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Entry tags:
(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
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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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.
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... 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.
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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.
cw mention of slavery
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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She probably broke her nose again. Probably, maybe. Ellie wishes it helped with what she's feeling. She'd been stupid enough to think that it would.
So she breathes through her mouth, watching Abby's eyes. They're so dark they're almost black in the lantern light, but she can make out the blue.
Ellie starts to say something, stops. Lets the pressure and sting ring through her sinuses, her breath aching in her chest.
It shouldn't hurt, but it does. Ellie shouldn't care, but she does. Abby, of all people. How fucked up is that?
Some small horrible part of her wants to bite. Wants to hurt, and push, and shove her away. She doesn't need this. She doesn't need her. Not her anger. Not her acceptance. Not her trust.
But instead, she just feels numb. Just lets Abby clean her up.
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Odd, to think Ellie has only ever known her this way. Who she was as a teenager feels like it was a different goddamn life altogether.
Abby swallows the ache, sniffs wetly. Her hand wavers over Ellie's face, and then she continues, blinking through the moment. It's fine. And really, she's a little too old to be wanting her dad, but she wishes he could scoop her up out of all this, just like he did when she was little.
"... Okay." The nose is still sluggishly bleeding, but she's mopped her up enough that all she has to do is keep the rag on it. With her good arm, that is. Gesturing, to get her to take it and ball it up, "You'll need to see somebody about the clavicle."
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Abby's simultaneously so easy, and so hard to hate. It makes Ellie wonder if she's going crazy, makes her feel out of her fucking mind. Instead she wads up the cloth and presses it to her nose a little harder than she should have. Shuts her eyes when the ache of it radiates through her face.
"I've had worse," she mutters around the cloth and her palm, shifting to pull her knees up.
It's a return to form this feeling -- of having so much to say and not knowing how to say any of it, or even begin to reason it out.
"... take the salve. Or you'll get scars on your face."
Plenty, to match the ones on her cheek.
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Abby digs a knee in the dust to get up, wincing in response to something (anything; everything), completely out of rhythm with herself. Ellie, pressed against the wall and looking up, seems caught. She thinks briefly of that zebra that her and her dad found out by the Salt Lake hospital, snarled in wire. Owen held her in place while Abby worked to free her with a pair of wire cutters, and she still caught one finger on an exposed barb, cutting deep, creating scars. She wanted to help, and got hurt in the process.
Abby's exhausted almost everything she'd like to say. She wipes a hand across her face, thinking.
"... Why'd you let me go?"
She could have drowned in her full lungs. Ellie pulled her out.
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She stays on the floor where she is, huddled around her broken collarbone, the same arm with the shattered and bitten-off fingers.
Just take him, she'd whispered, the words ripping themselves out of her throat as the surf washed itself crimson around her. Right now, her mother's knife is still in her pocket, not tumbled into the sand, lost forever. This time, she never drew it.
"It wouldn't have helped."
Her lower lip trembles, but it's still as she looks up at Abby in the flickering light of the lantern, in the ghostly dark.
"And maybe... part of it was just. Getting to decide, for once."
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Wouldn't have helped. Finding a bit of control, in making decisions. It felt like that in the theater for her, when she stared down at Ellie in much the same way, with a set jaw, and blood on her knuckles.
So that's where her head is at. Back in Seattle, while Abby is looking out to Catalina.
"Good," she says, and surprises herself with how calm she sounds. Glancing over her shoulder she adds, "Don't follow me."
Probably best they stagger their exits. Abby will go first.
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But that's not all this is, and Ellie knows it.
It hurts. Because somehow, at some point, Abby actually expected better out of Ellie. Because at one point, she understood her. They were from the same place, had been through things nobody else would understand.
And every time Abby reached out, Ellie bit at her, over and over. Sometimes little nips, sometimes bloodying her teeth. But she'd kept trying until Ellie had started to let her creep in. The kind of hatred that becomes sacrosact.
And now she's leaving.
She'd done everything she could not to fucking care about this, and now-
"Just go," she whispers, because it's all she has left.