Chapter 1: pen in the ceiling, that's property damage
Notes:
this is my first foray into md fanfiction and probably won't be my last so hi there. this is kinda just an exercise to see how to write these menaces so i cannot promise they're canon i kinda suck at characterizing stuff LMAO
also doll is my favourite so uh thats why shes showing up a lot :3
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
"You do understand that I am here to help you? Not everything I say is an insult."
"Yet somehow, ninety percent of what you say is an insult," she snapped bitingly, grinding her teeth together in aggravation as the three-pointed glyph flickered away again. "Look what you did!"
Doll watched on boredly. "I am not at fault if you can't keep your concentration." As if to mock her, blazing red came alive at her fingertips, twirling in circles and lifting up the plank of wood with ease. "People will not be as nice as me. They will insult you much more fiercely than I would."
The plank clattered back to the ground, released from the staticky red grip as Doll crossed her arms back over her chest. Her eyebrow raised in a very pointed manner at the girl in the centre of the room, urging her to get on with it.
Oh how she wished someone other than Doll could help her with this. Why her own mother couldn't do it, Uzi had no idea – she was busy, but she wasn't always busy. Teaching her daughter to use the weird freaky powers she passed down felt like the least she could do.
"C'mon, you know Doll!" Yes, mother, she did know Doll – quite well, in fact, for someone who's friends with an awfully irritating classmate of hers – but knowing someone didn't automatically make her want to interact with them! But refuting her mother had only made her more insistent, and once her father joined in, well, she was just fighting a losing battle at that point.
So she uncharacteristically held her tongue, stretching her arm back into position. Folding only two fingers to her palm never felt right, but the rushing purple always responded better to her commands that way. She tried to hold the scarcely useful advice in her head from her unwilling mentor, zeroing in on the plank of wood laying innocently on the floor.
She pictured it in her head. Every processed fibre, every drop of stain, every minuscule groove. Then, she imagined it raising into the air. Rich violet sparked to life, quivering and glitching under her strain as the wood began to respond. This part she was good at. She could do this part, picturing it, getting it up off the ground and defying all laws that science placed on them.
She just struggled at getting it to do much else. The moment she tried to tug it in a different direction, it was like the magic fried over having two different commands – they were not two different commands, magic! – and the wood gave in to gravity again. She spluttered as it thudded back to the ground, cringing.
"It was a good attempt," Doll lamented, and thunderous applause erupted from beside her.
"Woo! You got this, Uzi! You're doing great!" N cheered enthusiastically, waving his arms with a large grin plastered right across his face. Her face burned. She didn't not like having all her friends at her practice sessions, but sometimes she wished she wouldn't feel guilty about yelling and kicking them all out.
Thankfully, N was the only one who really cheered. Thad clapped politely whenever she did something new and always congratulated her after her sessions, and Doll would express whenever she saw Uzi improving, but that was about it. Lizzy stayed glued to her phone the entire time – she was only there because Doll was there, that bitch – and V took glee in commenting on her screw-ups or just sharing snarky remarks in general. The only reason she hadn't pummelled the woman into oblivion was the promise of clocking her in the head with a dictionary once she was powerful enough.
"Okay, what am I fucking up on?" She barked at Doll, fed up with her constant failures. The Russian girl did it so easily. She had to have tricks or something. "And don't you even start on the whole 'magic is your friend, stop fighting it' bullshit." She had heard that too much.
"Yet you do fight it," she deadpanned, releasing her breath and strolling out to where Uzi was standing. In her peripherals she saw N whisper something excitedly to V, pointing eagerly, and after a few moments V rolled her eyes. "Do not think I didn't see you straining your powers."
Uzi dug her nails into her hoodie sleeves. "Bite me! It usually works!"
