esau dearborn (bluebeard). (curtainsmatch) wrote in fableless, @ 2016-10-12 06:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log/thread, anahita abedini, esau dearborn |
WHO: Ana Abedini & Esau Dearborn.
WHAT: Flashback to when everything went wrong.
WHERE: Woodsbridge Academy.
WHEN: Mid-2004.
WARNINGS: Tale outing, swearing, threats.
PROMPT: Self-fulfilling Prophecy.
College was better than Ana could have imagined life to be, back in New York. Sure, the town was boring, but there were Tales, Tales everywhere, who at least on some level could get her more than almost anyone was ever able to before. It felt like a bit of a dream sometimes, really. Friends she actually liked, check. No family to hold her back, check. Hot, clever boyfriend with whom she had a fair bit in common, check. Mysterious, too, even now, after having been together for two years, an amount of time almost unfathomable to her. Ana didn’t know Esau’s tale, and she hadn’t told him hers either, which didn’t seem too abnormal around town, despite how long they’d been together. But from what she could tell he had a more difficult relationship with his identity than she did with hers; whenever the topic came up, he got a look on his face she couldn’t quite read, except that it wasn’t a happy one. Which didn’t bother her so much, except — her boyfriend shouldn’t look that way around her, right? Right? Especially when they were, like, serious? Not like she knew much about the stuff. They’d been figuring out a lot of this relationship business together. Ana was crawling out of his bed to get ready to go to an evening lab one night when the words escaped her, coming seemingly from nowhere. “You know, whatever you did, I’ve probably done worse,” she said, and had to turn away for a moment, the grimace on her face destined to appear whether she liked it or not, as it did whenever anything reminded her of the sound of a human skull cracking. Parts of Sinbad’s story were often overlooked for the more glorious bits. Unlike the casual followers, she remembered it all. “Not to — I’m just saying, I wouldn’t dump you or anything, for whoever you are, if you’re, like, worried about that.” He'd been lying on his back, already missing the warmth of her body curled against his beneath the sheets, but those words snagged his attention like a hook. Rolling onto his side, Esau propped himself up on his elbow, watching the way her long, dark hair slid in a wave across the notches in her spine as she bent to pick up some discarded piece of clothing from the floor. Ana was beautiful, effortlessly graceful with every movement, but she'd never parsed her words. He liked that about her; she was blunt even while she was witty, smart and unpredictable at the same time. She could surprise him and catch him off-guard, even now. Except he wasn't certain he liked this surprise, the non-sequitur rising out of the mysterious depths of her mind to douse him with a little, unpleasant shock. Whatever you did, I've probably done worse. She meant it to be comforting, he supposed, but it was a phrase designed to drag memories straight to the surface. He didn't dare close his eyes; he knew what would be painted on the backs of his lids. Slowly and heavily, he exhaled. "Honestly, Ana? I think any sane woman would dump me if she knew who I was." And then, one eyebrow quirking: "Though you might not qualify for sane, so there's that, I guess." “You really do know the compliments that fire me up, chief,” she laughed, and, her own brief grim moment having passed, leaned back over to the bed to press a languid kiss to his lips. She didn’t like the way his sigh sounded like it dragged something from him unwillingly, and if she were one to regret, or if she were one to admit regret, she might have wished she hadn’t brought it up. “I’m kind of convinced you’re trying to hide the fact that you were a horrifyingly unsexy slug or insect. If you are, then don’t worry, you’ve got enough going for you in this life to make up for it. Unless you were a rat. In that case, yeah, I might dump you.” Ana smiled, long fingernails tracing lightly against his face, and mentally crossed her fingers that he wasn’t actually a rat, because then her joke would fall very flat. Her nails felt good in his beard, a nice distraction from the way his stomach was quietly knotting tighter. "See, this is what I'm talking about." He smiled crookedly back at her, the lingering kiss still warm on his lips. "I tell you that my Tale would make you break up with me, and your first thought is 'please god, don't let him have been an unsexy slug or a rat,' because obviously it would be far worse for me to have been something gross than done something awful." Wrapping his arm around her waist to cradle her close with the ease of habit, Esau studied his girlfriend with serious, thoughtful sincerity in his dark eyes. Her face reflected — he wasn't sure, but it wasn't setting off alarms. Just a quickening of his pulse. "I don't think there's any way you could look at me the same way, if you knew." There: his turn for a little honesty, frank and unadorned. Times like this, he felt older than his twenty-one years. "I think it would probably make you question your trust in me, and fuck up what we have going, here. This is a good thing." His free shoulder rose and fell. "Why ruin it?" “It is a good thing, and it doesn’t have to get ruined,” she murmured, her