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Lilian Rook     Two weeks. The same room. The same lights. The same bed. The same monotonous nothing. Too much time to think, and too much time to fill with any one emotion.

    It turns out, soon enough, that Lilian did not provide Petra with a charger whilst returning her phone. It runs out shortly enough, and nobody is forthcoming to replace it. Meals are provided by package left in the airlock, all three at a time, heated by breakable chemical element. The water runs, the light cycles, the radio is silent; a useless piece of vestigial equipment, reminding Petra of a time she had allies. Nobody even thinks to bring her smokes. Lilian won't even if told. She doesn't want the room to smell like smoke, and ultimately, it is her decision to make.

    There's no knowing when sentencing will occur, and Petra will be transferred, but these things often take a lot of time. Two weeks is well past the timeframe the Watch would need to prepare and attempt a breakout; the only logical conclusion is that she is a writeoff; she quit, after all; she's no longer their asset. The fact she doesn't so much as see another human being all this time is surreal, almost begging disbelief, but also a reminder of how little these people think of her in the first place; the elites and aristocrats Lilian has formed an uneasy and deceptive alliance with, not Petra's people.

    It's only the number and type of packages left on the table, slowly filling the shelves, that changes along with the state of Petra's wounds. New clothes, far prettier than she'd normally ever wear; just enough of a steady trickle to avoid prison jumpsuits. The odd book of mildly insulting implication, that Petra has nothing better to occupy herself with. Proper conditioner and body wash. Scattered first aid supplies to take care of emergent nuisances. Random canned drinks and packaged sweets Lilian got while shopping and 'won't finish'. And a steadily growing assortment of random, incidental objects of cruelty that Lilian had brought in a moment of disassociation, and left behind in a moment of self-disgust.

    She comes in only erratically. Days pass without sight of her, bringing with them the burgeoning realization that she really means to never see Petra ever again, only for her to reappear once more in just as terrible a state as last time. It becomes so very plain over the patterns of days and weeks, that she is doing her very best to be done with this all, move on, and return to normal, and yet, over and over again, she cracks and comes storming shamefully back.

    One more time. One more hit. Then it'll be enough. Everything will change this time, and she'll finally feel normal again. One more, to get well.

    Once more, the door opens without warning. It is Lilian's privilege to come as she goes as she pleases, and Petra's reality to have to deal with it at any moment. Heels on tile. The pneumatic hiss of closing behind her. The thump of a dropped bag and the jingle of buckles. It's been so many times that there isn't even an introduction anymore. At some point, Lilian had grown tired of composing her thoughts beforehand and tactically planning her provocations, and simply started talking. It makes for a surreal scene, when she launches right into it, like the two live together.

    "Congratulations. You've ruined Tachibana too, you stupid bitch. Are you happy now?" Phone. Card. Clattering on the table. "She used to be worth something. Going somewhere. And now, like everything else you touched, she's rotten goods." A leather binder of files, slid across. "Ishirou looks ridiculous. He has no sense of shame. Going out in that clanker like he's proud of it. What a piece of shit." Jacket. Shrugged from the shoulders, thrown over the back of the seat. "Not as if that's unusual. The twat. He could never keep his mouth shut. Never back down. Never fucking think about anyone else." A new wrapped parcel, removed and thrown after the folder.
Lilian Rook     "But fuck you especially for Rita. I'm not surprised that Ishirou only thinks of me as a ticking time bomb. Tachibana turning into a pathetic limp-wristed loser who won't fight anymore is bad enough without her acting like I killed her dog and want more. But the way Rita looks at me now. The way she won't talk, won't trust anyone, the way she fucking grieves for you, and can't spare a thought for what I went through." She kicks the under-edge of the bed so hard it lurches fully off the ground by thirty degrees before crashing down.

    "She'd never do that for me. Fucking-- Hearthward, that nasty scumshit fuckmale! All he can think about is how evil I am for not taking his side! Shijima thinks of me like a wild animal! Candelario only gives a shit about me because he wants revenge now! Those fucking people! After everything I've done!" She whirls on Petra. Like usual. "I have to hear their thoughts, rotting from where you touched them! I have to bear with the festering hole you left! The way they look at me! The way they think of me!" She looks to the shelves. Her eyes rove back and forth madly. Knife. Lighter. Feverishly ranting.

    "How they think of you! You were really living it up during all of that, weren't you?! Where the fuck were all the people lining up to help me?! Where were my fucking karaoke nights and zoo trips and diner dates and sleepovers and skate parks?! Why is it when I'm stressed and scared and frayed to the bone, everyone steps back and picks up a mop for the 'inevitable' mess, but when you shit everything up and spew bile everywhere and burn everything down, it's free therapy every hour of every day?!" Yeah. Those two are good. Taser for good measure. She's getting a sense of what gets which reaction.

    "Do you know what, Petra? Not once, in all that fucking time, did one person even so much ask how I was! Nobody but Tamamo, of course! Of course! The closest anyone else came was Ishirou using me as an excuse to act like a school shooter at you!" This is normal. This is what normal is, now. "They still won't! All they can think about is when they'll be ready to forgive me for hurting you! You are so fucking spoiled! The whole universe bends around you and tries to spit me out!"

    "God. Some days I wish they could hear you scream. I want to see the looks on their faces. I want them to know what they did. If they're going to take what it's like for granted then I want them to know what it's like when I don't even try."
Petra Soroka     The boredom is the worst part. Even considering, um, everything else.

    Petra's phone died weeks ago, at this point. Her charger is-- was?-- in the Kana, and there weren't any outlets for one in her cell besides. Even without internet or cellular connection (aren't I supposed to get a phone call, or something?), she'd still had crosswords saved to pass the time. If that was all she needed her phone for, though, she wouldn't be mourning its loss like she was.

    It had been over a week of, at best, sleepless nights. Twenty four hours of boredom a day. Petra could never bear to sleep alone: practically her entire life she'd been in the same room as someone else, from her childhood friends, to bunk beds at Applied Ontology, to Remee. For the times that she couldn't, her months living in the Kana, she'd been able to figure out ways to manage. She left the radio on every night, often falling asleep to background chatter, and when it was silent, she had long audio clips downloaded on her phone, of soft breathing and muffled voices, to at least be able to imagine people nearby.

    Her cell has none of that. Without the soothing presence of other people, every sound, real or imagined, sets her heart racing with sheer, instinctual panic. Whenever Petra fitfully slips into unconsciousness, indistinct, gut-wrenching nightmares jolt her awake again, more exhausted than before. By now, she's achieved a restless second wind, so tired that sleep no longer feels possible.

    Sleepless headaches and nausea, compounded with nicotine cravings, on top of the myriad of always, always persistent wounds collecting on her body, burns, cuts, bruises, ragged scratches, all pile together to make Petra feel... fine?

    It's strange. Physically, she's beaten ragged, subject to arbitrary torture, exhausted enough that shadows coalesce into monsters in the corners of her vision and nonexistent voices mumble in her ear. But still, after a routine was established, Petra settled into feeling-- fine. Not happy, of course, not forgetting her guilt, or bitterness, or anger, but not despondent, either.

    Start the day when the ceiling brightens, stretch and work out, shower. Find some way to entertain herself. Finished books were often stripped of their paper, and for a while, Petra had tried to use a spike Lilian left behind as a writing tool, finding it at least a little funny that the only ink she had available was her blood. Other paper was crumpled and assembled into rudimentary dolls, before Petra got embarrassed of herself and hid them. The only thing that really held her attention, almost to an alarming degree, was her.
Petra Soroka     Lilian's visits were always preceded by a gut feeling, like butterflies with razor blades for wings. It gives her just enough forewarning to tidy up and discard the remains of her meal, sweep the remains of the radio out of sight (it only takes one bad moment), and when Lilian stomps into her cell, Petra is setting out two cans of sweet tea across the table from each other for the pair.

    "Hibiki's still upset? Even after Ishirou's started showing his face-- or, well, screen-- again?" Petra matches Lilian's familiarity automatically, just as used to it now as she is. Her tone, though raspier than before, is casual, until the topic of Ishirou makes a note of scorn bubble up. "I kind of-- no, I do feel shitty for Ishirou being in that body, but it-- it kind of feels gross, right? How he's treating it like something to toy around with?"

    Petra stacks up the parcel and folder, nice and orderly, then tosses a paper towel roll onto the bed, because if she's going to bleed today she's not letting it get on the sheets again. Right when the towels bounce onto the mattress, Lilian kicks the frame, sending them rolling away, and Petra flinches violently at the sound. She tries to keep her voice steady when walking past Lilian to pick up and open her can of tea, despite her racing heartbeat and instinctual tensing when getting near her.

    "I wish you wouldn't talk badly about Rita. I-- I know she didn't say anything to you, but she was always advocating for you, and she was-- she and Hibiki were the ones that I really, really tried to do better by." She twists her lips unhappily, glancing towards where the dented remains of the radio were gathered. "I probably should've left the Watch earlier than I did, though. Because of that."

    Petra sits down at the table to sip her tea, rather than on the bed, to maybe buy herself more conversation. "I still... can't believe that no one ever talked to you, though. Like-- literally every time someone reached out to me, *they* always brought you up, talking about, talking about your feelings and stuff you'd done, to me. It's fucked up that they only ever talked *about* you." Petra readjusts her hair, resisting the urge to side-eye the torture implements. It's getting too long, actually, almost past her shoulders now. Maybe she'd be lucky and Lilian would be in the mood to bring in scissors someday. "That's what I meant by 'worship', by the way. That they talk about you like a, like a given? As if you were a fact about the world, or a-- a goddess, like that. Something to be talked about to others, hushed and reverent, and like... yeah. Like a time bomb. You have no idea how many times people brought up Hibiki's hand to me."

     "It's not fair at all." It's a really strange feeling, or rather the lack of a usual feeling, that Petra isn't automatically becoming defensive. "This doesn't, like, balance it out, because people still reached out to me too often even when I told them not to. But I was actually the one who initiated a lot of those. Did you ever invite someone out to do something and get turned down?"

    "Oh, and--" Petra looks down at her lap, lowering the tea. "Thanks for the last book. Blood Meridian? It was really good." It might make Lilian angry, to outright acknowledge the gift, but Petra's getting somewhat of a sense for Lilian, and 'acknowledging acts of kindness' feels like a net positive, regardless of her immediate reaction.
Lilian Rook     The sheer asymmetry of the mood Petra has fallen into greeting her with compared to the moods that cause Lilian to crack and send her spiralling right back here is something that Lilian never fails to notice, but still has yet to make anything of. At first, she thought it'd make her even angrier,§Why can she look so calm when she's in the worst possible situation? Is it the obvious sleep deprivation? Adrenaline from those-- Why does she get to feel fine about this when I can only feel miserable? Is it just to mock me? Is it because she wants--§ but in the end, she never quite has the presence of mind to spare for dwelling on it. Petra's attentive and neutral banter is simply taken as it is, unquestioned, responded to on its face in a now-routine act of furious absurdity.

    "You 'feel shitty'? You should be grateful you even have the chance to feel anything about it at all! Don't pretend you knew this was going to happen you smarmy little shit!" begins Lilian, the same way she had entered with, only to seamlessly shift course with the mismatched tone. "'Gross' doesn't even describe it! I'd barely forgiven him for getting his old body in the first place! Persephone gave that to him! And he fucking threw it away! He's talking about how 'rushing' to be human was a 'misjudgement' and acting like he's going to go back to being a fucking robot! Just spitting in her face!"

    There are no real secrets in there room. There's no point. Petra is the one person in the entire world that Lilian neither fears nor wants anything from, and she is socially connected to neither. Nothing she says here will change a thing outside. The radical, intoxicating freedom of it disables her inhibitions, to the point that she forgets what she's doing for a moment and only glares emphatically at Petra to keep shouting about something else."And mine! How fucking dare he cling to me!"

    Lilian jabs herself in the chest with her fingertip. "Did you know that?! When I was at my limit, when everyone else had abandoned me for Persephone, the new model, and when I'd spent years helping him with his circumstances, he said fuck you and ran off to beg her for handouts when I thought he was the last ally I could rely on! That pushed me over the fucking edge back then! He was partly responsible, and he knows it! That's why he won't talk about it!" Lilian is still shouting even as she storms back to the table. "And you know what?! He gave me the same dickless nothing-apology back then, too! And now he's decided he's had his fun and he wants a new toy! And he has the fucking balls to talk to me about bleeding for a body!"

    The surreal pageant continues as Lilian stops to snatch up the canned tea; it's hers, anyways, and her throat is raw from earlier already. Lacking a spare hand, she bites into the tab, too-sharp canine showing, and rips the metal back, spitting it out at Petra, and throwing the crumpled empty can shortly after, stopping only to wipe her lips with her thumb. "For fuck's sake he doesn't even have the right to talk about you that way! 'It!' 'That thing'! The putrid little snotrag-- he screamed to the whole Multiverse about how you 'don't even treat him like a human, and then turns around and does the same fucking thing! Now he's run off to cry in Candelario's lap because I told him to eat shit and die and frankly he should thank his fortune he isn't in a cell next door!"
Lilian Rook     "All of that! All that pain and misery he caused for everyone! All of the patient advice and tender help, once again, ignoring everything everyone's ever said to him and done for him and having to be the man, and then after he makes so many people grieve for him, he pops back up without so much as a fucking sorry! He mocked Hearthward for being injured in the line of duty! Even if it does serve him fucking right by now."

    The lunatic reality of the fact that Lilian is still going to do what she came her for, without even hesitating, sinks it when she kicks her heel against the table edge so hard that it slams into Petra's ribs, the motion revealing-- "I'm not speaking badly of Rita, I'm speaking badly of you! Do you listen to a single-- god, why does it matter?! You're full of shit anyways! As usual. There's not an alternate timeline where Rita advocates for me, the Paladins' most unstable landmine, to anyone!"

    The sound she makes moments later is something between a bestial snarl and a choked down sob. Lilian glances angrily way. "Time bomb. That's right. Because once they know anything, that's how it is. It was better being the evil bitch who needs to be put down like a rabid dog, you know that? I miss everyone hating me for sickening reasons I put in their heads! All this fucking 'sympathy' is just guilt and we all know it! Once they butted in and stalked and spied on me, they realized it was their fault, and now they all keep their heads down and act like it was pity! Fuck them! All they did was panic when they saw they caused it in the first place, and make themselves sound like fucking saints for tolerating me!"

    Around the table. Storming past. Grabbing Petra by the collar. Raving as she drags her, choking. "And what did they even find out, hmm? What does everybody know now? What makes them all feel some sense of smug, sagely ownership over me? They know that Matthew and Alison both treat me like shit? So fucking what! Everyone does! They don't even know why! Do they really think it's just because I'm a fucked up mutant? Do they think I don't deserve it or something?!"

    For a second, it sort of seems like Petra is being dragged behind a giant teddybear. That the incautious transportation is a sign of comfort. "How does that have anything to do with what happened?! They know it's not that. They know it's not that simple --what's wrong with me. And they're coveniently. Fucking. Avoiding. It. Because the only way they can let me exist is if I'm a poor little wet kitten in their minds-- but not so victimized that they'd ever actually help me of course!"

