faderift | (Closed) Even when I try, you don't believe it

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(Closed) Even when I try, you don't believe it

WHO: Worst girls (Abby, Ellie) & guests
WHAT: Shit going down September
WHEN: Kingsway
WHERE: the Gallows. Fitting!
NOTES: Oh no. CW for eventual violence, & discussion of past violence, murder, slavery, child abuse, torture, stalking. Will update as we go along too

The nightmare is an entirely different beast, unlike anything she's had before. Abby doesn't even remember getting to her bed and falling asleep; why would she? Nothing about tonight was abnormal, until now.

She finds herself dreaming, unusually lucid, and completely aware of the cool night air and thick pain pulsing in her thigh and shoulder, blood a hotter wet contrasted to the rain. A trickle of understanding: she's walking back from the theater? Lev is ahead of her, bow in his hands, drawn. Ready. He's wearing her jacket, and he turns to look over his shoulder as if he heard her think his name. It's so good to see him again she could cry and maybe she is, just a little, but it's hard to tell in the rain.

The memories start off slow, catching her up, taking them back to the aquarium and then further, to the next day, a week out–

The time on the boat could go even slower. Abby wants to savour going down the coast with the kid in tow, the two of them bruised silent for days before they relax into the routine of handling the sails; Albany isn't long enough. There's Lev, fishing off the side of the boat. Abby, writing letters in the cabin, curled up on her side. Together they comb through Florence, Port Orford, Ferndale, heading south, hunting Fireflies, months of travel covered in a night of sleep. He teaches her how to whistle like a Seraphite with two fingers in her mouth, and Abby wakes him the morning dolphins pull up alongside them in Santa Rosa; it no longer feels like they're running from ghosts.

Every lead they get runs to a dead end. It's hard to shake the feeling that they're going the right way anyway– or maybe Abby didn't notice the way Lev looked at her then and does now. He rolls with every disappointment, and her enduring hope; he doesn't care if they find any Fireflies, or not. He's fine with the way that things are so long as they're together.

A disappointment in Anaheim leads them to 2425 Constance, Santa Barbara, and she wishes that part would go much faster.

Wagner notices that Abby has begun twitching and whimpering in her sleep: he does his best to wake her but can't, even when he jumps on to the bed to drape over her legs like a sack of anxious potatoes. Abby doesn't notice, dead to everything else but the dream as it turns on its heel to attack her. Perhaps it's lucky River isn't around when she claws her way up and out with an airless sob, a crying heave for breath. Seconds ago she'd been drowning in the ocean. She was fighting for air, through blood slick fingers and hands.

Her own scrabble at herself, palming her body and throat. Still here, still intact. She can feel the spot where her braid caught between the back of her neck and her pillow but everything slots into place with little relief–

She cries.

It's only her in the room and a whining dog (who knows something is wrong but not what). She's got a fistful of her own hair and she knows where she is, but the pattern of cage bars has burned onto the undersides of her eyelids, claustrophobia crawling up and down her spine. She can almost feel Lev asleep and fitful, tucked into her side (Wags, his weight leaning into her, wet nose burying into the crook of her arm in an attempt to soothe). By the time he was cut down from the pillars and fell into her arms, he weighed next to nothing. Abby was no better; their bones were hollow. She runs her hands slowly up herself, a stomach no longer concave, and skin no longer blistered.

They were the same size as each other. The fight was almost fair.

Ellie.

Abby flinches from the memory of her, and irons both hands up over her face, peering through her fingers. She shivers around the urge to dry heave. Is she imagining the tang of salt water in the back of her throat?

She's moving before she realises. She's pulling clothes on, keeping the protesting dog inside with her leg as she opens and shuts the door to go out. She has to accept that she knows her well enough by now to check her usual haunts: the tower to the griffon keep, closest, Abby's first guess: empty. It's too late for the library or the stables to have many people left in them, good. She can't risk running into anybody else, not volatile like she is, a loaded gun.

She doesn't know what she wants. They are past talking. Or rather: she thought that they already spoke about this, and cleared whatever air they could. She certainly didn't think that finding out Ellie withheld information from her would hurt like this: sharp, and knife-like, jammed into her ribs.

All she wants to know is why.

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Now and again, Ellie can see it, can feel it. She's come so far, but sometimes she moves too fast and she can feel it. Her old self, rubbing up under her skin, sharp as knives. Not fighting to get out, just reminding her of who she's always been.

