Chapter Text
The first time Kipperlilly got a burn was back in middle school. Some time as she passed from elementary to middle school, her hair gained a slight wave to it. No one had ever said anything about it, no even noticed other than Lucy. But Kipperlilly did, stared in the mirror and felt some sliver of her control slip out of her grasp.
The burn itself was small and on the side of her finger where her hand slipped while straightener her hair one morning. But the pain itself felt overwhelming for a moment, a burst of intense pain that startled her more than she would admit to anyone who asked.
When Kipperlilly Coppkettle came back to life, she felt the lava around her still. It was gone, she knew, and she didn't even have any burns to prove it happened. Her body had been remade from scratch, bones and blood and organs and skin rebuilt from nothing. There was a moment where the world felt too much for her, light too bright and her own emotions too much for a brain that was rewriting neural connections as she stood there.
But she got her wits about her enough to hide before any of the other Rat Grinders saw her, before the Bad Kids saw her, before Lucy Frostblade saw her.
Kipperlilly accepted that she would never see Lucy again the year before. She stood over Lucy's corpse, retrieved her crossbow bolts and Ivy's arrows, and then watched as Porter carved the rune into her chest. Everyone else left while Kipperlilly waited for Lucy to come back. Something in her broke in that moment, some part of her so sure in the one fundamental truth of her world: Lucy Frostblade loved her just the same as Kipperlilly Copperkettle loved her.
Unseasonable snow started to fall around her, melted on her skin the moment it landed on her.
Anger bubbled between her skin. With each beat of her heart the rage only grew and grew. It made it easy enough to ignore the sorrow that nestled behind her ribs.
But in the present, while Lucy Frostblade stood breathing and moving and alive for the first time in over a year, Kipperlilly was too tired for the rage to sink it's teeth back into her throat. She reached for it still, came up empty. After a year of rage burning and burning and burning, she was lost without it.
After everyone left, and Kipperlilly was left alone, she stumbled home. Or to her parent's house. It'd hadn't been home for a while but there wasn't anywhere else for her to go—not Ruben's place, not the school, not to Lucy's side. She broke into the house.
Her bed room was the exact same as it had been before spring break in sophomore year except for the dust that had settled. She curled up in her childhood bed, ignored the way her skin crawled, and slept.
When she woke up she'd have to deal with everything but in that moment all she felt was that horrible, bone-deep exhaustion.