mette thinks you're a liar, liar, pants on fire. (lyve) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-04 20:25:00
and no one wants to talk about the loss, no one wants to talk about the cost. WHO: Mette Skoglund & Moa Enquist. WHAT: Mette finally asks for her first visitor after being rescued. WHEN: Evening of the 4th. WHERE: Her room at the European safehouse. WARNINGS: welp.
Physically, she felt better.
They’d given her a hot meal and plenty of fluids. Her hand had been expertly bandaged, and she’d taken a searing hot shower and scrubbed and scrubbed until the sweat and grime from the past week had run down the drain. Mette paid especial attention to her hair, struggling to detangle it, combing through the wet locks with a hard-bristle brush again and again until she looked marginally human once more. Less like the creature in the video. (They’d told her about it, but she hadn’t asked to watch the footage. What was the point? She knew what was in it.)
The medical intake room was well-lit, neat and military in appearance. With its single bed and attached private bathroom, it reminded her of visiting her grandmother at Ullevål University Hospital. The girl was now dressed in jeans and a large baggy sweater, and clutching a brand-new IVF phone. The network was there, but she didn’t want to read it.
What Mette hadn’t expected was how the new phone would sync with her account. How she would have old text messages waiting for her when she first turned it on.
[1/2] hold on, we're coming [2/2] just please hold on
I’m coming to get you.
Which set off the tears yet again, one more time, once more. Fingers digging into the phone and hovering over the buttons, she strained to find the right words to respond to Savannah or Richie – but what could you say? Thanks? She wanted to thank the entire team of students who’d gone into the maw of fucking hell and rescued them – but she could still see the way Myra’s head jerked just the once, and the way the girl crumpled in the arms of her kidnapper. Like a woman fainting in her lover’s arms.
But it wasn’t like that at all.
She had been informed about Erik and Alyosha, and the truth was somehow even worse than all her imaginary nightmare scenarios. (The staffers had been reluctant to tell her and pile on yet another shock, and had tried to hold this information back for now. Just for today. But that very act of secrecy had confirmed what she suspected; so Mette had screamed and shouted until they gave it away. Be careful what you wish for.)
She’d been told that Marine and Malcolm’s bodies were recovered from the facility. She’d given them up for dead days ago and thought she’d adequately prepared herself for it – but the knowledge ripped open another gaping wound where she didn’t think she had any more to spare.
Mette crawled under the covers, the phone still clutched to her chest. She couldn’t be alone, didn’t want to be alone – those hours she’d been without anyone had been the worst of the entire experience – but the prospect of contacting someone made her hands shake. Even Padraig. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t bring herself to reach out, couldn’t contact her friends, couldn’t open that box and set off the cascading landslide that would bring them all back into her life when she didn’t know what to say to them, and couldn’t even seem to stop crying.
It was a type of paralysis, a limbo which she couldn’t and wouldn’t puncture.
Mette threw the phone across the room; it bounced off the wall and slid behind the table on the other side.
Several minutes passed.
Finally, she went to the door and cracked it open – the IVF soldier, her guard, stirred from his position across the hall and gave her a politely enquiring look. “Moa Enquist,” she said, knowing that the word would click in the other girl’s head, knowing that the staffers would go and fetch the Swede anyway.
Then back to the bed and under the covers. To wait.
====
Moa had been so sure it would never happen. That they were lost forever. Everyone else had kept fighting, had kept on trying. Doing everything to get people back. Moa’s fight had ended the moment she found out that Erik was gone. She felt guilty that she hadn’t kept going, that Mette had been out there while she’d been sitting there, numb from shock, letting them give her pills to sleep (only one at a time; as if she’d do that to Oden, to all of them, knowing how it felt to be left behind), eating when they told her, using all her strength to simply exist.
Some part of her must have held on, though. Some part of her must’ve been hoping still, although she didn’t know it. Otherwise she would’ve let them send her back to IVI, let them stuff her behind that forcefield again. But she was here. She was still here, Mette was alive and she wanted to see her.