It's here in her now, in the wary way she watches Abby, like she expects her to lunge. It's something that'll never die.

It was only a matter of time. This. But Jesus, she'd almost fooled herself into thinking that it wouldn't. Pressing her lips together, Ellie moves forward, reaching out to grip the front of Abby's shirt with her bad hand, tugging her.

"C'mon," she says, her voice rough. She's not sure what it is. Hurt? Regret? Grief? Some of that old terror and the hatred that never really went away?

"Not here."

Ellie's scarred fingertips closing around her shirt hem don't actually brush up against her, but Abby still jolts away like a wild animal, lashing out with a flat palm at her arm in warning. "Don't you fucking touch me."

She's right. They shouldn't do this here with Abby trembling on a knife's edge, waiting for half a reason, but that doesn't mean she's going to let Ellie tug her along like they're friends, or friendly, whatever the fuck they've been doing all this time. Pretending like none of this happened.

She's got a big cramp in her gut, a knot of guilt and misery. Her braid lashes behind her as she walks, bouncing off the back of her neck, and for a moment she's just walking blindly, away from the towers (where her dog is probably barking at the top of his lungs for her to return). She's angling downstairs, into the hull of the building, where the layers of stone have a hope of containing her.

There's nobody around to stop them.

Edited (no closets!) 2022-09-01 22:13 (UTC)

The echo of horror and rage comes through the years when Abby slaps her hand away, and it comes with a burst of hurt, and guilt, and resentment, and hatred.

Don't you fucking touch me, Ellie said to Joel, when he'd reached out to comfort her when she'd collapsed in tears at the rotting ruins of the hospital. She wonders if her face resembles his in that moment- that I-told-you-so she'd tell herself.

The world is buzzing and numb as they descend into the depths, where they can keep their sickness away from the Gallows around them, where they can contain the blast.

She and Joel did this too. Contained it.

The pressure inside of her ratchets tighter with every step downward. It feels like the air around them is growing colder. It's dark, vaguely unreal, smells of dust.

When they get to a cavernous storage chamber, without any witness but boxes and crates and broken furniture, Ellie lights one of the lanterns. Lets the reddish-orange glow wash over the both of their faces. Abby looks like a ghost half-cloaked in the dark.

Edited 2022-09-01 22:19 (UTC)

... It's hard to go down into the dark. Abby has never had a problem with this until now; she finds herself stop-starting on the stairs, catching her breath in little gasps. It reminds her of the nest. All the stone, and being down in the dark. They're in a fucking gallows lest she forget, there are cells down here. What a mistake. She keeps thinking she's about to squint hard enough to make out a small body lying curled on the ground behind bars.

She white-knuckles, moves her legs through it, and then they're in some kind of chamber surrounded by refuse, where they can shout all they like, except that the anger has gone out of Abby. She's deflated, her eyes wide in the gloom.

What the hell is she supposed to say. She stares at Ellie, brow knitted, jaw set.

God her eyes hurt. They're hot, prickling. When she says, "You were wrong about the Fireflies," it's halting, upset instead of righteous, "I found them. We were going. We were on our way to join them."

Ellie realizes it, too late. It was the smell that got her back in California. The smell of human misery, the waste and the rot and desperation.

She doesn't feel satisfied over seeing that look in Abby's eyes. Not anymore. Instead it's like that feeling after seeing her tied up on the pillars. That hopeless despair.

You.

It hasn't felt so real in a while. It threatens to choke her.

"Did you get there?" she asks, her voice sounding like it's coming from far away.

Silence. "No."

She runs her tongue over her teeth. Widens her eyes when they water and blur, slowly blinking. She shakes her head, and stares out at the dimly lit corners of the crates, waiting for the feeling to pass her by.

It won't go easy. She says, almost offhandedly, "You left a few things out of your explanation," and is able to look at her directly. Her expression pinches, twisting; Ellie looks like she's in despair, like it pains her to have ended up here. It's not her fault they did, but Abby would like for it to be because control is slipping from her clutches, and her fingers hurt from clinging.

Her voice is wet at the edges when she whispers a question meant for the both of them. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

All that and they didn't even get there. She plants her feet so they won't sway.

"Which part?" Ellie asks, digging in the knife for both of them. She knows, specifically- but is there more? Is there something more monstrous that she forgot to mention? Something else that she's blocked out or forgotten?

