What goes on in that place in the dark? [OTA]

[teen_angst_bullshit]

WHO: Veronica Sawyer
WHERE: Town Hall
WHEN: 24 February, evening
OPEN TO: ALL
WARNINGS: Mild self-harm, mention of death
STATUS: Closed to new threads

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Dear Diary,

Well, I'm still alive, although I don't know if that was intentional.

Yesterday when I was cutting through the park, I was struck by lightning. Not directly; that's why I'm still here. If you think you know what that feels like, trust me that you don't. I wish I didn't.

I should probably be a big bundle of gratefulness that I survived, but I can't get around why.

It felt personal when Ren died, like he might have been on the right (wrong) track. He was always pushing so hard, all the damned time. Even when I told him to relax.

I don't know if this was a warning. Could it really be coincidence? Lots of people were struck recently, but only one died. Only one got a message etched on his roof. Did I just get the celestial equivalent of a smack with a rolled up newspaper?

Staring down at what she's written, Veronica fights the urge to tear out the entire page. You don't even have to read the content to see the abrupt slide from rational to ridiculous: The tidy block letters she'd adopted to save paper had been abandoned for her own massive scrawl weeks ago, looped across precious pages with all the eye-rolling angst of a truly mournful teenager.

The main room of the town hall is large, and every movement she makes seems to echo. It's cold -- Nobody lights the furnaces in the buildings that aren't being used -- and she'll have to leave for somewhere warmer soon, but the thought of the inn with its brightness and bustle of people is still too overwhelming to consider.

The sweater she has on over her clothes is black, large enough to nearly be a dress and perpetually slipped off one shoulder. She sets her journal aside and pushes up one saggy sleeve to reveal a strip of linen bandage wrapped loosely from elbow to wrist. Gently, she unwinds it and considers the livid, fractured pattern beneath. It seethes against her skin, tender and accusatory, and without thinking she presses hard against a shiny red line with her finger, pain flaring up bright and hot until she cries out and drops her hand with soft hiccough of sound.

Comments

[teen_angst_bullshit]

A laugh bubbles abruptly from Veronica's throat, and she immediately tips her head forward, covering her eyes with shame, and yet not doing much to curb the honestly much-needed moment of levity.

"He did have good teeth, didn't he?" And a great smile, when he managed to show it, and a lot of other things she swallows quickly down to avoid spoiling the moment.

"I tried once, when I first showed up," she continues when she finally leans back again. "I was in the first wave. A ton of us came out of the fountain on the same day, one after the other. We didn't know then that getting out was harder than it looked. I broke a bunch of my nails off."

She turns her hand up now, fingers curled in against the palm, nails long grown back, and then slides a look up to Kira.

"But I would be lying if I said I didn't wonder sometimes if we weren't drugged to not really try very hard."

[3ofswords]

It's a joke, it isn't--if she was ever the type to worry about a few broken nails, she isn't now, sitting out in the cold with lightning scars down her arm and a dead friend. He favors her with half a smile, his own teeth starting to show. Some of it's just her, herself, and some of it is slotting that into his idea of Ren, and what Ren responded to in people.

"I can't say I know everything Kate puts in that bread," he offers, but she has a point. There had been more than one time someone had explained a danger to him, then shrugged off its existence with no idea how to handle it, or no will to try until the snow cleared. Now that it had, lightning kept them at bay. Soon it will rain, then be too hot--any number of excuses to spend another day inside, reading Casey the same three books until he didn't need any help.

"Everyone handles the stress differently," he adds, some well of forgiveness springing eternal from him. "But I'm not worried about my nails if you aren't."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

For a long moment Veronica just sits there, looking back to her hands and the filed arcs of her fingernails -- Not the meticulous manicure she'd arrived with, but far from ragged. She still cares how she looks most days. Or did, until recently.

She just lets it settle, the sheer idea of it: Of flouting everything Cougar and Frank have tried to tell her, of just going out there and trying to get out simply because she'd used up all the fucks she had to give. It's reckless and selfish; she isn't so distraught that she doesn't recognize that. But she really isn't sure she cares.

"Let's go," she finally, abruptly replies, and pushes herself to her feet. "Before someone tries to stop us."