Moa stared at the woman who told her this. She had a hard time understanding the words. No words meant the same thing anymore, and these were even harder to wrap her head around. Too hard, almost. But she had the taste of waffles in her mouth suddenly, telling her that Mette had asked for her.
She picked herself off the bed, she put a shirt over the tank top she’d slept in but forgotten to change out of. She had to be reminded to put shoes on, and when she showed up, when she stepped into Mette’s room she knew that she looked awful, but that it didn’t matter. That none of that mattered.
Moa stepped up to the bed, walking slowly across the floor, trying but failing to smile. “Hi,” she said, finally, as shaky as the rest of her. “I’m here.”
====
The blankets writhed, and the girl’s head popped into view; she’d been literally buried in them, a pillow pulled over her face. “Hi,” Mette said back... only to quickly realise that she hated peering at Moa from the bed. Like some convalescent invalid, like an ancient withered grandmother, like the wolf in granny’s bed. A sudden and irrational anger welled up: she wasn’t weak, she wasn’t wounded. She didn’t have to sit there, all faint and fucking frail.
So she immediately slid off the bed, bare feet hitting the floor, clumsy in her hurry like a child scurrying off to see Santa Claus. But it wasn’t Santa and Christmas eve had long-since passed; instead, Mette strode across the room and pulled the tiny girl into her arms, crushing her into a hard, breathless hug.
Mette hadn’t even thought about it beforehand. Hadn’t known what she was going to do until she was suddenly doing it, reaching out for the same sort of comfort that had propped her up in the cell. Seeing Moa had knocked something loose inside her, a single snip of the knife loosening all the stitches that had held her together for the last half hour. (And she’d thought that was an accomplishment, truly: thirty minutes without tears.)
“Sorry,” she said, voice strangled, as if all the air were being squeezed out of her. Mette had been so happy, so fucking happy and relieved to be rescued and alive; she’d left tears and snot on the sleeves of the IVF soldier who lifted her into the helicopter, and felt that irrepressible joy lifting her up before it dashed her on the rocks. So much lower than before. Because Moa brought it all crashing back.
Brought him crashing back.
====
Moa found herself in a crushing hug and she wrapped her arms tightly around Mette, clinging on to her. Her eyes burned as the emotions overwhelmed her, twisting her apart. Again. It happened all the time now, four or five times an hour she felt herself being ripped apart again, hardly even having time to cobble herself back together before breaking all over again.
She held on. Didn’t let go. One of the two had survived. One of them had been returned to her, been saved by people much stronger than her while she sat quietly, staring at the wall. She should’ve done more, should’ve helped, but she hadn’t been able to.
And that guilt, together with all the others, made it so hard to face Mette, to do anything but clinging desperately to the girl she had barely been able to think about, whose survival was everything even though she’d been unable to even contemplate her being locked up with Erik and the others.
“No,” she whispered, unable to speak up, however much she’d liked to. “No sorries.” She pulled back a little, just enough to look at her friend, to brush her hair back. The gesture was unusually confident for her, but a lot of things were different now. Everything was. “You’re alive,” she said. “You’re alive.”
====
“Yes, but–”
The guilt was a landslide, a tiny rock that would slip and slide and erupt into an avalanche if she let it, or if she examined the feeling too closely. Two. Two out of seven. Seven went in, and only two had been dragged out. Two out of seven, and half of those rescued were her.
Mette hated those numbers and hated those odds. They didn’t seem real. Marine and Erik and Alyosha and Malcolm did not seem real – she’d never seen the bodies, so surely it was all one cruel joke, some terrible mistake or mix-up had been made.
That bullet in Myra’s head, however, was real. Real real real real.
The warring emotions smashed against each other once more: happiness, grief, guilt, and it resolved into Mette looking pale and harrowed, struggling to wipe the tears away as they kept streaming down her cheeks. Looking directly at Moa was difficult.
“But they’re not,” she finally managed to say, miserably. “I can’t–” Then her voice fell off again, throttled. It was a trial to talk; not for the first time, she found herself irritated, wishing she could turn it off, wishing there were some switch to flip that would make her able to talk without her voice shaking, without her already-raw eyes watering. Something to make this awful fucking pain go away.
====
It was the anger that kept Moa going. It wasn’t as strong as it had been with Lottie, the day of his... (but no, she still couldn’t say, or even think the word), or maybe she’d just become better at hiding it, but it was still there. Keeping her on her feet, making her function. Sort of.
The meds helped too, white little pills, helping her calm down, helping her sleep, pulling her out of the worst of the worst. It was strange, thinking about how long she’d resisted them. She couldn’t go a day without them now. She was sure of it.
“I know,” Moa said. “But you are.” It hurt, saying it. Hurt so much. There was supposed to be two of them; two people to hug, two people to love, to tell all the things she’d always been too Swedish to say out loud.
Eyes burning, chest aching, each breath a struggle. “I can’t,” Moa echoed. “I know. I can’t do this either. But –” A shaky breath. “I am. Apparently.”
====
I can’t, but I am. Those five words were deceptive in their simplicity and in their honesty: with them, she immediately knew that Moa understood.
And this was why, even after hours of stewing alone in her little room here, Moa had been the only person she could summon for a visit. At least for now. Because the Swede had an Erik Svanström-shaped hole in her heart too (and it was even bigger than hers), and she would understand.
It occurred to Mette for the first time that she couldn’t monitor the other girl’s honesty (and that she didn’t need to). It’s what Moa had asked for once upon a time, wasn’t it? To please not use her powers on her?
The thought was alien and strange and possibly ironic, but Mette didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. But she managed to gulp another desperate breath, forcing in air as if she were drowning. And perhaps she was.
“You can’t but you are. I can’t but I will. That is what happens with fucking tragedy, isn’t it?” Mette was able to say more between hiccoughing breaths now, but her voice sounded high and strange. “We pick up and we move on. We survive. We... fy faen, helvete, fuck, fuck, shitting motherfucking hell,” she broke off in order to lapse into English. The Norwegian curses came more naturally to her but they simply weren’t enough; sanitised, tame Nordic profanity couldn’t encompass everything inside her, couldn’t convey the scope of the situation.
“Shit, Moa, I am so happy to see you. I didn’t think I would again. And I’m so glad you’re here. No one else is–” No Isla, Rose, or Lorelei in Europe, “–but if I had to ask for someone, anyone out of all the world, to be here, you’re one of them.”
====
“Yeah,” Moa said, voice flat. “I guess it is.” Tragedy. Such a big word, a dramatic word. A word she never thought would apply to her, to her life. Plays were tragedies, sometimes. Newspaper headlines used it. No one ever said it, not without irony.
There was nothing ironic about this.
“We’ll survive. We have to.” For each other. It sounded so stupid, so cliché. Like something out of a movie. It was true, though. For a fleeting moment Moa was back at that lake, going deeper, thinking about nobody but herself. Never contemplating the others, the people she would’ve left behind. Who would’ve hurt like this. Like she did, right now.
She hadn’t thought about it, had never even given it a moment’s thought. Not until Erik was gone and everything hurt and she realised – she knew what it would’ve done to all of them. It made her feel as much guilt as all the rest. Erik would never have gotten that close. He wanted to live. He had never not wanted to live.
He didn’t deserve this. She did.
But it wasn’t about her. It was about Mette, who had survived, who had been broadcast across the world, humiliated and broken. Who had been there just before –
Moa stopped her train of thought right there.
“They’re all in America. My friends too. Most of them.” Everything she said sounded so strange, so flat. It was in her voice, the grief was in her voice, either flat or shaking, one of the two, always one of the two. At Mette’s words the lack of emotion twisted and pulled, snapped and turned into the latter.
