Chapter Text
Adaine feels it, the way a prey creature can sense a change in the air, when Aelwyn shifts her focus onto her dear younger sister. “How about you? Is there anyone cute in your life?”
Her pulse spikes. Eight or so syllables run through her mind. “What? No. What? No. No.” She gulps. “What? No.”
“No?”
“No. What?” Her hands are shaking. She knows she’s verbally short-circuiting but she genuinely cannot come up with other words to save her life.
“Why not?” Aelwyn’s stare pins her in place. “You’re very fetching. Why not?”
“I’m busy. I’m busy!” Her breath catches in her throat. “I don’t know! What?”
Aelwyn grins. “You’re so mad at me. What did—”
“You’re so mad at me!” Deflect. Deflect and change the subject.
“No I’m not.” Aelwyn laughs.
“Yes—”
“I’m having a good time.”
“You’re having a terrible time!”
“Don’t you ever fucking tell me what I’m doing!”
“Fuck you!” She’s working too hard not to stop a smile from filling her face.
“Fuck you— Bitch—”
Adaine playfully punches at Aelwyn’s shoulder.
“No! You have a punching spell, stop— Ow, you’re way stronger than me now!” Aelwyn rubs at her shoulder and nudges Adaine back. “Well, any interesting magical stuff you’re working on? Anything I could help with?”
“Yeah, no, just all of this Kipperlilly Copperkettle malarkey, you know?” Her pulse is still up. Her face is all flushed. It’s just from the teasing. It’s not— It’s nothing. It’s really nothing.
She tries not to read into the fact that Kipperlilly is the first thing that came to mind when Aelwyn asked about “interesting magical stuff.” Because there’s nothing to read into, obviously.
It’s just that Kipperlilly makes her blood boil— makes her see red— makes her pulse pound—
It’s nothing at all, actually.
That night, Adaine can’t make herself trance. She’s overthinking. She’s replaying in her mind the way it felt last week when Aelwyn admitted to working with Kipperlilly. That burst of heat in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t— It didn’t feel pleasant, exactly, but it was kind of exciting, like if an anxiety attack had a nice version. It felt kind of righteous, even.
Well then! Nothing to do about that but try to ignore it. Surely that won’t backfire. She lets the train of thought drift back down below her subconscious and finally closes her eyes to trance.
The trance is no escape. Her mind is circling, like a dog trying to get comfortable, padding between the same spots on repeat. She can’t stand that stupid halfling.
She’s not even stupid, is the part that Adaine can’t get around. Just foolish. Looking for trauma porn as if it would make her a better adventurer, more popular. More desirable.
Adaine understands the instinct: looking for any way to game the system, to find the trick that makes any part of her life winnable. Any way to make her day survivable. Because every moment is a contest. Just—
Adaine was competing with Aelwyn, a duplicated braid of hate and love binding them together like horse blinders, centered on their parents. Now Kipperlilly is fighting for power against someone that she has no true attachment to. At least Aelwyn felt like someone she was stuck in a hole with—granted, at times by choice—but Kipperlilly moves like brimstone from above, falling with no preamble. A tornado of rage.
She feels herself getting worked up again, even in trance, as she rewatches their interactions; Kipperlilly, looking for any reason to snipe her friends, for any way to manipulate the rules to get around what she understood as unfair advantage.
What drives Adaine batty about it all is Kipperlilly’s fundamental misunderstanding of advantage. Because she has parents who work hard to support her and raise her. She has parents that don’t need to be killed to release the shackles of misapplied childhood responsibility.
Adaine isn’t typically a jealous person. But she is resentful of this wilful calculation error: that to be traumatized is to be forged by the twin flames of luck and success. The worst version of “grass is greener” she’s ever seen. It’s not greener here.
How presumptuous. How entirely bratty and deluded.
Adaine’s trance ends and she feels no better than she did four hours ago. Her gut is rotting, roiling, crawling up through her ribs. She wants—
She can’t even admit it to herself for longer than a second: she wants Kipperlilly’s delusion. Her idiotic perspective. The holy certainty, the righteousness that she walks with. The conviction.
Would it just be easier to believe the mirage? Could she stomach that level of vitriol, day in and day out? It flashes through her mind that she already is that angry. Just not in the same shade.
Interesting magical stuff, indeed.