she goes by lottie she can be pretty naughty (lustres) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2012-12-31 17:45:00 |
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Lottie didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was stupid, to act like she was the only one grieving – there was Valya, of course, who was losing someone he had known his entire life, and in the face of that, Lottie felt like her grief was prepubescent, her sadness unfounded. But she couldn’t help it: it seeped in between her ribs and sunk into her chest, curling into the contours of her bones so that each breath came out ragged, so that her heart dragged out each painful beat. She knew she should have worn waterproof mascara today; each pitiful rub at her face smeared her wrist with black, and she was too nervous and too sad to drag herself to the bathroom to clean up. No, let them see it on her face: like ashes streaking her cheeks, like she was really a widow in mourning, not just some flippant young woman sad that her boyfriend had died. Her boyfriend had died. After the conversation with Mike, Lottie had felt roused from her dreary inanimation. Anger. Get angry, get fucking pissed. Lottie’s small hands curled into fists, but she could not muster rage – though now, the knuckles glinted white, refracted rainbows spilling onto the floor, the walls, as she finally got up from her corner and walked through the safehouse, searching for someone in particular. There was only one person now that she could stand to see, and as Lottie’s thoughts hummed around her, Lottie knew that the small Swedish girl would be expecting her by the time she came over. When she saw her, she put her hand – now all diamond, smooth like skin, but shining like glass, translucent – on Moa’s shoulders as her skin slowly turned over and crystallized, creeping up her arm, spreading up her neck, to her face. Her eyes became hard gems; her lips, rock. “Moa Enquist?” and already, her crystal-lips were trembling, her face lucent with tears. ==== Moa had frozen the moment the names were released. She didn’t remember much after that, just that people’s voices hadn’t quite reached her when they spoke to her, that she’d pulled away from all touch, walking away with her power going off in her head, over and over and over again. She wanted to tell them to care about Lottie instead, to forget about her. She wanted her last sensing ever to be Erik – it had been him, she knew that it had – and desperately tried to turn it off, tried to do what had only worked for moments before. Her room was cold and quiet. She sat there for a long time, wishing she could cry. That she could scream, hit something. This anger was different from the ‘what if’ anger, though. It was cold, quiet, twisting, burning. It ached. When Lottie showed up it felt – right. Moa hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, but this was different. They didn’t really know each other, they’d barely ever talked about anything that mattered, but there was Erik. Or wasn’t, as it happened. “Lottie,” she said. “You look cold.” ==== “Kind of,” Lottie said sheepishly, or it would have been sheepish if she could muster any tone out of her voice – instead, it fell like lead in the air, deadpan, devoid of her usual giggles and titters, the excitement that tended to bubble up between each syllable. “You know, SoCal is kind of warm. Not like – here.” She was wearing a sweater, a huge, oversized one she would never be caught dead in if she were at UCLA or even at IVI, something Anders had given her in the mess of time before the IVF picked her up from their household, shaking and teeth clacking like she was going to freeze, but it had all been nerves. Her fingers reached up to play with Erik’s locket. “I’ve only been to Europe once before this. It was a graduation trip, like, for not being a complete fuck-up. My older sister, she was the smart one, I was the – well, you know.” Lottie wasn’t quite sure why she was saying any of this, depositing her worries on poor Moa Enquist, so she stopped, swallowing down the rest of her ramble. There was the swelling rage shaking inside of her, sitting in her bones, sitting in her chest, sitting on her tongue. She thought, maybe, she should apologize – that she had been part of the mean coterie of IVI students who had abused Moa’s power, that she wouldn’t do it now, if she had a choice about it. But that seemed oddly selfish to apologize right now, the same way that talking about her relationship with her sister was also a selfish move. So Lottie settled for sitting next to Moa, feeling awkward and out-of-sorts, like her