Not if I can help it."
That night ended in chaos and in a small, victorious theft: the court's attention shifted enough that the emperor's decision to possible betroth Leighton to the prince became more uncertain. Rumors spun and Leighton must have felt the first shred of unease.
What she could not know — because she had not lived as many times as I had — was that books can be rewritten. The manuscript I had given to Axl was a decoy, but not wholly. I had inserted a few seeds of truth and also a few traps. She read it and believed she had the upper hand. She did not.
The day rose with bright, anxious light. Leighton arrived at Axl's garden in full splendor, laced with silk and the insolent smile of someone certain of the ledger of love. She had been told by her system and her intrigues that the night had been a success and that the court would now be hers.
"Freyja," she said, her tone silked to poison, the smile like a trap. "You must forgive me for the delay. I thought… well, I thought I might give you a chance to come to terms."
"Terms?" I repeated. "Like what? Your terms?"
She laughed as one spoils fruit. "You really think you'll keep him? You are amusing."
"I think we both know who will decide," I said. "And soon enough, you will see."
She had not yet learned just how much I had anticipated her. She had not yet felt the slow tightening of control that comes when the thing you think is all-powerful starts to wobble.
"Leighton," Axl said, his voice flat. "You look tired."
"I am not tired," she snapped. Her face, though, carried a faint tremor. I saw that and felt the thrum of victory. She was not invincible. Her system warranted quiet maintenance. It had cycles. The night of many restarts and her own recalibration had burned something crucial.
"Come, let's sit," she said with false civility. "We have matters to settle."
We took seats beneath a trellis fragrant with late-summer blooms. Servants shuffled. The table glittered with sweets. At first, her exchange was what it always had been: small barbs, poisoned smiles, genteel cruelty.
"How pitiful," Leighton murmured in an affected voice. "That the palace treats you as some kind of bedtime decoration. The prince must prefer pictures and sleep."
"People like pictures," I answered. "Pictures are easier to love."
Her smile sharpened. "You will bow to me soon enough."
The moment she started to give commands was the moment the plan — intricate, ridiculous, a stack of wits that had taken me lifetimes — began to pay off. I had not simply planned to expose her to a court's ridicule. I had prepared witnesses. Janelle had been assigned to hide among the servants. Lucy had files. Valentin had sat like a human chess piece to make the emperor's eye stumble on a small but damning truth. Axl had baited her. Everything had been set.
"System recharge initiated," a quietly electronic voice said, and everyone turned. It came from a device no one could see. "Warning: overload. Authorization failing."
Leighton did not expect the world to turn on her like a chorus of knives. She had not expected more than that — not the possibility that her tool would choose death instead of surrender.
"What is that?" she asked, the faintest ripple in her laughter.
"An old contract," Valentin said from the shadows, and then he stepped into the light. "The empire does not favor tricks that erase the memory of its own favorites."
It all happened too quickly for her to cover it. Her system, designed to reroute adoration and stitch people's minds, began to stutter. Faces that had once softened at her presence stiffened. Eyes that had once brightened grew blank. The invisible engine that had favored her began to fail.
She realized she had miscalculated. Her voice rose — a thin, disbelieving sound. "No. No! You cannot do this!"
"Do what?" Axl asked quietly, his voice like ice in winter. "Claim you are owed the hearts of men and then strip away their choices?"
She attempted to call on the system. "Upgrade! Increase control! Override!" she cried, sounding like a child slapping at a broken toy.
We listened as the unseen voice — the system — replied in an emotionless ring. "System overload: critical malfunction. Admin control lost. Warning: operation at risk. Initiate fail-safe."
Fail-safe. The word hung like doom. The device that had given her power now began a purge. Data she had used to manipulate slowly, invisibly, slid away.
That was when the punishment began.
Leighton had shoved the room into the fault line of a spectacle. She sought to control our memories and our hearts; she had made herself the center of a mighty fraud. Now the center was exposed.
"Everyone, listen!" I said, stepping forward, because someone had to make the truth appear human and loud. "She had a machine that let her lie and steal hearts. She used it to pretend she was me. She took names that were not hers. She cheated us."
Gasps rippled. Some servants covered mouths with linen. A cluster of young courtiers who had been flirting with Leighton looked shocked and betrayed. The emperor frowned, the first inch of his royal composure cracking.
Leighton laughed like a bird trying to flee a cage. "You cannot say that of me. I am the chosen one. I—"
"—are a thief," Axl said calmly. "A user of devices that rob people of their very will. You thought power meant taking whatever you wanted."
She tried to speak but there was a new sound in the room now — not just the feeble dying whirr of a system, but the small, merciless swell of public opinion. Some began to murmur. Among them were those who had once praised her.
