Daisy unlocks the door and keeps an ear out, coming back out into the hall to greet her when she comes inside. At the question, she glances over her shoulder, down the hall into the kitchen, and shrugs, "The cold room swallows sound pretty well. Just also full of meat."
"You know how bad it has to be if I'm actually wanting to talk about it," she says wryly, carefully closing the door behind her. "I could say something about me trying to be more open with my friends, but..."
She lets that trail off. Coming to Daisy might not have been other people's choice, but she needs the other woman's tendency to cut straight through bullshit, and the fact that she's never needed to ask her to give it to her straight.
"If I don't get this out, I'm going to cause a scene in public when I really shouldn't."
Damn, that is bad. It says something that it's her, of all options, that Fever thinks she needs here. "Well, alright then. Let's get it out."
Leading her through the door to the living room, Daisy vaults and perches herself on the back of the sofa and leaves Fever to settle, or not settle, however she so chooses.
A long pause comes when she does settle on the sofa, sinking into the cushions and letting her face change. The mask of careful control over her emotions slips, and Fever looks...exhausted, pensive, wrapped up in considerations in a way she doesn't exactly love the world to see. It's the sort of feeling that makes strangers want to ask if you're all right, and you want to send them away.
"You remember when we were at Aster's grand spectacle of demonic bullshit for a while? When we talked there, on our own?"
It's the only place she can really think of to start.
"Mm. I remember." Has to think back, to really remember what they said, but she does. "Christ. Been a hell of a year since that."
There's a couple things they got into, but... well, they've never had to talk around the violence before. They both know there's no need. So that leaves... the other thing.
"It'd be easier if it were a mess. If it was a disaster. I could scream, I could fight, I would have something I could blame. I would be able to get angry. And I can't, because it's so simple."
Fever seems to sink farther into the cushions, a long silence descending as she wrestles with saying things aloud. And when she speaks again, her voice is a whisper, so quiet only Daisy can hear it. Like this house will hear if she's too loud, and tell Basira, who might tell Mothers knew who.
(And the world can't know, because they don't know, because she's guarded this secret for years. It's a weight - it's one she doesn't carry alone, but it still presses her down into the sofa, affixes her mask to her face on the daily. Just, it's starting to slip, and threatens to shatter into pieces if she drops it. Being here with Daisy, Fever thinks she can at least try to set it down for a little bit.)
Daisy lets the silence hang until Fever cuts it loose again, sitting still but for reflexive breathing she's never truly sure she needs, gaze on the other side of the room. No use in staring someone down.
"...if we had a choice about it. Lot of things would be easier."
A sigh. She folds her arms against her knees and turns her head half-Fever's way.
"You talked about it, then. But..." She narrows her eyes, even with only her peripheral vision. "Not a rejection, or a big row. But it still didn't work out. Right track?"
She nods, still trying to become one with the cushions. This feels like unwrapping a wound, dealing with how it hasn't gotten better, looking at the swollen and furious infection of it and bearing with finally getting treatment. Painful, but it won't sicken and kill her like it would if she went into Merrymeet without admitting it, having to swallow it back down every minute.
"It...can't. Because no matter what, it can't last."
Not past the barrier breaking. She can't follow, and he can't stay. It would be asking one of them to cut off their limbs, to shatter their heart into fragments. A life spent utterly miserable is no life to share. And she loves too much, too strongly to be content with something she'll know she has to let go of.
Air hisses between Daisy's teeth. That would've been a familiar feeling, once upon a time. These days she's... luckier. Less threat from the march of time than there once was, less chance she's going to drop dead tomorrow.
"Shit." She drags her tongue over her teeth. Maybe some people would feel inclined to question if it's really as hopeless as Fever says it is, but Daisy is not one of those people. Daisy knows Fever wouldn't be having this conversation if there was any other option. "...yeah. Rejection would hurt less."
At least then you can move on. Luckier these days or not, she still knows the feeling of holding onto a love you think can never, ever become anything real.
"And you've been sitting on this for... however long." Months, she's going to guess, for Fever to get to the point of knowing she has to talk to someone. "And now we're heading into romance season. Yeah, I'd be worried I'd start biting people too. Still best not to, mind."
She could have handled a no. She could have wept and broken apart and found herself trying to heal. What she can't handle is knowing that it exists, and it can't be for her. That there's always going to be a barrier, as invisible as the one they live under, and that there's going to be a day he walks out, and she never sees him again. Because that's the only way this can end. Is it kinder, to not pretend while they have the time to?