    She stops before the bed. Fingers clutch roughly in Petra's hair. Lilian is shaking. "Yes. Tachibana's hand. How could I forget." Her fingers are still shaking even as she tilt's Petra's head back. Knife. Probably her face, where the hair will hide it later, so she doesn't have to look at it. "You know what, Petra? When I took that girl away, told her what I felt, beat her to a pulp, and decided she had forfeited her command seals --her magical control over my friend-- do you know what I felt?"
Lilian Rook     Flip. A beautiful arc of light. Reverse grip. "It felt good Petra. The thought of that nasty, arrogant, shit-talking brat, thinking she was better than me; that she could handle me all on her own because she's the heroine-- collapsed in that gravel pit-- the look on her face is something I'll never forget I enjoyed. The way everything about her, every shitty thing she did to me back then, all the weight of support and goodness she had, just ceased to matter once I finally took the sword to her. I envy Blueberry Princess, because the feeling of flesh splitting from bone felt like a drug. Like inner peace. I wish it were always that easy. I wish I always did that. I think all the time about how much I just want to give up and remind everyone that they are standstill meat and breathe at my mercy. That's what I was born for."

    Thinking about Petra chiding her for not simply reaching out-- even if she hadn't, really-- makes Lilian draw the knife up to her hair. An inch away from the root. The edge quietly hisses with the fine friction of not quite slashing through blonde locks. And the sheer, concentrated hatred; for Petra, for everyone, for herself; jumps the fuse gap and momentarily transcends the need for any psychic link. Petra need only feel the violent quivering in the  blade, more and more unstable, as the muddy admixture of abhorrent feelings sloshes back and forth between different ratios. By the time the knife slips from Lilian's fingers and clatters onto the floor, Petra already knows which of those hatreds is the strongest.

    "And shut the fuck up about the books. I forgot about them." Lilian hisses. Her voice is heavy and bleary with emotion. She spins on her heel, furiously marching back to her bag. Regathering for another assault. Getting back up her nerve, lest her shame and disgust overcome her earlier rather than later this time. The heaviness of its drop to the table is explained by the sound of glassy scraping. A bottle of wine, some snobby gift, kept safe so as not to offend, soon to be thrown on a rack at home and forgotten for a year. The cork is torn out by tooth as well, the contents consumed even faster and harder than the canned tea, before Lilian stops to breathe at the one third mark. A quick gag, and a retching hiccup. She turns and leans on the table.

    "'Worship'. Yeah. I'm sure they love talking about how special they are for knowing me. How they're all basically celebrities for being 'close' to me. How fucking odd, that nobody so much as fucking bothers to say sorry to me, while they all puke heroe's tales and tragic backstory and giddy 'oh you're gonna get it now' into both your ears." The bottle sloshes idly in her hand. Lilian stares into the crimson whirlpool. "You want to know how much respect they have for me Petra? How much they really 'worship' me? Today, in front of half of fucking S.O.N.G, some shithead from the Concord showed up, Justin Rook, and the whole meeting turned into--"

    Lilian stops herself with a queasy sound, unrelated to the wine itself, then fastidiously consumes another fifth, gasping as her lips come away red. "Everyone spent the whole time going Mister Rook. Hey Mister Rook. 'He'. 'Him'. Rook. Haha, don't you look so alike? You look just like him!" A deep, rasping breath. "For the second. Fucking. Time. And I told them to stop before. I wonder whose hands I'll take next?"
Petra Soroka     That Petra doesn't flinch when Lilian raises her voice at her is an act of intense mental effort. On one hand, the reason seems simple, given the obvious relevance to the topic of their conversation. But this is Petra, the girl who's singlemindedly focused her efforts towards driving Lilian into this spiral for six months, so that can't be all of it. She has to be working towards something.

    Petra isn't entirely sure why she's trying so hard herself, either. It does feel a little bit manipulative to put that much concentration into subverting Lilian's expectations, but confusing Lilian isn't nearly as much of a psychological attack as further trying to convince her that she's nothing but a violent, unpredictable monster would be. Those words from her first visit still hang in Petra's mind, as she surreptitiously releases her tense grip on a handful of her soft, white blouse, as Lilian continues on to the next topic. 'I don't believe you.'

    "Ugh, right, with Kore. He told me once that she'd 'created her own world to let him be what he wanted', which I guess is his dull way of grasping the idea of a normocausative vacuum." Even though Petra's history with the space program isn't a *secret*, exactly, it's still wildly uncharacteristic of her to talk so freely about it. Nowhere outside of this room. Petra chews on the inside of her lip, visibly bothered by the idea. "God. And he thinks he's so smart. Doesn't that just mean he doesn't know what he ever actually wants, past the shallowest surface level gesture? And to justify it to *you* like that. Jesus. He makes *me* feel like a fucking genius sometimes."

    Petra's voice trails off in a daze as she's briefly enthralled by watching Lilian tear the tab off with her teeth, shiftily uncrossing and recrossing her legs. Why doesn't she ever bite me? Is that an-- Petra rubs her neck, dispelling the thought in time to focus on listening again. Then she flinches, indignantly jumping up from her seat at the table, stumbling when the sudden motion sends throbbing pain and fresh blood through a particularly bad bruise--maybe a broken bone--on her shin.

    "He fucking *what*?! Th-that putrid-- that-- he doesn't even-- he doesn't even *get*," That's why I still want to say 'girls like us'. Because everyone else is just as *fucking* bad, by accident. Petra barely has the self-control to not say it out loud, mostly out of fear of being rebuked again. That frustration has to be vented, though, her arms shaking in anger as she presses her hands into the table to support herself. "He's such a toxic shithole of a person. He's so fucking draining to interact with. Maybe I did you all a favor."

    The kicked table hits Petra in the knees, the impact sickening alone, on top of making a dozen local wounds flare up again. She cries out and collapses into the chair, whimpering as she rubs her knee with tears flooding her eyes. She was getting a sense of what got what reactions too-- it's not like she'd ever sat down and sampled them all together before-- and blunt force trauma *sucks*. She'd pick a dozen knives over a single wrench.
Petra Soroka     Petra hasn't recovered enough to respond by the time Lilian grabs her collar, yelping as she's yanked out of the chair. She's long since learned that trying to pull away is pointless, but she still tries to twist around, readjusting herself in Lilian's grip to ease the pressure on every wounded part of her body. There's not much point to it, when she's thrown to the ground beside the bed, with fingers twisting in her hair and forcing her to look up at Lilian's face. Endorphins flood through her at the touch, tingling with fear, and all the aches are drowned out briefly in the neurochemical buzz.

    Her hair, blonde, too-long, and consistently, thoughtfully cared for moreso in this cell than she did for all the months Lilian's known her outside it, falls away from her face. Like the tide pulling away from shore, it reveals all the past marks of Lilian's visits, red lines scabbed and unhealing, traced along her neck and jawline, bruises on her neck and nose, the neckline of her blouse exposing discolored skin down beyond what the cloth covers. Petra's eyes flicker to the knife, then to Lilian's eyes, breathless. As Lilian talks, Petra seems to forget that the knife is even there despite its cold edge pressing on her skin, her face furrowing in confusion and leaning forwards to start to say something.

    Readjusting the knife only cuts her off long enough for Lilian to go into detail about how it felt to sever Hibiki's hand. From Petra's position kneeling on the ground, her face is tilted up attentively despite the content and context of their conversation. The growing discomfort on her face doesn't come across as fear-- she's already *here*, after all-- but slightly apprehensive sympathy. "I-it's not really the same thing, obviously, but I think that's a little bit like what I felt with Ishirou? 'Heroism' and 'support', and the way that makes them justified in hurting you in whatever halfassed ways they want, and because they're 'good', you can't escalate without being 'evil'. And how none of that matters if you decide to fight them *that* way. You're just... better at drawing the line, I guess. But what was that about command seals...?"

    Petra stiffens up, eyes wide, knife quivering against her scalp. Lilian wouldn't cut off her hair, would she? Petra's shoulder throbs, bringing her awareness back to all the pain suffusing her body, and the fact that Lilian is responsible for it. Petra shivers, her breaths fast and shallow, about to pull away despite herself, but the longer that Lilian holds her there, the less she feels the need to.
Petra Soroka     Lilian releases the grip on Petra's hair, and she sags to the floor, releasing her held breath. When she storms away, it seems for a moment that she's about to pick up her bag and leave early, and the impulse briefly flashes across Petra's mind to say something to keep her angry so she sticks around to talk more. Something to redirect that nauseating self hatred onto Petra, a more acceptable target, so that Lilian could have an outlet before stumbling back to the Paladins like this. Instead, when Lilian pulls out the bottle, Petra settles down sitting on her feet, knees folded under her. She looks at Lilian with an odd expression, lips pressed together like she's holding back tears.

    It's an indescribably lonely scene. Lilian despairing and sick, chugging wine alone in Petra's cell. Petra watches her in thoughtful silence, trying to formulate thoughts in her head that have been spinning around for a while, and gets momentarily deflected off track by Mister Rook, flinching sympathetically. "Oh god. That's-- that's grotesque, saying you *looked* like him?" A year ago, Petra wouldn't have reacted like this. She'd think it was a little funny, a little mean, something distantly alien and unrelated to her. Now, she looks sick by association, and the realization of that change, a fraction of the empathetic character arc that she was so fixated on, doesn't even register in the moment. "For a second time, too. What's everyone's *problem*, why can't they just listen? That's really awful."

    'What's everyone's problem' echoes in Petra's head after she says it, and thoughts rapidly coalesce around it. She leans forwards on her knees and squeezes her thighs below the end of her shorts, still kneeling on the ground beside Lilian. "...Lilian? What was that about, Ishirou having a part in what happened before, and Hibiki having magical control, and... Kore being involved? I don't-- nothing they ever told me mentioned any of that. Just... 'she came to my house when I hated her and cut off my hand', or 'I wanted to go to her house and blow it up because of the awful things she did', or 'once I learned more about what she went through it was harder to hate her'. That... what actually happened? What was all that like for *you*?"

    Petra glances at the red liquid sloshing around in the bottle as Lilian gestures. Something about her drinking alone, in this state, around these topics. Petra opens her mouth before she can really consider why. "C-could I have some too? Um, please? I-I think I read once that being drunk makes you bleed more anyways, so it's a win-win."
Lilian Rook     'Jesus. He makes *me* feel like a fucking genius sometimes."'

    From the most jarringly cold opening moment, Lilian blurts out "You did fucking outsmart him, didn't you?" as if it were the most natural thing to say to someone she hates so much. "The stupid little shit thinks he's god's gift to intellect because they built him with a sensor suite and cryptography tools, but when has he ever done anything intelligent in his entire fucking life?!" Lilian yells. After all, though Petra is far worse, she is now also harmless; neutralized; it's pointless to care about her value relative to others.

    "He was completely outplayed by Doctor Eggman! He freely gave away top secret information to NAZCA! He fell for your ridiculous little plots, twice! He never understands a single thing I or Candelario or even Tangent say!" Having absolute leverage counterintuitively only seems to lower the amount Lilian cares about Petra's transgressions. "He's so stupid he doesn't even understand what we did for him! I know that thinking you know fucking everything and never once listening to some filthy woman is natural to men like him, but--" She cuts off to point affirmatively at Petra's breakdown. Having all of the power sublimates her rage into an awkward and ungainly middle-level of vehemence that she never achieves in appropriately moderate threat situations.

    "Right?! What happened to be a 'scanner'?! A scholar or hacker or whatever! What Persephone does has data! It's a scientific venture! Even if he'll never grasp it with the heart like we do, he could at least review the fucking science! What does he even do with all of that spare time?!"

    'Maybe I did you all a favor.'

    "If I'd known, if he'd catalyzed the thought, that identity is a privilege that he deigns to give as respect and can revoke as he pleases, after everything he's seen, then maybe I wouldn't have let them resuscitate him." Lilian rumbles, her throat hoarse with overuse and tension. "When am I 'it' to him? When he's no longer scared of me?" She breaks off with series of rolling coughs, muffling the sound with her palm to her mouth, but having to still the heaving of her shoulders before continuing. "What the hell am I saying? Of course I wouldn't. I'm just . . . so furious. Nobody learned anything. Nobody changed. Nothing got any better. Again. All the Extras get to go on about their lives knowing the evil intrusion is gone, and never even think about anything that might be wrong with them. They're all fucking perfect, as usual."

    'But what was that about command seals...?'

    Lilian, across the room, bottle in hand, slowly turns on Petra, and stares at her in dull, semi-conscious noncomprehension. For the first time ever, Petra can see the instant Lilian stops to think; like a bad splice, quick enough that Petra recognizes it's already happened by the time she even perceives it, brain struggling to catch up, she can see the way Lilian looks vaguely flushed, and hear the encroaching tone of carelessness in her words. How many times has she done that already? How much does she do it all the time? How long is any conversation to her, really?
Lilian Rook     "Are you serious? Back then-- We-- Muramasa. In the Paladins. He swore to help me, with my world, and people who needed me. And he was also Hibiki's friend." Not 'Tachibana'. "Hiromi-- you remember her right? Showed up around that time. And wiped them out in combat. It was just me left, alone, like it always always always always is, and I had to rescue them." Dry laughter. "Because that's how it is, right? The villains are stronger. It's okay if the heroes are defeated any number of times. My being evil is convenient to them, because I get to be on even terms with the bad guys and thanklessly save them." Another swallow of wine disappears. "He wanted to help her, so they forged this fucking . . . magical pact. Where she had spells that could give him absolute orders. And obviously that's insane, right? The fucking security risk-- an angry teenager in the Watch with control of one of our assets."

    "I told her to stop. I told her to give it up. I warned her. I pushed over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And like always, she sneered at me, like my being 'mean' would make right and wrong sort me out right quickly, no threat to her, and told me to get bent. And then she took him off without me, thinking she could beat Hiromi without me. And failed. And then I knew she was dangerous to him." Lilian gestures, tapping the back of her hand. "The pact is engraved here. So I took it off. She wouldn't surrender it, so I reminded her that I can take anything at my leisure. And then it was all better. Only she suffered. And you know what? She deserved it." Lilian slows her uninhibited rambling to remember something, staring at Petra all over again. "Why the hell do you not know that?"

    And then she spots the flinch from Petra at Mister Rook. Once again, another moment in the pile of mistakes, the unbridgeable wall between hearts deflects yet another opportunity to finally understand, and sends her careening into the worst possible outcome. The two women drag each other into hell.

    "What the fuck was that, Petra?" says Lilian, slowly looking up from her bottle again. "What the fuck was that?" Her voice quivers with something that isn't quite rage anymore, unreadable in its intensity, like a microphone peaking out into crunchy static. "No, no no-- stop talking! Don't give me 'why can't they listen?'; you never did! What was that fucking look?! What was that?!" The contents slosh as the bottle is slammed on the table. A shallow dent forms in precise contour to the bottom. "You were thinking they were right, weren't you?! Just now, you went 'oh god, we were all thinking it, but they said it', didn't you?! Another fucking fear reaction to me being shit on!"

