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For a very long time, she thought she was her own fatal flaw. If she could only fit her hands under her skin, through the gaps of her bones, to pry free whatever rot was blossoming along her every organ and vein, it would get better; if only she could be clean, she would get better, and she would be perfect, and she would find moments to breathe. If only she could be clean. If only--
Ugh. Fuck that.
Her hands are buzzing, still settling from the rush of her own voice a minute before. She stuffs them in her pockets and tilts her head back. The streetlight is shitty and weak, but it's still strong enough to block out the stars. Adaine scowls at it. For half a moment, she considers tossing a firebolt up at it, but then she sees against the back of her eyes a broken image of the flames biting harder than intended; iron twisting, sidewalk cracking, Fig and Kristen hearing the crash--
Maybe it's some mystic vision. Maybe it's the anxiety. Either way, it makes her grit her teeth until they sting.
Down the street, someone slams their car door. Adaine jumps. She's always on edge here-- and she's trying, she's really fucking trying, but Stormtower is-- it's a fucking wreck. And she think that a few months ago, she might have been ashamed to be seen here, and that makes her mad, but she's not sure if she's mad at herself for being a bitch or mad at her parents for raising her to be scared of things like humans and tieflings and shitty apartment buildings where the concrete is cracking and the lights are flickering and people are probably selling drugs around the corner and--
Adaine kicks the lamp post so hard something cracks. “Fuck!” And then again, because her foot hurts like hell, “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” and she kicks again with the same foot, but she can't kick very hard with it anymore, so it's not even satisfying. She throws herself down on the curb instead, head in her hands, torn between sulking or brooding or maybe just licking her wounds. “This place is a shithole.”
“What are you pissed about?”
She almost hits him on instinct, but catches herself at the last moment. Riz seems unfazed; even with her hand inches from his face, he just watches her, halfway between concern and curiosity. “Chi’thall, Riz,” she snaps. “You scared me.” He only tilts his head further. She looks away. There’s something about his eyes in the flickering light, wide and yellow and searching, that puts spiders in her blood and sends her skin crawling from the inside out. Before she can help herself-- “You freak me out sometimes.”
In her peripheral, she sees him blink. Shift. Cross his arms. “...That’s fair, I guess.”
“I guess,” she echoes. The words make her tongue ache. She’s so fucking sick of guessing.
The night is always louder than it’s supposed to be. The day is too, but the day is always louder, and even when it sucks, at least it’s the day. The night is… it’s harder to control, some fickle thing, a creature that refuses to bend in her fist. When the sun comes spilling up, the world will strike up all its chaos again, and Adaine will go back to school and the streets will swarm with ants of people and Aelwyn will sit in a jail cell, already forgiven by the only people that matter, the people that matter least, the only people in the world--
When the sun comes up, the world will turn all to hell. This is the only respite Adaine has ever been able to fucking find, is the dead hours of the night, except there are no dead hours, not really. The streetlamp still buzzes with each flicker. There’s a car, somewhere off on the main road, that lays on its horn. Someone is playing music with their window open, and the beat is heavy enough to make her ears throb, and there are crickets, and there’s something that cracks a branch, and there’s voices around some corner, but she’s not sure which one, and even in these dead hours, the world is still steeped to the throat in sound, and Riz is still looking at her, and she has never wanted to pry the rot from inside her as badly as she wants it right now.
She feels sick. Fragile in the way of spiderwebbing, a sticky, gaping, lethal thing. Her hands are still buzzing.
“I’m not pissed,” she finally says. “Sorry.”
“Oh, okay,” she had imagined Riz would say to that. “I’m going inside, then. I have girls several years older than me to stalk through a red string board.”
Instead, he says, “You’re a really shit liar,” and it is the second time tonight she almost hits him.
“I’m not pissed,” she repeats, but she repeats it through her teeth, and it scrapes, serrated and ugly, along the soft parts of her mouth, and she’s lying, she’s lying, she’s fucking lying, except it tastes like the truth. The lie makes her mouth bleed, but isn’t there blood in all her words?
The streetlamp is making his eyes glow. It’s strange. Off-putting. Unholy, as her parents would say-- as Aelwyn has said-- as Adaine keeps almost saying, because she still hasn’t learnt how to bite the fork from her tongue.
Some fleeting shadow passes over Riz’s face. Something foreign, but not entirely, like maybe she recognises it, but she doesn’t recognise it on him. He breaks her gaze, looking out at the empty street. “...Maybe I should go.” His voice, for once, matches him: normally Riz talks like anyone else, but right now his words are shrunken, small, curled up behind the points of his teeth.