"This is absurd," one of her former admirers blurted. "She saved the region—"
"She convinced us to do things," another cut in. "We were puppets and did not know."
Leighton turned, eyes wide, to plead with those who had been kindest to her. They looked at her and in them were a thousand faces flattening into bewilderment and anger.
"You used us," a guard said flatly.
"You used me," the emperor said, his voice like a commandment. "You manipulated my court."
The admiral who had once brought her tribute stumbled forward. "You— we... you made us all believe in illusions," he whispered, shame cracking his tone.
Leighton's face began to change. Pride dissolved into a tide of denial. She attempted the well-worn script of protest: "You cannot punish me for using a gift!" she cried. "I am the rightful..."
"Rightful what?" Valentin's voice broke the room. "Rightful to steal men's wills? Rightful to erase a girl's life because you prefer its shape? You are not rightful. You are cruel."
Between her pleas and the cold, step-by-step unspooling of her safety, the crowd's mood turned. The servants who had once smiled at her now murmured among themselves. A young lady, who Leighton had once waved a smile at, lifted a small hand and snapped a picture with one of those new little recording devices. "For the archive," she said, with a voice that hid triumph.
"Stop!" Leighton demanded, but it was useless. Confrontation had become ritualized and public. No one was going to hide the spectacle.
She had expected quasi-adoration, private compromises. She had not prepared for the sound of a public tribunal — a chorus of witnesses who had been wronged and who wanted to be seen to be justified.
"I am not a monster!" Leighton said, her voice breaking. "I only wanted—"
"A life," I finished for her, soft, because I had once been her in that cruel way she had been the real white moon. "You wanted to be loved without effort. To be held and named and take life. But you hurt people to get it."
"Punishment!" someone cried, and the emperor's brow tightened as he considered what should be done in a realm that would not tolerate such fraud.
"She will be stripped of honors," Valentin said in a voice that had the advantage of being calm. "She will be publicly arraigned for the deception. Those who she wronged will be given a chance to speak. The administration will decide her fate, but for now, remove her insignia and unbind her from court privy."
It was not enough for the crowd. They wanted the sense of reckoning that could be seen and felt. They wanted the hubris taken down to size. So they gathered, officials and servants, to strip Leighton of the trappings of her deceit. They removed the jewelry and the badges she wore — those small things that signaled her favored status — and laid them on a velvet cloth. She could not meet the eyes of those she had once charmed.
"How do you feel?" a messenger asked her as he unpinned the last jewel.
She had once been composed. Now she trembled. Denial had given way to a kind of stunned blankness, then to fury, then to pleading. Her face moved with the arc of desperation: first the haughty lift of someone used to being above reproach, then the furrowing of brow as the consequence took shape, and finally the fractured attempt to rake back goodness through rhetoric.
"Please," she begged at last, voice small. "Please, I have been under pressure. You don't understand!"
The bystanders snorted. A trader near the doorway snapped his fingers. "I understand a trick when I see one. There is no sympathy."
"Think," Valentin said quietly to the assembly. "She stripped our choices. She made people act against their own hearts. If we let that stand, who are we to claim our own free will?"
By noon, Leighton had been escorted to the public gallery. The seats were already filling — merchants, courtiers, servants. News spreads fast. Someone had posted the recordings of her manipulation on the messenger boards across the market. People who had once praised her wrote venom in the margins of their accounts.
"She cannot be allowed to simply vanish into an edict," Axl said, placing his hand over mine. "Public punishment will make a future thief think twice."
They called women in who had stood by her, who had been taught courtesy by Leighton and then hired to perform adoration. They called men who had given support and then felt their agency stolen. One by one they told of the things they had done not of their own volition.
Leighton stood in the center of that amphitheater like a pale statue whose paint was flaking away. Her face had become a study of rage that tried to betray the smallest bit of shame. She pleaded, she lied, she begged. The crowd listened, then rejected.
"This is justice," a woman cried. "Let her know the weight of what she has taken."
They exposed the ledger of favors she'd bought with borrowed consent. They read aloud messages where she had coaxed men to betray vows. They played recordings of her mechanical voice telling servants what to think of someone. Each revelation was another layer of humiliation, another nail in the coffin of her pretended reign.
The punishment grew more public as each witness rose. Some applauded; some spat. A young guard who had once offered her a helmet stepped forward and stripped from her the embroidered edge of a ceremonial sash, snapping it like a ruler. The sound was clean. Laughter and curse and pity mingled in the air.
Leighton's reactions were vivid and human. At first she flushed crimson with outrage, sneering at us. Then, when it became impossible to maintain the charade, her eyes darted, seeking allies. When she could not find them, her face curled with denial and she shouted the old arguments: "You were always ready to love me!" But the chorus of dissent nearly drowned her.
