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Laudna spends a while longer at the bow of the ship, the echo of her scream bouncing endlessly inside her skull. Delilah is quiet now, smug in her petty (or not so petty, who can tell when the bitch won’t answer a single damn question) victory. She holds the railing so tight her knuckles threaten to pop from their sockets, frail arms trembling with the force of it. She knows what she must do next, but her hands need to stop shaking first.
She lets go when she finally has enough control over herself; a bitter thought suddenly, acid and poison in her gullet. Gathers the pieces of crystal left on the deck and carefully pours them into the now empty pouch. Scurries below decks, not acknowledging the inquisitive stare the captain gives her from their perch.
Her room is lonelier than ever before, for the realization that the two-way open invitation between her and Imogen, the door never barred to each other, is broken and gone. Laudna is sure the last thing Imogen wants right now is to see her, and she dares not intrude so far as to waltz into the woman’s room. So she gathers her meager supplies, thread, masonry glue, and a vial of varnish, splays them out in a corner of the room. The pieces of crystal tumble into her palm, though she winces at the contact, and Laudna sets to arranging them in puzzle-piece order.
She puts it back together the best she can manage, binds it with thread. It falls apart. She uses the glue to keep some of the smaller pieces from rattling free. The glue doesn’t take. Stubborn (desperate) she keeps trying new combinations and new techniques, but the crystal refuses to be put back together.
She doesn’t like the thought.
“Doin’ a bang up job aren’t ya, darlin’,” Pâté says from her hip. Laudna jerks her head around, but he’s not on her strings, she’s not called him for a conversation. “Really, should give it up for lost. Waste of time all around, I bet.”
Laudna tsks, unlatching Pâté from her belt. “If I want your opinion I will ask for it. Besides, it’s rude to interrupt a girl at work.” She puts him on the cot, out of sight, and returns to her tedious task.
What may be an hour or more of failure after failure, when her fingertips begin to pinprick bleed ichor, Pâté pipes up again. “Let’s all be honest here, ya? You’ve never been a real fixer-upper kinda gal. More of a ‘delay the inevitable’ sort of patchwork thing.” And Laudna can imagine the paw gesturing to the lot of her, the skin draped over bones, the aberration of nature that she is.
This isn’t how she made Pâté to sound. He is crass and impolite, but never quite rude. He’s the tiniest little rock of sanity when the dark quiet of her lonely existence, the crushing pressure of it all like the deepest depths of the ocean, begins to break her open.
She’s also reaching the end of her rope, and is not so gentle when she snatches Pâté onto his strings, hovering him in front of her. “I’m really not in the mood for your opinions, Pâté. I am busy. I am tired. I am, quite frankly, cranky as all hell. So do be kind and go to sleep.”
“Ain’t opinions if they’re right,” he snipes back. “When’s the last time you made anything that lasted longer than a year? What lil’ shacks have you built up that didn’t just go down in flames cause of you? I think I’m the longest-lived of your little pet projects!” And Pâté cackles, a cackle that Laudna recognizes from the jagged depths of her memories and mind. There is something sparkling in the darkness of his eye sockets.
“Stop it, please… why are you doing this?” Laudna begs, fresh terror pouring down her spine in chill tingles.
“I suppose poor little Imogen lasted a good long while,” Pâté continues, “What, two years despite all the headaches and hardships, you thinkin’ it was doin’ you both good. Problem is, sweetheart, we got another word for that kinda relationship! It’s called being a parasite.”
“Shut up! This isn’t how I made you, this isn’t why I made you!” Laudna cries, truly crying, frantically rubbing the slow oily drops before they taint this precious crystal further.
A pause. All the sound seems sucked out of the room, a deafening ringing. Laudna only hears the so slow thump of her heart once, twice. When Pâté speaks, it’s with her voice overlapping his. “And why were you made, exactly?”
Laudna recoils, flings him and her away, shrieking, “Shut up!” The strings snap, and Pâté flies into the wall, cracking. He falls with a dusting of broken skull pieces around him, his body slumping at a terrible angle.
It is quiet. It is terribly, breathlessly quiet now.
Something gutters in Laudna’s chest, holding still with one last clinging claw. Then it just goes away.
She slumps into the wall, arms in her lap, and stares blankly into the nothing beyond her ceiling.
He’s right, isn’t he? All of them are, the people that chase her out for ruining things: drowning crops, starving the livestock, causing nightmares. She doesn’t really fix things. At best she delays their decay so they become like her, corpses waiting for someone to remember to bury them. The untended dead of the world, pretending as if they can yet live.
At worst she just sets a new expectation for how they’ll be destroyed. Would a cabin rather rot and mildew into mulch, or be repaired and tended to only to burn to death one night? All those little hovels, places other people made and lived and loved before they passed on; she dragged her claws through them, painted them in her colors for a moment before leaving as they were burnt, defiled, defaced, bricked, bashed, desecrated. Maybe that’s all her little lifestyle, as much as it could be called such, was. An experiment in new and unexpected ways to destroy things.
She is made from destruction, after all. Died, and was reborn in the midst of hundreds of lives lost as Whitestone burned. How can she deny her very nature.