    She flips the folder open with a swipe of her hand, wrenching free a page of the dossier with a full colour photo. Petra can guess who it is before Lilian even starts stalking forward again. Thrusting it into her face and grabbing her by the collar to hold her nose to the paper is a formality. "Take a better look! Go on! Really drink it in! Say it again! I dare you!" The fact that Petra said the exact opposite is forgotten, maybe even already irrelevant, in the moment. Lilian's voice rises to a hysterical fever anyways, crumpling up the page and throwing it away to shove her own face into Petra's.
Lilian Rook     "Look again! Where's the resemblance?! What about any of this could possibly anything like that?!" Gesturing around her own face in a fit, her inebriated coordination scratches a bloody furrow into her cheek with a fingernail, and she doesn't even notice. "There isn't one, right?! I'm fucking perfect! Go on! Find a flaw! What could possibly look like him?!"

    She's drowning Petra out completely, rising up to an unambiguous screaming pitch. "SHOW ME! WHERE DO I LOOK LIKE HIM?!" Lilian shoves Petra back roughly, freeing up her shaking hands so she can clumsily tear at the neck of her top. Her prisoner can hear expensive thread ripping with the drunken effort of tearing it off, and knows immediately that being trapped in a cell with a tipsy and furious Lilian Rook could only get any worse this one way. Hurling the damaged clothing into a corner, Lilian continues her inexorable advance, slowly trapping Petra in the corner of her cell.

    "DOES HE LOOK LIKE THIS?! WELL DOES HE?!" Perfect figure, obsessively cared for; subtle definition, suited to swordfighting; black bra and lace, meant for later tonight; miserable, dangerous, pathetic, and Petra's own special circle of hell. "I LOOK LIKE ME! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU ALL! I DIDN'T DO ALL OF THAT JUST FOR NOBODY TO EVEN RESPECT HOW I LOOK!" Her fingers curl; something about their tension feels mortally dangerous. "THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE BEEN THINKING ALL ALONG, ISN'T IT?! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! ALL OF YOU!"
Petra Soroka "Even if he'll never grasp it with the heart like we do,"

    Willful, longing misinterpretation. 'We' has never included Petra, never about this. Lilian obviously meant herself and Persephone, all of Sapient Heuristics, the ones who belong in the program and wouldn't give it up for the world. But for a moment, in this private room, Petra can imagine that Lilian meant her, and that instant of playing pretend feels like a dagger plunged through every layer of "don't want to", prying them away to expose the raw subdermal film of "can't".

"Like we do,"

    Petra stiffens and quiets down, her throat closing up. She waits just long enough, a handful of seconds, enough for Lilian to move on to another topic and the obvious thread to be lost, stuck in that unresponsive state. In a brief lull in the conversation, Petra pulls the collar of her blouse up over her face and ducks her head, trying to muffle a hiccuping sob. She wipes away her tears inside her shirt, shoulders trembling, then pulls back out to give Lilian her active attention with bleary, bloodshot eyes.

    "I remember Hiromi." She murmurs, just as acknowledgment of the question. Petra looks increasingly queasy at Lilian's explanation, putting a hand up on the chair beside her to brace herself. Her posture sways with exhaustion, and hearing Lilian's voice, even with her intense tone, is enough to make her eyelids droop. "That's not-- that's not right, that's not how it's supposed to be. You're the heroine, not the villain. I'm the villain. Everyone should be on your side. You're not...."

    'People become more real, more comprehensible, when she describes them.' The uncomfortable realization that Petra hadn't ever heard Lilian talk about her own history hits her in the gut, eyes wide. Every person who talked about Lilian had been a former enemy of hers, why would Petra expect them all to understand her now? Even if Hibiki hadn't purposefully lied to her-- but what about Ishirou? Candelario? Cantio?-- not a single one had been an ally of Lilian until... recently? Was *anyone* close to Lilian before then? "W-wait, no, I'm serious actually, I think I'm missing a lot about what happened before. No one mentioned that *they* did anything except go to your house."

    Petra's attempt to elaborate on how little she was told gets cut off and shouted over before she can fully protest her ignorance. "...Kore being-- what was what?" Petra hesitates, genuinely unsure if she'd fucked up somewhere. It's not like she's really any good at this, after all, and she knows it. Her face only shows worry, growing into alarm as Lilian presses her. "What was what?! No! That's not what I meant! I wasn't-- I'm not *afraid*-- or, I mean, I don't want to, to show when I am, because you were talking about how much it sucks for everyone to treat you like you're a moment away from becoming violent and dangerous, so I was trying not to react to things like that, even though you are kind of actually pretty dangerous to me--"
Petra Soroka     Petra's babbling defense continues despite Lilian talking over her, fists clenched and pressed into her lap. She talks right up until Lilian interrupts her by shoving the paper in her face, cut off in surprise. Petra tries to pull her head back away from the photo, squirming around to face away from it, like looking directly at it would be some grave offense. "I-I didn't--! No!"

    Petra shakes her head with her eyes shut, opening them again when the grip on her collar shifts and Lilian's wine-drenched breath washes over her face. At the proximity of Lilian's face, Petra automatically shrinks down a little bit, angling her chin upwards and letting the hand wrapped in the fabric of her neckline support a fraction more of her weight. Eyes dutifully roaming Lilian's flushed face until they land on the scratch, Petra only manages a whimpered "There isn't..." before getting shoved backwards.

    Taken off guard, Petra puts up no resistance and falls onto her back, instinctually scrambling backwards to put distance between herself and the shouting Lilian. Her retreat halts when she bumps her head into the bedframe, and climbing into the bed to get further away is removed as an option when Lilian tears off her top. Petra's brain instantly short-circuits. Paralyzed for multiple seconds by conflicting thoughts (I shouldn't be looking at this Oh my god what is she going to do to me Maybe she'll bite me now What if looking away makes her feel more insecure I shouldn't do that), Petra ends up frozen while Lilian approaches, reddening face shielded by her hands, fingers widely splayed to obviously peek out between.

    Stiffly, Petra reaches around the back of her head to withdraw a pillow from on top of the mattress, and mutely holds it out towards Lilian. It's unclear what she means to accomplish by doing this. She's shaking like a leaf as she sprawls on the floor next to the bedframe, knees drawn up close to her chest, sweat beading on her forehead. The whole time, her eyes don't leave Lilian, though they seem unable to settle on any particular part of her.
Lilian Rook     For one, transcendentally terrifying minute, it isn't clear if Lilian hears Petra at all. She has no idea if her answers mean anything, or if Lilian has already decided exactly what she's going to do, as the woman works herself into hysterics. She'd nearly killed Petra once, after all. Back then, she'd been saved by Lilian's fear of crossing that line, and her leaning on the better nature of Tamamo-no-Mae. But she doesn't look afraid right now. And Tamamo certainly has no idea where she is. Who knows; that much port with her bodyweight might be enough.

    It's when Petra collapses in a heap on the floor that Lilian stops to stare at the offered pillow, locking onto the object of importance and locking up in confusion. The gesture is easier for her to notice, and to want to interpret, than words. Words are just more hurt, so so very often. Gesture less so. It takes her no time at all, of course, but the litre bottle is down to its last third by the time she figures it out.

    All her momentum stopped, Lilian's gaze struggles towards Petra's face, roaming in little circles like aiming drift, and mostly just sees sweat and red. Her features tic to an irritable scowl, and she slaps the pillow out of Petra's hands and into wall. "God. What the fuck is wrong with you?" Lilian mutters.

    Then her eyes go wide. Lilian doubles forward and dry heaves. Her voice cracks in half, plummeting into a fearful, sobbing whisper. "Oh god. What the fuck is wrong with me?" She sways, and loses her balance, collapsing on the spot, knees splayed. A hand claps over her mouth. "Why, why am I like this?! Why did I do any of-- What the fuck was I-- Oh my god I knew better! That's why I hid it from everyone! And I still did it!" A hiccup rises into her throat. Her eyelashes bead with tears she refuses to let out by blinking. "Why why why does it turn out this way?! Why can't I just be fucking normal for five seconds?! It was supposed to get easier now, but I've made no progress at all! It's the same fucking thing all over again!" Her breathing is coming so fast and hard through her fingers that it seems she might be sick. Lilian--

    Sits beside Petra, back to the bedframe, one knee partway up, bottleneck loosely clutched in her fingers. Her eyes are red and raw. She stares off at the far wall. There's no repairing that top.

    "Fuck you." Lilian croaks. "I'm not apologizing. Not to you. You deserved all of this and worse." She stares into the bottle, clearly contemplating the rest, and then plunks it down with a glassy thud-slosh next to Petra. She'd asked, and Lilian knows better than to go for the rest. "Of course they didn't tell you shit. Why would they admit to it? I'm sure they told you all about breaking into my fucking house because it makes me sound pathetic. That's how they cope with me. We can sort of be friends as long as they think of me as a sad little girl. I hate it, but that's the only way it can be."
Lilian Rook     Lilian exhales, tilting her head to stare up at the ceiling and draping her arm over her knee in repose. "Everyone but Xion and Persephone, I suppose. But they weren't the ones you talked to, right? Otherwise you'd know literally anything." Her head lolls to the side, rolling slanted to look at Petra so that her hair blocks one of her eyes. "Candelario. Cantio. Tachibana. Ishirou. Wiremu. Parsons. Kohler. Phony." She goes through the list, dull and encyclopedic, as if she couldn't forget if she wanted to. Her hand lifts reluctantly to her face, touching the thin scar below one eye and over the bridge of her nose.

    "That was when I got this. The one time Phony and I fought for real." Lilian's eyes finally connect with Petra's. It's a little strange, come to think of it, how they always look more like bottleglass than a real green. "They all died, you know. I killed them. Phony-- you know Type Green, right? She was just in time, and to this day, I'm still unbelievably grateful for that, but . . ."

    "That was when they finally gave up and accepted me, you know? The first time any of them ever said even one decent thing to me. All of us know that it wasn't because they cared; it was because they had to. They'd finally realized, for once in their lives, that they had never really been capable of going through me; their power just didn't compare to mine, even eight on one. I'd just let them get away with it, all of it, for so, so long. Everyone but Persephone, they finally wanted to listen and understand and talk to me because they had no other choice."

    "So don't get the wrong idea, Petra. That fear of me is ingrained into them from the day I killed them. Not just them, either. The other people I nearly killed along the way too. They don't want to talk about it because they don't want to remember it that way. That powerlessness terrifies them. So instead of learning the only thing I wanted them to care about, we all settled for playing pretend; that I'm a sad, scared, beat up little girl with too much power, and we're all fast friends now because they reached out their hands when I needed it most."
Petra Soroka     Petra blinks in surprise when Lilian knocks the pillow out of her hands. Relief doesn't register to her at first, and upon probing, might never. She holds her empty hands up in front of her for a few seconds after, then limply drops them to the ground. Her gaze falls to the ground too shortly, looking away when Lilian starts sobbing.

    Only for a moment, though. With Lilian collapsed, Petra pushes herself to standing, wobbling as her vision dims and wavers from the motion. She walks past Lilian, over to the shelf, and chatters with the same light tone she started the evening with while rifling through its contents.

    "Well, you know. At least it's just me, right? No one else saw, no one else will hear, and really, it's not like there's much to apologize for." There it is, a box of crackers that Lilian had brought once. Petra hovers her other hand over an energy drink, tucked behind a metal baton and boxcutter. She's already drank so much fluid, would more even help? Petra takes both, just in case.

    She sits back down on the floor where she'd been crumpled and places the snacks down between her and Lilian, casually sliding them between the pair again when Lilian repositions. Petra leans her head back to bump into the bedframe with a painful-sounding thud, staring off at the same wall as Lilian. Thoughtlessly, she takes the offered bottle, hesitates briefly, then takes a swig, immediately coughing and spluttering.

    "God-- fuck, damnit. Sorry." Petra rubs a hand against her injured throat, wincing. "Of course you shouldn't apologize to me. Yeah. They all talked about your house. How you were just so unbearably fucking evil and awful, and then they stalked you home, implied big, vague, sympathetic tragedies, little fucking plot points that made them 'understand why you are the way you are', and then you all lived happily ever after. I should've known it was just revisionism, huh?"

    Another drink, smaller this time. Petra shakes her head. "I think I've met Xion once? And Kore... obviously not. She wouldn't even know how to talk to me." Petra bites the inside of her lip, frowning. "And the other way around, too, I guess. I talked to half of those, the ones that you know I've met. All the same story." Petra looks mostly unsurprised, solemn, just nodding in recognition at Type Green. "I think you mentioned before, when trying to convince me that this-- that being an Elite is dangerous. Just without saying it had been you. Eight at once." It's unbelievable how well she remembers conversations from over half a year ago; it's as if every word Lilian's ever said to her was inscribed in her brain.
Petra Soroka     Petra snickers, slowly draining the last of the bottle. "It's a little too late for me to not get the wrong idea. Almost a year too late. God. Fucking stupid. Of course that'd all be a part of it, it's all the same thing. Worshipping you like a weapon because they know what you're capable of, and belittling you as a battered wide-eyed little girl because they don't want to imagine that aimed against them. I fucking hated that version of you, the one they invented." The last rivulets of wine slide out of the bottle, and Petra swallows hard, looking immediately dazed. She holds the bottle up to the light and inspects it with a nervous expression. Why did she drink all of that?

    Petra rubs a hand into her cheek, trying to conceal the growing flush. "Um. Anyways. Why did you and Persephone fight, anyways? You sort of implied it wasn't for the same reasons as all the rest. I can't imagine what would, what'd actually get you two fighting, not when you're both...."
Lilian Rook     "Yeah. At least it's just you." Lilian repeats after Petra. She sounds drained. Sore. Apathetic as to the value judgement of the statement. "God knows what'd happen if it were someone out there. Maybe we'd have another fight and they'd make up another nice story. I could probably get away with it, right? Convince them that this is all acceptable because I have my reasons. They're all desperate to like me. Or maybe they just never speak to me again."

    Lilian reaches, as if for the bottle, then upon realizing it isn't there, remembers that she already feels bad enough with a BAC number starting with a two. "Whatever. Your throat is halfway your fault, isn't it?" says Lilian. She doesn't even glance at the strangle marks. "I'm not a doctor, but I fight. I know how long it takes for a bruise to go." She follows with a dry, sarcastic laugh. "I had one like that for a while. God, that was how it started, right? That one moment." She winces, at Petra reciting the exact number. "You were a fucking idiot for believing anything that convenient." she says. "But it's always right to hate me."

    'I can't imagine what would, what'd actually get you two fighting, not when you're both....'

    Lilian slumps incrementally against the bed, until her head squishes down the edge of the mattress. Her fingers wander to her throat, eyes downturning at the chain of Night Mist; she draws a deep breath at the sight of her bare skin. Her legs come partway up, arms loosely curled over her knees; a halfway version of the same thing Petra does when she feels exposed. "That's the problem. We're both so alike. It's just that she's the better version."

    Lilian loops the black chain around her fingers, rubbing the pendant thoughtfully with her thumb. Petra recognizes the look of wistful fondness she reserves just for that sword, like she's thinking of an old friend she only sees once a year now. "When she showed up, we ran into each other by accident. Sapient Heuristics sent her out after-- well, it's not really important, except it was bad, and maybe useful to the research, but dangerous enough we'd already been sent after it anyways. We fought, a little, because Persephone can't not help the project without not being her. But . . ."