"That is a lie," Doll said bluntly, tossing a pen up in the air and catching it with her powers. Her hand flicked upwards fluidly, fingers folding in and lax as she twisted her wrist and twirled the utensil around. Not like the board-stiff of Uzi's white-knuckle grip on the air. "You can get it up into the air. Congratulations. But you are so strained on that one command that it has trouble shifting between them. If I were to do that.." and she stiffened her hand, her skin dipping around her tense bones. The pen halted mid-air, the sparking red glyph glitching. She gingerly tugged her hand up, but the pen did not follow, instead sputtering in a haze of red light and dropping to the floor.
"It could not quite process that I wanted it to go a new direction." Her grip relaxed, and the pen obediently floated back into her pocket. "Conforming to my first command, which was hovering. Don't overload it."
It made a stupid amount of sense, but she wasn't about to give Doll the satisfaction of actually teaching her something. She folded her arms over her chest with a scowly frown, picking at the fraying threads of her hoodie. Stupid magic and stupid rules.
"On second thought, take the pen," Doll said, throwing it towards her with a deft flick of her wrist. Uzi startled and just barely caught it with the tips of her fingers, narrowing a glare towards the girl. She pointedly ignored it. "The weight of the wood is not doing you any favours."
Agitation bubbled up in her throat but she swallowed it down as she turned her focus onto the pen – a standard school pen, but she still twisted the utensil apart to study the insides. Half its ink used, scratched to all hell…
She screwed it back together. She was dawdling.
Uzi tucked her last two fingers against her palm again, but she carefully avoided tensing the muscles into an unmoving position. Stiffening her hands always helped the power pool into something she could use faster – or she thought so – so waiting until enough trickled through her veins was awfully boring.
It was like the wooden plank as she lifted it again, simply rising straight from her left hand to levitate uninterestingly. As she pushed the second command towards it that would hopefully cause the item to float sideways, she was quite surprised to find that it actually did.
The pen drifted lazily to the right, encased in hazy purple that dragged it through the air with such ease it was almost ridiculous that she hadn't figured it out on her own. Excitement spawned as a devilish grin on her face, baring her teeth and waving the pen about in the air.
A burst of determination nestled in her ribs, and with a flourish she tossed the pen, released it from her grasp, then snatched it right back, catching it just centimetres off the ground. She tried to twirl her wrist like she'd seen Doll do, and the pen rotated with it, spinning like a fan with no cage.
Her success got the better of her as she twisted, intent on doing a few more moves with the pen before a rather harsh flick of her hand flung the pen directly into the roof. It embedded straight into the panelling far above with arrow-like sharpness, and Uzi blinked around once she realized that the pen had abruptly vanished from her vision.
"Aw, man! That was mine!" Thad cried despairingly, throwing his hands up with a deep sigh, "My favourite pen, man.."
"Stop your whining," Lizzy complained, gripping his hat by the brim and pulling it down over his eyes, eliciting a yelp of surprise from the boy. "They'll get it back with their weird demon powers or whatever."
"They are not demon powers!" Uzi defended hotly at the same time Doll muttered something about it hardly being a demon power, wiggling the pen from the panelling with little effort and flinging the thing back to Thad with little care where it ended up hitting.
A little bit of editing with the ceiling and it was like new, with no hole in sight. Doll sighed, cracking her knuckles with a stretch. "We will wrap up there. That was good work today, Uzi," she said, oddly kindly, inclining her head politely.
Uzi, being the absolutely edgy and rage-filled teenager that she was, stammered over the compliment and fixed her face into a concealing scowl, "Whatever, would've figured it out without your stupid help anyways…"
" Jeez, just take the compliment," Doll groaned, picking up her bag from the side of the room and being quick to depart, followed soon after by Lizzy yelling at her to slow down.
With her finally gone, Uzi felt a bit freer to mull over the Russian girl's more odd behaviours that session, namely actually being willing to teach her stuff. At least, she did feel free to do that until N swept her up in a ridiculously tight hug.
" Ack- Hey! N, put me down!" She yelped, but it was lost on his ears as he showered her with praises and congratulations, sporting a wide, proud grin on his face. Fluster burned at her face relentlessly, embarrassment crawling up her spine and heating her skin bright red.