limbs were too big and she was not sure where to put what, just that she wanted to find some sort of stillness while her insides insisted on rattling, readjusting. “How are you?” Once it exited her mouth, she realize it was a stupid thing to ask, something that you said when you could not figure out what to say – but she meant it, was concerned, let the worry seep into her dark gray eyes, toying with the edge of Anders’ sweater. ==== “Warm,” Moa said. “Like Australia.” It was not a statement. She had no idea if the two were similar or not. Posing a question just somehow seemed to require a little more tone of voice than she seemed to possess right now. If it hadn’t been so awful it might’ve been funny; the unlikely pair of them sitting side by side, talking about travelling in voices that resembled nothing human. “I’d never been outside of Scandinavia. Before IVI.” Normally she would’ve followed it up with a ramble of where she’d want to go or where she’d almost gone that one time. Nothing was normal today, though. She fell silent. “Angry,” she said evenly at Lottie’s question. A little too much so. “I’m angry. I hate them. I’ve always tried not to hate people unless they really deserve it.” It was funny (or not) what she’d deemed deserving it before. None of it seemed to matter anymore. “I used to think the only ones worthy of it was this guy back home who –” but no, why didn’t matter, “this one guy. And Karim. For being so awful. And now...” She would’ve laughed, if it hadn’t been too close to crying. “That wasn’t hate. I mean, I thought it was, but...” Moa dug her fingers into her leg as she talked, pinching, pulling. Twisting. Nothing hurt. “Or maybe it was. Maybe that was hate and this is... maybe there’s no name. For this.” ==== “Yeah,” Lottie replied, turning to look at Moa. She dragged fingers through her hair, pulling on the waves and raking her fingers through it like a makeshift comb. The action calmed her, gave her something to do. Even now, she was still trying to look nice, look the pretty girl she wanted to be – she had wiped the streaks of mascara and eyeliner, glossed her lips, reapplied her make-up with shaking fingers. But there was just nothing she could bring herself to do about her hair but it leave it loose around her shoulders, stringy and gross and certainly nothing Erik would want to run his fingers through. “Like Australia.” But there was a more important subject to pursue. Mike had told her to get angry and she felt it come and go in waves, but fury was evading her, eclipsed by the blue sadness that drifted across the white-hot heat, cloaking her in its fine mist of misery while she grappled with the shock that had settled on top of her. She felt like someone was sitting on her and had made their home on her shoulders, pushing down – down – down. Had it only been a few hours that part of her worst fears had been realized? That, for all her urgent, desperate searching, the only thing left to do was watch Erik’s corpse be lowered into the ground – if they would let her leave IVI for the funeral, if they would, at least, give her that. She felt her chest grow tight and constrict with the fear that, even with the new chip in her neck (the one she had never wanted, the one she didn’t get because of her friends and now that she did get for her friends), she would be stuck behind that forcefield, kept away from him and the last moments she might ever get to see him. “I spent a lot of my life hating people, or like, doing the same thing,” Lottie said slowly, watching Moa’s fingers work on her leg, her eyebrows knitting together in concern. She wanted to reach over and hold the smaller girl’s hand – her hand hovered for a moment and found rest next to her, letting her pinky brush up against Moa’s thigh, the smallest contact for comfort. “Like, I’d hate my parents for not accepting me for being a Vol and I, like, totally hated my ex-boyfriend after he cheated on me with my best friend, and I def thought I hated Mikey,” Mike Fitzgerald, of course, “when I figured out that he like, didn’t think I was wifey material, like not good enough for him or whatever. But you’re right, like, all of those things, it doesn’t really matter when you think about like...” Her voice drifted off. “I’ve always known there are people who hate us. Because they’re scared or they’re jealous or like, whatever. My parents are like that. I wish they weren’t, but they are.” It was one of the few times Lottie had spoken openly about her parents, and she could feel the little fragile house she kept them in her heart break open, the facade spilling open to let the little doll-people walk