    The tone of recollection she uses is one of naked guilt; an emotion Petra has never seen or heard her genuinely express. "The fact that she was so insanely strong, yet so effortlessly kind, so completely graceful and sincere, that it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. But everyone else fell head over heels for her, just like you'd expect. Because of that 'gravity'. Everyone but me, because my head doesn't work that way. It bothered me enough that I had the Paladins investigate Sapient Heuristics. You know. As a Concord supersoldier factory. I think I meant it, really. But I also just wanted to be sure that she wasn't really like that. That she'd paid for all that power somehow."
Lilian Rook     Lilian's finger curl and squeeze tight around the pendant. Past the point it would cut through Petra's skin if she did it."That's when it all went to shit. On the station. Our plan to prepare for the infiltration ran into Dylan, because of course the heroes who tagged along with me fucked it up. She got hurt, and ran back, warning them, making them hate us. We got shitty intel. I aimed for when Phony was away, but she came right back. And when she found what we were doing-- when she felt me and the doctor and how afraid of me that Carpathia was, she took it on herself to punish me. Because when she said 'no', she meant no, and everyone had to respect it. If they pushed her boundary, then she got to enforce it. Not me."

    Lilian exhales deeply. "And I was so pathetic I had to take it out on a wall of children's crayon drawings. Because I couldn't stand that the doctor loved them and they loved her back. There was no cost to that power at all. The opposite, even. It made those children better people. All that power, all that freedom, that safety and care and a loving family; no one hated them, no one mistrusted them, they were all just happy. It made me furious. And, honestly, it still sort of keeps me up at night. Hah."

    "Phony, though-- we had a fight. In the Decompression Chamber. Near zero normacausative pressure, too. She wanted to show them all what they were working towards. And you know, it worked. They all bought it. They got their 'ideal selves' manifested there, and they believed her every word, and they all lost, as usual, just leaving me, like it always is, because I'm the big villain. And I walked away with an 'ideal self' that was like you are know. A stupid fucking child, all beat up and bruised forever. Because that's what I deserved. I deserved it when I was ten and I deserve it now."

    Lilian pauses mid-verbal stride. Her gaze drifts away from her pendant and up to the ceiling lights. "What is there to really say about it after that? Everyone fell in love with Phony, and they all hated me. The woman who was so powerful, she could say no to me, and I had to either accept it or put everything I had into challenging her, but better than me in every single way. The upgrade. The replacement everyone deserved. The worse I felt about it, the crazier I got, and the more people turned against me. The more they turned against me, the more I cut off the people who left me and the harder I worked to cling to the people I had left, and the more it backfired. I was . . ." Lilian swallows.

    "Convinced. That there could only be one of us. And it should obviously be Phony, right? But I just couldn't bring myself to let that happen. I got through my whole life on 'the only rule is that I get to exist', so even if I knew it was the evil thing to do, I decided I had to get rid of her. Because it wasn't fair she got to be happy and then take everything I had, and I had to be miserable and then disappear. So, people wanted to stop me. They wanted to kill me. They harassed me in my social life. Stalked me from place to place. Got in my way on missions. Tried to plot assassinations. Tried to convince her to kill me, the fucking idiots. I got into even more fights, and more people hated me, and--"
Lilian Rook     Lilian erupts into a burst of tipsy laughter. It isn't ungenuine, but rather swept away at the sheer absurdity of what she'd remembered. "Hey. Did you know going to my house wasn't even their idea? Normally, you can't find it. Someone close to me helped them, because they were praying it would make them understand. Mostly they just saw how serious I was about Phony-- that I'd been driven all the way to planning to kill her-- and they got scared. But they picked up lots of little bits and pieces about how I'm a fucking error that shouldn't even exist."

    "So after, like, months of preparing for this, I pull it off. And Parsons had rigged up some fucking psychic machine that sent everyone to some mind-dimension I never really learned much about. Just so they could get to invade my fucking thoughts too, and still not get it. They found the two of us screaming at each other and covered in damage, and tried to stop me, and they failed. But Phony saved them, because she's strong like a villain, even though she's a hero, and I was so fucked up because I thought I murdered all my former friends that I finally listened to her."

    Lilian raises her wrist. With her sleeves gone, the white wristband with the single black stripe is plainly visible. "Type Black. When we fought in the Decompression Chamber, their equipment had picked me up. The thing I do. A naturally evolved paradigm for Jungian Newtonian dynamics. All this time I'd been plotting to ruin everything, they just wanted to welcome me in. She told me that I deserved her family too, and . . . she apologized to me. For not being there. Even though it was obviously impossible, she said sorry that she wasn't there to save me before, and I think I lost it right about there." She tugs with her fingertip on the wristband, as if its very presence should answer the rest.

    "Everyone protecting her, who felt scared of me and sorry for me and wanted me to be friends with their friends . . . some of them were shit, but some of them were genuine in the moment, I think. At the time, I really believed them. I spewed out every horrible thing I thought, and they took it, and they still reached out, and I ran out of hate before Phony ran out of wishes, because she's infuriatingly wonderful like that. There was a while after, I suppose about a year, where everything seemed like it was getting better. Before you came along. But looking back on it, it was never going to last. Not really. It was built on too much bullshit."

    Lilian turns her gaze towards Petra. Dull, unfocused, exhausted, and swimming with used up tears. "There's something really, really wrong with me, Petra. I'm . . . sick. And all of that didn't change it. I just got talked down off the ledge. Tamamo, Phony, Xion, Sapient Heuristics, my work, those things all help with it. I thought it'd be like chemotherapy. Like enough good things would slowly burn it out of me. But here I fucking am. Worse than ever."
Lilian Rook     "It's not about fucking . . . identity, or love, or any of the other things I already know I did wrong and selfish and evil, and I'll keep doing anyways. People like pretending those things are excuses. It lets them look away from the glaring fucking truth that nothing will ever fix me. I'll always be something that isn't supposed to exist, pretending to be human, who'll do anything that gets her one more second, and all of my bullshit is just my way of begging everyone else to stay out of the way, because I know if it comes down to it, between them and a little more time, I won't be able to stop myself from hurting them."

    "After all of this, even though I know better, I still can't forgive the things that didn't save me, Petra. I can't forgive humanity for still not even trying."
Petra Soroka     Petra rubs her throat again, digging her nails into the bruised skin. The first impulse, when looking at her expression, is to interpret it as angry, because Petra's face settles into that feeling so easily and so often. Instead, after a moment of observation, she looks guilty, practically ashamed.

    "Don't say that. It can't be partly my fault. You know what those powers are, you know what they mean. What would that fucking imply about me?" Petra cough-laughs, short and unhappy. "Why fucking bother, at this point. Of course I'd be stuck with some freak perversion of something that's meant to be objectively good. Toxic in places where it shouldn't be possible. I'm the fucking freak to you all, the one whose 'ideal' makes you look away and gag." Lilian's second and third assertion of being detestable cut through Petra's own self-deprecation, and she settles down with an uncomfortable look, eyebrows drawn together in unvoiced thought.

    Petra draws one knee up into her chest, letting the other leg stretch across the floor, and leans her head on the upraised knee to face Lilian. After a few seconds, her eyes track downwards from Lilian's face, and she coughs and looks away, face red. "Do you, um. Do you want a towel, or one of my tops to cover up, or something? Sorry. At least there's no cameras like last time though, ahaha." It's probably stupid to bring up the maid contest, but Petra's tipsy stammering has limits to the tact it can employ. When Lilian accepts, Petra shuts her eyes for a couple seconds and sways, a flash of unintentional disappointment crossing her face. She staggers to her feet, grabs a silk pajama top from its place on the shelf, then collapses back in her previous position, handing the top over to Lilian.

"Everyone but me, because my head doesn't work that way."

    Petra, cheek propped up on the leg that she hugs to her chest, quietly absorbs Lilian's explanation. Murmuring to herself, not loud enough to interrupt, Petra echoes something Lilian said in the radio, ages ago. "'Even I can manage a healthy relationship with Persephone of all people'. I'm not making fun, just... yeah. Head doesn't work that way." She snorts. "I'd ask for pointers, but it's not like it matters for me at this point."

    The suggestion that Sapient Heuristics is meant to produce 'supersoldiers', that it's somewhere that warrants an 'infiltration', makes Petra agitated enough that her whole body radiates distress, from her face to the tension in her posture. Petra is physically expressive even in the best of times, and the buzz of the wine amplifies that to the point that she practically wears her heart on her sleeve. Never actually, though. Her fists ball up around the cuffs of her shorts, trembling. Even as Lilian describes her process of breaking into the station, though, Petra can't feel right in directing that inarticulate frustration at her, so she remains tensely silent, listening.
Petra Soroka "And, honestly, it still sort of keeps me up at night."

    "...Doesn't it feel wrong? I think about it too. Whether it's fair for that to not have a cost." Petra breathes out, releasing some of her built up tension. Without any particular trigger, tears silently slide down her face, dripping onto her white blouse when she lets her head droop forwards. "I mean, if it's fair, if all that suffering can't exchange for anything meaningful, then doesn't that mean that you're just objectively worse than a less damaged option? I don't believe that. I don't believe that someone like me could deserve it as much as you do. Much less everyone else."

    Petra lifts her head up to stare at Lilian when she describes the Decompression Chamber. Her mouth opens in a silent 'Oh', but no actual words follow. What else is there to say that she didn't say about herself already? Instead, she just closes her mouth and mutely nods in acknowledgement, eyes downturned.

"The replacement everyone deserved."

    "... Second place in your own identity. Yeah." Petra absentmindedly slides a hand down her side, around where her revolver would rest in her jacket pocket. "There's a clone of me running around out there somewhere. An objectively better person than me. I tried to kill her, but she survived, and by the time I'm out of jail, she'll have been around as long as I was. Well, assuming I don't kill myself in here, which I'll probably just do whenever you stop coming around." Filters eroded by the alcohol, Petra says this as matter-of-factly as anything, without any indication that she's trying to guilt Lilian. Not even a glance to the side. "I guess that makes it a straight upgrade, actually. They trade in for a better Petra. I hope that works for everyone, especially Bikki and Ri... ta...." Petra's voice falters, and she scrubs her face with the back of her forearm, muttering 'Nevermind'.

    Petra reorients herself to slightly angle towards Lilian, leaning her shoulder and head against the mattress to face her. After brushing loose hair out of her face, she props her arm up between her knee and jaw, in what would be a contemplative pose if she didnt keep absently gnawing on her finger. "Jesus, not just your home, but your fucking brain too? Even though you're...?" Petra taps on the side of her head, in a vague gesture to represent 'protected against mental stuff', though Lilian could interpret it as the universally recognized hand motion for 'batshit crazy' instead. "At least none of them were tactless enough to talk about whatever they found in there to me. Not that it seems to have done them much good, ahaha. Maybe they wanted to gossip to me and just couldn't think of a way to phrase it that made them look heroic."

"She's strong like a villain, even though she's a hero."

    Petra suddenly leans forwards towards Lilian, close enough that if both of Petra's hands weren't pressed into the ground to support her, her head would fall onto Lilian's shoulder. "I don't think that's t-rue. You keep saying that." Petra blurts out, her words slurring while she earnestly stares at Lilian's face. "That fighting alone is a, a villain thing. I've never seen it like that, every time you do it. I remember you fighting Hiromi, and matching her. The thing beneath Indus, everything you do with Night Mist. When you were holding back Kraken yourself, in Rita's world. You're like a hero. A knight."
Petra Soroka     Petra doesn't pull away from Lilian when she raises her wristband. Still unsteadily too close, Petra leans over Lilian's shoulder to look at it, and swallows hard. "Oh." Her voice is shaky. "Oh. Yeah. Of course." Petra withdraws, reclining back against the mattress, sitting incrementally closer to Lilian than she had been before, nearly brushing shoulders. She presses a hand against her cheek, and it comes away wet. "Yeah."

"Everything seemed like it was getting better. Before you came along."

    Petra flinches, the reminder sick and unwelcome. "...Yeah. I'm... sorry. I don't know if I've said that before. I thought a lot about it, you know, about everything, it's not like I have better things to do. I think I wish you hadn't lost. I don't think I really expected you to. But... I didn't know. Yeah."

    After Lilian finishes talking, Petra stares down at her lap for a few seconds in silence, where her hands are folded over each other. Her fingers rub at her bare wrist, meditatively. "... Do you want to know a secret, Lilian? Back when I was-- when I used to be one of them, I had one too. An... undocumented paradigm. I don't want to say special, or unique, or anything." Petra chooses every word with uncharacteristic deliberation, looking at the far wall. "The researchers never knew it as anything besides some inconsistent measurements, so it never got a name. I always thought it felt like White, though. Like a blank page. Filled in by other people's wishes that they wanted more, always shifting around because I could never hold on to any of it myself."

    Petra giggles, dripping with self-loathing. "Isn't it grotesque? Isn't it awful, that even the things I want more than anything in the world are so fucking hollow? You even said it yourself, without even knowing, it's that easy to tell even after I fucking gave it up. 'A pristine little snow white sheet of nothing and no-one', is how you put it, and that's just the way my heart is, even in the best circumstances, even around the best people. So I just never allowed them to learn about it and study it, so they wouldn't get repulsed by me. And they were anyways, because they could tell, just like you could. You're the first person that I've ever told."

    Petra smiles at the ground, then finally looks back up at Lilian, her expression forlorn and heartfelt. "So here we both are, right? We're both broken, we both deserve where we've ended up, we both don't deserve sympathy. If suffering doesn't exchange out to being better, then it doesn't matter that one of us got here the hard way and one of us got here the easy way. We're both just rejects of space. The girls who aren't good enough to be good even around perfection."
Lilian Rook     "Yeah. I guess you're right. It's basically all your fault, isn't it?" says Lilian. Just because there's no animosity doesn't mean there can't be no mercy as well. "I don't even know what your 'ideal' is, Petra. I honestly don't. Can you even tell me?" Her head slowly rolls to face Petra, neck limp, eyes dully unexpectant. "'Your' tops?" she repeats. "I suppose I have to go back outside at some point."

    'I'm not making fun, just...'

    Lilian huffs. "Do you just remember every fucking thing anyone's ever said to you? Why bother? Most of it is worthless. Make some room in your brain for an original thought." Her face after pulling on a billowy silk top is soured by a scowl. "I'm the only person in the world who gets to reject Phony. Deeply and as a person. In the end, I didn't; so what's your excuse?" Reclining once again. "Nice to have an answer to that time in the onsen, though." She chuckles darkly, elaborating no further.

    'I mean, if it's fair, if all that suffering can't exchange for anything meaningful, then doesn't that mean that you're just objectively worse than a less damaged option?'

    Lilian gives Petra the single most heartbreaking smile she's ever seen; half-hearted, distantly affectionate and unbearably hollow, every centimeter radiating pain covered up in saintly patience.

    "Yeah. It does." Lilian says.

    "Isn't that just the most maddening thing? It's so unfair that it makes you want to scream. People follow the arc of how they were born, without exception. Those with good circumstances are able to grow and thrive and accelerate into the future, healthy and happy for their whole lives, while those with bad circumstances are stunted from the start; if they even heal at all, they're late to start, slower to go anywhere, damaged, handicapped, and they might get a little happiness much, much later."

     Lilian laughs desolately, cutting herself off by one breath. "Sure, you can work on yourself and change things, if you're very, very special, but it's like the bullshit they feed you about natural talent against hard work, right? Obviously a hard worker will come out ahead of someone talented if all the genius does is slack off, but geniuses can work hard too, you know? Someone with natural talent and a work ethic is someone you'll never, ever catch up to, no matter how hard you try. It's not a matter of spirit or wanting it more, it's just a matter of time. You both get twenty four hours a day, and you both lose it at exactly one second per second, just like everyone who has ever lived and died, and you can never overcome that limitation. All they have to do is stay ahead of you."