He did finally set her down, beaming brighter than the sun on a breezy summer day. "Uzi, that was so cool! Well, the pen in the ceiling was a bit worrying, since I didn't really want to have to pay for property damage, but it's a big improvement in your skills!" His grin didn't falter, genuine admiration staining his voice in such a sickeningly fond way that she had to drag her beanie down over her face to save the last shreds of her dignity.
She couldn't really refute anything with her beanie shoved against her face, and N was perfectly content to pat her shoulder, shining with pride, so Thad took it as an invitation to leave. "I'm gonna head out now, I'll see you all next week, right?"
N nodded enthusiastically, shooting the guy a pair of finger guns that were easily returned with a laugh, "Alright! Oh, and keep it up, 'Zi! You're really getting better at that magic stuff!"
The door clicked shut, and then it was only V, N, and Uzi left in the room. The latter had finally recovered enough to return her beanie to its perch on her head, combing her hands through stray strands of hair with contempt as they frizzed up.
V slung her bag over her shoulder, checking her phone as she eyed the two with very poorly veiled dislike. "Hey, pipsqueak, you gonna be spending the night? Because I'll need to call Tessa if you are."
Uzi narrowed her already very thin glare, so very tempted to thwack her right in her thick head with the phone laying innocently in her hand. It was a cheap insult and she was not above sending a cheap punch right back-
"Yup!" N chirped before she could finish her murderous train of thought. "We're gonna watch some movies, maybe bake some cookies because I did buy those new cookie cutters on last week-"
"Alright, alright, can it!" V dismissed him quickly, waving her hands up in the air, very much not interested in the intricacies of the night they had planned. Uzi couldn't help the little bud of smugness tugging at her lips as she watched the older woman move with a bit more haste than before. She quickly pulled up a contact on her phone and rang it, not even exiting the room with a goodbye.
Once her voice faded from behind the thick, wooden gym doors – which really didn't take long – Uzi shamelessly spat, "She's an ass."
N spluttered in surprise, looking wounded, "Aw, no! She's not that bad! Maybe she just had a bad day today."
"Then she's having a bad day everyday." Uzi was not in the mood to be nice to the silver-haired woman who strutted around like she owned the place. "Because she's an ass."
N ultimately elected to ignore her salty grumbling, instead opting to haul up his bag while he waited for Uzi to do the same. The fleeting thought of carrying the bags with her powers was quickly discarded, because as much as she was a determined, rebellious teenager, she wasn't going to let it become a detriment to her health. Like that one time.
So her bag was shouldered without a flicker of purple, and then a hand slid against her own and threaded their fingers together, so she couldn't really do it even if she wanted to. Her gaze was cast upwards, suppressing a blush as best she could as she met N's tentative eye, who was trying really hard to not beam like an idiot.
"You are going to be the death of my edgy, mysterious reputation, you know," She snarked with no real heat, finding that she didn't mind his hand in hers all that much.
"I know," he said mischievously, a silly smile arching from ear to ear across his lips. "I know."
Notes:
help the nuzi just spawned i didn't intend to write them like that what (i am not good at romance did i do fine)
also note, i'm not really looking for constructive criticism right now, but if anything is glaringly wrong then maybe do tell me because that would be good to know. thanks!
comments and kudos very much appreciated :)
Chapter 2: bringing the outdoors inside (why)
Summary:
practicing with different materials and learning their different rules- doll why have you brought a mountain of snow inside.
Notes:
i think i might be playing up uzis standoffishness :/ and idk what im doing with doll. characterizing has never been my strong suit oops :p
this is winter hater propaganda (my school is built for sunshine and rainbows so i am rightfully salty)
anyways only uzi and doll in this chapter. nothing goes on except for them trying to figure out how the fuck to hold snow 👍
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Her next session occurred a few days later, much to her chagrin. School had been cancelled for a reason, so why on Earth did she have to make the sluggish trip to their criminally underheated gymnasium in the midst of winter?
At least Doll was willing to drive her, so that made up for a very minuscule piece of it. She also would not be accompanied by the usual cheer squad sitting on the sidelines for hours while she struggled to pick up a plank of wood, because no one really wanted to make the trip when they could stay snuggled up and warm in their own heated homes.