out of the front door, no longer trapped in the glass dome where she kept perfect memories. “And like, I spent – spend – a lot of time being scared. But, you know, being scared, it like, doesn’t do anything. Or sitting and being scared. Like, what use is that? And like, they tell us hate is bad, but I don’t think it is. I hate these people. For hating us. For like, doing this to us. Like, do they think we want it to be like this? Like we want to feel this weird and different? But you know what, like, fuck it.” And there, the anger: she found it. Like striking a match in a gas-filled room, it flickered and then exploded and bloomed inside of her. She had been mad before, but now she was baleful, she was vengeful, and anger was thrumming, drumming, vibrating inside of her. She gripped it like a rod in her mind and kept her hand on its hot surface, let herself burn. “It’s not even about us being Vols and about them hating us for it now, it’s like, I hate them for being so hateful, and for doing what they do, and for making other people think it’s okay. And if I could do something, anything, to go back in time and run downstairs and like, punch that stupid kidnapper in the face before they touched Erik,” before it was too late, “then I’d do it. But I can’t, and Erik is gone, so you know, we have to get angry and we have to fight back and show them that we’re not like that. We’re not bad and we’re not just going – to be like, their tools or whatever.” She inhaled sharply; her exhale came slow, shakily, and Lottie’s eyes were closed, her fingers curled. “It’s for him, you know. For him, and to get my friends back. To get everyone back. We have to get mad.” ==== Moa, usually one to flinch at the least bit of touch didn’t move. It was the smallest bit of contact, but it did make a difference. Made her feel a little bit less lost, in a way. Slowly she slid her free hand down and took Lottie’s, half expecting her to bat it away. “Your parents don’t like you for being a vol?” she asked. It was the opposite of her life. Her parents accepted her, preferred her being a vol to being mentally unstable (ha!), but everyone else in town would taunt her for it, make fun of her. She’d lost all her friends because of it. “But you’re their daughter.” It sounded stupid, but if there was one thing Moa had learned it was that she wasn’t nearly as smart as she once thought she was. This was nothing new. She listened as Lottie spoke about being angry, about hate, about being judged and used and eaten up by it all. It was simmering underneath the surface. Her anger. It wasn’t loud anymore. It wasn’t explosive. It was cold and firm and it would probably break her in the end but it was there to stay. She became more convinced about it for each word Lottie said, and for each one that she didn’t. “I wish I’d been there. I would’ve made them take me instead. Erik is –” She took a shaky breath and it hurt, it hurt so much to even think the word. “He doesn’t deserve this. He’s the best person I know, the I don’t know, he’s so gentle and good and he doesn’t, he shouldn’t have to,” and the pain with those words were nearly choked her, “have to die like that. I deserve that. I would take it, I would let them do that. If I had to. And it’s not giving up or whatever, it’s just doing what I have to and it would be worth it.” Moa believed that. She believed that if anyone deserved death it was her, not her ‘brother’, not one of the two boys that were the most important to her, so important that it felt like she had four brothers, not two. She had thought about doing it to herself. To make it stop. It should’ve been her. She had to struggle to want to live anyway. She didn’t appreciate life. Not like he did. “And yeah, you’re right. I can’t do that. I don’t have my own personal time traveller to take me there because that’s just stupid stories that doesn’t matter anyway so I guess I just have to...” She held Lottie’s hand hard, desperately needing something to hold on to. “I don’t know. I don’t want to be all big and noble and show them that we’re human too. Because they don’t give a fuck. They never did. We’re nothing to them and since we’re apparently so evil maybe we should just capture them and torture them and do everything they’re doing to... to our friends. Right now.” Moa had never been cruel or vengeful. She’d always been too nice for that, too sweet. There was nothing sweet about the anger freezing her insides to dust, though. It was ugly. It was so very ugly but maybe that was what things had to be like from now on. “I would kill them. I wouldn’t feel bad about it. And if I can’t –” which she couldn’t, of