"Everyone's so happy, and people at work are asking me plans, and I just want them to leave me alone. But I have to keep smiling, and then there's that stupid Floral Court that I don't know why I said yes to, and it's just..." A deep breath, her trying to keep back the lump in her throat. She knows Daisy wouldn't judge her for crying. But Fever's spent so much time trying to not cry over this that it's become a reflex.
"It just hurts. I see him and it's this ache that makes me sick."
Daisy doesn't shuffle over, or try to touch her, but she does slide her hand down the back of the sofa a little to rest a little closer by. "Mm. Feels like you could turn inside out and still feel it over the pain."
(She finds herself thankful she's not wearing a ring or anything since her own talk with Basira, they've both always been too lowkey about all this to go flashing it about like that. Convenient, when you don't want to make your friend feel even more out in the cold at the worst time.)
"If you need to scream it out. The neighbours aren't close. And honestly, they wouldn't question it."
It would hardly be the first time screaming came out of this house, for one reason or another. And like she said before, there's always the cold room.
She thinks about it. Thinks about rage, about the enormity of things, and the weight that kept her in the space between yes and no. She wants to rise up, to become flush with passion and tear things apart and decry the very idea of love. She wants to revoke her name from the Floral Court and pour ice water into her veins until she goes completely numb.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Covers her eyes with her hand, and hates, hates, hates that everything feels like acid burning against her skin, bitterness and twisted knots in her head, and when she breathes in -
It's the telltale hitched breath that preludes crying. Please. Not now. Please. Calm down. Calm down.
"Don't say sorry. You don't have to be sorry with me."
It's not some big dramatic declaration, it's just a statement of fact. Fever doesn't need to be sorry for needing to cry. It'd be easier, wouldn't it, if their emotions worked the way they wanted them to. Screaming would feel better, wouldn't it? Kicking and screaming is more befitting of people like them. But your emotions don't care about that.
Permission is the dam breaking, twin leaks in the foundation, her whole body feeling it. Silent at first, then a heaving, sharp edged breath, tremors as the body attempts to curl inward, fleeing from what hurts. But the pain is inside, inescapable, and Fever weeps - tears like blood from a grievous wound, grateful for the sofa so that she doesn't have to hold her body up. She knew, she knew, it wouldn't be forever. This was probably always going to be the outcome. And yet, years in silence, for this to be the result - exchanging one heaviness on her heart for another. There's only one solace in that she hasn't been asked to yield her feelings. She'd have to be a better woman - a woman who felt less, did less, was less in order to do that. Maybe she'll carry this forever, if no one makes her let it go.
Nothing that's happened between us has been something I've regretted. So why does she want to take one of her daggers and drive it into the space between her lungs, create a point she can gesture to and say here, here is where the hurt is. It's everywhere otherwise - it's in her whole body, and no medicine she knows will cure it.
Fever sobs, doubtlessly leaving tear stains on the cushions, feeling herself in pieces. Once, it would have felt like exposing her throat to do this in front of anyone. But Daisy will keep her safe. This she knows as much as she knows the pain.
Daisy slides down from the back of the sofa, lets her weight distort the cushions beneath Fever's body as a substitute for direct touch. Shuffles closer, within range to be reached for if so desired, but still not so close as to impose it.
It's not easy, bearing your soft parts to a world full of sharp things—even when you are a sharp thing (especially when you are a sharp thing). But Daisy won't let another find its way in, here, now. Fever can cry. There is no judgement here. There are no teeth but those that have already been gnawing at her insides in her own silence. Just a friend.
The indication is permission, and Fever finds a miraculous thread of strength somewhere to reach for her, to ask for what she needs. Her heart, whipped around by the winds, bruised and seared and punctured, wants the solidity of someone there, so she's not just holding onto herself. She wants to hurt, and yet she hurts too much. It suffocates. It undoes. And the worst part is that when she leaves this house she'll be expected to somehow shove it back inside and stitch herself back up, a mocking parallel of the scar on her abdomen.
Crying floods her, justifies the months she's spent quiet. It's not fair she wants to say, like a child would. What is she supposed to do with all of this, when the person she would ask for advice is the one making this happen?
She'll live. Of course she'll live. But she isn't coming out without scars.
Daisy goes easy. Draws in and circles an arm around Fever's shoulders, presses close to her side. She is a solid rock, warm from the sun; what she lacks in softness she make up for in presence and immutability.