    "Damage is like that. You lose out on something, and you'll never get it back. It'll forever be a black, rotted part of you; no matter how many good things you cram into your life, yourself, you'll always be able to say 'I could have had all of this, plus what was taken from me'. There's no winning!" She trails off with the ghost of a fond look that is certainly not for Petra.

    "The best thing you can do is to grow as much as possible, so that percent of you that's ruined forever shrinks smaller and smaller. One bad ring in a tree with hundreds. But you'll always, always be working harder than the good kids. The healthy trees. They'll always get everything, better than yours, by working less hard. And they'll lord it over you, sneer at you, mock your rough edges, and try to cast you out at every opportunity they have."
Lilian Rook     "So the other best thing you can do is to damage them too. As long as you never ever slow down, even for an instant, you can kneecap everyone ahead of you and race past them while they stumble. That's the power you have to make it fair." If Lilian at all notices the way that her voice crackles for the space of one sentence, distorting with a soft whine and doubled up sound, she doesn't show it. §You punish people according to their good fortune.§

    'Jesus, not just your home, but your fucking brain too? Even though you're...?'

    Lilian wobbles her hand. She never gestures that lazily under ordinary circumstances. "Not literally. What I know from the data we beat out of Parsons was that it was some sort of demiplane temporarily manifested out of the imprint of our consciousnesses on space. Two girls with two wishes that smashed together so hard it created a cavitation bubble in normality. But that's enough, right? To get an idea of what it's like to be someone."

    'I've never seen it like that, every time you do it. I remember you fighting Hiromi, and matching her. The thing beneath Indus, everything you do with Night Mist. When you were holding back Kraken yourself, in Rita's world. You're like a hero. A knight.'

    Lilian blinks at Petra suddenly leaning right into her face, but she doesn't shrink back. Her flushed gaze slides restlessly around her expression, but locks unwavering onto her lips after a moment, reading her words from them at the same time as she hears them; verifying their reality.

    "God I hate you." Lilian laughs, unevenly. Even if the strong drink impacts her presentation more than her eloquence, her involuntary sounds and motions are all over the place. "If you really felt that way, then why did you do any of this to begin with?" Her fingertips lift to Petra's chin, nails gently pressed into her jaw, and then her thumb turns her a few degrees to the side. In the next thoughtless, confusing, alcohol-fuelled moment, Petra feels Lilian's lips press to her cheek, and then feels her breath on her ear. "That's really sweet of you, though. Nobody else ever says that. It kind of makes me want to hold your head underwater even more."

    'The girls who aren't good enough to be good even around perfection.'

    "That's your one, fatal mistake, Petra. The reason you're in here and I'm about to be back out there." Lilian says, breathing it out more than vocalizing. "Even if I'm horrible, even if I'll never be close to perfect, I'm not going to give up, and I'm not going to go away. If I don't deserve anything, I'll take it. If I don't deserve to be loved, I'll make people fall in love with me. Whoever gets in my way, even if they're right, even if they're a hero, I'll crush them. Just because I know it's wrong doesn't mean I'll stop. I can thrive and feel guilty, or I can die; those are the two choices."
Lilian Rook     Lilian's voice descends into a low, sharp-edged whisper. "Do you understand? You're the reject because you let them reject you. I won't allow them to reject me. Even if, one day, Phony herself decides that she's too good for me, I'll ruin her just enough to force her to take me back." She leans back, away from Petra's face, though there's hardly much room to separate them anyways. "It was always just a matter of selfishness, Petra. You couldn't be good enough to deserve it, but you wouldn't allow yourself to be evil enough to take it, and because you were too lukewarm to wish for either anyone else's sake or your own, you came away with nothing. I'd have accepted you either way, if you'd just chosen one."

    "But you'd still never be like me. Because when I made my wish, when my heart's desire was strong enough to make anything I could think of into reality, the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world was to make everyone else less real."
Petra Soroka "Do you just remember every fucking thing anyone's ever said to you?"

    Petra looks like she's inflating from the effort of holding back an outburst, cheeks puffing up. Her face is tinged pink from a combination of the alcohol, her struggling restraint, and some secret third thing, until she loses the battle and blurts out awkwardly. "Not *anyone*." The intensity and emphasis of the word seems to vent enough of Petra's agitation that she doesn't continue, but she still fidgets in place as if there's more she would say.

"What's your excuse?"

    Petra rubs her cheek with the back of her hand, trying unsuccessfully to work out the stiffness around her mouth. "I dunno. 'In the end' is the thing, I guess. An arc that resolves somewhere happier. It's not even about Kore, anyways, I barely know her. I've only talked to her twice, ever." Petra purses her lips in thought, arranging the slippery building blocks of vague feelings in her head to construct them into words. Something's always lost in the process. "But... what she represents is scary, right? The way that everyone else finds it so easy to just, fall into her orbit, and because there's some fucked up tangle in my brain, it's not easy for me at all. So even when I try to follow, I'm a beat behind and out of step, and suddenly everyone I care about is out of reach, but going back is intolerable. Space is scary because it makes earth inhospitible. I'm not ready for it. I'm not suited for it."

    --the single most heartbreaking smile she's ever seen.

    One of the unexpected aspects of being isolated in a prison cell, something that seems obvious in retrospect, is that Petra doesn't have access to the internet anymore. Whenever she doesn't know something, or starts doubting her memory, that's it. There's no way for her to look up the answer and settle the question, it just sits. So then, every time Lilian visits, Petra's mind inevitably wanders to Stockholm Syndrome.

    It's something about falling in love with your kidnapper, right? Putting 'Lilian' in the same thought as 'love' is terrifying, but like a self-fulfilling prophecy, her anxiety over the topic makes it return to her mind every time. Is it like a mental disorder, where it can just happen to anyone and she can't be blamed for it? Or does it not count because she was technically arrested, not kidnapped, so there's nothing to worry about? Or does that make it worse, because if that's what this is, there's no excuse? It's not real, and if it is, she has an excuse, and if she doesn't, then it's temporary.

    It doesn't really matter either way. When Petra sees that smile, her heart aches painfully enough that she feels sick, and despite the ever-futile nature of arguing with Lilian, she cuts in anyways. Anything to stop Lilian from feeling like the worse option.

     "I don't want to believe that! I don't. There isn't... just a single track, that everyone is racing on. Most people, the ones that *do* follow the arc they were born into, are completely worthless no matter how easy they have it. People that-- that never got hurt badly enough to be knocked off that predetermined arc, they're the ones who are cold-pressed and forged into never feeling or doing anything important, so it doesn't matter how comfortable they have it. It makes it *worse*, how comfortable they have it."

    "But, for me, the problem is-- is," Petra slurs and her head droops, rubbing at her eye. "I think everyone who's ahead of me is also a better person. So it's just, I feel like I should be happy, but I'm angry instead, and that just makes me feel worse. It feels like all of the parts of me that got treated well by this putrid fucking world are the ones that are rotted. I don't know. I don't think you're a worse option for anything."
Petra Soroka "If you really felt that way, then why did you do any of this to begin with?"

    Petra feels woozy after the flood of breathless adulation leaves her mouth, eyes still dazedly locked onto Lilian's. The smallest edge of defensiveness enters her voice, and she blinks, looking increasingly distraught. "Felt-- felt what way?" She starts to duck her head and curl inwards, though not pulling back away from Lilian's face, before her fingers lightly touch Petra's chin and all of the motion stops as if she was grabbed.

    There's a second topic that's been rattling around in Petra's head, that she would normally resort to the internet to answer. Isn't withdrawal, like, bad for you? Of course there's the physical effects-- those don't matter, she always feels like shit-- but there's also some neurochemical thing, she's pretty sure. Something about how, when you're forced into withdrawal from a drug, your oxytocin levels plummet, and you're more vulnerable to getting addicted to any other drug, to rebound them.

    So when Lilian's fingers on Petra's chin drowns her thoughts in soothing warmth, it's just because her brain is latching on to that as a replacement for nicotine. When she docilely turns her head to the side with Lilian's thumb and parts her lips with a slight inhale, it's just because that's what she would do with a cigarette, too, and her brain is filling in the gaps. When Lilian's lips touch her cheek and that sigh of her breath on the small spot of moisture instantly feels like the most important thing Petra will ever experience and her whispers in her ear send shivers down her spine, it's just because of... the wine?

    There's no heterosexual explanation for this. Even Petra knows that.

    She doesn't pull away, afterwards. She doesn't dare to. She doesn't want to. The fog in her head provides a convenient justification, that she doesn't have to think right now, at least for a minute. Petra stays frozen where Lilian left her, her precarious lean supported by her hands on the ground, face angled to look down at Lilian's shoulder. Her cheeks are bright red, and each panting breath is heavy with warm fog.

    "Y-you're so... I wish I had that kind of conviction. I think I wanted to be *forced* to have it, you know? To either have this horrible, awful rot beaten out of me, or to be hurt and hate everyone enough that I could feel important enough compared to them to want things for myself." Petra's shoulders shake, and it's unclear whether she's holding back tears or silently laughing. Now that she's started talking, she can't stop herself, and it's so easy to blame it on the wine. "I-I really look up to you. I know that's hard to believe, now, after everything that-- that's happened. That I did. You're so... intentional. Even every time you crack it feels like, there's a story behind it."

    The haze of alcohol, the warmth of a nearby body, the susurrus of whispering, sap the dregs of energy from Petra's sleepless body. Her arms buckle and she falls forwards onto Lilian, head leaning on her shoulder. It's fine, because none of this is real, and if it is, she has an excuse, and if she doesn't, then god at least this one time. "I know this is so fucked up. I know it's awful and deranged and sick, but I'm all of those things too, so it makes sense that I'd be broken like this, too. I-I think, I like you, Lilian. I, don't--" Petra's eyes flutter shut and her breathing slows, but she still murmurs loud enough to hear. "I really didn't like the idea, of you thinking I hated you. Even though it was probably better that way."

    Petra sleepily giggles, then hiccups. "If that makes you want to drown me more, the offer's still open."
Lilian Rook     'An arc that resolves somewhere happier.'

    "That's the thing about arcs, Petra. Like any series that has to keep going forever, they don't fucking stay resolved in real life." Lilian sighs, raggedly. "A beat behind and out of step. How in God's name is that unique to her? You always are, right? So am I, so obviously you are. I just deal with it by faking that I'm playing with tempo, like an expert does. Maybe sometimes I even am. But you're always lagging behind, too little too late, even with your friends."

    'Space is scary because it makes earth inhospitible. I'm not ready for it. I'm not suited for it.'

    Lilian gives up speaking. She puffs out air like exhaling smoke; she never has, but the long drag is silently implicit, in the slow fall of her chest and the slight part of her lips, and the look of detached exhaustion on her face. "Yeah. Once you know how good it could be, what you missed, it makes you fucking furious about wht you got." she says, unclear whether she's missing Petra's meaning or not. "Seeing people like that just permanently changes what you know people can be like. So when they're the opposite of that, you know that the vileness in their hearts is even deeper than you ever thought." She slowly taps her fingertip on her face, thinking.

    "I believe her. That I should have been there. Should have grown up with what they had. But I didn't. So I just have to take what I can get now, and be grateful, and feel like myself for a few hours, before I have to go home at the end of the day anyways, like every other day. I'll never really be there unless I give up everything. So it makes everything feel like a weight."

    'they're the ones who are cold-pressed and forged into never feeling or doing anything important, so it doesn't matter how comfortable they have it.'

    Lilian, smiling, desolate and cold as space, only responds with a slow tilt of her head, and a flicker of wry patience, as if she secretly envies the spirit of a child who has given completely the wrong answer. For a short time, at least. Before--

    "That's a nice way to think of it, if that's how it works for you. But I think, if nobody does anything important when they're happy, then 'important' must be a very miserable thing. Like a begrudging thanks we give to people who push the meter forward, because we don't want them to stop, but none of us want to be the one. Nobody who ever did anything meaningful was happy about it; we're built to want easy lives that stay the same."

    Lilian deflates, gasping in strung out and mildly slurred exasperation. "I don't get it. I really don't. Why you'd be angry at things being easy. Who cares if it's rotten if you belong? Is it that easy, to be jealous of what the survivors built out of it at the end? To just forget everything they paid to get there? It's not a fair price at all, you know. You lose so much more than you can ever forge yourself. You don't really get stronger; you just-- . . . Petra . . ." Lilian breathlessly seizes up, and then rolls her gaze lazily to the corner of Petra's face, lips joylessly still. "I'm only special because all the other people who were like me are dead."

    A sick, poisonous kiss later.
Lilian Rook     'Y-you're so... I wish I had that kind of conviction. I think I wanted to be *forced* to have it, you know? To either have this horrible, awful rot beaten out of me, or to be hurt and hate everyone enough that I could feel important enough compared to them to want things for myself.'

    Lilian sighs, and this time it's still tinged with the razor-edged hoarseness of a mere minute ago. A boiling mix of frustration, resignation, self-loathing. And yet, what she says is, "Yeah. I shouldn't have listened to them. I should have just done it to you."

    Lilian, unexplained, begins counting off on her fingers. "Rita. Tachibana. Tangent. Halcyon. Padgett. Cantio. Candelario. All the others who believed in you too. Who thought they could get to you first, and protect you. What a waste. I really let them believe in the 'arc', like I could just be nice to you and not control my space; no standards, no stress, just 'feelings' and 'forgiveness' and it'd all work out."

    She laughs, rasping and miserable. "When all I ever wanted to do was to ruin you and make you more like me. Ever since Doe, when for a second, it seemed like you'd get it; like you'd stop being an annoying little girl and adapt to being hated; really loathed, pathologized, never safe, never really stood up for. I wanted you to reach the end of your rope, and crack, and tell me 'I know what it's like now', and then . . . I don't know. But I wanted you to say it."

    "But I didn't. I couldn't. That'd be sick. They all loved you, and not me. They thought they could save you and keep you pure; and not me. To think that was your sole reason all along . . . That's so depressing. all you had to do was hurt them. To be either-or, and not lukewarm both. You were so close."

    'I-I think, I like you, Lilian. I, don't-- I really didn't like the idea, of you thinking I hated you.'

    "That's a first." says Lilian, then laughs a single syllable at her own thoughtles blurt-out. "Well, not the first, but it's really rare. Most people love the ambiguity. Like, they think it's flattering, or appeasing, that they're nice to me in spite of how much I deserve to be hated. Nobody feels guilty for the stress." Her fingers drift slowly down Petra's cheek. "You were always kind of too sweet for this, weren't you? You tried so fucking hard to be as awful as possible because if you were any softer than the worst you knew you'd give up and try to help me, right? You never wanted to win; you just wanted to be special to me. And that's so fucking sad, for so many reasons now."

    'If that makes you want to drown me more, the offer's still open.'