course she couldn’t, she was tiny and naive and weak and had nothing, no useful power, “– maybe I’ll just have to be prepared the next time they come. For the rest of us. Because they will.” Moa knew Erik wouldn’t have wanted that. He wouldn’t have wanted her to hate this much. But he wasn’t here. They’d taken him from her, and he wasn’t here to say ‘pytte, it’s not worth it’. (No one would ever call her that again. Ever. They’d taken that too.) “They’re afraid that we’re going to become a vol army or whatever and take over the world and do evil things, so maybe that’s exactly what we need to do. Become fucking evil.” She had no idea how to do that, of course. She didn’t know how to find them or how to kill them or how to avenge Erik or hurt them like they’d hurt him, but she didn’t care. She just knew that the anger was the only thing she had left. They’d taken everything else. And if they could, they would take even more. ==== “No,” Lottie said hurriedly. She was squeezing Moa’s hand hard, trying to bring her back to earth – she had watched way too many television shows to let those statements slip by unheeded. How many character development arcs had gone this way? The wronged party turning evil – and it never ended well. She had auditioned for a television series where she would have been a former law school student rendered caustic and cruel by the American justice system, but she could not deliver the lines with enough venom and had not done well. Now, watching Moa, Lottie’s own anger checked itself, bubbling beneath the surface like slow, waiting magma, but paling next to her mean, her hate, her fury. Hearing mild Moa talk like this put Lottie even more on edge. She could feel her emotions twisting this way and that, trying to compensate for each development. No, she was too afraid to give into anger – but she could stoke it, let it burn underneath her. Lottie gulped hard, feeling her throat tighten and constrict, forcing nothing but saliva down her dry esophagus, needing moisture, anything, to wet the tinder. Moa could not do evil – she could not do hate – Lottie tried to imagine the Scandinavian girl being cruel and couldn’t wrap her head around it. It didn’t suit her, it didn’t suit Lottie, it didn’t suit anyone except maybe Vampire Ted and Remy sometimes and even then, she liked to think that they had a better bone in their body than to give into something so seductively cruel as hate. Absolute hate: that’s what the other people were operating on, and they were awful, killing innocents. Killing Alyosha, who Lottie remembered once had been in Daisy’s good graces, a possible former object of her affections (her heart twisted thinking of Daisy, her hand’s hold on Moa tightening, as if she could turn into Daisy if she squeezed hard enough), had been on her team. And Erik, of course, and tears dappled her vision. “No, we can’t – we can’t be like them,” Lottie said after a moment. “Being evil is, like, not the way to do this. No, we have to do it right. I don’t want to be like them. People who can kill guys like Erik and Alyosha and kidnap poor kids and not even, like, bat an eyelash, that’s so fucking horrible, I just, I don’t–,” more haggard breathing, and one hand was pulling at a loose stitch of Anders’ sweater, she was gulping, more tears clinging to her lashes, “I don’t want to be the kind of person who could kill Erik. Ever. No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t think you should do it either, Moa, we have to get mad, but we have to remember, like, about Erik. Like, what he would want us to do.” She had read a script like that once, but the words rang very true to her in that moment. She turned earnestly towards Moa. “Let’s make a promise, okay? You, me, we’ll stick together. Like, we’ll – we’ll get revenge. The right away.” ==== “How is showing them that we’re human revenge? They know we are. They’re using it against us. They’re using it to make us scared, to get to us, to hurt us.” Moa’s voice was very matter-of-fact. There was no doubt in it. She had made up her mind. “Everyone talks about making videos and statements and show them how great we are and that we’re not dangerous but they don’t care. They didn’t kill someone who has super strength or who can burn you or spit acid or whatever. Someone they thought was dangerous. They killed a guy with a power that everyone was mocking, who people joked about all the time and made fun of and told every,” she had to stop and take a deep breath, “told every fucking oral sex joke in the book and they thought they were so clever about it.” She remembered what Erik had told her the last time they