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All things told Hell is rather small, a bit of an infinite loop that repeats itself in just the right way, so that when you walk all the way around it feels exhausting and yet like you haven’t gotten anywhere far. Charlie supposes that’s part of the hell of it. That and the other residents of course. Hell has limited space and extremely limited methods of entertainment, (betting on the same game gets a tad dry after the five thousandth round). Case in point, when it comes to the matter of today. That in itself begs the question, do days even exist in Hell with no sun to count them by? It’s debatable.
Time passes in a slimy way, at least in Hell. So then in this particular fragment of time, Lime is being strange again. Lime is, of course, always strange. Charlotte firmly believes you can’t be a demon without being at least the slightest bit crazy. At least, if you aren’t crazy when you start, you will be soon. It’s demons’ nature.
At this particular point in time, Lime sits at the round table, the betting table, with a large array of sweets and snacks. The smell of them fills the entire space. She’s clearly trying to draw Charlotte's attention, Charlotte knows this. But it’s a slow route this attempt, and none of the house demons have anything going on right now, so Charlie indulges.
Whether Lime or herself, she isn’t sure, but she indulges nonetheless.
Lime greets Charlotte before she can open her mouth, already grinning widely.
“Welcome to my little tea party! Will you do me the courtesy of joining?” Her voice is taunting and teasing, as if it finds the words it’s saying laughable.
“What are you doing, Lime?” Charlotte asks, direct and to the point.
Lime rolls her eyes.
“Boo, you’re no fun. But as I said, I’m having a tea party~! Can’t I have a little fun?”
Charlotte raises an eyebrow, still hovering at the edge of the table. Her hand rests at the table's edge, fingers brushing against the lace tablecloth, but she does not sit down. Not yet.
“Since when is this your idea of fun, Lime?”
“Now, now Charlotte,” Lime chides, eyes shut as she shakes her head. “Reliving others' deaths has always been entertaining for me!”
That makes all too much sense, and already Charlotte can feel her skin crawl. Her gaze drifts across the table, searching for some sort of weapon. A plate of scones, a jar of honey, a jar of jam, tiny pies, some sort of bread. No knives, no guns, no sign of a fight.
“A poisoned tea party, then?” Charlotte surmises, looking up to meet Lime’s eyes. They meet each other, piercing, red, and angry. There’s a shard of something in Lime’s eyes that Charlotte can’t quite place. Mania, despair, excitement. Maybe all of them.
“Ding, Ding, Ding, we have a winner~! Well, no one wins here, really. That’s the fun of it.”
Charlotte sighs.
“Come on, darling, Charlie, don’t be like that! If you join me, I’ll tell you how this little Hater died~”
Lime singsongs as she explains, eyes shining. She speaks as though this is some sort of special gift for Charlotte, instead of a promise she’s holding her to.
Charlotte does not want to join this tea party. She does not want to hear the story of another death, certainly not through Lime’s point of view.
She sits down, Rabi sitting in her lap.
“Wonderful, wonderful! Let me set the scene…”
Charlotte’s stomach sinks, but she listens anyway.
“Our friend here was a wonderful servant, the most dedicated maid the household had ever seen. A grand household, a proud household, a sprawling family with an old matriarch standing at its top. It’s a great honour to be the finest maid of nobility, naturally, even if it exposes to you just how fucked up they are! Naturally, in a family so powerful and so large, every member was an arrogant, rotten fool. Day after day, the maid watched them live in luxury, as they treated her like dirt and gave her no more than table scraps. Like something out of a fairytale, ain’t it? But sadly, no prince or party awaits our hero. Instead, she cracked when instructed to serve a platter of pastries to the oldest son by the youngest daughter. She was starving, she was livid, so instead, she snuck the pastries off the plate and ate them for herself. That night she howled in agony, and in the morning was found dead. It’s rather easy to poison pastry, and one is inclined to when one is an arrogant little rich child. So she died, angry. Funny, right!”
Charlotte feels a tad sick.
“I’ve told you again and again, Lime. This doesn’t help you understand their suffering. Not at all.”
