multiversallogs | CLOSED. don't ask what happens when the curtains draw.

Entry tags:

CLOSED. don't ask what happens when the curtains draw.

Who: Megan Gwynn & Sonja Garin.
What: Sonja brings Megan the antidote, and later, an explanation.
Where: Megan's place.
Warnings: Discussion of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, Sonja's very existence, at least narrative thoughts of violence.

There are probably many, many people in Baedal better-suited to going to speak to a young woman who has been violated by magic in a terrible way, to explain to her what has been done. Unfortunately, the only person in the city with the necessary knowledge to create an antidote is one of the least qualified counselors around, and she knows it, too; she doesn't let herself become awkward because that's not her way, but when she turns up on Megan's doorstep (in her leather pants, crop top, and leather jacket), she's got a tension in her shoulders. Admittedly, some of this tension is to do with wanting to beat Hilmi with a sack of hammers, but she's trying to quell that until later.

She knocks at the front door. While she's aware that Megan might well be too far gone to answer (she doesn't know what the time frame is like, that's the problem--none of them know as much as they should), she figures she ought to do this before trying to break in like a total maniac. That's restraint, right?

Fuck it. She wonders if she should just castrate the guy after this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's not surprising that there isn't any answer except, after a moment, the faint miaowing of a cat. The front door is unlocked, so at least nobody is going to have to break in a window. Immediately upon the door opening, a giant fluffy cat begins to purr hard and twine around Sonja's ankles, like she knows that someone is finally here to help.

Megan's apartment is a disaster -- the remnants of the party she threw a week ago are still everywhere, but half-gone, like she made an aborted attempt to clean up before she just stopped. In the kitchen, there's an open bag of cat food on the floor, which her cat has evidently been helping herself to.

Megan only knows someone is here because her cat left her. She hasn't left her up until then, had come up and sat on top of her and purred all week when her person stopped coming downstairs to play, as if the nearness of her could bring her back from wherever she's gone. Megan realises she forgot to lock her front door and barely considers going to do something about it -- she just does. Not. Care. If it's burglars, they can steal all her shitty stuff. If it's someone she knows, they can fuck off.

She's lying in front of her window upstairs, where she built a little nest so she could people-watch, the first thing she did when she moved into this place. Gauzy curtains, fairy lights, heavy blankets, it was supposed to be a place for her to decompress, but now she's wrapped herself in it like a funeral shroud. On her vanity, there are bottles of perfume, little girly knick-knacks, hair ties, empty lipstick tubes, a stuffed animal that a regular of hers bought her, all strewn there like shrapnel from some strange war. The entire upstairs is coated in a very thin layer of pastel dust, too fine to be chalk.

She stopped eating days ago, and she stopped getting up for water earlier today. She knows there are things in her bathroom that could help her, she could end this if she could just make the effort of walking the ten feet, but it's too hard, and all she can think about anyway is who would clean up the mess? Instead, she gave up, laid down and waited to die.

Interpreting the cat's presence as a sign she should continue on in, Sonja sidles through the door. She can sense someone on the second level, and makes her way through the (wrecked, she notices--it's impossible not to) apartment, her boots sounding heavy on the floor. On the second story, she can tell that dust is going to carry on her footprints for a while, though it isn't really a concern. She does wonder what it is, though.

At the doorway to the room Megan is in, she stops, and leans against the frame, quietly watching for a moment.

When she does speak, there's no greeting, no lead-up. What can she possibly say? She's basically just walked straight into this woman's apartment with a little vial of curious black liquid and the plans to, if necessary, force-feed it to her; she is dimly aware this may be traumatic, but she figures it can't be more traumatic than death by idiot fae. Politeness has never been Sonja's strong suit in the first place, and it seems especially pointless now.

"I need to talk to you," she says, "about Hilmi. He's worried about you."

Sort of true. She's not sure if that's really genuine worry or something that was forced onto him, but she doesn't know Megan, period, and that's the only thing she knows might get her attention, especially given the psychological state she seems to be in. "First, though, there's something else."

The name grabs her attention. She sent him a few text messages, but she's not an idiot and after the first day, seeing him talking to other people but not her, it became abundantly clear to her that he has been deliberately avoiding her. She looked for him, she asked around, but she couldn't find him, not at the Inn and not at Anarchy 99 and not in the neighbourhood she thought she remembered him saying he lived in. Nothing. She doesn't understand what she did wrong, was she too clingy? She was just worried, he left and he didn't sound so good when he came back --

She stirs and barely manages to sit up; the movement makes her dizzy, her face unfocused for a moment. "He asked about me?" Her low, husky voice is thicker than normal, like she's been crying, but her face is dry and it's hard to tell from her eyes, they're so black. There is a pathetic, fragile hope on her face. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was busy. Maybe she should have just waited. How could she have thought that about him?