talked. How he’d said that he felt like he was nothing but a funny power, nothing but a pretty face. And then he’d died. No, not died. He didn’t die. He was murdered. Big difference. “He was nothing to them. Collateral damage, maybe not even that. They took everything sweet about him, everything that made him Erik,” and she was crying now, angry tears, “they took that and they knew, they probably knew he couldn’t harm anyone but they didn’t care.” Moa didn’t like this version of herself any more than she liked the one that had been yelling at the whole school a few days ago, or the one that snapped at her friends for no reason. She didn’t want to be hateful. They’d made her that way. And she didn’t have the strength to fight it. Hate was the only way she could cope. It had only been a few hours, but she knew that much. “I’m not going to be the person who kills kids like Erik,” she said, and normally she would’ve been angry that Lottie assumed that was what she meant, but everything was different now. “I’ll be the person who when they come for me, maybe I’ll get them back. Or I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do or how I’ll do it but we’re not going to beat them by being fucking nice. We’re not. Not ever.” ==== While Moa spoke and raged, Lottie smoothed her diamond-hands over Moa’s and thought and listened. Her fingernails were shining and light passed through them and speckled the wall with refracted light, dappled her thighs (still skin). Lottie still felt her throat was tight, much too scared to loosen the fear that had settled in there and unsure of how to proceed knowing what she did of Moa and listening to her words fall down like bricks. Harsh, she thought, wincing as Moa continued on her tirade, rubbing comforting circles on her friend’s hand, gripping her one with both of her own now, even if they were cold and crystallized. She needed to hold Moa’s hands; this was for her, her comfort, just as much as she was trying to help the other girl settle down. “But everyone knew Erik was the nicest, the nicest guy in this entire school,” Lottie said quietly, “and like, maybe you, like, feel comfortable doing that, but I can’t just become hate like that, like, I’m mad and I hate them but I can’t – can’t let it define me.” Her voice was a thin line in the air, wavering delicately, spoken with little to no gravity to it but it was Lottie trying. “I don’t think you want to be evil, Moa, like, you’re mad, but evil means doing what they do, and you don’t want to do that. I don’t want you to do that, I don’t think, like, Erik would either, like, it’s not a very Erik-thing to be evil.” There was a nagging memory tugging at the back of her mind – she could remember Erik and Claudia, Erik being mean – but she stuffed those memories away into a box and locked them. No: the Erik she would remember was right and good and she would smooth his memory into his shape as he always had been. “You don’t want to be evil. You want to be. That’s not the right word, I don’t think it is at all. You want to be...” She was not the most verbose person, so she paused, trying to find the right word. She couldn’t find it. “We’re going to get them,” she said, changing her tactic. “The good guys always win, anyways, and like, they’re obviously bad, so...” ==== “I’m not comfortable!” Finally some emotion in her voice, and with it the strength to pull her hand from Lottie’s. “They killed him. They killed him, Lottie! How can we not hate them? It’s not evil to hate them, it’s fucking normal. It’s the only thing to do, the only thing that –” But no, she couldn’t keep going. She crumpled instead, the tears that had been fairly quiet, kept in check by the anger, suddenly being so much more than that. There was nothing pretty or calm about them now; it was ugly, it was deep and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Moa just cried into her shirt, hiding her face from the pretty girl with the diamond face, with diamond hands sparkling. It hurt much more that way, it hurt to let go of the hate, it hurt so much and how could she even do this? How would she ever be able to survive this? And why would she even want to? ==== Lottie instinctively threw her arms around Moa, letting the tears drip down her face. She was weeping openly now, disarmed by Moa’s open show of emotion, letting her own crystal facade crack and creak under the weight of trying to – be okay. That’s all she wanted, really, but it was clear to her now (clear as her hand, which pet Moa’s hair, dragged fingers through it, smoothed it down with her glass-like surface) that it was not so. It wasn’t – and it wouldn’t