She doesn't say anything, doesn't even really make soothing noises, she's just there. And she's not going anywhere.
It's the steadfastness she needs, after giving it to others. A rock, a safe place to hide, somewhere she can curl up and be...not lonely, not in that way, but heartsick in a way most people learn to deal with far, far earlier. Did she ever know this before? Was there ever anyone she longed to weep over, until her tears ran dry? Fever doesn't know, will never know.
What she knows now is that she stays like this, until finally it seems like she can come up for air. She's not cried out, but she's allowed a brief reprieve. A respite, in which she simply leans her weight into her friend, trusting that she'll hold her upright still.
"It sucks," Daisy murmurs, eloquent as ever, more acknowledgement than anything meant to be meaningful. She doesn't move away, squeezing just once before settling back into stable presence alone. The feeling sucks. Crying sucks. All of it sucks. Love shouldn't be such a trial, should it? And yet she's never known it to be anything but, even now she's out the other side of most of the obstacles that make it so.
You have to choose it. And you have to choose to let it go. And neither is as easy as it sounds. And the latter might just be impossible.
"Is it okay if I don't know how I'll ever stop loving him?"
How could she? How could she give it up, though it will hurt every time she breathes too deeply? And what in the hells is she supposed to do now with all of it but keep it set just enough to the side?
"Depends what you mean by 'okay'. Probably won't ever stop hurting. But. You don't have to force yourself to let it go. Not if you don't want to. Probably wouldn't work anyway."
You can't let it go if you don't want to. That'd be like trying to amputate your own arm with the saw in the same hand.
"...love's like. Ripping your heart out. And giving it to someone else to carry. You can take it back. But you can't put it back."
Poetic, by Daisy's standards, but, well, she's thought about this one a lot over the last few years. And that's how it feels.
Love is your heart, offered out for company. A piece of the self in the shape of that vital organ that will always bear fingerprints. It's knowing exactly the direction she has to stand in her apartment to be facing the house, all the way out there. She can't put it back. It's too altered by now.
"...it's Phil."
She doesn't want to carry the burden of secrecy anymore. Let Daisy know the name of the person Fever cried on her for.
It must say something, about the kinds of people they have always been, that a she can describe it that way and it resonates in an instant. But they know the kind of people they are. It's not a surprise.
"Ah." Now that Fever says the name, it only makes sense. Can't imagine who else it could've been. Would sooner have had answers for people she could be sure it wasn't. "No wonder it's so complicated."
Phil's a good guy, and his voice is on the radio every day, and he's the kind of guy with reason to keep his wedding ring years into being pulled into multiple other universes. And that's before getting into everything else.
"You're telling me. Out of everyone on this island."
She had to fall for the would-be widower with a good heart who comes from a world without magic in it.
"It's not like I didn't know. He's normal, and I'm not. It's not like I didn't know that he wants to go home."
To his normal world without magic, to the wife he has long since mourned, to a place where strange occurrences and kidnappings and unexpected gods and transformations don't happen. To a place she can't follow, even if she wanted to. And that would be complicated enough, if not for all the rest of it.
"If knowing all the reasons we shouldn't fall for someone was enough to stop us..." Well, add that to the list of things that would make life a lot easier. But it's not. They don't get the easy ways out of this. "These places make a lot of things easy to ignore. Or feel less impossible. Then reality crashes in. For better or worse."
Or for both, sometimes. There's not such a fine line between the two, in her experience.
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hadnoright) wrote2022-11-01 01:56 am
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Daisy unlocks the door and keeps an ear out, coming back out into the hall to greet her when she comes inside. At the question, she glances over her shoulder, down the hall into the kitchen, and shrugs, "The cold room swallows sound pretty well. Just also full of meat."
She's not joking. It's there if Fever wants it.
A beat, then: "That bad, huh?"
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She lets that trail off. Coming to Daisy might not have been other people's choice, but she needs the other woman's tendency to cut straight through bullshit, and the fact that she's never needed to ask her to give it to her straight.
"If I don't get this out, I'm going to cause a scene in public when I really shouldn't."
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Damn, that is bad. It says something that it's her, of all options, that Fever thinks she needs here. "Well, alright then. Let's get it out."
Leading her through the door to the living room, Daisy vaults and perches herself on the back of the sofa and leaves Fever to settle, or not settle, however she so chooses.
"Hit me. What's up?"
