mette thinks you're a liar, liar, pants on fire. (lyve) wrote in invol_rpg, @ 2013-01-08 00:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! log, isla wolfe, mette skoglund |
LOG.
WHO: Mette Skoglund & Isla Wolfe.
WHAT: Besties finally reunite for some comfort, because one of them is very, very angry.
WHEN: January 7th, shortly after the fight with Jonas.
WHERE: The art room.
STATUS: COMPLETE.
Not everything is about you, Isla. It was a common refrain from her brother Kyle, and it was his voice Isla heard in her head as she fluttered over the mess of paper and charcoal at her table in the art studio. It was difficult to remember not to chew on the end of the stick, difficult to concentrate on transferring dead soldiers’ blank ID faces onto paper with expressions more fitting for a memorial. Difficult because Mette had finally, finally asked to see her and Isla kept having to forcefully derail her trains of thought: I should have taken an earlier flight so I’d be in Europe; I was so worried; I was so angry; I’ve been so anxious to see you; I was so good about not teleporting you; I wish I’d been there; I’m sorry; I, I, I, I, I I’m so terrified that you’re so changed that I’ve lost my best friend She didn’t know how the others - Jada, Lorelei, Richie - had been so patient; she’d been crawling up the walls, blocking out her powers so that one bright light wouldn’t torment her and tempt her. Every time she got the urge, every time she started down I, me, my pain she’d pinch herself, mentally and physically (black charcoal smudges all up and down her arms), and reroute: Not everything is about you, Isla. Mette needs her space; Mette needs time; Marine and Mal and Providence and Erik are dead; Myra and Alyosha are dead; all these soldiers you are giving faces to, they’re dead; be respectful, be patient, not everything is about you. It was mentally arduous, telling herself this over and over. But all the charcoal and paper wasted as her frustration manifested itself in drawings that were not good enough paid off: when the art studio door clicked open and Mette stood in the door, all of Isla’s thoughts distilled into you, you, you. The Norwegian girl hovered in the doorway. She looked cleaned and groomed and well-fed – but not well-rested, no, there was something noticeably different about her. Saying that it was her powers would be an oversimplification. (Her powers were not a visible thing.) But there was a change in the way she held herself, a wariness and trepidation that hadn’t been there before: a natural restraint that the buoyant, bubbly Margarethe Skoglund had never quite exhibited before. She’d been flayed open in front of two and a half billion internet users, her pain bare for the consumption. A news headline. A blurb. But now, here, she was just a girl diminished, her eyes flitting around the edges of the art room (were any of Marine’s works pinned to the walls? she wasn’t sure, she wouldn’t be able to recognise them), briefly resting on the cupboard where her sculpture was stored, before finally darting back to meet her best friend’s eyes with a strained smile. Mette was still thrumming with anger, practically vibrating off the floor with it, but the rage quelled – or ebbed slightly, at least – once she saw the rush of emotion flicker across Isla’s face. It was a heady mix of relief, happiness, worry, the same staggering display of emotions she’d seen from everyone she’d met with so far. Most of her friends were open books. Most. “Hi,” Mette said, the standard monosyllabic greeting she’d been trotting out for the past two days – but then she broke into a run, as if a hook had dug into her shoulder and suddenly dragged her towards the other girl. But there was no teleportation necessary; she instantly flew into the hug. The charcoal dropped from her fingers as Isla wrapped her arms around her friend and hugged her so tight the other girl could hardly breathe; tight enough to keep them both from shattering into pieces, a puzzle that couldn't be put back together. It was too late for that, she knew, but she held on anyway. "Hi," she returned, choking on the syllable as tears leaked out of her eyes. I missed you so much, I'm so glad you're okay, and all the other awkward, not-quite-right phrases buoyed up to the roof of her mouth, blocking her airways. When she finally let go and stepped back, Isla gasped like she was coming up for air, scrubbing at the tears on her cheeks and leaving more charcoal smudges there. "I am not letting you out of my range ever again, ever," she blurted, all her self-imposed rules about "I" flying out the window with the most heartfelt platitude breaking ahead of the pack. "So I hope you're prepared for a life of never being ten miles away from me, bébé." Mette laughed, though it was more like a nervous burble, a shaky noise that quavered its way out of her throat unplanned. “Ten miles, got it. Never a-fucking-gain, sweetheart.” She didn’t have to articulate the thoughts thrumming in both their heads: had they been together, in the same city, Isla could have easily yanked her out of the kidnappers’ very hands. But: no use crying over spilt milk, despite the fact that tears were pricking in Mette’s eyes yet again, that all of her carefully-wrought composure from the last couple hours had flown right out the window as soon as she saw her charcoal-smudged best friend. “What are you drawing?” she asked, trying to keep her voice light and the topic innocuous. The aim of the question didn't escape Isla, and the look she cast the drawings was full of chagrin. "Oh..." It didn't even occur to her to lie and skirt the truth; she'd never lied with Mette, she couldn't. "I volunteered to do portraits of the IVF soldiers, since you know, their ID photos are so--" Lifeless she almost said, but bit it back. "Expressionless, so I've been trying to portray them more like real people than nameless guards." She shuffled the paper around carefully, mindful not to smudge the portraits she'd deemed acceptable so far. "One of those moments I wish I'd gone into, like, 3D modeling, trying to predict muscle movement in 2D is so hard." The unacceptable renderings, a pile far larger than the few she'd placed carefully before her, stood testament to that. Seeing Mette's expression, though, Isla jumped to a different topic. "But your text sounded super urgent, is everything okay?" It was a stricken look that flitted across Mette’s face like lightning, disappearing