be, for a very long time. “I know, I hate them too,” she said, sniffing hard so she didn’t get her snot all over poor Moa. “I hate them, I wish I could kill them all, but like, I don’t know, I just keep thinking about Erik and how disappointed he’d get and his stupid dimples and how he always smelled like clean laundry and his nice nails and the way he–,” she shuddered, stopping herself. “I loved him, Moa, I mean, I love him, and now he’s gone, I don’t know what to do. Like, I know how you feel.” She sniffed again, tucking her head into Moa’s shoulder, still blubbering. “I just don’t want to be evil. I don’t want to take over the world or make a stupid Vol army, I just, like, want to live my life as a normal person. I wanted to get married and have babies, and like, have the first Vol wedding, and now it’s like,” she sighed. “It’s like, impossible now. But I’m going to fight, like, don’t get me wrong, but I like, don’t want to prove them right, like, we’re all evil. I want to show them that I’ll fight for my right to live.” ==== Moa was crying so hard that Lottie’s words were little more than a haze, something wrapping around her as she struggled for breath, struggled against the pain that pressed against her chest, pulling tight. She felt like she was breaking apart, like each breath just brought her closer to the point of shattering into a million pieces. “But you can’t,” Moa whispered once she ran out of tears, much, much later. “You’ll never get married to him and you’ll never have his babies and you’ll never see his dimples and he’ll never bake me a cake or call me pytte or tell me it’s not worth it when I get to mad and start hating things. Never. Ever.” She didn’t mean to be cruel. She didn’t mean to break every little bit of resolve Lottie had left, but she couldn’t help it. She was beyond thinking, beyond even realising how much it had to hurt to hear that, the words just pouring out of her without a filter. “And I wish I could do that but this is what happens when I don’t hate everything. Maybe you’re a lot stronger than me but I can’t do it. I can’t. I don’t know how to do this. I have no idea how to – how to... do this. Anymore.” ==== “I’m not strong,” and she said it automatically, without thinking. And it was true at this point – her resolve was crumbling, and though Lottie tried to parcel it back together, she could only gather the dust and hold it in her hands. Her hope was fragile. It was difficult to face Moa after such devastation had been wrought on both of them, after such loss. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, only held Moa tightly like she was afraid the both of them would spiral off into the atmosphere, unable to be grounded to the earth, like gravity would let go of its grip on either one of them. Lottie’s mind was full of memories – soft eyes, gentle smiles; tenderness; the accent; his dependability – but she couldn’t dwell on it when each image was fractured by sobbing (hers, Moa’s), the shaking of her shoulders, her desperation to cling onto the remnants of what had been lost. For now, she couldn’t say anything. There was nothing right to say. Lottie had not been acquainted with loss and death the way others had been; and because of it, she didn’t know what to say, how to say it. ==== Moa held on to Lottie so hard that it hurt, pressing her face to the other girl’s shoulder. It was surreal, sitting there hugging the girl she hadn’t liked, that she hadn’t wanted Erik to be with because she thought she would hurt him. She’d changed her mind later but for so long she’d believed in that. She’d believed so many things, none of which seemed to matter now. Nothing did. Because Erik was gone and the two of them were left with their feelings, left loving someone who wasn’t there. Who would never be there. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fucking fair and she wanted to stomp her feet, she wanted to scream and yell and throw things. She wanted a power that would burn their faces off, that would knock them off their feet, stop their hearts or rip them apart. She wanted strength enough to break their necks, to throw them into concrete and smash their brains right out of their skulls. Lottie talked about being nice. About doing the right thing. Moa just wanted to hurt them. The ones who had done this. She wanted to scare them, terrify them. Make them bleed. She couldn’t, of course. All she could do was sitting here, crying into Lottie’s expensive shirt and feel so very helpless. She could watch them take everything, she could watch them rip her life apart, unable to do a thing to stop them. That was all she was good for. |