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"You remember when we were at Aster's grand spectacle of demonic bullshit for a while? When we talked there, on our own?"
It's the only place she can really think of to start.
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"Mm. I remember." Has to think back, to really remember what they said, but she does. "Christ. Been a hell of a year since that."
There's a couple things they got into, but... well, they've never had to talk around the violence before. They both know there's no need. So that leaves... the other thing.
"...make a big mess to clean up later, huh?" It's not an unkind echo, but it is a straightforward one.
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"It'd be easier if it were a mess. If it was a disaster. I could scream, I could fight, I would have something I could blame. I would be able to get angry. And I can't, because it's so simple."
Fever seems to sink farther into the cushions, a long silence descending as she wrestles with saying things aloud. And when she speaks again, her voice is a whisper, so quiet only Daisy can hear it. Like this house will hear if she's too loud, and tell Basira, who might tell Mothers knew who.
(And the world can't know, because they don't know, because she's guarded this secret for years. It's a weight - it's one she doesn't carry alone, but it still presses her down into the sofa, affixes her mask to her face on the daily. Just, it's starting to slip, and threatens to shatter into pieces if she drops it. Being here with Daisy, Fever thinks she can at least try to set it down for a little bit.)
"I wish I never fell in love."
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Daisy lets the silence hang until Fever cuts it loose again, sitting still but for reflexive breathing she's never truly sure she needs, gaze on the other side of the room. No use in staring someone down.
"...if we had a choice about it. Lot of things would be easier."
A sigh. She folds her arms against her knees and turns her head half-Fever's way.
"You talked about it, then. But..." She narrows her eyes, even with only her peripheral vision. "Not a rejection, or a big row. But it still didn't work out. Right track?"
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"It...can't. Because no matter what, it can't last."
Not past the barrier breaking. She can't follow, and he can't stay. It would be asking one of them to cut off their limbs, to shatter their heart into fragments. A life spent utterly miserable is no life to share. And she loves too much, too strongly to be content with something she'll know she has to let go of.
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Air hisses between Daisy's teeth. That would've been a familiar feeling, once upon a time. These days she's... luckier. Less threat from the march of time than there once was, less chance she's going to drop dead tomorrow.
"Shit." She drags her tongue over her teeth. Maybe some people would feel inclined to question if it's really as hopeless as Fever says it is, but Daisy is not one of those people. Daisy knows Fever wouldn't be having this conversation if there was any other option. "...yeah. Rejection would hurt less."
At least then you can move on. Luckier these days or not, she still knows the feeling of holding onto a love you think can never, ever become anything real.
"And you've been sitting on this for... however long." Months, she's going to guess, for Fever to get to the point of knowing she has to talk to someone. "And now we're heading into romance season. Yeah, I'd be worried I'd start biting people too. Still best not to, mind."
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"Everyone's so happy, and people at work are asking me plans, and I just want them to leave me alone. But I have to keep smiling, and then there's that stupid Floral Court that I don't know why I said yes to, and it's just..." A deep breath, her trying to keep back the lump in her throat. She knows Daisy wouldn't judge her for crying. But Fever's spent so much time trying to not cry over this that it's become a reflex.
"It just hurts. I see him and it's this ache that makes me sick."
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Daisy doesn't shuffle over, or try to touch her, but she does slide her hand down the back of the sofa a little to rest a little closer by. "Mm. Feels like you could turn inside out and still feel it over the pain."
(She finds herself thankful she's not wearing a ring or anything since her own talk with Basira, they've both always been too lowkey about all this to go flashing it about like that. Convenient, when you don't want to make your friend feel even more out in the cold at the worst time.)
"If you need to scream it out. The neighbours aren't close. And honestly, they wouldn't question it."
It would hardly be the first time screaming came out of this house, for one reason or another. And like she said before, there's always the cold room.
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She opens her mouth. Closes it. Covers her eyes with her hand, and hates, hates, hates that everything feels like acid burning against her skin, bitterness and twisted knots in her head, and when she breathes in -
It's the telltale hitched breath that preludes crying. Please. Not now. Please. Calm down. Calm down.
"I'm sorry."
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"Don't say sorry. You don't have to be sorry with me."
It's not some big dramatic declaration, it's just a statement of fact. Fever doesn't need to be sorry for needing to cry. It'd be easier, wouldn't it, if their emotions worked the way they wanted them to. Screaming would feel better, wouldn't it? Kicking and screaming is more befitting of people like them. But your emotions don't care about that.