The table winds and bends, stretching itself out impossibly long, yet still a perfect circle. On one end, Charlotte, Rabi’s ear still clutched tightly in her grip. On the other end, Lime, leaning against the table so the edge of it pressed into her stomach, ramming against her internal organs as she leaned in. Her body swayed a bit as she attempted to dig herself in deep, lean further.
The tips of her hair spill forward, some strands long enough to curl up against the table cloth, like kittens sleeping in the sun. Others streak and slip into Lime’s ‘teacup’, ending up smeared in the jam.
“I disagree! After all, if anyone would understand being used and exploited by someone richer than them, wouldn’t it be me?”
Charlotte swallows her words and holds her tongue. After a moment's hesitation, she speaks again.
“Then why bother?”
“Well, isn’t it just fun to have a little tea party? Besides, if I’m going to do anything, I refuse to do it halfway.”
She smiles at Charlotte, far too many teeth shining in the dim lighting.
“Now! Let’s dig in, shall we?”
The first thing Lime reaches towards is her own teacup, if it can be called that. It’s a flower actually, sized entirely impractically. Its petals bend under the weight of the liquid sloshing about inside, but never far enough for it to spill. Charlotte almost wishes it would stay frozen in place, clearly artificial. Instead, the flower remains as true to reality as Hell can permit, sans the size.
Somehow Charlotte finds that even more unsettling than would be the other way.
“These little guys are my own creative liberty! Gotta have some fun with it, of course. It's Lily of the Valley, and isn’t it adorable!”
Charlotte shrugs nonchalantly.
“I suppose. It’s rather white, isn’t it?”
The color, or lack thereof, of the petals is blinding in the dim haze that makes up Hell.
“Bingo! These babies represent “absolute purity” and apparently also “happiness”! Isn’t that hilarious? Though I suppose they do send your heart a flutter!”
She winks at Charlotte, absurdly obvious in a way that bordered on comical.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to drink out of a little flower cup?”
Charlotte shakes her head.
“Not really.”
“Boooring! Let’s move on!”
Impatient, Lime grabs the edge of the table cloth and yanks it towards her, the dishes jumping and clattering back down to the table. A couple of them chip, one shatters itself to pieces under the pile of tiny pies it was displaying.
“Ah, I guess you’re next!”
Lime grabs one of the tiny pies next, her fingers brushing against the shattered china and leaving a thin slash against her hand.
Either she doesn’t notice or she doesn’t care.
“Ta-da! It’s a pie! Mini pie, to be extra fun!”
Lime cups the pie in her hands, presenting it out to Charlotte.
A drop of blood splatters down to the now rumpled table cloth.
Charlotte leans in, only slightly, to get a better look.
“Is that… a flower? Woven into it?”
The pie features a criss-crossing pattern of strips of pie dough, but braided in with the pastry lies clusters of tiny white flowers, their five teardrop shaped petals poking in and out of view.
“Such a clever girl! That’s Conium maculatum as the fancy folk like to say, and Poison Hemlock to anyone else.”
“It’s… poisonous, I take it?”
Lime slaps a hand against her cheek and feigns a shocked expression.
“How could you guess!”
“Not very subtle, is it?”
“Don’t be so quick to judge! What it lacks in stealth it makes up for in strength! It’s suuuuper toxic!” Lime says, starting to giggle partway through her sentence. “Touching it, eating it, breathing it, doesn’t matter! Get too close and it’s started working, it's magic!”
Lime toys with the edge of the pastry, the tiny metal tin it’s been baked in. Then suddenly, without hesitation, she shoves the entire thing into her mouth, pulling the tin back out with two fingers and tossing it away.
Charlotte raises an eyebrow.
“Moving a bit quickly, mm?”
Lime waves her off.
“It’ll take a bit to kick in,” She says, spewing crumbs from a mouth still stuffed with food. “20 minutes maybe, could be longer. Say, “ She swallows, “if this one makes your heart slow down, and the Lily of the Valley makes your heart speed up, I wonder if they’d cancel each other out! That’d be hilarious. The flowers meaning is like ‘you’ll be the death of me” or something stupid like that, which is pretty ironic considering what became of that Hater, right, right?”