(His teeth, Adaine notices absently, are not as sharp as she thought.)
“Maybe you should,” she agrees, and her voice is sharper than intended, colder than he deserves; the rot has crawled through her lungs and throat to tangle on her words until they are as sour and necrose and corroded as the fatal flaw that makes her the thing she is. She wants to scrape it out, she wants to rake it off its roots, she wants to crush it under her heel, and she would go under her own skin, inside her own veins, between her own ribs to do it, but she can’t do that. She can’t do that. All she can do is sit here on the sidewalk and rot.
(Decay, Adaine spares a moment to think, is a desperate, embarrassing thing to be. How pathetic, to be living, to thrive off the dead. How wretched. How parasitic.)
(“How pathetic. How wretched. How parasitic.”)
(His teeth aren’t as sharp as she thought.)
His eyes flicker down to her foot. “You should probably ask Kristen about that.” He says it quietly, but there’s something final in the way it falls, and instead of you should ask Kristen, Adaine just hears please don’t ask me, and there is behind her chest an acrid collision of panic and anger and something like flickering lights, something like hollow jars, something like decay, like her moulding heart has come up her throat to sit throbbing between her teeth.
She doesn’t want to bite-- fuck, she doesn’t want to know how withering she tastes on the inside-- but it’s blood or silence, and Adaine never did learn to hold her tongue.
“Do you think I’m like my parents?”
It tastes worse than she thought.
Riz blinks. “I don’t know your parents,” he says.
“Right. Sorry.” Her buzzing hands have gone numb. “Nevermind.”
“I don’t really know you, either,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “So I can’t answer you.”
Adaine almost tells him to shut the fuck up, but she can’t breathe well enough to say anything at all, so instead she just nods once, a short, sharp thing, and tries to focus on the wind in her hair and the pain in her foot and not her crawling skin or her swollen throat or the way her eyes feel like cavities.
And Riz, for some unfathomable reason, keeps talking. “I mean, I know you. We do shit. We killed a guy. But we’re not, you know, super close.” And he punctuates it with an awkward laugh, like that might make his words scrape shallower.
For half a moment, silence stretches between them. Except it’s not really silent, because even in the dead hours of the night, the world is never silent, and even the dead parts of herself that Adaine feeds her bitterness on have the right to one last scream before they go, and when the half-moment of silence is shredded by her own inhuman sound, she can’t even be surprised. She shatters into the streetlamp, crumpled up and crying on the ground outside fucking Stormtower, and one of her best friends is watching, a guy she doesn’t even know is watching, and it’s the most humiliated she’s ever been but she thinks that maybe it shouldn’t be. It’s rock bottom, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe she’s done worse. Maybe she doesn’t know what her own hell looks like.
It's twenty degrees, windy and on the verge of rain, and she is splintering under her own touch, shredded to shit under the flickering street lamp in the kind of neighbourhood she was raised to avoid, and she is realising all at once that the rot never existed at all. Her fatal flaw was always something ingrained far deeper than bone.
“Fuck!”
“Adaine!” And Riz--
His eyes are glowing in the streetlamp, and she can’t focus on his words because his fangs are catching the light, but he keeps talking. He grabs her wrists, holding them close to his chest, holding them like he’s trying not to bruise, and he keeps talking. For some unfathomable reason--
She hears her own voice, as distant as the car horn. “I don’t want to be like them-- I don’t want it, I don’t want it-- I wanna be good, I wanna be fucking good--” She closes her eyes as tight as she can, because the look on his face is making her feel sick, and she thinks he’s saying her name, but the buzzing of the streetlight is too loud to hear it. “I don’t wanna be like this anymore, I don’t wanna--”
(“How pathetic.”)
“I can’t be like them--”
(“How wretched.”)
“I don’t wanna be scared of you--”
(“How parasitic.”)
Her ribs all crack open, like her body is trying to escape itself, and it mangles everything left inside her to say, “I don’t wanna be fucking angry anymore!” and then her voice dies altogether, and she’s left sobbing in her own shipwreck, trying to swallow something other than water, trying to breathe something other than blood, trying to be something alive instead of whatever half-dead thing she’s been calling herself all this time.
And Riz, for some unfathomable reason, doesn’t let go. He stays there, silent, keeping his claws from the delicate parts of her skin, until her tears turn into stumbling hiccups, until they turn back to not-quite-silence.
Somehow, the crickets and the wind and buzzing light aren’t as loud in the aftermath. They aren’t pretty, but they don’t claw through her ears to thump under her skin. Riz blinks at her, kind of slow. “...Alright?”
She gives her best attempt at a shrug. “Bad in a better way.”