    "A little." Lilian admits with a dangerous, crooning edge. "But I couldn't kill you like that. Not after everyone else made you this bad, and especially when it was because they thought you were so normal and good that they could bring you back from the brink. I don't think I could even really leave you to kill yourself. I want you to be as completely fucking miserable as I am until you finally get it; not dead. Hurting you like this is the only way I can think of how to get it across. How to make anyone understand what's on the inside. I want you worn down into the tatters of a human being and infected with the same virus, until you don't know any other way to be but like me."
Lilian Rook     Her hand drifts, thumb brushing the cuts at her neck; the burns and bruises at the edge of her face. Her touch is so delicate that it doesn't even hurt. It sets every quivering nerve on fire instead. Her fingers are so soft. Her breath is so sweet. "It's not like I don't kill people because I don't hate them enough, Petra. Or some moral thing either. It's because . . . because . . ."

    The way she shivers goes all the way from her core to her wrist to Petra's jaw, unbearably fearful and longingly ecstatic at the same time. "When you're me; when you have the perspective I do, the power I do, when you really, really live it-- it's not like Persephone, where she loves everyone more. It's the opposite. Everything feels so fake. The whole world. How am I supposed to care about people when I just turn them off? How do I respect them when they're always so vulnerable? They're like plastic toys; all there for pretend, like props."

    "So when I can stop anyone from doing anything at all, everything I let them do is like I brought it on myself, right? I have all this fucking power, so whenever I don't use it, I deserve whatever happens; it's opt-in. Knowing that option is there, always, right within reach-- it wears everything down to this hollow little action figure of reality. It's all so not real. I'm so fucking alone, all the fucking time, off in a world of my own that I can't live without anymore, and everything I ever did, everything I am, that makes up every part of me, just makes me even more alone; even more that there's nobody like me."

    Again, on her fingers, but pressed to Petra's collarbone below, counting by pressure and warmth. "Rape and murder. That's it. The only rules I didn't test, just to see if they were real. They probably aren't, but I can still pretend. I can still pretend I don't have that power, and that people are real enough to at least be safe from that. So if you kill yourself because of this, that's basically like I did it myself. And then I know I can take a life just like that. It'll stay in my head for the rest of my life, and I'll never come back from it, that every person I ever let live deserved to do what they did to me. Because I didn't kill them, I didn't want them to stop."
Petra Soroka "Rita. Tachibana. Tangent. Halcyon. Padgett. Cantio. Candelario."

    Petra, leaning on Lilian's shoulder out of sheer exhaustion, shifts to a more comfortable position, without breaking contact, of course. She readjusts to take strain off of her neck, scooting close enough to Lilian that their arms brush up against each other, and the heat emanating from the touches and near-touches of bare skin prickles across Petra's nerves. Petra lays her cheek on Lilian's shoulder and sighs, reaching across her body to count off on Lilian's fingers too.

    "Berislav. Blossom. Buttercup. Newman. Futaba. Even Ishirou, before all of that. I could name a hundred more before we ever met. It's such a waste. All the ways I was cared for only ever made me worse."

    Petra falls silent, letting her hand fall down and retract to her lap. Lilian feels Petra's jaw shift against her shoulder as she chews the inside of her mouth in thought, her hand balling into a fist and relaxing. "That really made that much of an impression on you? The..." Petra struggles to remember his first name for a few seconds, then gives up. "The Doe thing? That's... wow. Haha. That's honestly when I felt the most like myself. Scared and threatened by someone who was awful in a way that no one else wanted to admit to, and the only way to convince them was to shoot him six times in the head until they had to notice how horrible he was. The only person who was really on my side then was Remee, and all she was doing was betting on me like a racehorse to win more favor with the Watch. That's probably why she started hating me too, when everyone else did."

    Petra rolls her head over to look up at Lilian's face with a thoughtful expression, lips drawn together in a pout. "And you. You were on my side too, even though it was for the First Code. I don't think that makes it any less you, just because it was part of the code. Everyone's probably horrible to you about your rules too, aren't they? Treating them as unimportant, or like you shouldn't need them. I like them though. I looked into them, before, the Thirteen. I think it's, secure feeling, to not need to trust yourself. I only ever fuck up when I do that." Petra yawns with a shaky squeak, stretching her torso and legs as much as she can without dislodging herself from Lilian's shoulder. Blood spots through her white clothes, wounds reopened by the exertion. "Neither of us should've listened to the rest of them. What would they know about being broken like this?"

    "We both should've just done the sick thing. I-I kind of thought I was hurting them, though, by hurting you. I'd assumed they were all on your side, and that they'd all hate me soon enough for being against you, because you were the best of them. I guess I was too much of a coward to do it directly. Until Ishirou, and then suddenly everyone did hate me. Not for you." Petra sniffles, teary congestion clogging her throat. "...Yeah. Kind of depressing, now."
Petra Soroka "You were always kind of too sweet for this, weren't you?"

    Petra whimpers when Lilian's fingers brush down her cheek, wide-eyed expression trembling with tiny uncontrollable movements. When she starts talking, Petra disintegrates into tears, messily hiccuping and sniffling, wet trails rolling down her cheeks to soak into Lilian's shirt.

    "I-I-I'm s-so s-sorry Lilian! I-I'm not sweet at all, I'm just fucked in the head, I did such h-*horrible* things to you! And it felt *good*-- well, everything felt awful, but it was cath-cathart-chatharit, to be able to hurt someone unreservedly and feel like I was, was allowed to, like I had a reason, and that's just so, so fucked up. And I-I know you get that too, that was the whole-- 'reward for being so good'. Like that. I know I'm not good for anything else but that. 'Empty doll'."

"But I couldn't kill you like that. Not after everyone else made you this bad, and especially when it was because they thought you were so normal and good that they could bring you back from the brink."

    Petra shudders, exhaling a warm, unsteady breath. Twisting around, she wraps her arm through Lilian's and clutches her tightly, pressing her damp face into her shoulder, muffled sobs racking her body. "God. I-I'm almost glad it's over. That part, of people grabbing at me and pulling and demanding that there *has* to be something good about me. This is so much more..." Petra hiccups and laughs, two short shrill syllables. "It's more fitting. Being made more and more miserable until I fucking hate that I ever chased it, because that's the right way to feel, isn't it? It's better to be infected and battered and broken until I get it. Even though I'll never end up doing anything with it, it's still better than existing like this."

    Stroking the jagged scabs and raw, tortured skin hidden by the curtain of Petra's hair sends crackles of painless electricity across her nervous system, sapping some of the tension from her body with a sigh. Soft touches on knife wounds feel earned enough to be tolerable. At some point, Petra's hand slipped beneath the sleeve on Lilian's arm that she was hugging, and now it grips around her bicep with gentle intensity.

    "People are fake anyways. Even without that. I've seen enough real people to know that I'm not one and neither is practically anyone else." Her voice is hazy with sleep and alcohol, clogged with phlegm, muted by Lilian's shoulder, ethereal in how faint it is. "There's nothing inside people like that, like me. They're barely people at all." Petra rolls her head to the side, to look up at Lilian's face. "I'm sorry you're so lonely, though. I really wish I was able to help."
Petra Soroka     Petra giggles a little, halfheartedly. "Isn't it funny, though? That even though I'm not real at all even besides your wish, it's actually the other way around. You're powerless to keep me alive. No matter how hard you try, or what words you say, or how much time you put in, it's not in your power to stop me from killing myself. The moment you leave, I could decide to stop eating and starve myself to death, or just swallow one of the heating elements. I could figure out how to make a noose with some of these clothes by trial and error. I could drown myself in the sink without your help, if I tried hard enough. I'm a clever girl, there's a lot of options."

    Petra rubs her cheek on Lilian's shoulder, practically nuzzling it, with a dreamy, vacant smile and closed eyes. "Fake people like me can just disappear if you look away. So it wouldn't be your fault, either way. It doesn't have to be something you 'can do'. It's more like something you 'can't stop', and maybe that feels a little better." Petra drowsily rubs at her eyes. "I won't, though. Not if it'll stress you out that way. I don't want that. We're past that."

    Petra straightens up, leaning her head back against the mattress frame. Nothing else about her clingy position changes, leg pressed up against Lilian's, arm woven through hers. Her neck just hurt too much at that angle. "That's the thing though, right?" Recalling back to the earlier topic, Petra rolls her head around, stretching her neck and absently noting the sensation of weight shifting in her blotchy red face. "All of that about, everyone else like you being dead. It's-- it's awful. It's sick. Of course. But... that's not too much of a price, for me. Compared to the alternative."

    "Belonging somewhere rotten, it's, it makes you rotten, too. Everything about me is like that. None of it is precious enough to me that I wouldn't pay it. There's nothing of the, the annoying, disgusting, entitled brat that isn't worth losing, to be a little closer to the people whose feelings actually matter. I hate everything about the world, and it clinging so tightly to me as 'one of theirs' only makes me hate myself as much as I hate it. I'd rather be miserable than nothing. Does that make sense?"

    Petra laughs, and looks dazedly at the door of the cell. "If arcs were set from birth, then I wouldn't be in a prison cell a thousand worlds away from home. I'd be pointlessly in college, working some nepotistic internship at my fucking dad's company, guaranteed to be comfortable and empty forever. That was the plan before I was born, and me being a girl instead didn't change anything other than making me a convenient prop. None of it mattered. But I'm here, now, instead."
Lilian Rook     'It's such a waste. All the ways I was cared for only ever made me worse.

    "She just needs a little more. She just needs a little more. I can reach her. I can do it. Just be kinder. She needed more and she didn't get it. She'd turn out good if only people tried harder." says Lilian, rambling and evisceratingly tired. "Isn't it so perverse? They never even stop to think about it. If someone needs all the care in the world; so, so much more care than anyone else; just to not turn out awful, like everyone else, doesn't that mean they were innately more evil than anyone else from the start?" She sighs, deflating against Petra's leaning shoulder. It even smells like wine, and a little like sugar, and a little like iron. "I wish they knew. Then that'd at least mean they treat me like shit because they believe I'm innately good, and I can take it, right?"

    "But people decide how to treat you at first glance, and never really reconsider it. If whatever they're doing doesn't work, they'd rather try even harder than think for themselves. Their kindness and their cruelty are all just instinct. Like animals."

    '--- That's honestly when I felt the most like myself. Scared and threatened by someone who was awful in a way that no one else wanted to admit to --- the only way to convince them was to --- until they had to notice how horrible he was --- The only person who was really on my side then was --- all she was doing was betting on me like a racehorse to win more favor with the --- That's probably why she started hating me too, when everyone else did.'

    Lilian turns her head to match Petra's gaze with the numbness of a shellshocked soldier. Despite the flush on her face, her eyes are dull and glassy, her lips still in disappointment, lashes dry and unblinking. "Yeah." she croaks. "How was it?" comes out like the twist of a knife.

    'Everyone's probably horrible to you about your rules too, aren't they?'

    Lilian is silent for several, long seconds. The leaden weight of what she'd just been thinking about is slow to shift, and its inertia grinds her bones. "Almost none of them ever looked it up. I don't always cite them, you know. Usually I only say it out loud when I . . ." Her brow furrows in foggy, impaired concentration. "I guess when I don't want to find better words. Or when I don't want to say them. Or when I'm afraid of what might come out. Citing text is safe. People roll their eyes and accept it. I don't have to explain my feelings that way."

    "But even when I don't say it out loud, they're always there. It takes ten minutes to find them. A little bullet point handbook of what I believe in and how I want to be. Isn't that insane? Nobody has a tiny little guide on how to interact with them, right? A fucking walkthrough on how they're going to try to act. It's so easy. It'd be so easy. It's so fair, to everyone; I just put it right out there so they'd all understand, and we could all get along, but no-- no, they're all too fucking good to read the fucking manual."

    Lilian's grip squeezes Petra's arm to the point it hurts. Her volume rises and lowers erratically. "Yeah. I don't trust me. Every time I listen to anyone, do anything, have to wait, it's like ten billion shitty choices that'll hurt someone, and then all the way at the bottom, there's the one that's not so bad, and there's no fucking way I can find and pick it every single time for the rest of my entire life." Her grip relaxes dejectedly. "So why can't anyone trust me about the thing I trust too?"
Lilian Rook     'to be able to hurt someone unreservedly and feel like I was, was allowed to, like I had a reason'

    "It feels good, to think have a real reason, to hate those beautiful children from space." Lilian whispers. All of her drunken vitriol fails her. The energy bleeds from her body all at once. "When you see something so much better than you, you at least want to feel good about ruining it."

    'There's nothing inside people like that, like me. They're barely people at all.'

    "Stop saying that--" Lilian blurts out, slipping an inebriated instant, her voice raw and heavy with holding back some distant relative of tears. "I know. I know they aren't. But I want to pretend. I want to believe there's something inside them. I want them to prove they're real. I want so, so badly to be able to think of them as real people." The arm in Petra's hold quivers with tension. Lilian has never seemed casually 'well-built', but the strength barely being held in check is slightly terrifying to feel. "I know you're right. But that doesn't give you the right to say it to me."

    'You're powerless to keep me alive.'

    Lilian bunches up. "Don't." she says. She sounds queasy. "Don't make me take responsibility for that too. I already have . . . so many things, that I always, always, have to prove I have the power to hold. Every single day. Don't . . ." A low, sickly whine rises from her throat as Petra carries on. Her vision swims, the drunkenness finally coming back to the fore as she tenses up, until-

    'I don't want that. We're past that.'

    "Yeah. We are." Lilian sighs. "You're safe." She stops, blinks blearily, and repeats it in a strangely different way. "You're . . . Safe." Her arm slips from Petra's, fumbling down to her side, looping around her waist, and squeezing her, suddenly, as if to remind her that she's really there. "You have a reason to live. If you say you don't, then I'll give you one. Okay?"

    'Everything about me is like that. None of it is precious enough to me that I wouldn't pay it--- I'd rather be miserable than nothing. Does that make sense?'

    Lilian bursts out laughing.Not dry and miserable, but the emotional swing of someone two thirds of a bottle in all at once and suddenly finding something really funny. "Does that make sense? Are you serious Petra? Really? Hahaha~" She stops only to hiccup, then wipe her eye.

    "Oh my god. 'There's nothing about this that's worth trying to save. I might as well risk it all because I won't miss anything if it's gone. If I die trying, it was still better than lingering on like this. I don't need care and praise, I don't need someone to tell me I'm alright the way I am, I need to burn this all down and take at least one, even just one, stab at being the only way I can be. Sorry if you like the current me, sorry if I hurt you but I can't live like this.' That's what you're talking about?"
Lilian Rook     Lilian trails off into hiccuping giggles. "'Does that make sense?' Haha. Oh my god you fucking idiot. Why do you think it's so bad at home? What you did to all of your friends here, I did to my family. Wasn't that obvious?"

    "Matthew and Alison; those are the only people in the world I don't deserve to fight, because they really did love the old me; they did and gave and shared everything they could, out of love and want and care, and I spat in their hands and told them I'd rather die, if it meant I couldn't selfishly be this me."

    'That was the plan before I was born, and me being a girl instead didn't change anything other than making me a convenient prop.'

    Lilian breathes out, and then, finally, her own weight slumps against Petra. The center of gravity between them shifts a few degrees outside of herself. A fractional match against Petra's own leaning support. "Hey. Can I tell you a secret?" she asks, as if Petra had any means to betray it. "You know how my family has the sight, right? Clairvoyance. Precognition. Since ancient times, you know, like seers and all that." Her gaze wanders away into nowhere.