"So you chose to do this on the one snow day this school gets," Uzi grumbled, muffled from behind the thick layers of scarves she had wrapped around her neck. Doll merely glanced sideways at her, tugging her keys from the car and exiting the vehicle like it was nothing more than a light breeze.
The bitter air elicited a groan of pure loathing from her chest, and she begrudgingly opened her door and stepped out into the white-shrouded environment with hatred etched into her face like a statue. This would've been absolutely peak weather had she not been in it.
Crunching footsteps let her know that Doll was already leaving for the front gate. There was no difficulty on getting in – a special pass from the principal was all that they needed, and teachers still going through work in their offices were more than willing to let them in – and their boots tracked wet slurry across the clean linoleum flooring.
"I have something that I would like you to learn," Doll finally spoke up once they'd reached their destination and had deposited all their things on the nearby benches. She strolled over to the back doors of the gym, opening them wide and locking them into place so there was a nice, fresh view of the outside. Uzi watched her oddly, cringing as the frigid winter air crept in and permeated the place. That is, until she flicked her wrist, so obviously glaring with the three-pronged glyph, and a mountain of snow slid through the back doors.
Uzi let out a very un-Uzi-like squawk, whipping her hands up like she was ready to fight. Doll raised an eyebrow, and she quickly folded her expression into something much more dignified. "Bite me! Why do you need a pile of fucking snow, anyways?" Inside, nonetheless. Was Doll finally losing her mind? They went inside to get away from the snow, not bring it with them.
"You've been getting better with moving things, no?" She flipped her long indigo hair back over her shoulders, approaching the slushy pile of snowflakes and crushing a handful into a snowball. "Time to experiment with other materials. I figured snow would work well enough as a starting point."
The girl deftly tossed the ball into the air, catching it as cleanly as she had caught the pen last week. Yet, signs of minuscule struggle showed through her less fluid motions as she moved the snowball through space, eventually breaking her focus enough to crumple the snowball into a pile of sleet before her. A soft glare was thrown at the snow. "I am still working on it myself."
Uzi furrowed her eyebrows. "What, is it not like any other material? That's stupid."
"Agreed," Doll mused sourly, nudging the slowly melting puddle of slush with the toe of her boot before turning and rounding out a new snowball for herself. "It is similar to water and why it's a struggle to pick that up – no solid form for the magic to grasp. Snow is kind of the border between the two, so it is simpler."
Uzi stepped forward and carved her own handful of snow out of the mound, aggressively packing it together into a very lopsided ball shape. The cold immediately bit at her fingers and she cursed under her breath, trying to fish her gloves from the pockets of her jacket. "And you had to bring a pile of snow inside because..?"
"I did not want to be outside. There's a breeze."
It drew a soft scoff from her, but in all honesty, Uzi really did not want to be outside in a sharp winter breeze either. Frostbite would probably claim all her fingers and toes if that happened, and then she'd be pissed.
Finally managing to tug her gloves on, she tossed her snowball from hand to hand expectantly. "Now what?"
"Just hold it as you usually would," Doll nodded at the ball rather unhelpfully. She took a few steps back, making a reasonable gap between them. "See how it feels."
"I thought these were lessons," Uzi muttered distastefully, but she did as she was instructed. Crackling violet sputtered at her three outstretched fingers, enveloping the ball easily, reflecting the deep purple light on its white surface.
The snowball lifted in the air with ease. Such ease that she almost thought that Doll was just pulling her leg, playing some prank to get her out of the house on a snowy day, until she felt it. It simply felt like a restriction placed upon her abilities, like a barrier she needed to pass yet couldn't. Something continued past the solid wall that she couldn't go through, and her grip on the ball loosened enough for it to crumple to the ground.
"What the hell?" She peered down at the deflated snowball, flexing her fingers and furrowing her face. The teensy bit of heating in the building was starting to turn her snowball pile into a puddle, so she yet again activated her powers and tried to pick it back up.
