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Language:
English
Stats:
Published:
2025-11-13
Completed:
2025-11-14
Words:
35,000
Chapters:
5/5
Comments:
15
Kudos:
13
Bookmarks:
5
Hits:
207

A Wait So Long

Summary:

'Maybe, all the years they’d spent apart from each other were nothing more than an intermission – a meanwhile – and Alaska just had to wait for her Sharon to reappear, and then they could forget all this wasted in between.'

It's been five-and-a-bit years since they last saw each other. Thirteen since they fell apart. Now, Alaska has a show in Des Moines, Iowa, and a decision to make.

Notes:

How have I got here? I couldn’t tell you. 35,000 words of Shalaska! Character study! Willam cameos! Lack of plot! Pathological avoidance! Melodrama! If you like the sound of any of those things, hopefully you’ll like this.

Warnings for gratuitous referencing, overuse of the em-dash, pet-names, and, more seriously – Sharon’s alcoholism, teenage years, and cancellation (effects of, no details) and some fairly graphic smut. Obviously, real people are treated as characters, this is all made-up etc etc.

Please let me know what you think, even if you hate it, because I’d really love nothing more than to know. Title is from Here Comes Your Man by Pixies ;) And, finally, epigraphs are all taken from Richard Siken’s beautiful poem, ‘Meanwhile’, and jumbled around as I saw fit.

Chapter 1: Prologue

Chapter Text

                       The way we move through time and space, or only time.

The way it’s night for many miles, and then suddenly 

                                                                                      it’s not, it’s breakfast

      and you’re standing in the shower for over an hour,

                                         holding the bar of soap up to the light.

 

There were moments where she saw, very clearly, in her memories – a break. There was a Sharon before, and a Sharon after, and these were two separate people, only maybe the first Sharon was still living somewhere within, or behind, the second. And she understood that, in these moments, she viewed the first Sharon as the true Sharon and was waiting for that Sharon to shed this new, false person and emerge, shining and 27 and real again. If this did happen, Alaska felt that she would be the only one who could pull her out from whatever dark place she’d been hiding in.

This was massively unfair, of course. Alaska knew that it said a lot more about her than it did about Sharon. About her selfishness, her neediness, her ego. Nothing really about Sharon’s desires or who she was; the person she’d become on her own, without Alaska. Still, she couldn’t shake the thought that this would happen one day – maybe, all the years they’d spent apart from each other were nothing more than an intermission – a meanwhile – and she just had to wait for her Sharon to reappear, and then they could forget all this wasted in between. 

But she was only able to think about it like that at very specific times, and only when she allowed herself; namely, past midnight, in bed alone, after smoking a joint. Which didn’t happen often anymore. So mostly it materialised as a feeling, a strange ache at the top of her stomach, beneath her ribs, and a voice saying, ‘I see you, come out.’ A flash. And then gone.