The Dream of the Butterfly

Marcy was twelve the first time she heard of the dream of the butterfly.

She remembers this moment vividly. She’d read it in a manga, a seinen- a story aimed to adults. It had felt transgressive at the time; she was reading something forbidden, something purposely kept away from her, something not even Sasha would do (because she had no interest in mangas, but that was irrelevant.) Marcy had cracked it open bracing herself for mountains of gore, sex, and a mouthful of other mature themes her teenage hormones craved.

Sadly, the manga did not actually feature any of that. Marcy did not get to see any tasteful nudity, nor any exposed guts.  She did, however, get plenty of philosophical concepts.

There once was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. Spoke the woman on the page, fiddling with her pipe. He didn't know that he was a man. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable human. But he didn't know if he was the man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.

She hadn’t really understood the concept, at the time. She had thought the words pretty, but in the way poetry is pretty; all aesthetic, but not a lot of sense in real life. How couldn’t someone know that hey are awake? How could anyone ever doubt that they are real?

And now Marcy is fourteen, staring up at Anne’s ceiling, and it occurs to her that she has become the butterfly.

The butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences – in other words, they have non-linear impacts on very complex systems. For instance, when a butterfly flaps its wings in India, that tiny change in air pressure could eventually cause a tornado in Iowa.

No, not that butterfly, though- it does apply to her too, doesn’t it? If you trace events back to their true origin, she’s the one who kickstarted it all- Earth’s invasion, Amphibia’s ruin, her friends’ wounds…

Sasha’s arm is thrown over Marcy. Anne is curled by her side. Their breath is slow, steady, a comforting rhythm to her ears. They’re asleep.

Marcy doesn’t dare to be.

Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body, characterized by altered consciousness, relatively inhibited sensory activity, reduced muscle activity and inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles during rapid eye movement sleep, and reduced interactions with surroundings. It is necessary to all living beings to survive.

The core’s voice is a deep, blocky thing in her mind. It’s dead. It’s dead in that it has no will and no desire, it’s dead in all the ways that matter. But it’s still here. A body with no scavengers will remain in place unable to decay, and Marcy’s mind holds none of them. Or maybe it’s her, the scavenger, unwittingly feasting on the bones of this unholy god. Marcy’s body is a haunted house, and its ghost is millennia of knowledge from a world she never belonged to.

Marcy hasn’t had a single dream since she came back from Amphibia. Only memories.

In her sleep, she is Queen Newton, the renowned warlord who brought prosperity to Amphibia. She is Alastor, the strategist who conquered the Eliatropes. She is Tsilaozi, and the Heron Rider, and Cyrus the Wise, and-

She is Marcy. The butterfly.

She doesn’t know if she is Marcy dreaming that she is them, or if she is them dreaming that she is Marcy. She doesn’t know if she ever woke up from Darcy’s possession. Sasha skin is soft against hers and Anne is warm against her chest and Marcy does not know. 

Croakard's delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome or Croakard's syndrome, is a rare mental disorder in which the affected person holds the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs.

No, no, it’s not a belief. It’s a doubt, and that makes it worse. If she was certain she was dreaming, she could find a way to wake up, find a way to cease this charade and be done with it. But she isn’t. She does not know. And she never will.

Slowly, as to not wake up the other two, Marcy sits up. She steps over Anne’s body and slides out of bed. She needs to go to the bathroom. Some water would do wonders.

Water, food, and sleep you are are the three cornerstones of health- not both mental and physical. These three things should fucking helping always be a priority in any situation.  

The core is dead. It holds no emotion and no desire. It is simply a mass of code in a recursive loop with no end condition, supplying Wikipedia articles relevant to her last thoughts. But on god, if she doesn’t feel like it’s openly mocking her at times.

She stumbles her way to the bathroom.  She doesn’t bother turning the light on. She makes her way to the sink and turn the water on, splash it on her face. She can feel her scars under her fingers. Here, across the bridge of her nose, the line the helmet left upon her. There, next to the chin, a cut Sasha gave the core.

It was her face, then. It belongs to her again now. The scars will never let her take this fact for granted ever again.

“Marcy?”