It did not listen. The glyph warped around its form, flickering and sputtering like an old light about to kick the bucket, but couldn't get a grasp on the snow well enough to lift it more than a few centimetres from the ground.
"Difficult, isn't it?" Doll cocked her head, and Uzi genuinely could not tell whether that was a subtle barb or not. "Snow is trickier once it melts, since all things that have no solid form will be hard for it to grab onto.
"Solid objects it wraps around, like plastic wrap," she explained, cupping another snowball and covering it with the palm of her hand. "If you were to wrap water in plastic wrap, however, then it would have a lot of give. Or another material, like sand. It can be manipulated into different shapes. That is where the magic gets confused."
She exhaled a deep breath of hot air onto the snowball, pressing both of her hands against it. "It squeezes to grab, according to my mother. So with non-solids, it will squeeze and squeeze until it cannot handle holding it anymore."
Uzi frowned, narrowing her eyes in slight aggravation at the pile of slush on the ground. So many rules and restrictions on how they had to handle these magics… what was the point in having them if it was so convoluted to even learn how to use them? She never would've figured it out on her own, and she despised admitting it, especially with how lacklustre the answers were.
"So you're saying we just hold it with… less force?"
Doll just shrugged, returning her attention to the mountain of snow still occupying the gym and very much not giving Uzi any answers. She wanted to bang her head against something. Preferably a wall. Unfortunately, she was too far away and really didn't want to walk over just to hit her head against it, so she hung her head in her hands and sighed.
"I am figuring it out as much as you are," Doll reminded her with a small incline of her head, "My mother just isn't as secretive as yours is."
"And what help you are," Uzi spat dryly, stomping over and forking over a new handful of snow. After a split-second decision, she also heaped a few more handfuls into her arms, retreating to a corner of the gymnasium as to not see Doll's stupid, unhelpful face anymore.
The snow rustled wetly as it slapped against the shiny sealed floors. Uzi sat down next to the pile with a force that hurt her tailbone, flexing her gloved fingers as she formed some new snowballs to practice on.
She didn't want to be here. Not now, and not even in the first place. She was already bitter from a less-than-stellar test result – she swore that the teachers were sabotaging her or something – and now the cold settling into her bones made her patience brittle to all hell. Her fingers still stung and her nose had long since gone numb, but hey, fuck all that, right?
"Why do you want us to be friends so bad, mom?" Uzi muttered to the crisp, cold air, tucking two fingers close to her palm and watching the spluttery violet flicker to life between her outstretched fingers.
The shape's meaning had always evaded her, but it had grown familiar over the years – a hexagon at its heart, with three arrows jutting out from its corners like spears. It glittered bright violet against her skin, the same as her mother's, flickering and glitching like it was made from incorrect computer code. She planted her cheek into her other hand, propped up on her knee as she lazily watched her hand drift around, the light following obediently. A heavy exhale left her chest, fogging up in the air.
A thud smashed into the wall nearest to the doors, and Uzi would not admit how high it made her jump. The rattle the doors gave caught her off guard, but as snow slid off the wooden panelling, all Doll did was hum.
"Fuck was that for?" She called bitterly, straightening up and folding her arms in her lap as the deep purple glyph glitched away again.
"I am trying something," was all Doll replied with, balling up another snowball and hurling it with her magic.
"Is that something property damage?"
The Russian girl slid her gaze towards Uzi. Her mouth was set in a firm line, and her eyes were sharp with concentration like she was doing something harder than throwing snow at a wall. "Experimentation is not a bad way to find things out, Doorman."
Uzi scoffed from behind clenched teeth, " Jesus , alright…" She turned back to her meagre snow pile.
Quiet settled back over the gymnasium, heavy in the echoey silence of panelled walls and smooth floors. Strong smacks periodically sliced through it, but that was the only noise present as Uzi tried yet again to hold up the rapidly melting snow for more than a handful of seconds. Was the magic melting the snow or something? Because snow should not melt as fast as it was in the cold they were braving.
