Re: Derek's place: Derek/Marta
She'd had fights and fights and fights, and if she could live on them, she would have been as large and as bloated as a whale. Derek couldn't though, and while she accepted that to be her, to be int his place, meant a certain type of loneliness, it wasn't so different as the ones she'd experienced in years prior.
"Yes, you can," she lilted. "You won't, and that is altogether different." She sipped her water, still silently regarding Marta over the rim of the glass. There was a nuance to humans, and to this human in particular, that she never quite understood. "I cannot make you. Only consider that if something is rotten, that it should be cut out, not allowed to allow everything to fester."
The flinch was noted, but she was already moving past it. Her head tipped back and music began playing faintly from the living room, the woman's voice clear and bright. "They are. Perhaps they aren't universally shitty, but they are shitty to you. That's all that matters."
She tilted her head again. "Your fate is. But there's always room for you to make it bigger. Some things are unchangeable. They are so much a part of you that they could not belong to any other. These can't be changed. Like your desire to be pleasing, to be found pleasing in someone else's eyes -- and you're looking in everyone's."