Work Text:
“Charlotte, stop moving!”
“I’m not.”
Cain pouted, holding the eyeliner pen steady as he painted the dark color over Charlotte’s eyelids. She blinked at the sensation, making his hand shake and threatening an uneven line.
“You’re going to make me get it all over your face.” That didn’t seem to persuade her.
“Well, why aren’t you done yet?”
“Because, dearest Charlotte, you keep wiggling like a restless Wurmple. I need you to not even move your eyes. Don’t blink, don’t look around, don’t even twitch.” In retaliation, she blinked three times in succession. He was half tempted to tell her not to breathe.
“I’m trying,” she said, “maybe I wouldn’t move so much if you worked faster, Princess.“
He made a face at her, lips pulled in a pout as he sat back and readied himself to try again. “Girl, I’d be able to work faster if you held still. I’ve seen you not even flinch at the craziest things, but a little bit of makeup is what does you in.” Which wasn’t far from the truth at all, considering all that had transpired in the past few days.
She began to explain to him how that was different, her voice flat and uncaring before she shrugged and told him to go ahead and try again. It was touch and go for a while, until he squished her face in his hand to hold her head still and held his breath. All it took was a couple seconds and he sat back again with a dramatic sigh.
“What is it now?”
“Oh, nothing! That’s my sigh of relief because I finally got you still enough to finish your eyeliner. See, that wasn’t so hard now was it?” Charlotte perked up at this, reaching for the mirror Cain had set aside when he stopped her. “Ah, ah, I still have to do the other eye.”
After a few minutes of fussing he managed to finish up, and Charlotte heard the rattling of makeup brushes and cases opening and closing before Cain was dusting her eyelids with something softer, tongue stuck between his teeth in concentration. He batted her hands away each time she tried to reach past him for the mirror, repeating to her that she couldn’t look until he was completely finished.
She started bouncing her leg when he grabbed a couple more things off the table, her impatience ever present. “I need a smoke break.”
Cain sniffed out a laugh, uncapping the dark red lipstick that sparked this idea to begin with.“Your ‘smoke breaks’ can’t really be called breaks if they take more than fifteen minutes, can they? Besides,” he wrinkled his nose, “I don’t like the smell.”
“Weren’t you the poison gym leader before your sister? I thought you’d be used to nasty smelling things.” She left out the other part, living in a ward known for being uninhabitable due to being filled with toxic waste. They both knew that without her saying it. He ignored her, applying the lipstick through her cringing at the texture of it. “It feels weird.”
“Let it dry.”
“How long will that take?”
“It’d be done right now if you stopped moving your lips.” She flipped him off, but didn’t voice any further complaints until he was finished. “See? That was easy! Here,” he picked up the mirror with a giddy smile and handed it to her.
Charlotte held the mirror to where she could see all of Cain’s work, from the red eyeshadow darkening her eyelids and blending in with the sharp black of the eyeliner to the red paint on her lips, dark enough to be mistaken for black lipstick from afar. It was in the little details, too; the pink dusting of eyeshadow beneath her eyelids, the slightest hints of blush where it would naturally occur, even little designs with the eyeliner to pull it all together in the end.
“Holy shit! I look badass. Sweet work, Princess.” She raised her hand to meet his free one in a high-five.
“Thanks! It was so totally worth it to save it for the end, right?“ He held a little sparkling pot in her direction. “Want some glitter?”
She didn’t even glance in the direction. “Fuck no.” It came out quite abrupt, rude to anyone else, but Cain only laughed and put the pot back down. He probably already knew what she was going to say, too. “Where’d you get all this stuff, anyway?”
He shrugged, waving his hands this way and that. “Some of it was already mine, some I nabbed from my sister a while back. Your style’s a bit different than mine, but I figured I could pull it off. And you look suuuper cute, so I think it worked.”
She cracked the slightest smile, admiring herself in the mirror for a bit longer before setting it down, swapping it for Cain’s eyeliner pen that he’d used for her. “Wanna let me do yours next?”
Cain met her with a nervous chuckle and pushed her hand aside. “I dunno about that, hun. I don’t think either of us want you near my eyes with that thing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You scared I might poke one out?”
“That implies there’s a chance that you don’t. Here, how ‘bout you paint my nails instead? They’re a bit overdue for a repaint. I can even do yours later if you want.” He fumbled around in his bag until he pulled out his bottle of black nail polish. He put a small cover on the table, not wanting them to get scolded for any accidental stains, before placing his hands overtop. His nail polish was chipped, cracked, scratched, practically everything under the sun at this point. On top of that, his nails were nearly bitten down to his skin, a nervous habit that he told Charlotte he’d been trying to kick.
“Damn, Princess, you weren’t lying. Can’t say I’ll do a much better job, though.” She untwisted the cap of the bottle, taking one of Cain’s hands loosely in hers to start fixing up his nails. His hands were soft, if a bit chapped from the Calcenon cold. She moved the brush in flat strokes over each nail, covering the sides and tip of each finger in the process. She had to be sure to not miss anything, of course.
