Chapter Text
The first sign that something is wrong is that Tecna is forthcoming about it. She’s never, ever forthcoming about anything regarding feelings. So when she storms into the living room, eyes wild and hair an absolute mess, the girls are panicked. It is not like Tecna to have unbrushed hair or, in fact, to look anything other than completely orderly.
When she storms in, the girls are lounging. Stella is filing her nails, legs kicked up on Bloom’s lap as the fire fairy scribbles in her sketchbook. Flora is peering over Musa’s shoulder, the pair of them sharing headphones as Musa shows her a track she’s been producing. Aisha is curled up in a bean bag on her phone, dressed in lime green sweatpants and an oversized tank top. Each of them stop what they’re doing when the door bangs open and Tecna enters like a hurricane.
“We have a problem.”
Musa looks up, pulling out an earbud. Flora mirrors her, just a beat after.
“Um, who died?” says Bloom, her pencil stilling on the page.
Musa sighs. “Is this because I left the heating on again last night? Tec, I said I was sorry, I–”
“It’s me, I’m the problem,” says Tecna, interrupting through gritted teeth. Her friends stare at her for a beat, and then– “I want to have sex with Stormy.”
Five mouths drop open, staring at her.
“Sorry, darling,” Stella drawls, her eyes lighting up with barely concealed glee. “I think we misheard you.”
Tecna grits her teeth, her face burning like she can’t believe the words that are coming out of her mouth. “I’m serious. I can’t think straight. I keep missing cues in battle. Yesterday, she pinned me to a rock and I actually think I moaned. If I just… I could just do it, just once, and get it out of my system, and then I think–”
“Hang on,” says Bloom, shaking her head. “Are you feeling alright?”
“Yeah,” says Aisha, exchanging an alarmed look with Musa that Tecna pretends not to notice. “Are you aware you’re talking about an actual war criminal?”
At this, Tecna actually lets out an audible sound of distress, covering her face with her hands and sliding to the ground with her back against the wall. Through her fingers, she says, “I think I’m malfunctioning.”
“Hang on,” says Flora, gently. “Um, I thought you and Timmy were… talking? What happened?”
“This is not–” Tecna lets out another squeak of distress. “We are. I mean, I like him! A lot. But we’re not… we haven’t discussed… anything. And not that it matters, we’re friends, right now. Just friends. And besides, I don’t want to, like, date her romantically, or anything, it’s just sometimes she talks and I want to throw her against a wall and like… shut her up. With my mouth. I think. Just once.”
There’s a long beat of silence, like her friends are trying to decide who’s possessed her. It’s like they’re trying to work out whether to comfort her or shake the horny out of her. Even as she’s talking, Tecna has no idea what she’s saying. It’s like the words are tumbling out of her mouth and she can hardly contain them or like she’s suffering from a – hopefully – temporary bout of insanity.
“Please say something,” she pleads, almost breathlessly.
Musa says, “Dude. What is wrong with you?”
At the same time, Stella lets out an unfiltered howl of laughter. But Bloom, wide-eyed, places her pen and paper on a table to her right and clears her throat.
“Um, Tec, are you sure this isn’t, like, a low-grade hex? Or curse, or something?”
Aisha nods, solemnly, “This is definitely their idea of a sick joke, I agree. This is very unlike you, T. How long have you been feeling like this?”
Helplessly, Tecna shrugs. She lets her head fall back against the wall, stretching her legs out in front of her and fixating on a spot above her head on the ceiling.
“I don’t know. Weeks, maybe? It’ll be fine, and then she’ll say something or, like, come too close, and one minute we’re fighting and the next I’m wondering what it would feel like to pin her against a tree or lick her ear or something.”
Lick. Her. Ear. Stella mouths, then lets out a shriek and nearly falls off the side of the couch. She’s laughing so hard she’s got actual tears in her eyes. Bloom whacks her shin, not at all gently, which simply makes her laugh harder.
Musa says, almost hysterically, “you’ve been fantasising in battle for weeks under our noses and we haven’t noticed?”