If Abby's this pissed off at her, it's best to get it all out in the open. No secrets, no holding back. They had been starting to trust, and now Abby looks like she wants to break her open. It feels-

How can it feel like a betrayal? That Abby knew all the worst parts of her and has now decided she's a monster?

Something inside Ellie is too numbed out to care, or so she tells herself.

There it is, that surge of curdling anger. Thank fuck she never lost that, right. You go to hell and back and fail your people along the way; god fucking forbid you forget how to hate.

Abby bares her teeth, "You know which fucking part."

It's gonna go like this, huh. She's really going to stand there and act coy, like she doesn't know exactly what Abby is talking about. Abby could hit her. She could grab Ellie by the hair and drag her down, slam her against the cold, unyielding stone. She hasn't wanted to do anything like that in years. She doesn't welcome the urge.

"He's a goddamn kid." Her voice breaks over the syllable. Despair crashes over her like a wave; you used him, to get to me. And I let you. She can't say it, but it lodges in her throat like a shard of glass.

She swears, adds whipfast, dreading the answer, "Would you have done it if I didn't fight you."

The anger and hate is good, familiar, easier. It's something Ellie can hold even if it burns her. So she grips it tight in both hands, pushes it down deep until it grows dense enough to smolder.

Deep enough to forget that it's not just directed at Abby.

No, some part of her cringes. No, she didn't have it in her. She wouldn't have hurt Lev, not really. She just needed Abby to believe she would. But in that moment, in that desperate, horrible second? Ellie had almost believed that she would.

"I don't know."

Her back is straight, and she's a little too still.

She's telling the truth. She really doesn't know. Realisation gifts Abby a tremble of disgust, skin crawling, and she actually laughs in disbelief. She feels horrified. Her hands are shivering.

Thickly, "I get it.

No, really– I wouldn't have told me either. And you almost fucking got away with it! I actually trusted you."

It's one of those cuts that doesn't hurt right away. It's deep, and later it'll mess her up, but right now, Ellie just can't shake the adrenaline of it, the fucking audacity Abby has to stand there and act like she's been taken in. Deliberately fucking fooled.

"You really wanted to know the whole truth?" she asks, and the volume of her voice climbs a notch, sustains into something not quite a yell, but not quite reasonable either. Every syllable is tight, cutting.

"If you did, you would've asked about your other friends. Or about that map. You know, the one you used to find the theatre?"

Ellie can't feel her skin.

"How do you think I knew to look for you in the aquarium, Abby?"

The map. Right. She didn't see that moment in her nightmare but she remembers it freshly, the memory sharp-edged in her mind, enough to cut. Owen's stabbed body, Mel's slashed throat, the shit she couldn't bear to let herself think about then or the entire time she's been in Thedas, living another life, being a different Abby.

There is no other Abby. It happened to the both of them, and then she let it happen to Lev.

Ellie has gone unrecognisable across the way from her, dagger-like. "I don't know." Honestly, there wasn't room at the time to pay it any mind. She's breathing short, and shallow. "How did you figure it out, Ellie."

... The aquarium was marked in blood.

Edited 2022-09-02 17:06 (UTC)

"We were looking for Tommy," Ellie says, and there's a horrible quality in her voice now, the too-soft anger that came out when she had Joel's revolver pointed at Nora.

Yeah. You remember me.

"And we heard someone say you were at the hospital. When I got there, you were gone. But your friend Nora was there."

Ellie steps closer, into range, daring her. Every bit of her tight, like she might shatter if she breathes. She feels out of her head, and perfectly in control.

"She didn't wanna give you up."

It hits like a bucket of ice water, leaves her cold to the bone. All Abby can hear is her own heart. Ellie’s right about one thing: if she had wanted to know the truth she would have asked about Nora a long time ago, but after seeing that sick little collection of Leah’s polaroids spread out over the table in the theatre, she decided she didn’t want to.

She still doesn’t, but that doesn’t matter. Ellie has somehow become closer to her. She wants to tell. She can’t be stopped.

Please don’t. Please, don’t. Her voice feels oddly to the left of her when she goes to use it, tongue thick in her mouth.

“… What did you do?”

This would be the point that Ellie would stop, if she'd been any kind of okay. But grief and damage and anger come in waves, and she's cresting the top of the worst one she's had since Abby arrived.

Still, she hesitates at the look on Abby's face. At the dull panic, at the hurt, at the horror, and she feels so fucking out of control.