    "They really had the perfect child. Someone they spent years creating before they were even born. Thousands and thousands of hours preparing, locking it in, changing things until the future could only be bright, with such talented and intelligent and loving child who they could teach everything and who'd be so happy to replace everything they lost in the Onslaught. They were supposed to be so happy."

    "And then I fucked it up. Because the child that they saw in every future, who was supposed to be a deterministic, completely sure thing, was a-- a . . . was-- they were supposed to be a--"

    With the amount of strong port in her system, it's a miracle Lilian's dry retch, doesn't come up as something else. Just vile, sticky, choked up coughing. "Haha . . . Is your being empty like my being a mistake?"
Petra Soroka "...doesn't that mean they were innately more evil than anyone else from the start?"

    Petra makes a contemplative hum, which crackles into a surprised squeak when Lilian leans against her. The weight and warmth makes her eyes flutter shut, and she lingers in that moment with a prolonged sigh. When she eventually comes to, it takes her some time to refocus, sounding dazed.

    "... Um. That's a smart way of putting it. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but that's how it felt. I guess, if they were actually doing it for that reason, they'd at least have been right about one thing." Petra's head droops, like it suddenly became too heavy for her. She scowls, and a note of indignant outrage enters her voice. "But what they actually did-- I showed up here as a stupid child that was being awful at you, and all of their first instincts, all of their snap judgements, were to *sympathize* with me! Every one of them! 'Oh, we get why you hate her, here's a list of all the reasons why we did too'! That makes me so mad! I didn't have to earn care from a single one of them, they all just offered up sympathy when they saw that I was upset at you! Fuck them! Fucking *pack animals*!"

    Petra shakes her head, then immediately regrets it when nausea surges through her. Her agitation drains away, and she lightly rubs her hand on Lilian's arm, her tone softer. "You're really smart, about these kinds of things. About the ways people are. I like listening to it."

"How was it?"

    Petra struggles a little to meet Lilian's lifeless gaze, and only manages for a moment before her eyes flick away again. "Sucked. Haha." Petra laughs slightly, the sound grating in her chest. "Felt normal, I guess. Even though I hadn't been there before. Like I was supposed to be, like it was inevitable."

"It takes ten minutes to find them. A little bullet point handbook of what I believe in and how I want to be."

    "*Right*?!" Petra exclaims, worked up again. As she tries to talk more emphatically, her stammering gets worse, slurred by the alcohol. "I was prepared to, to, to dig through interviews, or whatever, to piece it together! The way they, they talk about it, it was like-- I didn't think I could just *look it up*! They act like it's some esoteric ritual, like it's-- no, no, I know what it is." Petra holds up the hand that isn't intertwined with Lilian and waggles her fingers dramatically. "They treat it like it's some ~mysterious prophecy~ about a ca-cata-caclimsitic event, that can only be understood after it happens. And that's kind of hot, I guess, but it's terrible to treat a friend that way." She snorts derisively, dropping her hand back down to rest against Lilian's leg.
Petra Soroka "...it's like ten billion shitty choices that'll hurt someone, and then all the way at the bottom, there's the one that's not so bad..."

    Petra nods in grave understanding, eyes closed. She opens her mouth to respond, then winces and constricts her throat to strangle the pained squeal into silence before it comes out. Burned and blistered skin tears under Lilian's tight grip, and Petra swallows hard, tugging the sleeve of her shirt down over the reopened wound, to keep it from oozing onto Lilian's hand. It's okay that it hurts, that's just payment for being close.

    "...Yeah. It's, it's like, the first thought is always to burn it all down, right? It's *always* the last straw. When someone is slow, or wrong, or just vulnerable, it feels like... 'this is it, this is all I can handle, this is what will get me to finally stop caring'. It's *so* exhausting, without rules. I wish they got that."

"When you see something so much better than you, you at least want to feel good about ruining it."

    Petra's body quakes with quiet, unstable giggles. "If it makes you feel any better, I still think of you that way, even after all of this. Not, not the, feeling good about it, I don't feel good about anything at all, but the... thinking you're..." Petra trails off with a confused expression, then blearily rubs at her eyes. "Sorry. I don't really know what I'm saying."

"You're safe."

    Petra stops for exactly as long of a confused beat as Lilian, and then overlaps with her when she echoes. "I'm . . . safe?"

    Petra tenses up when Lilian's arm slides down to her waist, holding her breath. Her heartbeat skips, then doubles, and Lilian can feel it pounding through her femoral artery even from her hip, thrumming beneath her skin. Petra shivers, red-faced, her voice breathy. "I-I-I-- I'm glad?" Petra forces out a long breath, then continues with a softer tone, though Lilian can feel that her heart rate hasn't slowed at all. "I'm glad, that I can be safe. I don't-- I really don't want to hurt you anymore, Lilian. I really, really, want you to believe me when I say I don't hate you." A quick, guilty glance up to Lilian's facial expression after saying that, because Petra can't help herself. Then her face scrunches up in confusion, and she rubs at her nose. "What does that mean? Giving me a reason?"
Petra Soroka "Does that make sense? Are you serious Petra? Really? Hahaha~"

    Petra flinches and tears immediately well up in her eyes. "I-I-I'm sorry, was that not-- am I wrong? Did I say something...?"

    Recognition at her misinterpretation of Lilian's laugh registers in Petra's face right when Lilian starts elaborating, but it's not until she finishes talking that Petra's body language slowly starts relaxing again. Petra tries to covertly wipe at her eye and clear her throat, but entangled as they are, there's not any way to hide it. Especially not when Lilian's hand on her side can feel her heartbeat struggling to put brakes on its panicked acceleration.

    "...Yeah. Like that. All the care and praise, it just makes it worse, because it's harder to, to break away. It's treasuring something that's wrong, and not real."

    Lilian's family again. It's the dozenth time she's brought them up today, not to mention all of her other visits, and Petra never quite knows what to make of it. Everything she says stirs sickeningly uncomfortable feelings in Petra's stomach, but she stays solemnly quiet each time, just sympathetically nodding. Even if it feels wrong, Lilian seems to agree with them-- and *that* feels wrong too, even worse, but without Lilian's own words to lean on, Petra feels lost on how to approach it.

    Petra doesn't have the context, the words, the experience, or the empathic skill necessary address this kind of thing. Even if she wants to.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

    Petra nods and subvocalizes a hum of agreement. She shifts her weight a little, to make Lilian's position more comfortable, and doesn't even remember to get flustered about the contact. The sick pit in her stomach distracts her from blushing at the feeling of the other girl's weight on her.

"You know how my family has the sight, right?"

    Lilian had never told her, but it was easy enough to find that information online. Petra mutely nods again. As Lilian continues, Petra intuitively recognizes what the end would be even before Lilian gets to it, tensing up under her touch and wincing.

"Haha . . . Is your being empty like my being a mistake?"

    Maybe that's the same reason that everyone else prefers to ignore Lilian's problems. Maybe none of them feel capable of standing up to her on this. The thought irritates Petra *almost* enough to speak up, anger at everyone except the two in this cell boiling away the sickness for a moment. She rubs Lilian's back as she coughs, thoughtlessly, and then with her other hand she pops the tab on the energy drink that she brought over earlier, unobtrusively offering it to Lilian.

    The burst of anger burns away, leaving hollow guilt in its place. Petra's just not equipped to support Lilian like that. With an unhappy dimness to her voice, Petra finally voices her agreement, dully laughing. "...Yeah. It is, I think."
Lilian Rook     'Oh, we get why you hate her, here's a list of all the reasons why we did too'

    Lilian physically flinches. The reflex passes her inhibition centers.

    That makes me so mad! I didn't have to earn care from a single one of them, they all just offered up sympathy when they saw that I was upset at you! Fuck them! Fucking *pack animals*!'

    "Like I said back then." Lilian rasps. "Hating me is the normal thing to do. I wouldn't expect anything else from anyone." A dry laugh. "Play normal games, win normal prizes, Petra. You were normal so the normal people gave you normal acceptance."

    'You're really smart, about these kinds of things. About the ways people are.

    "Mmmm . . ." Lilian wobbles back and forth a little. "Yeah, I am. When you can't get close to anyone, all you can do is watch. And when you can't change their minds, all you can do is learn how to take them apart. You know?"

    'Felt normal, I guess. Even though I hadn't been there before. Like I was supposed to be, like it was inevitable.'

    Lilian maintains her despairingly Meaningful stare on Petra's face for a second, then gives up. "I guess that's true." she mutters to herself.

    '*Right*?!'

    Lilian laughs with Petra this time, rather than just for herself. "I remember when Hearthward of all fucking people looked it up, and I was so shocked, and then he was so shocked that I was so shocked~ Of course I wish he retained literally any of it, like, come on you actually read it. But still." Her head gently bounces against the edge of the bed where she slackens back. "He's so wrapped up in his own brain about everyone taking him seriously, people treating him like he doesn't matter, feeling inadequate and second place to me, desperate for my approval, what I have." Her gaze rolls over with her head. "Dumbass. He hasn't figured it out yet, that nobody takes me seriously either. I'm just scarier."

    'And that's kind of hot, I guess, but it's terrible to treat a friend that way.'

    Even flushed and wobbly, Lilian can manage a smirk that looks downright terrifyingly scandalous; as if her pupils could slide down Petra's body and slice her clothes open in their wake. "Y'know, if you called me hot more often, maybe we wouldn't be here." She lifts her hand from Petra's other side just enough to gently pinch her cheek. "You're not so much my 'type', but you're still cute when you try. You actually looked good in that dress, even. I kind of wish I wasn't so angry the whole time we were there." She sighs. "God, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do if you actually did polish my boots, hahaha. Maybe it's better you fucked it up." Lilian makes a sound of queasy discomfort. "It definitely showed everyone else's colours, right?"

    'I wish they got that.'

    Lilian gasps in angry exasperation. "I wish I didn't have to explain it to them. I wish they cared enough to figure it out. I wish they'd think for five fucking seconds outside themselves; what it's like to be someone else and not just how they feel at that one second." She doesn't pay much mind to Petra's flinch of pain, or the oozing of her blood, but Petra can see her quickly lick her lips between sentences. Is that related? Or are they just dry?
Lilian Rook     "It's always like, they don't deserve two thousandth chance, you know? It feels like the last straw because it should be. I want to burn them down because they're so like everyone before that they're all just the same shitty person in my mind sometimes. Everything feels like a continuation of the last thing; no chapters, no breaks. Just one gigantic grey morass. An ocean of sick."
Sorry. I don't really know what I'm saying.

    "I'm better than you." Lilian repeats, without reservation. "But you're better than them, I think. I think you deserved better than them. Not, more caring. I mean better people." She goes dead silent for a second, and then says out of nowhere, "You needed the Paladins, not the Watch. You needed people with principles to break you in, not angry little rebels eager to massage you into their coping. You needed to be where I have to be fair. And I needed another voice on my side there."

    'I really don't want to hurt you anymore, Lilian. I really, really, want you to believe me when I say I don't hate you.'

    Lilian slumps fully into the firm give of the elevated mattress at her back, bunching up her shoulders in the process, pushing her neck down to stare into her lap. "I . . . think I kind of like you, now? But I hate it. Because I still want to hurt you lots, lots more. Isn't that fucked up? More than just not hating you so much, I kind of wish I was on your side more. Stayed there, back then. After Doe. It wasn't just the Code. I kinda felt for you too. And I hate that after all this, I want you to hurt and I want better for you anyways."

    'It's treasuring something that's wrong, and not real.'

    "I wish I understood that about you at the time, instead of just thinking you were spoiled. I wish I could have read your mind."

    '...Yeah. It is, I think.'

    Lilian wordlessly accepts the energy drink and cracks the tab with her fingernail, downing an unhealthy amount of caffeine on an already unsettled stomach. She doesn't even bother to wipe her lip now; she just lets it drip. A long, awkward pause passes, just the one girl against the other, sharing the miserable moment of closeness.

    Then, "Thanks. I can't talk to anyone else about it. Phony just gets mad at me and starts yelling that it's my family's fault and not mine. Like, it's their problem they got hurt by it, and I deserved it my way, not like I did something selfish. I love her, but she doesn't really get it. And I can't talk to Tamamo about it, because she'll try to do something about it. I don't want her to meet them any more than she has. I don't want them to tell her any more about me. I want this me to stay locked in her mind, and not be tainted with that other thing."

    Lilian moves blindly forward, obliviously stumbling through barbed wire towards the twisted mockery of what she had just shared with Petra, leaving the other girl to brace for every second of it. "You're the only one who gets it. That there wasn't some care I deserved but didn't get. You can accept that I'm just shitty and fucked up and made my own problems because I couldn't tolerate something people would kill to have. I'll do anything to keep it, but I understand that I don't deserve it. So, I'm sorry I ever said those things about you not earning it. You didn't hurt anyone by taking it."
Lilian Rook     Drunk, relaxed, unguarded, and at rock bottom, connecting with the worst girl in the world and finally feeling seen, Lilian makes a sound of exertion and lifts herself from her slouch, places her hand against the bedframe to steady herself, and turns around over Petra, throwing one leg over hers and kneeling over her lap. Hands to the frame on either side of Petra's head, Lilian looms just over her, looking down, holding Petra down without touching her.

    "So don't go dying on me, okay? I still need to make it up to you."
Petra Soroka "Hating me is the normal thing to do."

    "Fuck being normal!" Petra shakes her head again, despite the queasiness. "I'm not one of them! No matter how much they'd prefer me to be, or pretend that I am. I won't let them." As the flare of anger dims and Petra quiets down, she pouts with guilty realization. "Well. Shouldn't have, I guess. Fuck."

"You know?"

    Eyes closed and reveling in the soothing, unguarded honesty, Petra makes a noncommittal noise. "I don't know, not really. I'm not smart enough for that, for changing minds or breaking them. I wish I was, but I'm not. All I can do is hurt people in their obvious weak points."

"...people treating him like he doesn't matter, feeling inadequate and second place to me..."

    Petra snickers, with a casually mean edge to the sound. "He should be. I didn't know his name for weeks, but the first time we bumped into each other he seemed to think he had some bitter rivalry with me. Just leeching off of you. He leaks that he's insecure every time he opens his mouth, it's embarrassing." Petra snorts again, then giggles, slurring 'nasty scumshit fuckmale' under her breath. "I kind of thought you'd be mad that I'd read them, somehow. Maybe you would've been, then, actually, and maybe you should've been." A sigh, regretful and exhausted. "I'm glad it's over."

"Y'know, if you called me hot more often, maybe we wouldn't be here."

    Petra flinches at the realization of what she'd said, turning pink enough that her eyes water. She presses her lips shut and shakes her head mutely, looking away from Lilian, though she's unable to actually put voice to what she's trying to deny. The attempt is made even more embarrassing by the way she shivers at Lilian's contact on her cheek.

"God, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do if you actually did polish my boots, hahaha."

    In the midst of Petra's minor ongoing crisis, a thought flits unbidden across her mind, emerging from the haze and heat suddenly enough that she can almost dismiss it as intrusive. Wait, I was that close to getting to her? Well, we still have time. "Well, we still have time."

    Oh no. Oh god. She said that part out loud. The words were blurted out in tandem with the thought, like the barrier had been eroded just enough for one thought, one of Petra's endless reserves of repressed or uncommunicated feelings, to slip through unfiltered by the conversion to speech. Of *everything* that could've been better off being said in the past months, piercing through the walls between hearts that Petra had so desperately constructed, it had to be *this*. Petra clamps both of her hands over her mouth with enough force to flood her tongue with the taste of blood, and looks directly down at her lap, shriveling up.
Petra Soroka "You needed the Paladins, not the Watch."