Riz nods. His grip slackens slightly, but doesn’t fail, and Adaine (selfish, selfish Adaine) has been so starved for someone to hold her, even just by the wrists, that she doesn’t pull away. “...Are you…” His nose twitches nervously. “Am I scary?”
“...No.” The denial doesn’t come as quickly as she’d like; she repeats it as soon as she can get another steady breath. “No, you’re not scary. Fuck. I’m sorry for--” everything, but she can’t quite say it. Doesn’t quite know how to admit how trenchant her tongue has been.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
Riz’s nose twitches again. “It’s nothing new.”
“Yeah, well--” Her whole chest shudders under the weight of breathing. “I should be better than that. I should know better than that. I-I know my parents are wrong about-- I mean, about fucking everything, I just--”
“They’re your parents,” Riz says, matter of fact, like it’s something straightforward and not a messy, tangled thing that leaches all her fragile dignity away. “Even when they’re wrong. They raised you. You don’t owe them agreement, but-- I mean, they expect it, right? Isn’t that what parents do?”
“They expect a lot of things,” Adaine whispers.
“My mom expects me to get four hours of sleep a night,” he agrees, and fifteen minutes ago that would have made her scream, but now she just laughs instead. It scrapes at her throat, but at least she doesn’t taste blood this time.
“Your mom is right,” she says, and Riz pulls a face that pulls a smile onto hers. “My mom is racist.”
“My mom could be racist.”
“She’s not.”
“I was trying to make you feel better,” he says. And somehow, inexplicably, he has.
The quiet that washes over them this time is comfortable. Adaine leans her head back against the lamppost and closes her eyes, trying to breathe like an ocean. In and out. Steady and rhythmic and slow. “Have you ever been to the beach?”
Riz takes a moment to answer. “...No. I’ve never left Elmville.” He says it like a confession, like he’s admitting to something shameful.
Adaine frowns. “Maybe we can go sometime.”
“You gonna pay for it?”
There’s a flash of embarrassment that runs through her-- she’d fucking forgotten-- she just rolls her eyes. “We’ll make Fabian pay for it, how about that?”
Riz laughs, and Adaine opens her eyes to see it; it’s something both foreign and familiar, a sound she’d predicted by never actually heard. She commits the cadence of it to memory. “How are you going to convince him to do that?”
“Oh, he’s a fucking softie at heart,” she says, mostly to see if he’ll laugh again.
He does. “Wimp.”
“Literally. Can’t say no to us.” He can, quite easily, but sometimes a bit of delusion is good for the soul.
Riz finally lets go of her wrists. “Adaine?” and at her hum, “What happened?” His gaze searches into her face like he might find the answer between her eyelashes.
Adaine looks down at her hands. They’re not buzzing anymore, but they’re not numb either. She has to take a breath, and then she has to let it out, and then she has to take another one, and even then it takes another moment for her to gather her words. Riz waits. He watches.
(His eyes, Adaine notices absently, are not as piercing as she thought.)
“...Fig,” she mumbles. “And Kristen. They didn’t-- they just-- they’re loud.”
Even to her own ears, it sounds pathetic, but Riz just nods. “You can stay at mine tonight. If you want.”
She almost starts crying again. “I should probably apologise. I just kind of stormed out. But--” She sniffs, rubbing the last of her tears away with her palms. “Some other time? Maybe?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, we’re adventurers, Adaine. We could be dead tomorrow. We might never get another chance at this sleepover thing.”
“...You’re a dick,” she says, except she’s sort of realising it as she says it, and the revelation must be obvious on her voice because he starts laughing again. She kicks him gently. “Help me up.”
He rolls his eyes, but obliges nonetheless. “You’re gonna-- be okay, right?” he asks, watching apprehensively as she puts weight on her hurt foot.
It fucking sucks, but she can walk. “I think I broke my toe.”
“I kind of meant, like, emotionally.”
“Shut the fuck up about emotions, I think I broke my toe.”
He rolls his eyes again, more dramatically this time. “Maybe if you apologise to Kristen really nicely, she’ll fix it.” Adaine groans. “Tough shit. Don’t break your toe next time.”
“You are an insufferable little man.”
“Don’t call me little, that’s like a slur to goblins,” he says, and for a moment she can’t figure out if he’s joking, but then he adds, “And don’t call me a man, I’m fourteen,” and she decides that if he isn’t joking, he’s the most insufferable person she’s ever met. But he helps her inside, and he lets her lean on him as they go up the stairs because the shitty elevator’s broken, so she’ll let it slide.
(His teeth aren’t as sharp as she thought.)
(She’d let a lot of things slide for that.)