Stephie Marsh (slinkster_ghoul) wrote in darker_london, @ 2018-06-18 00:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | josie rhydderch, stephie marsh |
Saving (Stephie, Josie)
Stephie’s phone buzzed on her last night in Spain. It took a long time for her to find it, then once she’d figured out it had slipped down the back of the bed it took even longer to wriggle her arm behind the mattress and grab it.
It was Josie, and she was video calling.
A dozen reasons why she would be using video thundered through Stephie’s mind, none of them good. Had she been kidnapped and needed to show Stephie where she was? Had she kidnapped someone?
The kidnapping possibilities were endless.
“Hey,” Josie said. She looked tired and hard. This ruled out ‘currently being kidnapped’ but could still plausibly be ‘just killed my way out of a kidnapping’ or ‘accidentally kidnapped an angel again’.
“Heeey,” said Stephie, slowly, cautiously. “Uh, what’s happening?”
“I wanted to see your face,” Josie said. There was a fluorescent light on her hair that Stephie fervently hoped was a hospital light. “I wanted you to see mine. See I’m serious.”
“Okay,” said Stephie, trying not to freak, but freaking. Serious? This was the worst. This was going to be the worst. She didn’t know whether to stand or sit so just hovered there beside the open windows in the master bedroom, the constant crashing of the sea somewhere out there in the dark.
Night had only recently fallen, but it had taken Josie this long to gather the – was she going to call it courage? Or just frustration with her own procrastination? – to gather the whatever it was she needed to call Stephie. Or maybe she just had to wait till dark, like everything was overexposed in the sunlight, emotions included.
Josie put her phone down but propped on something so Stephie could still see her. She raked both bony hands through her hair and for a moment, cast her eyes toward the ceiling. With the wider view it was clear she was still in her hospital room; at least Stephie could take a bit of comfort from that. She wondered if she could call Peter from Thomas’s phone (plugged in beside their bed, charging) and get him up there. She wondered if Josie was going to try and kill herself on camera. “Look,” said Josie, and Stephie’s legs made the decision for her and dropped her down onto the window seat. “I just wanted you to know you’re not going to have to save me again.”
Stephie blinked, rocking back on the seat a little. “What?”
“You saved me enough already,” Josie said, and paced away, and paced back. She thumped her hands down onto the table by her phone, looking down at it, looking down at the screen. “I’m not going to make you do it again, ever. This,” she pointed to herself. “This is my problem. I don’t know how but I’ll sort it out or I’ll stay locked up in here forever. I’m not going to make you save me again.”
“Jose,” Stephie breathed, totally unprepared for this.
“I love you,” Josie said, sounding fierce about it. “I hurt you, and I don’t expect you to forgive me for it but you probably will because you’re an idiot when it comes to people you love who hurt you. I am sorry, I…” she turned away from the phone again and for a moment all Stephie could see was the wall behind her. Stephie pressed a hand against her neck, feeling her pulse race.
When Josie sat back down she sat with both fists bunched in her hair. “I’m going to figure this mess out,” she said, again. “I just wanted you to know that. And that I might not be home for a while. I’m sorry.”
For a heavy couple of moments, Stephie just stared at her phone. “Don’t… don’t pull your hair,” she said, eventually. Josie pried her fingers out of her hair and looked at them in dismay, before dropping them out of sight. “Um. Did something happen that made you decide to call me or…?”
“No, not really.” She didn’t want to tell Stephie about Ko’s offer to go to Russia with him, but if she went now it honestly would just be running away to hide out in the wilderness. She could have gone, could have framed leaving in some other way – could have painted Peter’s hospital as just another place that had tried to lock her up, could have painted Jinx and Stephie as humans trying to hamstring her, could have convinced herself Izmaylov was the best option for her. But in her heart she would have always known she was running away. The guilt would have followed her. She might have been able to fly outside during the day and maybe Ko would call that freedom but Josie knew she wouldn’t have been able to.
Stephie was looking a little sceptical and maybe it was how quickly Josie had replied. “I’ve just had a lot of time to think lately,” Josie added, which was also true. “And it’s going to be a pain in the arse but I’m going to ‘save myself’ so you don’t – so we don’t end up in situations where I hurt you, again.” She’d gone from ironic air quotes to gravely serious in the space of a sentence.
“Thank you,” Stephie said, genuinely.
“Yeah well,” Josie muttered. She hadn’t really even started yet.
“Hey – I talked to Jinx,” Stephie told her, because last time Josie had called her it had been to plead for her to lay off Jinx, not that Stephie had been laying on - bad choice of words. “We’re okay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Mostly. When she thought about Jinx and Josie together it still hurt. It was a more confusing pain to deal with than the you-shitheads-both-attacked-me one, which could at least be explained away (not excused) by remembering how much godawful pain they’d both been in. The togetherness was more… complicated. It wasn’t jealousy and it wasn’t an everpresent thing but it did nettle at her when it came up.
But overall, they were okay. “Have you seen him since then?” she asked.