And, really, Tecna wonders if it’s too late to send out job ads for a new best friend. Out of all of them, Tecna would hope that Musa would be the one to hold her hand and say, ‘Don’t worry, T! We’ll help you fix this!’
“I would say it’s more of a case of mutually-assured flirting.”
“ Mutual?” Stella shrieks, which causes her to laugh even harder. She goes to say something else, but clearly can’t, because she’s laughing so hard now she’s literally wheezing.
“No,” says Flora, concerned. “I noticed something was weird last week. I mean, for a while Stormy has been trying to separate Tecna from the rest of us. It all feels very targeted. And then, of course, there was that incident the other week when she winked at Tecna while Icy was busy threatening us.”
“I thought she just had dust in her eye,” Musa agrees, remembering. “She looked like she was glitching.”
Tecna literally moans. Not in a sexual way. In, like, a ‘I can’t believe this is my life’ kind of way.
At this point, her friends dissolve into overlapping chatter. Bloom, Musa and Flora are trying to discuss ways of fixing this, while Aisha’s madly googling ‘lust curses’ on her phone with an increasingly furrowed brow. Stella does nothing overly helpful, just every now and then looks in Tecna’s general direction and bursts into laughter all over again. All the while, Tecna’s in her head trying to figure out how the hell her life has come to this point.
Finally, Aisha clears her throat. “Babe,” she says. Her tone is like that of a doctor delivering news of a terminal illness. “This is not very like you.”
“No!” Tecna almost wails. The cadence of her voice is embarrassing but she can’t bring herself to calm down. This is beyond awful. “I’ve had crushes before, okay. I have a crush on Timmy. Whom, I might add, I find very, very attractive. But this is different, I feel like I’m going to probably actually jump her soon if someone doesn’t physically hold me back.”
Because, okay, Tecna doesn’t do ‘out-of-control’. She does order. Logic. She’s restrained, composed, thank you very much. Except every time she sees Stormy she feels like she’s a feral animal. Also, she’s pretty sure she just admitted to having a crush on Timmy which she’s sure will come back to bite her in the ass later.
Now, Stella actually does stop laughing because Tecna looks genuinely panicked. Suddenly, the room is very, very still.
“Tec, I think… if you don’t mind… I think maybe we should run a few tests on you. I think Griselda taught us a few ways to check for curses and hexes and stuff last semester,” Flora’s voice is gentle. She’s come to kneel by Tecna’s side. Tecna peers through her fingers to look at the fairy of nature who’s got her hand on Tecna’s knee as she peers at her face with gentle sincerity.
“Please,” Tecna croaks. “At least I need to be benched if we can’t figure this out. I’m not joking – this isn’t normal.”
“In the interim,” says Stella, leaning over Bloom to pick up her pencil and sketchpad. She flicks to a new page with a flourish and clears her throat. “Because, honestly, I doubt any of us remember how to check for curses – I don’t – maybe we should write a list of terrible crimes against humanity that Stormy has committed.”
“Oh!” Aisha throws her hand in the air. “Burned down that orphanage – empty, but still diabolical – last summer!”
“Great example!” says Stella. “That was diabolical! Next!”
“Wore crocs to our last battle,” Musa chimes in with a shudder.
Stella lets out a noise of assent and scribbles that down. Tecna bangs her head against the wall.
“Stabbed Riven with a fork in that truce meeting a few months ago,” Bloom nods. Then, with a sidelong look at Musa, she adds quietly, “which… probably deserved.”
Going to write that down, then thinking better of it and stopping, Stella says, “I’d actually argue that’s a point in Stormy’s favour.”
Tecna wants to stab herself with a fork.
“Has tried to murder Tecna on multiple occasions,” Flora says grimly. “And the rest of us.”
“Very valid point,” Stella agrees, scribbling that down. Then she shoots a pointed look at Tecna. “That should, honestly, be enough. But if you need any more, she also probably tastes like ozone and having sex with her would likely fry your circuits. Additionally, she has a perpetually terrible case of bad hair.”
“I don’t have circuits–! ” Tecna, who is tired of computer jokes, snaps.
