the prettiest in crowd that you had ever seen, ribbons in our hair and our eyes gleamed mean

[rhinemaid]

Who: Lea Eshtazin and Ilde Decima. (CLOSED)
What: Post-apocalypse girls.
Where: the library at Lost Society.
When: Backdated to Sukkardi, Ceidary 5th / Saturday, May 5th.
Notes: A wild polyvore appears.
Warnings: References to suicide, mind control, Pale Man horrors. Subject to edits.

Sukkardi evening, Ilde is waiting for Lea a little earlier than they agreed on; she finds herself slightly more comfortable being dwarfed by one of the deep armchairs while she waits alone than she would be coming looking for someone else, confident in her own inability not to look coltish and awkward in the process. It's not as though she can do this without being uncomfortably self-conscious, she thinks, but she can at least minimize just how wrongfooted she starts, because...because it's shit, really, for the both of them, and it's not their fucking fault. It doesn't have to be that bad. She's got a virgin cocktail and a nicotine craving that she's trying to ignore, wishing irrationally that she'd pretended not to get Lea's text in the first place. Maybe if they ignored it, it'd just-- not have happened.

Except lately she's done nothing but run into women from her own world, and this feels more like something on her terms - something that she's at least nominally in control of - than that run in at the hospital did. She wants to know what Lea ... wants to know, she supposes, what it is that they're going to talk about. 'Remember that time--' well yes, it's not the kind of thing anybody forgets. Ilde remembers it every night whether she wants to or not, and she imagines Lea's in a similar position; it's difficult to guess at how someone who isn't Sonja deals with what Lucas put them through, because her obsessive devotion to her friend isn't blind and she's relatively confident no one else works quite like she does. It feels invasive to have witnessed Lea in his grip (its grip; Lucas isn't a person), and she carefully doesn't think about how much she hates to be looked at, known, understood - she doesn't think about it so hard that her knuckles ache when she puts her glass down on the low table beside her chair, puts her hands in her lap, and just waits for Lea to arrive. It can't be long now. She didn't come so early.

Comments

[agrat]

Lea promised to 'cover her ass', and this is indeed what she brings to the metaphorical table of their intended venue, however nominally; she turns heads in the posh environment of Lost Society both for the way she fills her low-cut, stomach-baring halter top and denim skirt and for the fact that it doesn't quite adhere to the dress code. She smiles at those onlookers, even though her mind is a million miles away, back in New York, and she lets them watch her walk.

Heels precede her approach, the wooden-stacked platform kind, her nails elaborately painted, door-knocker earrings, shaped like hearts. She has her fringed black leather jacket under one arm, and tucked inside she's got a lipstick with a knife hidden in it, an athame, and a tiny pink gun with bullets she blessed to know her will. It isn't that she foresees any remote need for those things, but it's habit. The world changes fast, and Lea is done being unprepared for what it can bring.

The guilt is irrational, most people would tell her. She wasn't in control of her actions. But if she had been more prepared back in Montreal, maybe this wouldn't have happened. If she had been stronger and broken out of his hold, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Most likely Ilde would be dead either way, but the threat of what she faced is, Lea knows intimately, far worse than death, and she played a big part in that, however against her will.

She doesn't get a drink, not yet. Instead, she slides into the chair next to Ilde, looking more comfortable in her own skin than she is, strictly; she crosses her legs at the knee and tosses her curls back, fingertips curling on the edge of the cushion. She doesn't say anything self-deprecating about her outfit or the scenery that an immigrant hoodrat hailing out of St. Catherine's street probably isn't meant for. She finds a cigarette in her purple patent leather bag, obviously acknowledging Ilde with the recognition in her eyes, but silent, as of yet. Maybe one of them can't smoke right, but the other is feeling like she needs something to do with her hands.

It isn't until she's lit up that she speaks.

"I have this responsibility, as part of being what I am," she says, "It isn't anything I picked; in fact, I tried to avoid it. It is just there. But you don't. So if you want to leave it, at any point, you can. I am telling you this for the record."

[rhinemaid]

Ilde is palpably much in her element here than she ever was on a battlefield, urban or otherwise; it isn't that she isn't dangerous, because she is, but she has neither the experience nor the particular kind of innate power required to handle the situations in which she found herself. Her death was always a matter of when and how, not if, and in retrospect she's almost painfully aware of that in a way she was never conscious of until she was losing consciousness for what should've been the last time. She's not absolutely certain that it isn't just cowardice, not wanting to go back with her heartbeat and her skin without scars.

She watches Lea because that's just how conversations with Ilde work, but-- because she wants to commit her to memory like this and replace the one she has. To see her in person and to see her and not the shadow of intersecting traumas. It takes her a moment to remember that the way conversations work is that she says things, too. “Okay. I think-- I did choose to get involved.” So there's that, and she's pretty sure that mostly it just makes her an idiot, but it is what it is and it still isn't something that she regrets. She might be alone now, if she hadn't.

('Without Sonja' means 'alone' and it doesn't mean she doesn't care about anyone else, but they aren't Sonja, do not fill space in her heart and in her mind the same way, do not make her feel so safe or so necessary. When she cut herself open it didn't occur to her that it might not be important, and she'd never not doubted, before.)

[agrat]

Class is a transient thing, not permanent like Lea's ethnic minority status or her gender or her sexuality, all things for which she is accustomed to being marginalized, but the four interact simultaneously to create a girl who uses her status as bottom rung as a weapon. She knows she doesn't belong, here or maybe anywhere, and she lets her aggressiveness about it carve out her niche. (She's always been cheap, always been That Girl, and it's never stopped them all from wanting to fuck her anyway.)

So when she orders her drink, the server stares, and she meets his eyes from beneath her lashes for just a little too long before returning her attention to Ilde, shoulders straight, chin tipped back just slightly.

"That's actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about. You don't have to answer, of course, but--why?"

She doesn't know Ilde well enough to have many expectations about what she'll say. There's it's the right thing to do and I didn't have anything else to do and a thousand other options, but often people's reasons for enlisting in what is essentially a cosmic war are surprisingly personal.

[rhinemaid]

“I didn't have anywhere else to go,” she says, sliding her little finger around the rim of her glass-- there's a moment where if she had the option she'd look away, because she'd rather to discuss something like this, but she's taking especial care not to miss anything Lea says and that means paying attention. “I'm from Italy, and I was visiting in Boston before the storm, when Prometheus came; I was only sixteen.”

She shrugs. “I knew how far I would get on my own. I thought I could make myself useful. I wanted to go wherever Sonja went. And I needed to remember why what they'd done was wrong. I needed to do something about that.”

--ultimately a lot more of it than Ilde is fully conscious of boils down to follow Sonja wherever she goes, but all things considered it's an unusually honest answer. It feels appropriate.