Fuck. Any of the others would be better at this. Sonja half wants to shove the antidote at her and leave, caught between wanting to turn tail immediately afterward (that kind of fragility in anyone, at all, often makes her deeply uncomfortable) and knowing she ought to play this out with a little more care involved. The latter option wins out because this isn't Megan's fault, it's Hilmi's, and Megan doesn't need Sonja to worsen her anxiety.

"He knows you haven't been feeling too great. Guy's kind of an idiot about that sort of thing, so I don't think he's been much help to you; I expect he didn't know what the fuck to do." She crosses the room, reaching in her jacket for the vial. "He asked me to bring you this to take. It's to help you out."

She watches Megan's expression.

"I would have done it sooner, but he and I are from the same world, and I was still back there."

Megan wipes her face on the back of her hand, the gesture much more childish than she generally is -- it's easy to get that impression from the way she looks and the way she's started decorating her room, but she is not a child and has not been for a long time. Skipping some very key formative years in lieu of intense, focused attention on survival over development does tend to leave kids like her with a gap in between their adolescence and their adulthood, a sense that they have been cheated out of something everyone else their age takes for granted, but she has always had this unerring sense that she can never go back there. She doesn't know what to do with this feeling of I wish my mom were here.

She looks at the other woman without saying anything for a long time. It's hard to read someone's face when the eyes give so little away -- and with her, it's hard to tell which direction she's even looking in -- and that absentness there is so unlike her that even someone who has never met her can tell something's off. It is actually taking her this long to process all that, and she's not entirely sure she understands. Why would he give her something, but he won't come see her? He won't even answer her text messages, but he's sending her drugs?

Fuck it. If it's poison, she doesn't care. If it's something else, she still doesn't care -- it's not like she's not used to ingesting strange substances without knowing what they are under the best of circumstances, and under the worst, well. She'd drink rubbing alcohol right now if she thought it would help. "Okay," she says, finally.

Sonja proffers the vial, deft, after unstopping it. It is scentless and opaque, inky black. The effects should be instantaneous, but also probably not terribly pleasant, especially on an empty stomach: akin to being rocked up and down in an elevator, that lurched-forward feeling of vertigo intended to launch Megan out of the despair currently encircling her like strangling hands.

She doesn't say anything. She just waits.

Megan shoots it like it's tequila, why the hell not. She's half-hoping it's antifreeze. It tastes about as vile, anyway, and feels like getting punched in the gut, which is at least better than not being able to feel anything at all except a two-ton weight where her heart used to be. She wraps her hands around her stomach and crumples forward, it hurts -- that's just the way it has to be, and it's good at least that she cares enough about it to react to it.

She's crying, her hands over her face, but not because she's sad -- she has so many feelings all of a sudden that she forgot even existed. Like she forgot how to think and breathe without that crushing sadness over her. She feels like throwing up, but all that's in her is that potion and bile.

It takes her a while to come back down from the edge, and when she does, her head feels clear for the first time in over a week. She can look around her room and see that it's dirty and care about it; she can wonder where her cat is and who's been taking care of her (and the guilt she feels over that will be the stuff of legends, when she has the emotional capacity to move beyond this moment); she can wonder why she hasn't been going to work.

And why she felt like this to begin with. She can see now that it isn't like her, that she's never been like this. When she talks, it's like she's waking up from a coma, hoarse and defeated. "What happened?"

Sonja withdraws to the doorway again, not leaving, but giving her a healthy amount of space--she doesn't know if that's wanted, she just knows that's what she would want here. It's not pleasant to watch, but it doesn't really faze her terribly; she's more ticking, mentally, over what she has to do next, which is educate Hilmi. She stays slouched where she is, lean and knife-sharp from hipbones to shoulders, jacket falling open and loose.

"Hilmi happened." Her voice is resigned. "He's a fucking idiot, and he's in my enclave, so I'll have to discipline him later."

She makes that sound a little bit like he belongs to her, like she's responsible for him and he's an errant pet. It's not entirely true, and it's not even wholly intentional, she's just accustomed to seeing the people in her army a touch like emotive weapons that are hers to utilize.

"His kind of fae have an addictive property when it comes to the women they sleep with. Feels like love, acts like meth." She's dispassionate, now, to conceal her thoughts. "It's eventually fatal without an antidote."

It takes her too long to process this. Addictive property. Eventually fatal. The words all make sense, but the visible struggle on her face to form them into some kind of series of events that make sense to her looks like it's hurting her.

Her cat comes up and lies down in her lap, batting at her wings, their constant slow motion, like a butterfly's, catching the light that filters in from her window.

"He didn't know," she says, and that is, yes, hope in her voice. Hope that he did not know he would do this to her, because she would understand that, it would be easy to accept -- she's known so many mutants with similar out-of-control gifts, many of which involve that kind of pseudo-mind control, and as long as they don't intend to, it's... not all right, exactly, but it's forgivable. Megan has to assume that that's what happened here because it is completely inconceivable to her that anyone could know, and do nothing to stop it, and not care.