    Petra laughs in spite of herself at the suggestion. "I haven't really had great experiences with the Paladins. Well, just Ishirou and Hearthward, actually, I can't blame anyone else. And they probably would've been better if I was one of you." She glances at Lilian's face. "Or, maybe not. But still, I guess I like most of you."

    Petra frowns, and considers the idea more seriously rather than brushing it off. "It's not like the Paladins would've wanted me. I'm not-- I was never really an Elite. I just abandoned my mech for one that could kill people and melt their skin off like wax, and grabbed a gun that happened to be inside it. Without those things I'd be nothing and no one, so of course I'd end up with the only people insane enough to let me have them."

    She closes her eyes, letting herself get lost in the idea. As she rambles through her train of thought, the distant, vague longing undertone in her voice slowly shifts to hollow regret. "If I'd been a Paladin, I probably would've needed to start off doing, like, clerical work. That's something I'm not terrible at, and it'd feel better doing it for someplace good rather than, like, my dad's company. At some point I'd start going out into the field, and because I'd know some of you already, and because I went slower, I'd have been less of a frag grenade waiting to go off. I would've had rules and structure, and you and I would've gotten along better-- hopefully-- and none of this would've needed to happen."

    Petra sighs, the vision of that alternative path already leaving her. "Maybe I even would've been able to keep my mech. Though, at that point it'd barely feel different from home, so I don't know if there'd be any point to it at all." It's clear from the way she says it, that 'home' doesn't mean with her parents.

"And I hate that after all this, I want you to hurt and I want better for you anyways."

    "I think that's fine." Petra shrugs with the words. Not as if she's being dismissive, or resigned, just subdued disagreement. "Only one of those is possible now, so it's fine. Anyways, I definitely didn't deserve better, especially not from you. I just should've been less flimsy and hollow, to not bend and go along with all the worst things. I'm fine now, with just-- with company. It's still better than I should get."

"I wish I could have read your mind."

    Petra winces in discomfort, and a wave of prickling pain washes off of her, across Lilian. Like a neuropathic itch beneath the skin, twisting and unreachable, propagating in ripples away from Petra, shifting fractions of angles when Petra fidgets in place. It only lasts a moment.

    "...It's not like I can control it. It's not a... choice. I just started being like that when all the rest of-- while I was losing all the rest of my psychic power too. Like I said. A reject." Petra doesn't want to explain the choking reluctance she has at the idea even if she could control her mental barriers, and almost lets the topic drop without bringing it up. That's the whole point, of course, that she's able to moderate her worse thoughts before saying them.

    But this cell, with all of its surreal pageantry and raw, bared hearts, feels just a little less real than reality, just enough that Petra wants to say it anyways. "...And it's scary, too, isn't it. There's horrible stuff inside of my heart, in a way that girls like them aren't supposed to have. I don't want people brushing their heart up against mine and coming away with cuts and splinters and blaming me for it. Maybe, maybe you, eventually, if I could, but not back then. That was never going to happen."
Petra Soroka "You're the only one who gets it. That there wasn't some care I deserved but didn't get."

    Petra doesn't feel *good*, about being the only one that Lilian can confide in about this. She certainly doesn't feel good about letting Lilian express that sentiment unchallenged, even though she'd apply it to herself in an instant. But being put in comparison to the two most important people in Lilian's life, and still being able to provide a uniquely comfortable emotional presence does convince her, at least a little bit, that it's okay not to say anything.

    Lilian's miserable, anyways. Pressing her on this, right now, wouldn't help anything; she just needs to vent. Besides, Petra will have plenty more opportunities to try to help Lilian work through this, with all of the potential visits in the future. They've got nothing but time.

    Petra's rumination is cut short in the most absolute way possible. Pinned underneath Lilian, the serious, heavy thoughts are instantly drowned out by incoherent mental babbling, while Petra's own mouth hangs open silently. Her chest visibly rises and falls with quick, shallow breaths, exhaling between parted lips, and Petra upturns her wide eyes to look at Lilian's face. It feels like hours before she responds.

    "Wuh?" It's not a particularly elegant response. "I-I-I-I-- what are-- I-I d-d-don't--"

    Slipping through the hairline fractures that form in reality, the most infintesimally minute freedom of wanting something that's just a little bit impossible, a single thought finally bridges the gap between the two girls' hearts.

    Shut me up.
Lilian Rook     "Fuck being normal!"

    Lilian exhales a sound that is more a laugh than a sight. It sounds-- she feels like she wanted it to be more of the latter, and is simply hanging on too loosely and moving too quickly to correct it like she should. "A lot of people say that, Petra, and none of them actually mean it." says Lilian. Her barely subvocal laughter trails off into a hum that would be contemplative if she didn't already know. "But you kind of do, don't you?" The thought surprises her, dimly. Enough to repeat, singsong, "'I know, I know, but don't care how much better it would be, fuck being a--" and then lock up.

    'I kind of thought you'd be mad that I'd read them, somehow. Maybe you would've been, then, actually, and maybe you should've been.'

    "I'm only angry that that it didn't matter, Petra. Why would I be angry that--" Lilian runs out of words more than she actually stops herself. She can hold her sentences together like this, better than Petra can, but her ability to compose them, tactically, is practically completely gone. They're too loose and honest and not properly thought through in advance. "I'm not embarrassed about holding them. It's not like it's the Bible or something. And it's definitely not like I need to have my own whole individualist special snowflake . . . thing. I think I'm even a little proud of them. That the smartest and most experienced people in the world could put those together as shorthand and go 'yeah, this is good enough', and I of all fucking people could keep to them. Better than half of Arthur's knights ever kept to Chivalry." She giggles darkly, only to morosely trail off again.

    "I wish more people read them. I say them out loud so people will get the picture, too. I talked to Tangent about this kind of thing once, too. How I don't feel like anyone deserves anything from me, so I want to keep everything to a contract. Like a mutual binding between me and everyone else, signposted like that. It's so important. People treat me like a mystery, but all they had to do was care to look."
Lilian Rook "'Bleed for me and I'll bleed for you.'"
"'Take what I say from a place of trying to mean it.'"
"'I'll always treat you with care if you don't try to tear people down.'"
"'I care about other rules too, even if they're bullshit.'"
"'Just earn it. I won't care how different you are. I won't take it away.'"
"'I respect whatever you worked for, and didn't get easily.'"
"'Don't drag yourself down to please others. I hate that. I won't get mad if you're selfish. What's yours is yours; you don't have to give it away. Have some pride.'"
"'Take yourself seriously. Try your best. I'm not looking down on you, I just don't want you to half-ass it.'"
"'I don't want to be someone who throws her power around over everyone. Don't force me to be her.'"
"'I won't change my mind when I'm serious. Don't play word games and try to get one over on me, or try to shame and manipulate me; I already thought it through.'"
"'I know full well how much I'm supposed to be hurting you. I got this strong so that I never 'need' to kill you, for your sake. Please don't make me regret it.'"
"'I'll help as many people as I can where I can. I'll help good people before bad people. I'm not a saint; I only have so much help in me. Just be good and I'll help.'"
"'And don't play games with me, about who matters and who doesn't. I can name what a person is. Can you?'"

    "Thirteen little things. And the implied one. That if I fuck up, you can just cite this to remind me. That I want more than anything else in the world to be like this. You deserve to be treated this way, and I agree. Who else is that easy to understand? Who else is that simple and predictable and fair? Nobody else declares everything they mean and everything they stand for and exactly how they'll treat you just up front like that."

    "I hate that everyone else gets to act however they want, never be consistent, hold nothing sacred, make up their own self-serving rules, and still feel like they're the good guy. Why do only I double check myself? They were born more good than me, but they weren't born that good."

    'Well, we still have time.'

    For someone who was proud and nasty enough to flex on Petra that she'd had boyfriends; that she finds men attractive, and flirts with them too; just to make her feel small and invalid, Lilian is far too confident in her love of women to ever be an awkward lesbian; even now. "Oh~? Maybe next time I get mad, I'll bring that dress. You can't get away from it in here, you know. You'll have to do everything I say. I'll even wear the tall boots, up to the knee, just for you~" It still isn't clear how much she means it, and how much is drunken banter, but . . .

    That's it? That's the punishment for being a little too gay out loud? Isn't that kind of nothing? Why is that so bad?
Lilian Rook     'I haven't really had great experiences with the Paladins. Well, just Ishirou and Hearthward, actually, I can't blame anyone else.'

    "You sound like Rita." Lilian says. The giggle is implicit. "I told her she was right, too. They don't reflect well on us. They're so eager to be nasty and in control, like they think I am. They want so badly to be right. To tear other people down and be in charge. There are a couple of others like them, too. So it sucks that the rest go unappreciated. People like Shijima and Fairfax and Friz and Strawberry and Tamamo. Why don't people think of them first? It's always Ishirou and Hearthward." Lilian looks directly at Petra. "Even Dimo was patient with you, wasn't she? Even if she can be awkward."

    'I just abandoned my mech for one that could kill people and melt their skin off like wax, and grabbed a gun that happened to be inside it.'

    "I abandoned a doctorate in medicine for a sword that drives people mad." says Lilian. She blurted it out, and she knows it. "Did I ever tell you that? I changed careers. A year before I reached the Paladins. I was going to be like my sister; I really honestly still want to be like her. And I was minoring in . . . well, I wanted to be like Cecilia too. But I put that aside to chase a dream where people die. I carried off the evil sword in the basement, and I begged someone to train me to use it. Without it, I'd be nothing and no one. The Paladins were insane to have me."

    'Though, at that point it'd barely feel different from home, so I don't know if there'd be any point to it at all.'

    Lilian blinks, slowly. "Isn't that the point? To try and get what you didn't get back there? Shouldn't you have aimed a little lower than space and worked your way up? Here at least, you wouldn't have been the outsider. The tourist. What's wrong with getting along? Earning things is easier if you mix sweat in with the blood and tears. That's what I've learned." says Lilian. ". . . It's sort of cute, how you still call space 'home'. I wish I could. I wish I wasn't so hopelessly attached to that house in my heart. I know it's bad for me. I just can't let go of the one person who's always waiting for me there."

    'I just should've been less flimsy and hollow, to not bend and go along with all the worst things.'

    Lilian muses aloud. "That's true. But it's the same thing as me saying 'I just should have figured it out', right? It's always easy to say, after the fact, that you should have tried harder and done better. I wish you did. I deserved that much. And I wish I did too. Even if you didn't really deserve that much. Deserving is something invented in hell. I just wish we both could have been happier."

    '...And it's scary, too, isn't it. There's horrible stuff inside of my heart, in a way that girls like them aren't supposed to have. I don't want people brushing their heart up against mine and coming away with cuts and splinters and blaming me for it.'

    "Yeah."

    Lilian's voice drops out from under her.

    "If my head wasn't like this, full of shit people can't really grasp, I think I'd still do the same. I'd never get a chance to do better. I'd never get a shot at having friends. I'd never have Tamamo, never have Sapient Heuristics, I'd never be allowed to save anyone, and I'd never have my new life. And he'd have even more power over me." She starts laughing, trying to make it sound anything less than miserable, and then gives up after the first heave.
Lilian Rook     "Even now. God, could you imagine? If anyone knew what I was doing to you. Why I brought you here. How vile is this? How vile am I? Someone redeemable wouldn't do any of this. Someone worth saving wouldn't even feel these urges. If they found out, they'd never be able to stomach me again. Some of them might try to kill me, honestly. They'd deserve to, but I wouldn't let them. Maybe someone, eventually, could get over it, hear my side, if all they knew was that 'Lilian did this to her', but if they could read my heart, they'd know how good it feels, and how much I'm always thinking about doing it to them, too, and how much worse I still want to do to you, and then they'd realize that treating me like a rabid animal was already too good for me."

    "I really don't blame you at all for that, Petra. I don't wish your mind was an open book. I just wish I could have read it. Just me. Because I'd have been the only one who understood what you were dying for. I'm still the only one who understands." Another tipsy giggle. Of course it wouldn't wear off in twenty minutes. Not even close.

    "Wuh? I-I-I-I-- what are-- I-I d-d-don't--"

    "You can always say no~" Lilian says, right in the middle of Petra's stuttering. She leans closer. Enough to block Petra's vision with her face again. Menacing as always, but also strangely sincere, as if she were making herself vulnerable by surrendering her peripheral awareness of anything but Petra too. "I'm not insane you know. You heard me, right? Those two things." A little closer. And a little closer. To one side. Sweet wine breath tickling Petra's ear. "Or you could just shut up, like usual. After all of the fucked up shit I've done to you by now, is this really so frightening?"

    The meaning of 'thou shalt not wear thy power gaudily' becomes fully, fatally apparent in that very next moment. The exact instant where drunk Lilian deploys the full, lethal extend of just how well she has Petra figured out, when she slides up her lap, brings her hands down from the bedframe to Petra's shoulders, sliding one just under her collar, while the other caresses her neck, bending it aside, saying--

    "It's all over anyways, right? It's not like anything will change. And nobody has to know, do they? I'd go down with you, even if someone did, so it won't get out. And besides. You've already bled so much. Hurt so much. Cried and screamed so much. What's wrong with a little thank-you?" Fingers slide down the curve of Petra's shoulder, then her collarbone, setting nerves aflame. Nails curl ever so lightly into her neck, exposing it to Lilian's heated exhalation. She whispers like the devil.

    "You're not getting spoiled; you went through so, so much. You're not being treated like you're normal, because it's me and I hate you. And you're not going to lose anything, because it's just us and this and nobody and nothing else; and, let's be honest, you've been holding back for a long time, right?"

    It's in a different league than Lilian's vaguely flirty-mean words at the hotspring, or the hotel, or the maid show. That behaviour, the little breadcrumbs she'd left around all those moments on the radio and in person, is thrown instantly, dizzyingly into perspective, as just something Lilian does for fun. Expression for the sake of it, without really meaning it; merely donning her desirability and owning it for a while, to remind herself. This is something else.

    This is what it's like when the most selfish woman in the world wants. This is what it's like when Lilian means it.
Lilian Rook     "You want to let go of everything normal, right? You want to let go of everything that those putrid people accept and love about you, so you can never go back, never be the same again. So don't bother to cling to this one, stupid thing." Lilian leans so close that her lips graze Petra's neck. Then her teeth. Her fingers stroke up the side of Petra's head, to her ear, nails trailing along the rim. Her other hand sinks lower, by tortuous inches. "Fuck up. Ruin it. Give up and be someone else. Someone weird and broken and special. Stop being a tourist and live our reality and feel what we feel."

    They're front to front. Without realizing it, Petra is held tightly in Lilian's embrace. On purpose, this time. Not to kill her, or to hurt her, but to share her warmth; that mad, toxic fire inside of her, through her skin. Chest pressed to chest, waist to waist, hips resting on her thighs. A moment later, just a little more, an instant of lapsed judgement, and Lilian really will own her soul.

    "If you really, truly hate being so hollow, then let yourself finally feel something fucking real." And then Lilian's lips fall on the hollow of Petra's neck.

    Oh. Oh those really are quite sharp, aren't they?