faderift | MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

"Was it...like that the whole time?" She asks, a little hesitant. It's difficult to find the right balance between being a good listener and being an active one, prompting without demanding. She's never really been good at it at the best of times.

"Yes." Laura stares at her bare feet, only now aware that she did not think to put boots on for this experience. She should have brought her cowl, too. One of her hands is wrapped around her opposite wrist, squeezing hard in lieu of pulling out a claw. (People do not like when you cut your skin in front of them, Athessa very much included.) "They liked my claws."

If it's any consolation, Athessa's own feet are bare, but that's because she doesn't even own shoes. Not feeling the ground beneath her feet the few times she had to wear them was very uncomfortable, moreso than stepping on rocks or in mud.

"Bastards," she breathes out the word with smoke. "You deserved better."

She shrugs, head still drooped against her knees--but her heart, at least, has decided not to race. It isn't something she notices, exactly, not just then. She'd notice the reverse, and that is it.

"So did you." The words keep coming out of her, bubbling up like blood from places they shouldn't be able to escape. "You were not...you were something good."

She frowns slightly, not understanding. "Something good?"

"You did not kill people. You were--" She does not want to say something better than me. Taking the joint from Athessa, she breathes in again, and then out. "I think it is working."

Well, that's something. Athessa smiles and nods about the herb no longer affecting Laura negatively.

"I was a thief. I may not have killed anyone, but I hurt my fair share," It's not an argument that she wasn't deserving of decency, or care, but they were both just kids doing what they had to in order to survive. "I did what I had to do. So did you."

"Yes. But--" But she does not really have an argument she can make that will stop Athessa from disagreeing. And she does not want to disagree right now, when the world is finally quiet.

She has to look for something else she can say instead. The best she can come up with, in the short span of time before Athessa might speak, is, "Don't tell Matthias. He--I do not want him to know."

"I won't tell him. Won't tell anyone. I promise." In this, she's dead serious. Laura is the first person she's ever told about Devigny, about what he did to her and what happened after. She'll guard Laura's past the same way.

Still, it's...freeing, in a way, for one other person to know. Carrying such a burden alone all these years takes its toll. She smiles with her next exhalation of smoke.

"He really likes you, ya know."

"I won't, either." It needs to be said, this much. Athessa has shared much more with her than Laura would want others to know--and she promises to keep Laura's story quiet too readily for Laura to think she'd like her own past told. She knows how to keep secrets, and this is one she's determined to hold tight to her chest.

And then they can talk about Matthias without concern.

"I know," she says, and when she's all huddled up now, it's in the interest of curling around a secret--a pleasant one. "I made him tell me how he felt. And then I kissed him."

Her face lights up with delight at that, and she can't help but bump her shoulder against Laura's amicably.

"And? Did he kiss you back? Of course he did he thinks you're magnificent."

"Yes," she says, with just a hint of a smile. And then, hesitant--"He thinks I am magnificent?"

That doesn't sound like Matthias. Brilliant, maybe, she would believe.

"Mmhmm," she nods, looking like the cat that got the cream. Or whatever the fuck that idiom is. "He said magnificent. And brilliant, and plenty of other nice things."

"Oh," she says, entirely unsure what to do with this information. Her cheeks feel too warm, and she can't bring herself to look directly at Athessa again. "He is...I did not know that."

"It's good to know, though," she ventures, tipping her head to the side. "Right? You don't have to worry about whether or not your feelings are one-sided."

Which is pretty much the extent of Athessa's ability to comment on feelings and relationships, really. She's been avoiding both for so long and focusing just on keeping things casual that she's probably on equal footing with Laura as far as experience.

"Yes." She hadn't believed Derrica when she'd said it would be better to know, but Derrica had been right. But that does not make it easy to talk about.

And that is why she asks, after a moment, "Did they really call you Tessa?"

She blinks, taken aback by the question. It's not at all what she expected.

"Yeah," she says. It feels like a much longer pause than it is, the haze making her perception of time unreliable. "I guess they didn't think Athessa had enough... appeal."

She thinks about that, looking over at Athessa for a quiet stretch of time. Athessa, who smells comfortingly of plants and lingering sadness, who makes nicknames for people and owns an enormous bat, who isn't human and doesn't need a human name. "They were wrong."

Something about that strikes a chord within her, the reverberations of that note shaking loose a fresh stream of tears. But she smiles, too. Laura has stumbled onto what Athessa needed to hear, what Athessa herself never knew she needed to hear. The name her parents gave her is good enough. She is good enough. She sniffs, wiping at her face with her sleeve.

"Thanks."

MOD EVENT ↠ IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

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