“I didn’t think – that I would. Either of you. And –” One of two isn’t bad. She didn’t say. Couldn’t pile the guilt that high, even though she meant it. It could’ve been two people she didn’t know that survived, could’ve been any of them.
“I’m glad he had you,” she said finally, and then she was hugging Mette again, hiding her tears against the other girl’s shoulder.
====
“And I’m glad I had him,” Mette echoed, her voice muffled into Moa’s hair, the girls clinging to each other as if the world might spin them apart at any moment. There was a quiver in her limbs; Moa could feel her shaking.
She was trying to find the right way to describe it, searching for the right words and none of them came up adequate. He was so brave? Cliched, awful. I would have died without him? No, likely not: they’d had absolutely zero influence on their fates. It seemed the end results would have been the same no matter what. And as much as Mette had feared it at the time, one can’t simply keel over dead from deciding to do so, from giving up.
She finally settled on the following: “He made it bearable.” Mette was still hanging on as if they would never let go, and truth be told, she didn’t want to. She’d hungered and starved for this sort of sisterly contact ever since Marine –
“He made me laugh. He was the only one of them that I knew from before. He made it... not okay, because nothing could have made that shithole okay, but he made it better. They all did, they were all– the best part. But at least I knew him from before. He was a friend, we cared about the same people. But then again I suppose we were all friends by the time...”
They, them, the fallen and absent them. A void and nothingness. They still hadn’t even said his name aloud, had they? Saying it would add the final coating of finality to this. Saying his name felt like it would rip her mouth open, it would make her gums bleed.
====
Moa held on. They were both shaking now, holding on to each other as if they would both crumble if they let go. It was probably true too; she didn’t know how they could still be standing, how they hadn’t slid into piles on the floor long ago.
By the time.
By time he was taken from them. No, not taken. Murdered. It sounded wrong, as if you had to be stabbed or shot or strangled to truly be murdered. But he hadn’t just died. He had been killed. Moa had tried not to think about how scared he must’ve been, how confused. Being taken from that cell, put on a train, gassed to death.
No, she really shouldn’t have let her mind go there. Really not.
“I felt you a few times,” she said, swallowing tears, swallowing the desperate sadness that pulled her into a thousand directions, that pulled her apart and cobbled her back together, again and again. “My power started doing this thing where –” A pause to breathe, to fumble for the strength to say it out loud. “It gives me a clue. About who it is. And it was you. And him. I know it was.”
The grief counsellor had tried to tell her it might just be coincidence, that her mind might be imagining it. Because she needed it to. She had screamed at him then, screamed until his calm silence turned her anger into sadness. But he wasn’t here now. He couldn’t take it away from her.
====
Surprise – one of the few emotions she hadn’t expected to feel right now – jolted Mette, and she pulled back enough to nod at Moa, her hands braced against the girl’s shoulders. “It was us, yes. We talked. A lot. All the time. It was the only thing we could do in there, there was nothing else to keep us busy except ourselves.”
Mette had undergone an immediate debriefing with a sombre IVF officer (apologies for the disruption but we need to hear the details while your memory’s still fresh), but this was the first outside person to hear any description of the experience, paring the details away from the core. But Mette could handle it, this time, because it wasn’t to tell her how awful it was, or to backtrack through terrible memories. No, it was to focus on the good part, on Moa’s power, on how it had worked and unexpectedly drawn a line between the IVF safehouse and a cell in Slovakia.
====
Hearing it like that, knowing they’d talked about her (why about her?) before he died, when things were that awful... it twisted the pain yet again. Everything did, though. Hearing someone say ‘okay’ sometimes did it. And people did that a lot.
She felt bad, bringing it up too. Because Mette had no power, if the video was true. Because it was gone and Moa’s was not and they’d both lost so much but Mette so much more than her. So, so much more. “I’m sorry.” Words spoken into Mette’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t –” She hesitated. “We don’t have to talk about...” Powers. “...about that. Right now.”