upcoming lab still at the back of her mind, but having taken a backseat to their conversation. She almost pressed for more. Don’t you trust me, then? But to push for his Tale was impossible without giving her own away, and Ana didn’t want to do that, not for him, not for anybody yet; the thought of someone picking up the pages of her life with her in mind and reading them like a bedtime story was so abhorrent as to not even consider the option. She could, however, give him something. More than she’d ever given anyone. “I killed people.” Pressing her lips together, she raised her brows slightly and stared at him like it was a dare, and she’d risen to the challenge. I killed people. His eyes hardened; he held her gaze, didn't flinch, didn't look away. "So did I." Maybe this was why they worked so well together. They had something in common, something that neither of them had ever vocalized but recognized, somehow, in each other. What were the chances? He wasn't sure this was how he wanted to do it — how certain was he of anything? — but maybe there was no good way. Maybe there was no right time. "You really want to know?" he asked, quietly. “I kind of do,” she admitted. “If only because you’ve made me curious and now I have to prove that I’m the best girlfriend ever, no matter how much of a pair of dicks we were in our past lives. I was a little bit afraid that after I told you that, you were going to say that your very horrible thing was, you know, bullying a couple of kids one time, and I was going to suddenly look very bad. “But I’m also not going to make you. I’m easy, chief, you know me. I can walk right out of here to lab and pretend we never brought this up.” A ghost of a smile on his lips. It was a good way out, a fair way out, offered seemingly without strings attached. But Esau knew better. Not telling now would have its consequences, sooner or later, just as surely as a reveal. Automatically, instinctively, his hand rose to scratch through the thick stubble at his jaw. "Bluebeard," he said at last, and it sounded like a sword falling. His eyes searched for the inevitable. "I was Bluebeard." Ana held his gaze, though she wasn’t sure what he would find there. Surprise was first — not a fairy tale villain, then — then a little bit of confusion — was that the pirate? no, no, not the pirate, a different thing entirely — it rang a bell but a faraway one; she’d always had trouble remembering things she didn’t care much about, and stories that weren’t hers were on that list — aha! Light dawned in her eyes. He’d killed his wife, hadn’t he? That was how the story went, she was more sure of it the more she thought about it, and it made sense that he would have been worried to tell her. She leaned in, close, one more time. “You’re my boyfriend,” she said, a whisper against his lips, and then, after, delivered with a smile, “I’ll see you later.” Later found Ana frozen, sitting in lab on one of the computers, the screen’s harsh light reflected onto her face. She’d looked up his Tale. Maybe that was the first mistake. She’d just been looking to refresh her memory, come up with a few good jokes that might put him at ease, convince him that she was totally a hundred percent okay with this. She was not totally a hundred percent okay with this, as it turned out. She was — if you listened to the panic building in her chest, the way her fingers tapped rapidly on the sides of her chair — approaching very much not okay with this at all. Bluebeard having killed his wife the one time as she had reconstructed when he’d told her was one thing. Bluebeard keeping a bloody room of corpses of all his past wives was something else entirely. She said she’d killed, in her own Tale, and that was true, she’d even killed wives and husbands (other people’s), but she’d done it because she had to, because he had to, to live. She’d assumed it would be the same case for him. What was she supposed to do now? I wouldn’t dump you or anything, for whoever you are. Her own words came back to her, and Ana knew she’d meant them when she said them. After all, she liked Esau, a lot. She liked him more than anyone else, even still. Hell, maybe she even loved him, whatever that could mean. It counted for something. Plus, she knew how having that sort of shit in your head could fuck you up. God, she knew. Even if he did ever try anything, it might not even be his fault. The thought didn’t ease her panic, and the stab of empathy she felt was just that. But it was decided: Ana would stay with him, like she’d promised. She’d simply take a couple of precautions. Just in case. So she texted Samar furiously on her way out of lab to the nearest college party. And then she told Shelley-the-cute-police-officer she talked to sometimes because she was pretty famous for not pulling punches when boys even so much as looked at girls wrong, and was like six feet tall, and would definitely be good to have on her side in that sort of a situation. And Shelley was very loud when she was enraged, and there were questions from this person and the other all night, and Ana wiffled and waffled and then answered them all, the last bits of her panic spilling out of her with the words, all the words. She even told Basil Fucking Romano when she found him hanging around her dorm later that evening in his smiley little barnacle way, because he still seemed to like her enough to want to use his super tracking skills on her corpse if the worst happened. Because in the end, even if Esau had nothing in common with his Tale at all, even if there existed not a single thread that connected the two other than the memories that shared the same space, Ana wasn’t like that. She was just like Sinbad. She’d do anything to ensure her own survival. "What the fuck is this, Ana." The paper pinned beneath his palm on her desk was bright, neon blue, and its block letters were easy to read. It wasn't even difficult to identify the badly-photocopied yearbook picture under his splayed fingers: not with that skin, that ever-present beard. IF THIS MAN APPROACHES YOU BE ADVISED THAT HE IS THE WOMEN-MURDERING TALE BLUEBEARD. STAY SAFE. Ana jumped with surprise; her eyes flew to the poster, took it in, and widened. “I did not make this,” was her immediate, vehement response, and she slid the paper back over. Her lips pressed together as she looked up at him and thought, shit. Last night had passed in a blur, but she was already beginning to suspect that she was merely out of the frying pan and into the fire. "Make?" His other hand was clenched tight at his side to keep it from betraying his trembling, yet he barked a laugh, humorless and disbelieving. "I — I didn't ask if you made it, that's not the fucking —" Yes. What was the point? His thoughts rattled around in his head, racing heart making it difficult to seize just one. He was hot and cold, burning with terror and rage, numb in the midst of it. "I told you my Tale in confidence," Esau tried to steel his voice, bring it back under control. "I told you because you wanted to know, and I trusted you. How long did you wait before you turned around and told everyone you know? An hour?" The words that had flowed out of her all too easily the night before deserted her now. She thought rapidly, calculating, trying to find a way to get out of this one — and for once nothing came to her. Not even her power; good luck, however powerful, couldn’t change a person’s mind. “I didn’t tell everyone I know,” she returned, and it was a weak defense, after too long a pause, but she met his gaze nonetheless, as much sincerity as she could project. “Just — just a couple people.” Lie. She didn’t usually resort to those, but she had nothing else. “I needed to figure out what was going on inside my head.” Lie. “I didn’t think that would happen, Esau.” A lie she was half-convinced of herself, but a lie nonetheless. He found himself shaking his head halfway through, his lip curling in a silent snarl, rejecting her excuses before she was even finished. "I told you this would happen. I told you that — that you wouldn't trust me anymore, that this would ruin everything. And I was right." Being wrong would have been so much easier, but the sick knot in his gut reminded him that he should have expected all of this. Should've known, should've seen it coming, the inevitable betrayal — Her desk had enough things on it that it made a satisfying crash when he swept it clean, shoving books after her computer to the floor, and yet. It didn't quell the urge to lash out at her, instead. "I trusted you!" Whatever faint vestiges of calm had remained were gone, now, dissolved into shouting. In contrast Ana was quiet, though her chair had made a loud screech against the floor as she’d jumped back from the desk to stand, and her expression shifted into an open painting of disbelief and annoyance. “What’s wrong with you?” she hissed back, and the fact that she didn’t shout was no less telling of her own frustration. It was tempting to glance to the floor, check on her things, but she forced herself forward, and attempted to calm herself. “Look, it’s not that I don’t trust you anymore,” and as if to prove herself she stepped closer, chin high. Ironically, this was not one of the lies: once she had told enough people that she felt like she had a safe network if something happened, she no longer really believed it would. “I did what I did. I maybe — that shouldn’t have happened,” she gestured to the poster, now scattered with her things on the floor. “But I feel fine now. I do trust you, chief. We can be fine.” For a heartbeat, all he could do was stare at her. Her face was so familiar. Last night, she had kissed him, cupped his jaw in her palms and rubbed her fingers through his beard. She was close enough now that he could kiss her, again. Reach out and make it true. But the longer he looked at her, the more he could only see red (deep, congealed crimson and dull brown stains, the kind of red that didn't come off, that would never wash away). "Fuck you, Ana." He jerked away, nearly tripping over his own feet as he put stale air between them again. "We can't be fine, because I don't fucking trust you. And that?" Esau gestured wildly at the poster, almost lost amid her cluttered belongings on the floor. "That can't ever be undone." Another step backwards, and another. "Stay away from me. Don't talk to me, don't look at me, don't come near me." This time, the words hit their mark. The change in her face was slow but steady: eyes hardened, jaw locked, lips pulled down into a frown, and already she looked at him like he was a stranger, his instructions already carried out to the full. “Alright,” she said, slowly, the syllables slipping out between clenched teeth. “Fine.” The door slammed hard behind him. One more that he would never open again. |