"Feel what you need to feel, Fever."
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Nothing that's happened between us has been something I've regretted. So why does she want to take one of her daggers and drive it into the space between her lungs, create a point she can gesture to and say here, here is where the hurt is. It's everywhere otherwise - it's in her whole body, and no medicine she knows will cure it.
Fever sobs, doubtlessly leaving tear stains on the cushions, feeling herself in pieces. Once, it would have felt like exposing her throat to do this in front of anyone. But Daisy will keep her safe. This she knows as much as she knows the pain.
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Daisy slides down from the back of the sofa, lets her weight distort the cushions beneath Fever's body as a substitute for direct touch. Shuffles closer, within range to be reached for if so desired, but still not so close as to impose it.
It's not easy, bearing your soft parts to a world full of sharp things—even when you are a sharp thing (especially when you are a sharp thing). But Daisy won't let another find its way in, here, now. Fever can cry. There is no judgement here. There are no teeth but those that have already been gnawing at her insides in her own silence. Just a friend.
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Crying floods her, justifies the months she's spent quiet. It's not fair she wants to say, like a child would. What is she supposed to do with all of this, when the person she would ask for advice is the one making this happen?
She'll live. Of course she'll live. But she isn't coming out without scars.
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Daisy goes easy. Draws in and circles an arm around Fever's shoulders, presses close to her side. She is a solid rock, warm from the sun; what she lacks in softness she make up for in presence and immutability.
She doesn't say anything, doesn't even really make soothing noises, she's just there. And she's not going anywhere.
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What she knows now is that she stays like this, until finally it seems like she can come up for air. She's not cried out, but she's allowed a brief reprieve. A respite, in which she simply leans her weight into her friend, trusting that she'll hold her upright still.
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"It sucks," Daisy murmurs, eloquent as ever, more acknowledgement than anything meant to be meaningful. She doesn't move away, squeezing just once before settling back into stable presence alone. The feeling sucks. Crying sucks. All of it sucks. Love shouldn't be such a trial, should it? And yet she's never known it to be anything but, even now she's out the other side of most of the obstacles that make it so.
You have to choose it. And you have to choose to let it go. And neither is as easy as it sounds. And the latter might just be impossible.
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How could she? How could she give it up, though it will hurt every time she breathes too deeply? And what in the hells is she supposed to do now with all of it but keep it set just enough to the side?
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"Depends what you mean by 'okay'. Probably won't ever stop hurting. But. You don't have to force yourself to let it go. Not if you don't want to. Probably wouldn't work anyway."
You can't let it go if you don't want to. That'd be like trying to amputate your own arm with the saw in the same hand.
"...love's like. Ripping your heart out. And giving it to someone else to carry. You can take it back. But you can't put it back."
Poetic, by Daisy's standards, but, well, she's thought about this one a lot over the last few years. And that's how it feels.
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Love is your heart, offered out for company. A piece of the self in the shape of that vital organ that will always bear fingerprints. It's knowing exactly the direction she has to stand in her apartment to be facing the house, all the way out there. She can't put it back. It's too altered by now.
"...it's Phil."
She doesn't want to carry the burden of secrecy anymore. Let Daisy know the name of the person Fever cried on her for.
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It must say something, about the kinds of people they have always been, that a she can describe it that way and it resonates in an instant. But they know the kind of people they are. It's not a surprise.
"Ah." Now that Fever says the name, it only makes sense. Can't imagine who else it could've been. Would sooner have had answers for people she could be sure it wasn't. "No wonder it's so complicated."
Phil's a good guy, and his voice is on the radio every day, and he's the kind of guy with reason to keep his wedding ring years into being pulled into multiple other universes. And that's before getting into everything else.
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She had to fall for the would-be widower with a good heart who comes from a world without magic in it.
"It's not like I didn't know. He's normal, and I'm not. It's not like I didn't know that he wants to go home."
To his normal world without magic, to the wife he has long since mourned, to a place where strange occurrences and kidnappings and unexpected gods and transformations don't happen. To a place she can't follow, even if she wanted to. And that would be complicated enough, if not for all the rest of it.
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"If knowing all the reasons we shouldn't fall for someone was enough to stop us..." Well, add that to the list of things that would make life a lot easier. But it's not. They don't get the easy ways out of this. "These places make a lot of things easy to ignore. Or feel less impossible. Then reality crashes in. For better or worse."
Or for both, sometimes. There's not such a fine line between the two, in her experience.
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