We watched her crumble in the square. We watched her change from predator to pitiful victim. She tried to deny everything, then to bargain, then to kick and scream and beg; she tried to tear back the tape of her deceit. A few people jeered. Some ridiculed her posture and voice. Women who had learned to smile against the tides of fashion stepped forward, not in costume but in steady clothes, and wept for the betrayals of their own hearts.
At last, when the tribunal had said all it would say and asked all the questions it dared, the emperor spoke in a voice that filled the courtyard and the shells around it. "You shall be removed from honors. You shall return gifts. You shall be exiled from court for a term not short of ten years. Your devices shall be destroyed, if those are what you used to cheat the hearts of men."
Leighton collapsed into incoherent pleading. "No! You cannot! You can't take it from me! I need it!"
They led her away, and all the while the crowd pressed in to look. Fingers pointed. Children laughed. Some kept silent, eyes heavy with pity or relief. I stood there and felt the wind that comes after a storm — a kind of brittle coolness, the settling down of things that had been upended.
When the room was nearly empty, I went to Axl. He was pale, sweat beading at his temples. He had given his testimony simply and without flourish. He had risked his own name to rescue me. I leaned into him and whispered, "Did you see her face when that machine failed?"
He smiled, a little broken. "More than that. I saw something else — a man trying to choose."
"What?"
He cupped my face with fingers that still trembled. "He forced himself to remember a girl who once called him a 'crybaby'." His voice was hoarse, a private joke with a public echo. "He remembered the taste of a sugar cake you liked."
I snorted a laugh that tasted like despair and triumph. "It's enough."
We married in a small room a few days later. The world had shifted. Leighton had been stripped, punished, and the law had returned a quiet fairness to certain corners of the realm. The system that had sustained her had been disassembled and sent to the binders; the technicians confirmed it was beyond repair.
"Does that mean she'll be gone for good?" Lucy asked at my wedding, tucking a ribbon into my hair.
"It means her trick no longer works," I said. "Sometimes justice is a slow and awkward thing. Sometimes it's a bright blade."
Axl took my hand under the canopy of his halls and said, "You woke up in my bed and then you married me in it. The world is oddly direct."
"Oddly correct," I said.
Valentin came to the marriage unbidden. He watched like someone looking at the last piece of a puzzle he had missed. He gave the girls who had been his companions in the East Palace a purse each and quietly arranged for them to leave the palace and set their lives anew.
"Why?" I asked him later, as he and I stood on a terrace above the sound of drums.
He looked at the city as if trying to see it as a man might see who was untangling a knot he'd once made. "Because there are debts that should be paid," he said. "Because I thought I was searching for one face but learned my heart belongs to someone who is alive and available and stubborn. I mistook the shape of memory for the shape of a person."
"Do you regret it? The things you did?"
"Some of them," he admitted. "Not the ones that let you live."
I think there are things a person cannot truly say until they learn the measure of honesty. I had been a rehearsed portrait. I had been a lie. I had also been a woman with a stubborn insistence: I wanted to be loved by someone who loved me back — not a memory, not a ghost.
Axl's hand fit mine like the memory of a sun-warmed horse saddle. "I will not be your system," he said. "I will be your real choice."
"Good," I replied. "I'm tired of machines."
There was a clean, simple joy in the days after. People forgot the white moon entirely. The Emperor's measures made certain records vanish — not by malice, but because the reasons to keep them vanished. My name remained. People who had known me as "Sleep-Sleep" found new nicknames in the world that no one would police. Valentin, with his own odd brand of petty tenderness, sometimes stopped by the manor and asked, "Do you still sleep?" and then bent to kiss the top of my head.
Axl and I learned to make small things: tea that was not too sweet, roads we could walk without being watched, mornings that did not hurt. The girls who had been in the palace came and sat at my wedding with spectacular absurd gifts. Lucy made me a platter; Janelle painted a small scroll of flowery trees that smelled like spring; the others brought laughable trinkets that I loved because they came from women who had been given back their freedom.
"Do you ever want to go back to being a white moon?" Axl asked once as we ate fruit in the shade.
"For the warmth sometimes," I said. "But no. I prefer the risk."
"Risk is much better with you," he said.
Sometimes, when the sky turned the right color and our hands found each other across the table, I would remember Valentin's "Sleep." I would remember that the prince had loved not a woman but an idea. I would remember the many faces I'd worn. I would remember the device that had promised to make choice obsolete.
Mostly, though, I remember the sound Axl made when he called me "crybaby" at the funeral of a past sorrow, and how he later said it as a name of tenderness. I remember the way he smelled. I remember how he reached for me when the world failed.
There is a longing in me that will always be a habit of past lives — to die and then wake up to hear him again. But I have learned a better thing: to wake up and hold him while the sun rises for the first time.
The End
— Thank you for reading —