as soon as it arrived, and leaving behind a stony, statuesque stare that she struggled to smooth into something approximating normality. The subject of the eighteen soldiers was something she wasn’t prepared to broach. Not yet. There were other things in the way first. “Fight with Jonas,” she said simply, pulling up a seat to the table Isla had been using. Mette fussed with the stack of blank papers, readjusting them at right angles to one another, then picking up one of the charcoal sticks and twirling it. “I asked him why he did not volunteer like you and Jada and Shannon and Richie and Oden and – and everyone, pretty much – did, and he basically said that I didn’t matter one shit. So I slapped him.” The charcoal snapped in Mette’s hand. "What?" It came out not as a question, but a hiss, a steam valve about to go off. Isla was already reaching out for that spark in her mind that connected her to Jonas, ready to pull him in and give him a piece of her mind in their shared language. It was only Mette's presence that held her back and made her channel that urge into tensed muscles, fingernails digging into her palms. "That fils de pute," she cursed sharply, shaking her hair out of her eyes and looking around as if Jonas might come striding into the art room any minute, smirking and smug. "I will teleport him into the sewer and leave him to choke!" Isla’s rage, always with a flair for the dramatic, was ever-so-slightly funny and tended to elicit suppressed chuckles whenever it flared up; Mette always enjoyed her friend’s sympathetic anger on some level. Much more than the jarring discovery that her own fury burned cold. It was a thing she’d never known about herself until now – because until now, her own temper used to be the same sort of histrionic scream, the childish stamp of the foot, the exaggerated threats. But the threat made her smile, slightly. She dropped one of the halves of charcoal, using the other to start furiously sketching something, not pausing to plan it much. “No, you do not have to do that.” Mette was surprised the blow to Jonas had even connected, but she tried to wave that thought aside. “How would you even know you reached the sewers? You might teleport him into a wall and as much as I hate the bastard and am, like, never going to sleep with him ever again – he doesn’t deserve to die.” If it had been him, Mette would have volunteered, no matter her cowardice. She was fairly certain of that now. “Fine, the lake, I will take out a boat,” Isla waved a dismissive hand. Obviously the details didn’t matter, but she could respect Mette’s concern for Jonas’s overall well-being. “A shallow part.” “A slap is only a tiny fraction of what he deserves!” she added vehemently, scowling at Mette’s furious sketching, uncertain if she should try to still her friend’s hands or not. “I know. Wish I’d done more.” Mette sounded almost blasé while a face started taking shape beneath her hands, dark black angles and curves forming the planes of their cheeks. The emotions were still fresh: seething and roiling beneath the surface and leering like an open wound. How long ago had it been? Only an hour or two, surely. “Fuck him,” she added, matter-of-factly. "And the horse he rode in on," Isla agreed. Overcoming her hesitation, she touched Mette's shoulder gently. "Seriously, though, I will teleport him into the lake, like, right now. Or we can wait until he's taking a shower or something, and teleport him into the cafeteria, though... that would take some kind of intense planning. I'm sure Oliver would help." "Or..." she trailed off, frowning. All of her schemes of vengeance were good for jilted lovers and cheaters, but this... this was different. How do you get back at someone for not thinking you were worth the effort to rescue them from kidnappers? And this was just a sliver of all that Mette was dealing with; was it really wise to focus in on Jonas and Jonas alone, as if humiliating the bastard would help heal her friend? "Ugh, you're right. Fuck him. He isn't worth the effort, honestly." She could always just teleport him into the lake by herself, later. The muscle in Mette’s jaw was tight, but at her friend’s touch, she managed to focus on settling down: letting her limbs relax, loosening her iron grip on the charcoal lest she snap it again, into fourths this time, progressively breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces. The poor art department didn’t deserve it. “I thought you could only teleport people to yourself,” Mette said, by way of tiptoeing around the subject. Something like a lake started unfurling on the background of her page, shaky and tree-lined. “This lake-dunking strategy is, like, obviously something we should’ve been taking advantage of before this. God.” She finally glanced up from the paper, going still, and tried to give a smile. "Well, yeah," Isla admitted, giving her friend a sheepish smile in return. "As a strategy it's kind of not the best, since I need to be wherever I want them to be. It worked pretty well for Raphael, though?" A bark of a laugh and Mette scoffed, shaking her head. “Jonas would just take it in stride if he were to be teleported into the girls’ showers. Probably someone would fuck him right then and there, knowing my luck.” "That is why the IVI gods gave us the lake," Isla sighed, theatrically wistful. She tilted her head, looking down at Mette's sketch. The dark, angry lines said a lot about her state of mind - not that it was particularly hard to read, given the tiny pieces of charcoal that were strewn about the table. Impulsively, she flung her arms around her friend again, squeezing her tight. "Who needs rich Swiss bastards anyway," she murmured. "I'd go to the ends of the earth and back again for you, and so would so many other people, okay." It was as if a fist had clenched around Mette’s heart, fingers tightening on valves and ventricles and squeezing the life right out of her; the girl hissed an inward breath, her other arm reaching out to pull Isla closer. She had to blink quite a lot, and she scrubbed at her face in almost irritation, letting the charcoal clatter to the tabletop. The drawing sat there, abandoned: the faceless outline of a girl standing against the lakeshore, shoulders hunched up into her coat, skeletal trees lined up in rows behind her. Eighteen of them. “Thank you,” she mumbled into her best friend’s shoulder, her fingers gripping tighter. “Love you, darling. Glad i deg.” |