WHO: Antigone and totally open WHEN: Same night as Fight Club WHERE: Diogenes Club WHAT: Come drink with an angry girl, see what happens WARNINGS: Reckless driving, and then open for LITERALLY ANYTHING. I'll update warnings if needed.
Two and a half millennia since the name Antigone was first uttered, and the girl was still finding things in this world she hadn't yet done.
For example: jumping into the back of a taxi and saying to the driver "Follow that car."
As the taxi pulled out onto the street the driver laughed, slapped the wheel with the heel of his palm. "Five months!" he grinned in the rear view mirror at her. "Only five months driving cabs before someone asked me that! You got it, miss, following that car!"
Antigone didn't need his enthusiasm to tell her it sounded like something out of a script. Words that had been spoken over and over, a narrative that had been told before. The awareness bit at her; she was living in a goddamn story.
She didn't want to be a story. Antigone never wanted to be a story. Stories about Antigones ended, usually badly. She just wanted to be a friend, wanted to be a woman capable of saving another woman from this putrid, incomprehensible, cruel world.
She was following them without a plan, following them based only on feeling. It was too familiar and the familiarity hurt so much because it just sang the same old tune. Antigone doesn't think. Antigone acts only on feelings. But what else could she do?
Right now, nothing. Sit in the back seat, muscles so tight her upper back ached like she was carrying the world, eyes on the traffic around them, eyes on the bumper of the dark red car in front. Every turn they took and she asked herself what exactly are you going to do when we stop? and every turn failing to find an answer.
Just as she'd failed to find an answer for Ismene why can't you just tell me that you're sorry?
Antigone dug her heels into her eyes till the darkness burst red. From one side a horn blared through the windows and the taxi jerked to the left, the driver shouting out in a language she didn't know (another thing, in two thousand years, she hadn't learned - how to swear at traffic in every language) as another car cut them off. The seatbelt stopped her lurching forward as the taxi braked and the hot wet pain of whiplash flooded up the back of her neck.
"Alright? Alright? Lady, alright?"
"Fine," Antigone said, raising her eyes again, her hand on the back of her neck. "I'm fine. Are you?"
"Yeah yeah - we can catch them!" he pointed, through the windscreen. The car that cut in front of them had stopped at the lights, but in front of that, the car they'd been following had carried on through. "They're not getting away that easily!" her driver had fully embraced his part in the story, and Antigone wanted to press her hands over her ears so she didn't have to hear it, didn't have to accept that this was what was happening to her life.
But didn't tell him to stop, either, and as the light turned green, he whooped, and they sped off again, darting through traffic to try and make up for lost distance.
Antigone didn't close her eyes again. It crossed her mind to message Joan I'm doing something really, really dumb but she didn't want to lose sight of the car.
Still... the world was the world, and when had it ever given a damn about what Antigone wanted before? They lost the car for good two blocks later, when the traffic merged too thickly to get through. Her driver was keen to keep trying, and Antigone let him drive around for a few blocks before she couldn't take it anymore, paid him, and got out.
Even though it was dark, the heat remained trapped in the air, heavy as guilt, thick as regret. Antigone felt lightheaded in contrast, and lost, and upset, and powerless, and stupid. The feelings only compounded as she carried on walking, walking because she had no idea what else to do.
Walking till her feet took her past a sign, and she heard, in Joan's voice, what her friend had said. Have you heard of the Diogenes Club? Special for people like us.
She hadn't wanted to go there, that first night with Joan. Back when she'd been trying to fly under the radar. Back before she learned she'd moved in with a muse who'd gotten involved with a war god, back before she'd lived the cliche of follow that car.
Fuck it, she thought. If Joan had recommended it, it couldn't be such a terrible idea, and if she was going to be living in a stupid, cliche story then at least she was going to get a drink out of it. If Romeo needed her, she had her phone, and Antigone could hire another taxi driver with illusions of heroics, but till then: this.
Antigone walked into the bar like a barely contained thunderstorm, and ordered the strongest drink they had.