Doll gave a sharp noise of surprise as Uzi shook off wet slurry from her gloves for the fourth time, grumbling incoherently at the stupidness of it all.
"Oh, that would make sense.." she heard the rusty-eyed know-it-all murmur to herself as she studied the absolute mess of slush plastered to the far wall. She subtly – not so subtly, it was awfully obvious that she was staring – watched as the other girl brushed her hair aside and steeled her position.
Doll carefully levitated a premade snowball into her waiting hands, smoothing it out before gently tossing it into gravity's whims. Like before, she caught it, and like before, she began to trail it across her field of vision. But as the glyph began crushing in on the snowball and faltering, her hand relaxed entirely and swept it across the air.
"What?!" Uzi cried, shoving herself up, feeling utterly scandalized. Doll hardly even spared her a glance, eyes furrowed as they followed the path of the warping snow. "We don't even have to do the stupid folded-pinky thing?"
"I suppose not," Doll responded rather blithely. Despite the harsh determination still etched into her face, a hint of mirth coloured her tone as she waved her hand through the air, the delicate red glow following and staying. It wasn't without a few hiccups, hiccups that ultimately led to her dropping the bunch of snow, but it was more than she could do at the beginning of the session. "Maybe it just works better for other things. Well. That's very useful to know."
"You're telling me," she deadpanned, crossing her arms over her chest and burying her hands into the folds of her jacket. They were still gloved, but the snow had long since seeped into the threads and chilled her fingers. "Now that you've finally discovered the little secret to snow or whatever, can we leave?"
Doll didn't directly respond, lighting up her hand and sweeping in a board of wood from the still-open back doors – maybe that was why it was still obscenely cold. She used it to shove the remaining snow back outside, only pausing slightly over the multiple piles of slush left over from failed attempts. She glanced up to meet Uzi's eye, silently pointing at the watery puddles.
Picking up on the question, she slowly slid her pile of snow behind her legs – a poor attempt at hiding it, really, but it was more the message it conveyed. Doll shrugged, abandoning the puddles as she brushed her snowwear off and began to close the back doors of the gym.
Uzi grinned. Good. Leave this mess for the shitty staff to clean up.
They were out of the gym, finally, walking back through the school's trailing hallways. Uzi readjusted her bag, grumbling in annoyance as it just didn't sit comfortably against her back. Stupid- fucking jackets, I swear to god.
"Take these," Doll said out of nowhere, tossing a jingly, rattling bunch of objects right towards her with no warning. Uzi scrambled to catch them, hissing curses under her breath and feeling one right at the tip of her tongue to snap back at the Russian girl, but she was somehow already ten paces ahead of her.
The objects – Doll's keys, now that she looked at them – were stowed away in her pocket as she hurried after the fast-paced girl. "Hey! Where are you going?"
"To return the pass." Doll kept walking, and Uzi belatedly realized that they'd passed by the entrance doors already and Doll had probably given her the keys so she could go sit in the car. Oh. Well. "I doubt I'll have use for it anytime soon."
"Uh- I knew that! Who said I didn't? Shut up!" She barked, drawing up her shoulders defensively as she twisted on her toes and scurried back down the hall. Her boots stamped heavy thuds against the ground, and the door handle rattled as she exited the building as swiftly as she could.
Doll stood blinking, watching her leave, her fingers brushing the pass in her pocket that she had reached to retrieve.
"..I did not say anything..?"
Notes:
me ignoring how the actual solver works in favour of hehe magic :3
also never underestimate the motivation a single comment gives you. i got ONE and then threw this chapter together after being stuck for a few weeks lmao. so i thank you, sole commenter o7
EllieWilliams_1fan on Chapter 1 Sat 13 Jul 2024 01:15AM UTC
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Lokeefe2023 on Chapter 2 Sun 14 Jul 2024 12:52PM UTC
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Anitsuga on Chapter 2 Thu 19 Sep 2024 08:31PM UTC
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Deviecu on Chapter 2 Tue 01 Oct 2024 03:08AM UTC
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