“Been trying to keep away from anyone with a soul,” Josie said, resting her forehead on her hand. “Apart from Peter. I’ve called Jinx.”
Stephie spared a moment to wonder what their phone conversations were like and couldn’t do it. “Hope you’re going easy on Peter.”
“He’s fine.”
“He’ll look after you,” Stephie was certain. “Josie, thanks. Thanks for calling.”
Josie smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes and shrugged a shrug that nearly did. “Yeah,” she said. “Well.”
“We’ll be home soon, anyway,” Stephie said, and where once she might have said it to give Josie a reason to hang on till she got back, this time, she didn’t need to. Josie was hanging on for herself, not for Stephie, and it was so much better. “You’ll let me know when you want me to come visit, yeah?”
Josie swallowed, shaking her head with uncertainty. “I don’t know when that’s going to be, Stephie.” The tone in Josie’s voice – Stephie suddenly wasn’t sure if she was talking weeks, or much, much longer. How long did it take to… re-write something innate inside yourself?
It was going to take so much, and Josie knew it – look at her, even tiny on Stephie’s phone screen, her face was screaming with how much she knew it.
Josie had spent so long thinking about self-control. Every single thing she'd learned about it, Josie had to learn in her adult years. Well – starting in her late teens, really.
Her dad had separated her from her mother when Josie was young, in an attempt to stop her becoming like Marietta, and she certainly had never received any control tips from him. Her dad had set up firmly in the ‘a problem ignored is a problem solved’ camp and didn’t know how to unpack.
Nor could she learn any control lessons from Stephie, who was the biggest influence in her early teens. Stephie who first gave her the words to describe how she had started to feel about her father. Stephie had said, one day, must have been their first year of high school, that she hated going home at the end of the day because her parents looked at her like they wanted her to be someone else, and every time she opened her mouth they were surprised that she wasn’t the person they expected or wanted. Sometimes it was when she swore or yelled at them which made sense but most of the time it was, like, when she made a joke, or tried to tell them about a band she was interested in, or even just her taste in clothes. They hate all the things that make me me, she’d said, and it had opened Josie’s eyes to her dad: Yeah, he hated the thing that made her her.
Which made sense, looking back. Given that she’d killed her dog to try and find his soul. Josie would have hated the thing that made her her from the outset too, except she had Stephie, who didn’t hate her at all. Granted, she didn’t know about the dog.
Their experiences with control, generally, were all about other people; parents, teachers, and later on juvie wardens and hospital staff, trying to control them. It had been a dirty word, a restrictive word. Control was synonymous with denying who you really were and that wasn’t what teen Stephie and Josie were about. Control was something adults inflicted on you. Control was never something you inflicted on yourself.
When she’d broken out of hospital the first time, and killed her father, she’d thought, that’s it, that’s the end of anyone controlling me ever again. It was a clear and simple decision to paint him as the bad guy in her life because it meant he’d deserved what she did to him which meant she didn’t have to think about feeling any other thing but righteous. Of course, after that she’d ended up in hospital again, and there’d been Renee, Del, Jillian, Marietta.
And Josie slowly nutted out the realisation that control was the only thing that was going to stop her turning into someone like Jillian. That control and self-control were different. That it was not about denying who you were but slowly turning the person you were into the person you wanted to be.
It sucked.
And she’d tried and tried and failed and failed again. Like Jillian had tried and failed... And so this time she had to figure out a way to stop herself failing for good. Try harder... be better...
But she’d said it out loud, this time. She’d told – promised – Stephie she was going to save herself and that would make it that much harder to go back on. She’d tell Jinx the same thing, and Peter. But she’d wanted to start with Stephie.
"If I'm in here for the rest of my life..." said Josie.
Stephie exhaled sharply, her mouth stayed open. She wanted to say - you won't be, cos we'll figure it out. You won't be, you can't be, I need you. But she didn't want to let her need get tangle up with what Josie needed, right now. "Like any of us can see that far into the future," she scoffed, not as lightly as she wanted.
"Yeah," Josie guessed so. What did the alcoholics say - one day at a time? Josie wasn't about to be so cheesy out loud.
"Look, like I said," Stephie sounded firm, and sure, and Josie wanted to lean on it or, at the very least, steal some of that surety to use on herself. "Let me know when you're ready for me to come visit. However long it takes."
"Okay," Josie said, because what else could she say beside okay? She'd said everything she needed to say, for now. Said sorry, said I promise. "Isn't tonight your last night in Spain? Shouldn't you be bumping uglies with your undead boyfriend?"
Stephie grinned and ducked her head and Josie realised just how long it had been since she'd seen Stephie grin like that. She wanted to be there, teasing her in person. "He's in the shower," Stephie said.
"Yeah," said Josie. "So?"
Stephie snorted and it was such a relief - so many things about this conversation had been such a relief, even if it was mixed in with all the oh-fuck-life-is-hard-sometimes. "Alright, I'm going. Love you, Josie. Thank you."
"Mmhm," said Josie. "Goodnight."