Charlotte ignores this, instead pointing to the pastry closest to her. Still out of her reach by a mile, but closest.
“What’s in these then?”
Lime sticks her tongue out.
“It’s the spreads that make those interesting!”
She points to a jar of jam, a thin twig with tiny purple berries, perfect spheres clinging onto the branch, jutting out of it.
“Nightshade jam! And yes, Deadly Nightshade jam, not my fault they make all their names so obvious! At least this one has a fun meaning!”
Charlotte doubted that.
“Property of the Devil! What a bold statement for such a little berry! What an endearing little guy.”
Lime leans forward again, flicking the edge of the twig with her finger and smiling at it.
There’s only one pastry left on the table that Lime hasn’t introduced yet. It looks familiar to Charlotte, a warm bread with caramelized onions inside that all melted together into something savory, sweet, and delicious. Almost nostalgic, but the film her memories play on has long since been tainted, scratched and damaged.
Lime catches her eyeing it.
“Looking at the bread, huh?”
“Onions?” Charlotte asks simply.
“Close enough! Hyacinth bulbs. They woulda grown purple if they ever got the chance to bloom. Preeeeety tasty, right? ”
The pit of Charlotte's stomach is cold and icy.
“Well, depends on whether or not the poison in it ruins the taste.”
“No no, you’re missing the point! The poison is the taste.”
“Well, I suppose you’d be the expert.”
Lime smiles at that, but Charlotte doesn’t miss how she skips over her little trivia fact on its meaning.
“It’s poetic isn’t it? I’ll consume these delicacies and then they’re gonna consume me! For a failure of a servant, that little hater had a nice sense of romanticism.”
“Now then, Charlie,” Lime says, voice growing a tad sharper. “What would you like to start with?”
There’s silence, or as close as Hell gets, as Charlotte sits stock still. Except for her eyes, darting about as she glances over the options laid before her, none favorable.
“Why don’t you choose for me?” Charlotte settles on, words sitting heavily on her tongue.
Something flashes across Lime’s expression, something unreadable. An expression Charlotte’s never seen on Lime’s face before.
“Of course. Then, only the best for you.”
Lime bunches up her edge of the table cloth in her hand yet again to yank it forward, dragging a plate of scones towards her. One tumbles off the plate and rolls across the table, and Lime snatches it up just as quickly.
She places the pastry in her left hand, letting it rest on her palm.
With her right hand, Lime lunges towards a pot of honey, ringed with flowers. She grabs the edge of it, tipping the pot over so it spills across the scone, oozing gold across her fingers.
“No knives,” Lime grins widely, “Sorry!”
Charlotte shakes her head.
“Not at all. What flower is baked into that, then? Buttercups?”
Lime giggles.
“Not quite! It’s the honey where the secret lies. You can almost taste the Oleander the bees made this from.”
Charlotte raises an eyebrow.
“Oleander, huh. And what does Oleander represent?”
Lime hums a bit.
“Desire, for one. Destiny, among other things.”
“Among other things?”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were getting curious.”
But Lime doesn’t elaborate any further.
Instead, she places the scone, still dripping with honey, on a small plate. Plucks one of the delicate pink flowers off the decor, and places it on the top of the puddle of honey.
And sliiiiiiiiiiiiides the plate-
Across the table, until it rests directly in front of Charlotte.
“This will hurt, won’t it?”
Charlotte asks, eyeing the pastry.
Lime doesn’t tear her gaze away from Charlotte even as she grabs her own scone, similarly slathered.
“Absolutely.”
Charlotte turns her gaze to Lime, looking her up and down.
“Alright then. Good.”
Lime’s smile grows even further, the corners tearing her face until it’s nearly split in two.
“To being used!”
She cheers, lifting her scone up to the air. Splatters of honey land on the table, droplets drip down her arm.
Gingerly, trying to avoid getting too much honey on her fingers, Charlotte lifts the scone up, flower and all.
“To being used.”
They both take a bite.
Chew,
And swallow.