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.