stella king 👩‍🍳 nina zenik (molasses) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-12-09 22:12:00 |
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Stella had no idea how it had happened. The day had started off a good one, though it wasn’t any different than her usual day. She had opened the cafe bright and early and set to cooking the dishes she’d prepared the night before for that morning’s breakfast rush. Shortly after the first wave was done, she’d left her shift manager to handle the lingering crowd while she’d popped in the back to log onto the office computer and order another fun delivery for Everett (with whom she was still keen on engaging on this fun game of not-quite-hard-to-get tag) and the afternoon had only improved from there. There had been no indication, no sign, that her very ordinary day was doing to descend into chaos so quickly and so thoroughly. The incident had begun with a group of guys she’d gone to school with in the area. Nate Cantrell, Pete Harris, Matt Gorski, Trevor Eubanks--if the dictionary were to be illustrated, their likenesses would indisputably have been rendered right beneath the word douchenozzle. Well, they would, she thought, had that actually been a word recognized by Oxford. The sentiment remained the same. She’d despised the group since she’d been in school with them. They’d been the sort to make sure everyone around them knew they were somehow better, and that had never been more evident than in how they had treated people like Leonard Morehead, or whatever name he went by these days. Stella herself hadn’t exactly been the popular type, though her feathers had always been difficult to ruffle which made her less fun of a target. Even as the bell chimed signaling their entrance, they were already making a scene. Stella’s shift manager, Lindsay, was a lovely young girl, early twenties, and Stella could easily admit that she was gorgeous. Nate had certainly noticed this fact, and it wasn’t the first time he’d made a point to single the poor girl out the moment he’d entered Stella’s establishment. One minute Nate was leering at Lindsay over the counter, letting his lecherous words fall from his lips while touching the tips of her dark plait that hung over her shoulder while she visibly recoiled from the attention. The next minute, Nate was falling to the ground, clutching his chest as though he were having some kind of heart attack and Stella was watching it unfold from just beside the bakecase, hands inconspicuously outstretched while her blood boiled with anger and the drumming of his heartbeat pounded through her palms as though his heart were some tangible thing she could control with the flick of her wrist. As soon as she became aware of it, though, she knew. She knew that it was a thing she could control, that she was controlling. She didn’t know if she was more horrified by Nate’s despicable behavior, or…this. Panic replaced her anger and her hands shook as the icy realization that the man in front of her was writhing in pain and gasping for was because of something she was doing settled into her bones. She didn’t know how to stop it. But she couldn’t let him die, either, no matter what he’d done. Stella wasn’t God and God knew that Nina wasn’t either. Taking a steadying breath, Stella closed her eyes and focused on his heartbeat in her hands and willed it to beat normally as she eased up on the hold she’d had on it. And then it was gone and Stella was left with nothing coursing through her veins but the sheer terror of what she’d almost done, and the sickening uncertainty of how it had happened in the first place. She was unwilling to admit that there was a small, desperate part of her that also felt relieved that it was there, like an essential part of her she hadn’t really known she was missing until it was returned to her. In the chaos, no one had seen the role Stella had played in the scene before them and, considering that someone had been seemingly having a heart attack right in front of her, it was easy to attribute the tears that were blurring her vision to the near death experience. Though she hated to do it, she turned to Lindsay and said, “I need to go. Don’t let him leave until an ambulance gets here.” To her credit, Lindsay didn’t question this sudden squeamishness and simply nodded in compliance. Stella hurried into the back room and pulled her apron off, grabbed her purse and her jacket, and snuck out the back door. She’d have to come back for her car later, she decided. She couldn’t trust her shaking hands to steer her home, and she didn’t want to almost kill someone twice in one day. A fresh wave of tears hit her as the thought surface and she stopped to stare down at her hands. For the first time since she’d started dreaming, she could almost understand why the Fjerdans were so afraid of her, why Matthias was so afraid of her. Bruja. Maybe the word wasn’t so wrong, after all. |