Promises (Stephie, Spectre, Abby)
Stephie had been trying to work out her own feelings about Spectre for a while.
On the one hand, Spectre had done something that hurt her, Marie, Thomas and his kids. On the other, it was Spectre, and he wasn’t an evil angel hell-bent on tearing their lives apart, and Stephie was struggling a bit with the shades of grey morality this fact was causing. It was like Jinx, she couldn't hate him. The betrayal made her sick, but she couldn't hate him.
How could Spectre just... leave? How could he leave this family reeling in such an... ordinary, not-demonic, real-life way? He wasn’t possessed or kidnapped or anything. He just left.
It terrified Stephie, that he was even able to leave. The worst part of betrayal was that it never came from your enemies.
When it came to Marie, Stephie was braced for supernatural attacks. If Lyon ever found out that Charon had a daughter... the thought was such a hard one to manage because the fear of it was so great it was like whenever it jumped out at her it threw sand in her eyes and screamed constantly in her ears. It was very hard to calmly plan an escape and how she’d go into hiding when half her mind was screaming.
When it came to her friends, Stephie was braced for them to die, too. She couldn’t not brace herself. She and Maiya the therapist were trying to work on this because living in constant fear of both Lyon and death wasn’t ideal, but it was a logical fear, so Stephie wasn’t letting it go. She had spent so many sessions drawing lines around the fears in her head so that she could try and catch them whenever they spread out of the healthy caution zone, but it was so, so hard to tell when a fear was going to save her life or destroy it by eating away at who she was and turning her into a furious panic-monster.
She was so used to her anger being this thing that shrunk her world into tunnel vision till all she could see was the person making her angry and all she could think about was what she could do to rip at them where it would hurt the most.
She wasn’t used to this anger that was complicated by so many different factors. Like Thomas. Stephie had the idea that if Thomas and the kids hadn’t been around, if Spectre had just left her and Marie, she’d be way, way angrier, and it wasn’t because she wasn’t furious on behalf of Thomas and his two, but it was the fact that Thomas was angry on behalf of Thomas and his two. Which meant Stephie had a different role; she wanted to look after him. She felt, instinctively, the need to look after him as well as Marie. And maybe that translated into not being as angry, not being tunnel-vision angry with Spectre as she would have been? Not because she was denying or repression the emotion, not really, but simply because Thomas and his two didn’t need any more anger in their lives. If she wanted to support Thomas then she needed to be not as angry and hurt as he was. Still both angry and hurt, but not overwhelmingly so.
Maybe there were flaws in this, but that’s where she was at.
Part of the reason she wasn't as angry, too, was that she'd been pouring it into a furiously stubborn we don't even need you kind of attitude. She and Marie were surviving. She'd needed a lot of help earlier in the year, after Jinx, through Miles, but the help was willing and forthcoming. And this last month? This last month had been a revelation into how good life could actually be. They were surviving, they were safe, they were even having fun.
But the we don't even need you had a big ol' flaw in it.
Underlying everything, there was the promise to Jax that he was breaking and Stephie couldn’t even understand that. But, she had caught herself thinking ‘breaking’ and not ‘broken’ which meant at least some part of her believed it wasn’t over completely. It couldn’t be. Marie needed...
Marie needed Jax. But instead she had Stephie and Spectre. And Spectre had just... decided not to, anymore.
If she got furiously, painfully angry at him, that might be the last straw, and he might leave forever. And Stephie could not let that happen.
So: anger, confusion, hurt, love, terror, stubbornness, and a frantically fierce desire to make sure Marie was protected.
Where did you even start?
By crossing the lawn Thomas and Abby shared and knocking on the door, Stephie guessed. She hesitated before knocking though, texting Thomas: Glad I still have my new jacket on. I feel fucking bombproof. Never taking it off.
Then: I'll let you take it off instead. Rawr.
Then: Okay, knocking now and she did, putting her phone away in one of the pockets.