"I was going to let her go, if she told me where you were. But then she ran. I chased her, and we got cornered at the edge of the spores. So I pulled us into the lower levels, where the wolves couldn't follow."

Ellie doesn't breathe. She probably should.

"I told her I could make it quick, if she talked. Or I could make it worse."

That little bitch deserved what he got, Nora had said, her mouth dripping venom. Think of what he did, she'd said, pleading. Think of how many people are dead because of him.

"She chose worse."

... The fuck did they even talk about, the last time they spoke? Abby hadn't known that about the conversation at the time, otherwise she would have memorised every goddamn word between them. Nora was asking her something about Owen? She told her to look out for abandoned ambulances, for supplies. Something so trivial and meaningless now; Abby just assumed she'd made it back to the FOB.

There's a horrible whine in her brain, threatening to shatter all her teeth. She thinks about Nora running for her goddamn life through empty hospital halls, and Ellie hunting her down, dragging her, wounded, into the spores.

And she didn't even give Abby up after that. She always was the most hardcore about the Salt Lake crew shit–

Abby gasps, a sudden, wretched heave. Her chest feels so tight it's unbearable. Her eyes are blurry, and hot.

When she lashes out at Ellie without any warning, it's to make her stop talking more than anything else. She can't listen any more. She can't handle knowing that this, too, is all her fault.

Edited 2022-09-07 06:17 (UTC)

It comes as a shock, actually. It really shouldn't, because Ellie's been trying to make Abby haul off and punch her in the eye for the last few solid minutes. But somehow it's still a surprise.

It means that Ellie doesn't guard, doesn't even flinch before Abby's fist connects with her jaw, and the lights wink out completely for a good second. She doesn't remember hitting the floor, she just comes to in the dim orange light, looking at the blood painted in an arc across the stone, blood filling her mouth and nose. She coughs hard, spitting out a good deal of it, the pain singing through her skull.

It's both a dull horror and a sick satisfaction.

"We didn't have to kill Leah," she says from the floor. "Scars beat us to her."

Ellie's bow and arrows and daggers and knives are all right there, but she doesn't go for any of them. She doesn't reach for her magic.

Instead she digs deeper, as she hauls herself up from the floor.

"Tommy got to Nick," she says thickly, wiping blood away from her mouth with the back of her fist. "He went the same way as Nora. But for a gate code."

Ellie's teeth are glazed crimson. The look in her eyes is wild, and she can smell the surf. The rush of thunder and tide.

The sound of Ellie hitting the floor is terrible, a dull slap on cold stone– Abby blinks, and tears roll down her face, dripping off her chin. She shudders and Ellie comes to seconds later with a horrible, wet cough. There's blood on her lip, and in her mouth.

It doesn't make Abby feel any better. It makes her feel even worse, but she already knew this; she's been here before. She's stood over an unmoving body, golf club in her hands, and kept going.

Ellie keeps going too. Abby's trying so hard not to listen to her but she can't tear her eyes away from the grim red of her mouth, teeth painted, and bared. Every word is plain.

She croaks, "Stop it."

Her hands are clenched in aching fists, and tremble out of beat with her heart. She can taste blood in her mouth, whether from sympathy or because she's been biting the insides of her cheeks she can't tell, "Please stop."

Or else.

"What?"

The word cuts its way out of her mouth, and Ellie blinks past the dizziness, the blurred heat. She wants to swing at her. She wants to fucking break her jaw. She wants Abby whimpering and crying and begging for the mercy she didn't give Joel.

Ellie closes the distance between them, inches from her face all over again, just fucking daring her.

"First you think I fucking lied to you- for what? To get you to trust me?" The laugh rips out of her like it should leave her bleeding, and she doesn't bother to wipe her lip. A tear tracks down her cheek, cutting through the blood and leaving it thinned. Salt.

"And now you don't want the truth?"

Ellie's hands are quick, sharp, her palms against Abby's shoulders to push her back with all of her strength. To ride her all the way to the wall, if Abby lets her.

Edited 2022-09-07 18:08 (UTC)

... She didn't break Ellie's nose. She can tell even through blood, snot and tears because she knows her, or thought she did.

Every breath comes panic-quick. It's shameful that after everything that happened to her she'll still allow somebody to drag her back down to this depth. This close, Abby's expression crumples. She stares into the hateful green of Ellie's eyes, an unfathomable forest. Once, she saw somebody between all the trees.

"I said, shut up–"

The moment Ellie's hands reach for her it's permission. She's barely pressed her weight into her before Abby is hauling her off again, and slamming her knuckles into the same side of her face that she hit before. Her other hand reaches, fingers clawing, for the back of her head, so she can grab her by the hair. Fresh sweat breaks at the nape of her neck. Tears wet her cheeks.

There's a hard, cutting vindication when she sees Abby make the decision to stop holding back. It cracks something in her, a dam holding back something rotten and awful.

Abby's fist crashes into her face and Ellie feels something dully snap, not sure if it's her nose or her cheekbone. It doesn't matter. This is a bloodletting. A catharsis.

The last time they fought, it had been desperate, horrible, and anything but.

This feels like lancing an infection. Gloriously painful, overwhelming in the relief. Abby grabs for her hair and Ellie dodges, pulls all but the ends free as she knocks aside Abby's forearm with her own, coming up instead with a snakelike right hook towards her solar plexus.

She gets to be enraged, like this. Gets to be terrified, like this. Gets to come completely undone.

As hard as she can, she drives her knee into the same spot.

The truce held so well for so long because they both knew they wouldn't attack the other unless they had cause: this is it. A reason to snap like brittle wood, and they take it. Abby had been counting on grabbing Ellie by the back of her head and holding her still for another hit but she gets loose, and Abby's knuckles go wide. Before she can center herself again, Ellie strikes at her gut, left exposed. Air leaves her in a heave, and then the knee goes in deeper, crushing up against her kidney, and she whines out a great sob.

Her palm spans the entirety of Ellie's knee. She punts the leg away and ducks her body down, cringing around her hurt, slamming her shoulder into Ellie's chest to knock her backward.

Why doesn't she go invisible?? Why doesn't she call up her glowing, golden eyes, and use the energy to put Abby on her back- she should. Abby is already wishing she brought her goddamn mace.

She is dangerously angry. Seeing red, like she did in the cabin. Hearing the same screams.

Edited 2022-09-07 21:27 (UTC)

Ellie couldn't have said why she didn't draw anything, didn't even protect herself as she went heavily down. She could've called Gold. She could've. She can feel it clamoring inside of her, screaming to be let out, shard of the essence of war and beasts, but this isn't that.

Blue can't take her either -- she has to what to not be seen. She has to be holding her breath. Instead she's calling Abby something filthy, something that gets cut off as they both go down on the dusty, bloody floor, scrambling together.

Maybe it's because deep down, there is still some trust. That Abby either won't kill her, will stop short of a crushing blow- or she will. And it'll be the kind of death that would fit.

Abby's got her knee, but Ellie hits with her fists, her elbows, and even uses her teeth when Abby gets close enough. Graceless and ugly, down to cornered-animal rage.

She reaches up, grabbing for her braid, to yank.

Getting hit so hard she bites her tongue by accident is more cathartic by far than crying; if she weren't down here, grinding Ellie into the dust with her knuckles, she'd be curled up in a ball on her side in bed, sobbing uselessly. This is better.

This is who Abby is, somebody who takes clawing fingers up the side of her face and ignores it, even when they threaten her eyesocket. Bitten nails rake angry lines down her face.

She doesn't care. She doesn't care that she's bleeding, that Ellie has already bitten her arm just to keep her hands from finding her throat, that they're fighting with the appropriate anger but no real intent to kill each other; if Ellie died she'd have nobody to take it out on. And nobody who will ever understand.

But she does consider murder the moment Ellie yanks her head backwards by her braid.

It doesn't hurt that much, she shrieks out of indignance more than anything, and promptly slams the heel of her hand down and forward into Ellie's collarbone to break it.

It's not the first time Ellie's had a bone snap, but she doesn't always feel it when it happens. She doesn't, now. The adrenaline's too high. Instead she punches back, a bruised-up, bloody fist to Abby's jaw even as she tightens the hold on her braid, leaning in to use that hold to wrestle Abby under her.

Something pops in her shoulder, and her arm just- isn't as strong.

She can't keep a hold, and doesn't think why. Instead she goes for her throat, to wrap her other hand around it and force her down, to get leverage with her knees.

Ellie brings back her other fist to try to throw another punch, and pain sings up through her left arm like a sounded alarm. She throws the punch at Abby's cheekbone anyway, her yell of pain strangled at the edges when she feels the shockwave of it radiate all up through her arm, down her chest.

"Fuck-"

So of course, she tries it again.

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cw gross injury

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