So, what, Imogen was just the latest experiment? Something in her grew bored breaking buildings and items, why not try something as complicated and fragile as a person. Something like a relationship, like trust. All those late nights spent comforting Imogen, holding her hand as the nightmare shakes her, earning that trust; just building her up like another cabin in the woods. Waiting for that perfect moment, at the height of renewal, to let it all crumble apart.
Her thoughts spiral down and around this revelation, coiling like a snake until its slick-sharp scales choke her. Does she even need to breathe, or was that another act of trickery, to fool things into thinking better of her? She’s never tested. Maybe she should.
There’s a creak, a thump, and a heavy sigh from outside her mind. It’s enough that Laudna swivels her eyes, dry and itchy in her head, to see a blurry green and red shape at her door.
“So, you missed breakfast. Then you missed lunch. And at that point we were all tryna’ figure out the fuck was going on, but some of us figured you were taking some you time,” they say. Ashton, right, their name is Ashton. “Now you’re going to miss dinner, people are getting real fucking worried, and since I’m ‘the leader,’ I’m the lucky shit that gets to see what’s up.”
Laudna tilts her head, her spine creaking from the uncomfortable position. She doesn’t feel hungry, or thirsty, or anything but a gaping hollow. An empty thing wrapped up in stick bones and paper skin. She tilts her head a little more, it’s the easiest and best way she can move currently, and feels her balance shift and fall to the side. The impact doesn’t register.
“Oh holy shit, are you sleeping or actually dead?” Ashton asks, interested and uneasy. “It’s real fucking hard to tell, you know that. C’mon Laudna, give me something to work with here.”
They lift her up and plop her on the cot. Waves a hand in front of her eyes and sighs with relief when her eyes slowly track it. “Kay, not dead. Great. So, and I mean this nicely, what the absolute fuck?”
She tries to shrug and one of her shoulders slides out of place.
“Right. Cool.” Ashton wanders the room, setting her supplies on the little table. They must find Pâté, because they whistle lowly. “What happened to him?”
Because Pâté is broken still. But Ashton is kind of broken too. Maybe they’ll understand. Laudna tries to sit upright in the cot, but the sway of the ship and her nerveless limbs send her tumbling off the side. Her elbow cracks into the wood and the sudden flare of pain and sharp noise startles her into taking a breath. Then she’s hacking, her throat dry and raw as her lungs struggle to expand, drowning in air. Gods, she really hadn’t been breathing all this time. Who knew it could hurt so much.
When she can focus, Ashton is at her side, sitting her against their chest. They’re not exactly trying to comfort her, more like preventing her from choking to re-death. Her elbow hurts, her lungs hurt, and maybe some of that great hollow inside is the knife-pain of hunger and thirst, and suddenly it’s all too much.
“I fucked up,” she sobs into their shirt. “I fucked up so much and I don’t know if I can stop it because it keeps happening.”
“Alright,” Ashton says.
“What do you mean alright?!” Laudna cries. She tries to shove at them, but, well, it doesn’t work. “I fucked up with Imogen! And I can’t fix it, and I don’t know if I ever fixed anything in my whole life,” Ashton snorts. She shoves them again. “But I need to fix this one. I need to.”
“Did you do it on purpose?”
Laudna sputters, “No! Of course not, never!”
“Go tell her that, problem fucking solved,” Ashton says, simple as you please.
“But- but…” Laudna grabs at her hair and tugs, tangling her fingers tight in the stringy locks. “It’s Imogen. She’s been hurt by so many people who didn’t mean to. I thought I was different - worse, she thought I was different. But I’m not, I’m worse because she let me in and I still hurt her!”
“Right,” Ashton sighs. They lean back so their head cracks loudly against the wall. “So, sometimes shit happens. And shit keeps happening. Ain’t on any of us why that shit happened, but you usually got a choice after. Figure it goes one of two ways: you stay and handle the shit, or you run away to find some new shit.”
Laudna would laugh if her voice wasn’t so choked and her mind so filled with barbs. She pulls back and sees the red of Ashton’s jacket stained black from her tears, making an instinctual move to magic it away. But no, her hands aren’t always her own, some of her power is never her own.
“So, what,” she rasps. “I stay and let her hate me to my face, or go back to my old life. I’ll warn you, I’m very good at running away.” It’s tempting, she doesn’t say, but Ashton’s raised brow tells her they know.
“Just my opinion. Take it or fucking don’t.” They stand, and heft Laudna back onto the cot. “Dinner’s being served. Not sure how much you need to eat, or if at all. Fuck, take it back to your room if you can’t deal with all that right now.”
Ashton begins to leave when Laudna calls for him. She twists her hands together, knowing how deeply unkind this request is, but she needs someone ready to do it. “It… I’m in far less control than I thought I was. If I ever start doing something I shouldn’t, something wrong to Imogen or any of you. Can you stop me?”
They frown so deeply it makes lines on the rock of their face, grunt. “Sure, I’ll just punch you in the face, you’ll go down like a fucking twig.”
Laudna manages a tiny smile. “Promise?”
“I fucking promise. I know it’s your whole thing, but you don’t always got to be so morbid.”
They leave. The door shuts. Laudna is alone in a room full of the broken pieces of her loves. She takes a step off the cot, shaky as a newborn foal, and picks up a shard of the crystal, a shard of Pâté’s skull. She rolls them through her fingers while she wonders, and worries, and despairs, about where her next step should go.