Cain noticed this, wrinkling his nose and looking up at her through his lashes. “Charlotte, could you be a dear and try not to paint my whole hand?” She smiled and left a large streak of paint on his knuckle in response. “I should’ve expected that.”
She continued onto the next hand, letting the first one dry. “Y’know, if you really wanna kick that nail biting habit, I’ve got somethin’ I can get you on that works pretty well.”
“I thiiink I’m good, I’ve got enough nasty habits, I don’t think replacing one with smoking will do me that well.”
“Who said I was talking about smoking?”
“Were you not?”
“No, I was.” She grinned at Cain’s not so subtle eye-roll. “There,” she capped the nail polish bottle, “let them dry and I can put another coat on.”
He nodded and blew lightly on his nails. “I kind of like the messiness, now that I’m looking at it. It totally fits the ‘couldn’t care less’ vibe.”
It wasn’t until Charlotte was painting the second coat on his nails that she shifted the tone of conversation. “You don’t have to answer this, but how’d you know about the railnet being a good place to hide out in? You seemed pretty familiar with it.”
Cain averted his gaze down to his hands. “Oh, y’know, I never liked being home too much and down in the railnet I didn’t have to worry about the weather outside!”
“Yeah? That’s it? I mean, I get it if it is, sorta… You don’t have to tell me everything, but there’s more to it, isn’t there?” She could tell because he hid things in a very similar way that she did. Deflecting, opting to adopt an attitude to brush off any concerns or keep their questions and intrusions at bay. She knew all too well.
She stayed quiet after that, letting Cain take his time and decide if he even wanted to elaborate on it or not. If he wanted to drop it, she would move right along. “Yeah,” he said after a beat. “It’s not something I wanna make a big deal out of. I just used to hide there when I’d run away, y’know?”
“From home?”
“Yeah. Nobody could find me down there.”
Charlotte hummed to herself, slowly applying the second coat of paint. “You run a lot, huh?”
He gives her a look, and she can’t quite figure out what it is. Something behind the upbeat attitude he parades around. Something serious, something solemn. “I don’t think I know what my life is without running. I’ve been trying to kick that, too, but it’s a little bit harder than nail biting.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It was back ‘n forth for a while until I booked it for good. It was uninhabitable there, and I don’t just mean ‘cause of the waste.” His tone was fighting to stay light, to play it off with humor and a laugh, but it was evident this was a conversation he didn’t practice much anymore.
Her grip on his hand tightens a little, the natural warmth from her fingers seeping into the chill of his. “I can’t say I know how that feels. I never saw any point in running from anything, from myself, from my actions, you know the gist. But… if you ever need anywhere to run after this, you’re always welcome to crash with me and my sisters. We got plenty of space in there.” She set the nail polish bottle aside so his nails could dry again. The mess had only worsened, but she figured at least the top coat came out smooth. Maybe it would deter Cain from biting his nails for a while.
Cain didn’t say anything for a minute, opting to lightly blow on his nails. Charlotte was preparing to sit in the awkward silence until further notice when he spoke up. “Thanks… that means a lot. I wouldn’t want to intrude on your sisters, though.”
She snorted a laugh, shaking her head and fanning his nails. “Well, we’re like friends now, or something. So don’t sweat it. They wouldn’t care anyway; Laura might get into neat-freak mode because she wants the house to look nice when we have guests but she won’t mind having you there at all.”
“You sure? You’re kind of sweet when you aren’t being so mean.”
“And you’re such a bashful bitch when you aren’t making innuendos all the time,” she bit back.
That seemed to finally crack the tension in the atmosphere, and Cain laughed, his shoulders relaxing from how drawn up they were. “Okay, when we finally settle this whole Meteor mess it might not be so bad to stop by.” He meant it, too, teetering between hopeful and certain.
They kept talking while his nails were drying, shifting from topic to topic to pass the time. They tucked their earlier conversation away, delving into a deep tangent of Cain’s disdain towards the weather. It was during this that Charlotte realized how much they mirrored each other. She knew Cain noticed it, too. She could see it in his soft expression and in his visible eye. She told him he would suffer vision impairment one day, and he just laughed her off while dusting his eyelids with a glittery purple. She assured him she was being serious.
It may have been different in how they executed it, or the motives, but the goal was the same: keep how you feel tucked neatly beneath an embellished attitude and you decide how people perceive you. Eventually, nobody knows what’s an act and what’s the truth. That just makes those who know the truth all the more important.
Cain was dappling his lips with a sheer gloss, and looked over to Charlotte who took to relaxing into the fur of her Ninetales. “You look in awful deep thought, something on your mind? I didn’t mean to bum you out earlier.”
“No, it’s fine. Just realizing a couple things.”
“Gotcha. Say, how do you think this looks?” Despite asking her, he was still looking himself over in a small mirror.
“You look fine, Princess. We’re fighting a terrorist organization, not going to a contest.” She wrinkled her nose when he started putting a weird substance on his eyelashes, the terrifying contraption of the eyelash curler in his other hand, and decided maybe they weren’t that similar after all.