Stella only shrugs and writes both points down anyway. When she’s done writing, she tears the sheet of paper out of Bloom’s notebook, spells it into the shape of a paper aeroplane, and throws it at Tecna where it bounces off her forehead with a sad little thud . Tecna stares at it as it falls into her lap but makes no move to read Stella’s elaborate script.
At this point, Stella claps her hands and summons… well. Tecna looks at the tiny, bullet-shaped lilac device in Stella’s palm and flushes as pink as her hair.
“No.”
“Yes, babe. Look, I even got you one in your favourite colour!”
“No. And now, actually, I suddenly hate purple.”
Bloom who, up until now, has been trying to pretend she is above laughing at Tecna’s expense, dissolves into hysterics. She buries her head in Stella’s shoulder as her own shoulders shake with giggles. Musa and Aisha are both wearing matching grins. Stella is blinking owlishly at Tecna, earnest but with a smirk that says she’s enjoying this far too much.
“Have a wank, get it out of your system, wake up tomorrow with renewed hatred for the Trix. Yes?”
Bless her cotton socks, Flora is the only one unamused. She’s frowning. “Girls, I think this is serious. I’ve read about spells like these, they’re notoriously hard to break and they often can lead to genuine insanity if you don’t fix them. I think we should be a bit more worried.”
Insanity. Awesome. Tecna files that away for a later panic spiral.
“Yeah, but we don’t know she’s spelled, Flora,” says Bloom, slowly, calming down somewhat and wiping her eyes with the back of her hands.
“She’s spelled,” Flora affirms. She peers into Tecna’s face and Tecna meets her gaze, warily. “We can run the appropriate tests tomorrow, but… I think we could just ask Tec.”
“Yeah,” says Tecna, defeated. Her voice is small, shaky with emotion she’d usually prefer to keep buried under layers of snark and steel. “There’s something wrong. I… I feel all foggy in my head. Like… I can’t think.” For someone like Tecna, whose brain is her greatest weapon, this is the most alarming part of the whole thing. She feels like she’s operating with a missing limb or something.
Peering at Tecna, Musa says slowly, “okay. Alright, then. We go to bed. We wake up tomorrow and we sort this out for real. Yeah?”
Tecna nods, drained and flustered and mortified. She can’t look at any of them, just continues staring at that paper plane in her lap where the only words visible from all the folds in the paper read, wore crocs and smells like ozone .
“Hmmkay,” Stella hums. “But, just know, I’m leaving the vibrator on the table. Right. Here.”
Tecna would like to find new friends. But, equally, she lets her eyes fall to the tiny device on the table and finds herself tempted, all the same.
At some point in the middle of the night, Tecna finds herself tossing and turning and unable to sleep. Across from her, Musa’s breathing is deep and low and loud, magnified by the panic fluttering in her chest and the heat in her stomach that she knows belongs to extreme sexual frustration. Her nerves feel on fire, her fingers tingling and she thinks back to earlier, to Stella’s gift, and thinks… fuck it.
She takes one more look over at Musa, bites her lip and slides out of bed. Her feet are bare as they hit the floor. She’s dressed in shorts and an oversized men’s shirt with a sleeping robot on the front that she’d thrifted in Zenith last summer holidays. Careful not to wake her best friend, she creeps out of the room and whispers the spell for her night vision, blinking as the room appears before her in infrared.
There, on the coffee table like a beacon, sits the vibrator.
Hovering in the doorway for a moment, Tecna contemplates it. Her body feels like it’s on fire. More evidence pointing to the fact she’s definitely – certainly – been hexed. Then, she breathes a furious sigh, throwing caution to the wind, and just thinks at this point, she’ll try anything. It’s not, by the way, like she’s never masturbated before, thank you very much. She has a very healthy relationship with her own body. But accepting the vibrator feels like accepting the help of her irritatingly nosy best friends and that… that wounds Tecna’s boundless pride just a little bit.
Still, she can’t think about literally anything else at this point and so without another thought she storms forward, snatches it off the table and goes to lock herself in the bathroom.
Stupid fucking storm witch.