Anne’s voice is soft and quiet, but it makes her jump all the same. It’s too easy for her to get lost in her own thoughts, with how long she’s spent locked in them. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

Under the dim light of the moon seeping through the window, she sees Anne shake her head. It’s probably a lie. 

(Two in the morning is the time for confessions. It’s when Sasha had told them I don’t want to be clingy, I want to keep getting better, but I’m so scared so scared to lose you two again, I swear I’m trying but when you take too long to reply to a text I keep thinking of you dying before my eyes and it’s- terrifying. It’s when Anne had told them I heard Amphibia, back then. The song of the world. I hear the song of Earth, too. The crickets outside. The birds tapping on the bark. Your heartbeat under my ears. I’m aware of every sound at once. I don’t remember what silence is like. It’s no wonder, really, that she noticed a pulse missing from her bed.)

“Can’t sleep?” She asks, walking up to Marcy.

It’s Marcy’s turn to shake her head. “Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that it’s all real. That it’s all over. That I am real.”

Dissociation, as a concept that has been developed over time, is any of a wide array of experiences, ranging from a mild emotional detachment from the immediate surroundings to a more severe disconnection from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality.

Anne nods. Of course she does. The three of them are the only one who can truly understand how deeply Amphibia has affected them.

“Mar-mar,” she brings a hand to Marcy’s cheek. Her fingers are calloused, from tennis, from war, from life. “Mar-mar, look at me.”

Anne’s voice is so soothing, and Marcy’s mind is full of static. It’s easy to obey. It’s easier than to think. Marcy turns her head, towards (her best friend) (the love of her life) (one of the two people could ever know what’s it like to have another world buried under your skin) Anne, and stares.

“Open your mouth.” Anne intones. Her thumb pulls on Marcy’s lower lip. Marcy does just that, and suddenly the thumb is inside her mouth, pressing down her tongue.

“Bite.” Marcy’s mouth shuts. Her front teeth rest on Anne’s knuckles. She makes a conscious effort to stop here, to keep the pressure low.

The thumb wiggles suddenly, moving to set itself on the side of her jaw, between her molars. “I said, bite. ”

And so Marcy does.

She feels the flesh cave under the pressure, feels the shape of the bone beneath. Her skin is bitter on the side of her tongue, human-bark-earth-Anne, a taste she can never hope to describe but would recognize anywhere.

“You know this.” Anne says. “My body. My blood. My bones. You know me.” And she’s right, Marcy does, she does, she’s bled for Anne and Anne had bled for her just like they had both bled for Sasha and these red ties are stronger than any string of fate. “This is real, Marcy. This is real, and so am I. This is real, and so are you.”

Her teeth sink into Anne’s finger like an anchor in the seabed. She might be hurting Anne. She wants to be hurting Anne. Want to leave scars and bruises and tear that skin open, want to leave long-lasting evidence that she was here, she existed and mattered and here is the proof.

The monstrosity of her desire is such that it takes her a moment to realize that it drowns out even the core’s voice.

(A spark of twisted, ugly satisfaction lights up at the back of her mind. The core took and took and took, but this- Anne is giving it to her willingly. The core shed blood and broke bones but it never, never got to know the true intimacy of being offered a knife and a bared throat.)

Slowly, Marcy pries her own jaws open, and pulls Anne’s hand away. That line of thought is, objectively, mildly worrying, but she suspects that might be the exact point. “That’s one hell of a grounding technique.”

It’s too dark to properly see, but she can hear the smile in Anne’s voice. “But it’s effective, isn’t it?”

Marcy runs a finger over Anne’s thumb. She can feel the imprint of her teeth on her knuckles. It makes her feel a lot of things she doesn’t quite know the name of.

“Come on,” Anne says, sliding her fingers between Marcy’s. “let’s go back to bad. Sasha will freak out if she wakes up without us.”

She starts to walk away, when Marcy says: “If you let bite you again, I might leave a bruise.” Now that she knows what it’s like, what Anne feels like under her jaws- 

One hell of a grounding technique, at the cost of the awakening of a hunger deeper than anything Marcy has ever known.

Anne pauses, for a second. Her hand tightens around Marcy’s.

“I’d let you.” She says, simply, and Marcy knows than whether she is the girl or the butterfly, she is loved, and that is all that truly matters.

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