====
“No, it’s okay–” (It wasn’t.) “I’m here and still fucking breathing, I couldn’t care less about... my powers. Me and Padraig are still alive thanks to you all.” (There were other problems. But they would come later.)
“We talked about Oden, and you, and what–” There was that strangling sensation again, as if hands were lodged around her throat, cutting off her air. Mette swallowed, worked past it. No use mentioning the Stockholm-visit-that-wasn’t. Daydreaming with Erik was one thing when it was the carrot at the end of the string, the light at the end of the tunnel, the thing spurring them on and giving them strength to keep hoping. But it was quite another when it simply reminded you of what would never, ever be. “I forgot about your power. I totally didn’t think of the fact that you would know, if we said your name.”
And oh.
… There was that other thing.
It would flay her open, and, worse, Mette knew it would rip the other girl apart too. It was a serrated weapon, a vicious bomb wrapped in good intentions – but it was one she had to deliver. Which was another reason she’d summoned this girl in particular: Moa deserved to know, and more importantly, Erik deserved to have his last message received.
She could already feel the hysterical tears welling up at the mere thought of it. Mette wasn’t ready; no one could ever be ready; but it was like a band-aid, it had to be torn off now, now, while the wounds were still fresh and it wouldn’t be like opening a healing scab.
====
“It’s new,” Moa said quietly. “I used to just know that someone did. But lately – I’ve gotten something more. Sometimes.” It was erratic. She didn’t quite know what made it happen or how, but it had been something that helped her deal with her worry. It was almost like a confirmation that they were surviving this hell, something that told her not to worry.
She’d still worried, of course, but not quite as much. She’d thought it meant they were both alive. Until she got the news and knew that the last time –
That the last time was truly the last.
“Yours smelled like lussekatter,” Moa said. “Because of that time. And he –”
But no, she couldn’t say it. Not without telling the whole story, tell Mette how he’d patiently had dealt with her playing that same song over and over, how she’d been sitting in her room at that other school, how the pretty model had asked her why that song, why so many times, if it was on purpose. And she’d shook her head, not knowing what to say. Because he was so good looking, and probably thought she was weird, and strange, like everybody else. That was what she’d thought, that first time. Having no idea how sweet, how nice, how Erik he was. Not knowing that he’d become her brother, that he would die and leave her and that it would...
Hurt.
So much.
====
Morbid curiosity took over. Mette was always, always curious – the cat murdered nine times over – but this time the question was a dark and ugly thing that she didn’t dare ask. Did Moa sense it, then, that very last time?
Mette watched the other girl, once again feeling naked without her powers, without that little crutch to hold her up. The cheat sheet, as she called it. (Used to call it.) Did you, did you, did you, part of her wondered, but she muffled and smothered that part. Because there was something more important to say.
“Moa, he...” How did you begin? Where the hell did you start? Mette took a deep breath (it shook when she let it out again), and tried to compose and reassemble herself in some form of order. She was forced to chop up the sentence as she went, neatly shearing off the clauses, because the only way to process this information was bite-sized: “He wanted me to tell you. His last words. Before he was taken.”
Deep breath. You can do it. Like plunging underwater. Fill your lungs and barrel your way to the end of this sentence, one clean rip, you can do it: “Moa, his very last words were for you and Lottie. He wanted me to tell you that he loves you both. At the very end, he wanted you to know that.”
Breathe.
====
And again she needed Mette to hold her up, to keep her steady because those words, coming from Erik, meant so much more than just the expression itself. He must’ve known he wouldn’t be back, must’ve known it was the end, because otherwise he wouldn’t have said them. Not because he didn’t mean them, not because he didn’t love her or Lottie, but because you didn’t just... say that. Not out loud.
Jag älskar dig.
Three words, so small one at a time, so big when you pushed them together. Moa had heard them spoken, but not directed at herself. Her family didn’t do that, they didn’t see the need to say things that were obvious. You were supposed to know, you were supposed to just magically know that your family loved you. Maybe Erik’s family was different, maybe they weren’t as terse as hers, being southerners and all, but the words still sent Moa back into deep, painful sobs, each one hurting more than the one that came before it. She clung on to Mette as if she hadn’t been kidnapped and starved and broken, as if she was there to hold Moa together when it should be the other way around. When she had no right to be so upset, when she hadn’t been there, hadn’t had all those awful things done to her.