That he didn't come to tell her. That he didn't tell her before, so she could weigh that in with her decision to sleep with him. She's not in love with him, not with her head finally clear, and she doesn't even want to be; he was supposed to be her friend.

"No." It's not abrasive, but it's cutting through that idea Hilmi was acting out of ignorance. "No, he knows what he can do."

He said that he was drunk, but she does not find that to be any excuse. This is what she weaponizes him to do at home, but it's against Lucas's entourage, to extract information and then leave only a suicide in its wake. Not against random young women who were simply there and attracted to him.

"He said that he'd been drinking and he lost control, and from there on, he wanted it to be someone else's problem." And Sonja is not too happy about cleaning up the mess he made, but that's not really her most pressing concern in this clusterfuck. "You had someone here, staying with you. I suggest you call them back to stay with you for a while. You shouldn't be alone."

She can hear her say that, but she can't quite believe it, not yet. It's easier to block it out and keep pretending, at least for a little while, but the idea's in her head now and she won't be able to hold on to it forever. It is too soon and requires too much investment to be angry, or hurt, or anything other than feeling like something inside her has cracked slightly.

Jae. Jae was here -- she barely noticed his presence before but now she remembers. He sat with her sometimes. Her cat likes him. (Her cat likes everyone.) "Okay," she says, again, and her voice is so unsteady, she's walking a high wire right now between falling back into that pit of despair and trying to keep her head up where she can breathe. This isn't supposed to happen to her. She's not supposed to get sad, not in a way that she can't just pretend isn't there. "Okay," she repeats again, lamely. Her CiD's somewhere around her; she had it within arm's reach, just.

In case he called.

She is going to break his fucking pretty-boy face, Sonja decides. "One second," she says, rather than extolling the virtues of revenge.

She disappears from the room, but she doesn't leave the house. It takes a little poking around Megan's cupboards to figure out everything's location, but kitchens are relatively predictable, and she doesn't really know what the hell to say; this is not her skill set, and furthermore, there's really nothing to say. A few minutes later, she's got a plate, a sandwich on top of it, and has returned to the doorway.

Sonja sets the plate down by Megan.

"Eat something." She probably doesn't mean to sound so bossy, it's just force of habit. "If you want to confront him at some point, I'll bring him to you; you can find me on the Network."

In the meantime, Megan has managed to sit up fully, so that's good -- she's tucked up against her window, her knees drawn to her chest and her wings tucked tightly behind her. It's a little uncomfortable to have them pinned to her back like that, but the world isn't built for people with wings and it's a kind of discomfort she's used to.

She stares at the plate without really seeing it; she knows she should eat something, she can't remember the last time she did, but the thought of it -- she just can't. It would feel right now like another failure on top of the already lengthy list of this week's failures, all of them her fault. She can feel this impending tidal wave of blame, its presence is too much. She would really rather get drunk immediately. "I don't," she says, after a pause. Want to confront him, she means. Definitely not now, but probably not ever, the idea of it is laughably alien. What would she even say to him? It's not like he cares what she could possibly have to say to him -- plainly, or he would have done something before now. Like never let this happen to begin with.

After a moment: "He asked you to come?"

She pauses.

"Yeah." That sounds too favorable to Hilmi, so she decides to elaborate. "Somebody gave him a little bit of a reality check before I got back, seemed like. He was a wreck."

And Sonja appreciates that headfuck Hilmi received prior to her return, even if she sort of sees it as softening up the meat before she cuts into it--if that sounds like an unnecessarily vicious turn of phrase, it's still perfectly accurate in terms how Sonja's mind works. She's not really looking forward to disciplining him, but she won't be satisfied until she's certain he's learned the lesson she wants him to understand: don't ever do this again.

That someone has already done something about it has completely escaped her notice -- to be fair, that's probably not something Jae is dying to share with her -- and, yeah, it upsets her. This isn't the first time some guy has beat up another guy over her, and it doesn't make her feel any better. Maybe it should. She should feel better that he's hurting, too. "Oh," is all she can manage.

She has the strong desire to find her purse with her cigarettes (among other things), but that's downstairs, and she isn't going anywhere except maybe to crawl to the opposite end of the room, to the proper bed there. Eventually. She does pick up her CiD, she'll call someone... eventually, after she's sure that she can hold herself together, she's not going to let anyone watch her cry. "Um," she adds, after a moment-- "Thanks." It's completely inadequate (eventually fatal still rattling around in her head as it is) but what the hell else do you say in a situation like this? That she's talking at all is a lot of effort, right now.

The thanks is a little surprising, though she supposes it shouldn't be--when you run out of words, you revert to those formalities, the structure of how social interaction is supposed to go. There's another lingering pause, and then Sonja nods, in acknowledgment.

"I'll be around." Not that she really expects Megan to contact her, but she leaves the possibility open. (Did she even give her name? Oh, well.)

She leaves.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

CLOSED. don't ask what happens when the curtains draw.

tw: suicidal ideation

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject