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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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.

That punch might have socked her jaw back into some better alignment actually, thanks, but her teeth fucking rattle in her head at the impact. And still, Ellie yanks her head around by her hair, guiding her over–

She calls her something hideous and bucks up, but Ellie is shifting over her and she presses her down by her throat, fingers digging in.

"Stop–" Abby chokes, and claws at her wrist. Ellie winds up, and punches her once, twice, they aren't very powerful. She's only making it worse for herself. Abby wheezes. The pain hasn't set in yet but it's there, distinct and throbbing below the surface, "Ellie–"

Fucking–

She grabs her wrist, and yanks her arm forward, pointedly.

Fuck.

Abby calls her name, and that's what hurts, that's what hitches the sob in her throat, on her knees over Abby's prone form and blood and tears dripping off her face, onto Abby's.

Pain thrums and throbs all up through her shoulder and the side of her neck, and she sucks in a breath, hitching, and doesn't try to pull it away.

Her skin's buzzing, and she can't get a full breath. She doesn't know what's happening, or why, only that it's stopping.

Abby's making them stop.

Ellie's fingers on Abby's throat ease, then slide off, her palm going to the dusty, bloody stone next to her. Stopping.

For a moment they hold where they are and breathe noisily, dripping gore and sweat and tears all over each other. Abby has some kind of stopper in her chest that's making it difficult to draw a deep enough breath– the knee slam, into her solar plexus. Right.

"It's broken," she gasps, gesturing, "Your collarbone." That's why she called for them to stop.

She thunks her head back onto the stone, closing her eyes tightly. Her pulse is on her goddamn tongue. She feels unreasonably fragile all of a sudden, like she could shatter into pieces.

It's such a fucking -- return to form that it hurts, and Ellie feels a completely inappropriate laugh bubble up even through the sobs that still keep fighting their way out, soft hiccupping broken things.

Abby stopped her from punching her in the face. Not to stop her from punching her in the face, but because she was hurting her arm more.

Ellie leans her full weight on her right arm, her left wrist still cradled in Abby's grip, her shoulder and broken collarbone throbbing badly. A tear drips over the bridge of her nose, down into Abby's rumpled braid. The two of them re-learn how to breathe.

She wipes her face on the side of her good bicep, so she won't cough blood all over Abby's face, pulls a slower breath, and looks at her. Really looks at her, all bloodied up where she's scratched claw marks into her face. Bite marks, bruises, bloodstained knuckles and black eyes.

Ellie doesn't want to care. She really doesn't. But the heat presses in behind her eyes, the hurt, and she catches her breath.

Somewhere along the line, she'd started to trust Abby. Maybe even care about her a little, in a twisted, possessive way that she's still shying away from understanding. Ellie takes another shaky breath, lets it slowly out.

"There's bandages," she says softly, so softly. "In my bag."

There's boats, Abby had said on the shore, and Ellie finally understands why.

This isn't mercy. It's a void in Abby's chest where the anger lived, suddenly sapped out. She feels numb, counts her breaths as Ellie shivers above her and wipes away a smear of blood. Everything hurts, but not enough to keep her churning thoughts at bay. They are still connected, hand to shivering wrist.

Ellie is saying something; Abby zeros back in on her over the tide.

"Okay," she says, quiet and final. "Stay there."

Hurts to get up. She feels like she got dragged backwards through a particularly vicious hedge, and stumbles over to collect Ellie's bag. She'll bring it over so she can go through it herself, she's not looking.

Whatever they've been to each other– it's done. Over. She doesn't want to be part of it any more, so she's separating them out; she won't go through Ellie's bag for her.

Ellie's shifts up, manages to get off of straddling her so Abby can get to her feet. Puts herself down on one hip, reaches up to cradle her arm to her chest so it won't hurt just because of the weight tugging on it.

With her good hand, she reaches up to get the lantern, puts it on the bloodstained floor. It's dark, all covered in scuffs where they swept the dust clean. She opens the top one-handed, dips into it for the rolls of bandage, a small box that she opens up. Elfroot salve, a wash.

"C'mere," she says, very quietly. "I'll get your face."

They could do Ellie first, but then she won't have both hands.

Abby grunts in reply, easing to sit down next to her. The flickering lantern light makes the blood on Ellie's mouth look vampiric.

... It's sort of everywhere, now that she looks. On the floor. In Abby's mouth and nose. She split a knuckle at some point.

Compared to Ellie she got off easy, something that she already feels bad about. She's going to have a hideous black eye tomorrow and her fair share of the bruises, but Ellie is the one sporting broken bones.

... That they can't exactly hide, fuck. Abby winces, and it has nothing to do with the rough scratches down her cheek. Only now is it hitting her: they had a fucking fight down in the basements. They beat each other up in the Gallows, like idiots–

She stares at the little container of elfoot in Ellie's hands, and to her horror, a lump rises in her throat. Her eyes water, and blur.

The both of them rest with their backs against a dusty stone wall, Ellie's good side to Abby's bad one. Ellie dabs her fingertips into the salve, holding the little jar in her bad hand. She pauses with it halfway to Abby's face, lips parting as she realizes what's happening.

It feels- horrible. Like a violation. More intimate than catching her with her pants down. Ellie's been numbing it all out, feeling empty and aching, but Abby's ahead of her. She's felt all of it, is feeling it afresh.

And god damn it, Ellie's had years now to process Santa Barbara. Abby has had minutes.

Ellie should leave, maybe. She shouldn't be here, watching this. Seeing her like this. But it occurs to her that Abby has no one else. Nobody who will understand what she saw. Why she feels this. Nobody but Ellie.

And Ellie has no one but her.

The twist of agony and trust is complex, here. But this makes sense to her.

So instead of working on her face, Ellie finds the deeper scratches on her arm, where she made Abby bleed in thick rivulets, and smears the salve there. Where her tears won't immediately wash it off.

It's too much. She hates that Ellie is the one to see her like this but who else is she supposed to go to instead?

Abby shivers, and blinks once, and then she's crying, almost silently. Ellie reaching for her arm to start with provides a nauseating tingle of relief. She doesn't want to be left alone down here, in the dark. The thought of that really scares her.

She sniffs. She says thickly, "They kept us in dog cages when we weren't all in the cells together," and stoppers up again with a shuddering gulp, touching her braid, drawing it over her shoulder.

Her body doesn't feel like her own. It is, but in the nightmare she was brittle. She was blistered, and hollow. That's what she can't get out of her mind: how it felt, living like that.

It hurt.

Ellie's fingers pause, her lips parting. She lets herself remember, feel it again. It was such a blur, given how fucked up she'd been at the time. Halfway to death's door herself, but she remembers the cells. Remembers the bodies rotting in the far corners, going to bones and falling apart. The starving hollowness, the infected chained outside.

Named, because they were infected on purpose.

Ellie's throat threatens to close, and she swallows to get it unblocked. Starts on a different scratch on Abby's arm.

There's a lot of things she could say, but none of it would make it so it never happened. She still found Abby on the beach, with haunted eyes and a ghost's voice.

She closes her eyes and sniffs wetly through tears, lifting a shoulder to wipe them away. There's a great yawning in her, something that she needs. Allowing somebody to help her satisfies it, but the fact that it's from Ellie chafes where it didn't before. It's too raw to be allowed.

Abruptly, she needs to do something with her hands. Doesn't matter what, but anything to keep from sitting here and thinking about Lev in the nest or Nora dead and disintegrating in the hospital basement.

She shivers and wipes her eyes on the back of her hand.

"I'm good," she says hoarsely, and pulls her arm away, retracting from any touch. "Let me get your nose." That's the worst looking injury between the pair of them, so.

Ellie stops.

It leaves something raw and aching inside of her, throbbing without distraction. She doesn't want to be touched. Doesn't want to sit still. Also doesn't want to let herself want that, especially from Abby.

But god, she doesn't want to keep fighting, either. She's so fucking tired. Instead she remembers Rialto, and the stitches in her hip that healed up so well, and lets her hands drop. She doesn't say yes, but she doesn't give any assent either.

If Abby wants to do it, she'll let her. And for a while she does, in silence. Her eyes water, and she tells herself it's just because it fucking hurts.

"Why'd you stop?" she whispers suddenly.

It's not good, it just is. The two of them cooperating enough to make it through whatever the fuck this is, and out the other side. Abby fishes some old scrap out of her bag, and puts her hand over the top of a bottle of– water? Whatever.

She wets the rag, and brings it to Ellie's face.

"Because of your collarbone." She grips her chin none too gently, holding her still. Her eyes are sore from crying. She blinks and adds, "And I don't want to fight you. Think I've made that pretty clear the whole time."

For the record, she isn't trying to start another right now. She's tired, her voice low but firm. Her movements, to wipe the flaking gore off of Ellie's chin, are methodical. "All I wanted to do was get to the boats. That hasn't changed. I want you to leave me alone."

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

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cw gross injury

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cw mention of slavery

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