“Did he,” she managed, but if Mette understood what she was saying it was a miracle and a half because the words were so mangled, so broken up that she hardly understood them herself, “did he say my name? Right then?”
====
Hopefully she had done the right thing, Mette managed to think to herself, eventually maneuvering the both of them until they were perched on the side of her little military cot. The belief was that this might be cathartic: prick their skin and let all the grief and sadness wash out, pouring it down the drain like the cleansing shower she’d taken hours ago, hoping to leave them messy and ragged but whole. Otherwise the pain could overwhelm; it would chew them alive, it would eat them whole. She hoped and hoped beyond hope that she had done right by opening that door and letting this monster through, setting off that bomb with all its barbs, and that they would feel better in the end.
Because right now, she did not feel better. It was raw and aching, Moa’s sobs setting off yet another hiccoughing fit in the Norwegian. Mette’s eyes were stinging and oddly dry even as she cried; there was absolutely nothing left, she was empty, and still the stupid little animal noises remained. It was guttural and frighteningly human. Wipe a person clean of rationality, and this is all that was left: ugly noises, grief, pain.
“Yes,” she finally said. “Yes. He said your name, then.”
That answered her question. So Moa had heard him. Curiosity assuaged, Mette: are you happy now?
====
It was good, perhaps, that Moa was alternating between anger and desperate sadness, because feeling this way all the time would have (no, it wouldn’t have killed her; that expression was forever gone from her vocabulary) hurt too much for her to bear. Not that there was a way to stop it. None that she could think of, anyway.
She slumped down on the bed with Mette’s arms around her, aware of little more than the pain, than the ache that simply would not go away. That she couldn’t cry away, that was simply there and would be, for a very long time.
“I thought it meant he was alive,” she said, much later. “I thought he was safe. And then when they told us what time it had happened...” It had only been a few hours, between feeling it and being told he was dead. It had been easy enough to count backwards. She’d done it a hundred times, sitting in the room she’d been given, staring at the wall.
“I’m sorry.” She wiped her face on her sleeve, wishing for cold water to cool it down. “This was really hard for you too and I know I’m not the only one who’s sad and I should really...” A deep breath. “I need to remember that.”
====
“Well. We’re all going to be sad,” Mette said quietly and simply. “For a long-ass fucking time, I think.” Focusing on others made the burden temporarily lighter to bear, but she knew it was nothing more than a redirection of her energies. Mette had done the same during the nightmares: tend to Moa, tend to Cheska, tend to Isla, sit vigil by Oden and Richie’s bedsides. Keep focusing outwards lest she suddenly lose her footing, tumble down the hole, and never be able to claw her way back out.
Perhaps it was selfish, but reflecting Moa’s emotions and dealing with them in the here-and-now was far easier than examining her own. Yet they kept surging up, like a dog barely held back on a leash, demanding to be seen and acknowledged and witnessed and borne. Her arms tightened around Moa, her chin resting against the girl’s shoulder. No, she thought. There would be time for that later.
“At least we’re in it together.” Those were the same words that had carried Mette through ten days of captivity. Together, together, together, all of them suffering the same – nevermind that five of them never made it out. That there were only two survivors.
But the point was this: she wasn’t alone.
Perhaps later, after another solid meal and a nap, she could brave the Roosters. For now, however, Moa was enough.
====
Moa nodded. A long time. Things would really fucking suck (an expression she wouldn’t have used two weeks ago, because Old Moa very rarely swore) for a really fucking long time, and the thought of that was more than she could bear, but sitting there, Mette’s arm around her it felt slightly easier. Not easy enough for it to not hurt, and not enough to feel even slightly happy, but enough to cope. Ish.