She feels greedy eyeing up his cigarettes. Precious commodity, that. She holds her hand out anyway.]
May I have one?
[It's less personal for her, but it's still a horror show. Her nerves could use the soothing.]
If that's usual way the place works, then... Why trust it? It's a personalized Fuck You from hell.
[Is it, though? She thinks of the base of each stitch in mottled skin and shivers. If it had been Marian she'd have ripped herself apart.]
Elise is the woman you talked to. The one you loved while she lived. You still love her, but she's not with you. Not in the way this "Prehival" wants you to think.
[ NOT HER SOUTHERN ACCENT Daan can't really correct her because everyone on the train was pretty diverse I'm sure it was just a very funny mishmash of accents and whatnot.
He pauses for a moment, and then holds the carton out so she can take one herself. ]
Thank you, but I didn't ask for a pep talk. I'd like to forget about it, actually.
[ He's not going to forget about it. It's haunting him so fucking bad, because her -- this 'Stitches' wasn't the only thing, more laughter echoing in the back of his head. Stitches and Needles and Patches. Ha-ha-ha. The hand that holds out the carton shakes ever so-slightly. ]
[If he wants to push it down then fast be it from her to stop him. That's a living nightmare, as nonsensical as dreams and real as day. You don't bounce back from that with a pat on the back.
Camille slips a smoke out for herself, flipping the end deftly and holding it out to be lit.]
This place just likes to push on our bruises.
[And as if summoned, another shadow swallows them whole.]
2/2 ((SPOILERS, CW: self-harm, parental/caregiver abuse, sadism, loss of autonomy, body exposure))
((NOTE: While not explicitly mentioned in this excerpt Daan will be able to see that Camille has cut words into her whole body, excluding only her neck, face, and hands.))
"Camille. Open up." My mother, but not angry. Coaxing. Nice, even. I remained silent. A few more jiggles. A knock. Then silence as she padded away again.
Camille. Open up. The image of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, a spoonful of sour-smelling syrup hovering over me. Her medicine always made me feel sicker than before. Weak stomach. Not as bad as Marian's, but still weak.
My hands began sweating. Please don't let her come back. I had a flash of Curry, one of his crappy ties swinging wildly over his belly, busting into the room to save me. Carrying me off in his smoky Ford Taurus, Eileen stroking my hair on the way back to Chicago.
My mother slipped a key into the lock. I never knew she had a key. She entered the room smugly, her chin tilted high as usual, the key dangling from a long pink ribbon. She wore a powder blue sundress and carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a box of tissues, and a satiny red cosmetic bag.
"Hi baby," she sighed. "Amma told me about what happened to you two. My poor little ones. She's been purging all morning. I swear, and I know it will sound boastful, but except for our own little outfit, meat is getting completely unreliable these days. Amma said it was probably the chicken?"
"I guess so," I said. I could only run with whatever lie Amma told. It was clear she could maneuver better than I.
"I can't believe you both fainted right on our own stairs, while I was sleeping just inside. I hate that idea," Adora said. "Her bruises! You'd have thought she was in a catfight."
There's no way my mother bought that story. She was an expert in illness and injury, and she would not be taken in unless she wanted to be. Now she was going to tend to me, and I was too weak and desperate to ward her off. I began crying again, unable to stop.
"I feel sick, Momma."
"I know, baby." She stripped the sheet off me, flung it down past my toes in one efficient move, and when I instinctively put my hands across myself, she took them and placed them firmly to my side.
"I have to see what's wrong, Camille." She tilted my jaw from side to side and pulled my lower lip down, like she was inspecting a horse. She raised each of my arms slowly and peered into my armpits, jabbing fingers into the hollows, then rubbed my throat to feel for swollen glands. I remembered the drill. She put a hand between my legs, quickly, professionally. It was the best way to feel a temperature, she always said. Then she softly, lightly drew her cool fingers down my legs, and jabbed her thumb directly into open wound of my smashed ankle. Bright green splashes exploded in front of my eyes, and I automatically tucked my legs beneath me, turned on my side. She used the moment to poke at my head until she hit the smashed-fruit spot on its crown.
"Just another little bit, Camille, and we'll be all over." She wet her tissues with alcohol and scrubbed at my ankle until I couldn't see anything for my tears and snot. Then she wrapped it tight with gauze that she cut with tiny clippers from her cosmetic bag. The wound began bleeding through immediately so the wrapping soon looked like the flag of Japan: pure white with a defiant red circle. Next she tilted my head down with one hand and I felt an urgent tugging at my hair. She was cutting it off around the wound. I began to pull away.
"Don't you dare, Camille. I'll cut you. Lie back down and be a good girl." She pressed a cool hand on my cheek, holding my head in place against the pillow, and snip snip snip, sawed through a swath of my hair until I felt a release. An eerie exposure to air that my scalp was unused to. I reached back and felt a prickly patch the size of a half dollar on my head. My mother quickly pulled my hand away, tucked it against my side, and began rubbing alcohol on my scalp. Again I lost my breath the pain was so stunning.
She rolled me onto my back and ran a wet washcloth over my limbs as if I were bedridden. Her eyes were pink where she'd been pulling at the lashes. Her cheeks had that girlish flush. She'd plucked up her cosmetic bag and began sifting through various pillboxes and tubes, finding a square of folded tissue from the bottom, wadded and slightly stained. From its centre she produced an electric blue pill.
"One second, sweetheart."
I could hear her hit the steps urgently, and knew she was heading down to the kitchen.
[ He's silent as Camille takes a stick for herself, asking for a light. He, with the slighest begrudgingness, fishes out a light (do I have one. I DON'T KNOW for the sake of this I'm going to say I have one for now) and holds it to hers.
And then he flinches back like he's done it wrong, like he's burnt himself on the flame when the shadows envelop them a second time. The dulled light in his eye goes wild briefly at the invasive touches of the check-up, a flare rarely seen in his often-blank and passive face, memory and sensation bleeding over to him. You don't want something like that. It's for a good cause. It's because she loves you. It's because She loves you.
He takes one heavy step back and then two, and the way he looks at Camille is like a person keeping eye contact with a wild animal that stands still for now, even though it just bit him moments earlier. ]
[The memory itself makes her skin crawl. Her stomach turns anew. There's the disgust for things seen outside yourself, and then there's the disgust for things felt within.
Camille watches her body be invaded by pale fingers. From this angle the curve and thin knuckles made them look like spiders. She swallows seeing the pink rim of Adora's eyes, lashes newly plucked from nerves or eagerness. She looks hungry. Camille is a dead fish in her own bed, flopped this way and that, sweat-sheen from the comedown beading like scales over her forehead and back.
And when it's all done she's the one still holding her ground. Daan is backing up. Daan is looking at her like a new beast in his unholy city. Her throat clenches to a girlish rasp. Small, desperate.]
[ The call of his name brings some level of clarity back into his eyes -- something dim and broad focusing on a pinpoint that almost looks to pierce through Camille herself.
She's not any of them. He breathes out, hollow, and straightens his posture.
His expression dims back to its usual dullness, maybe even a little more than before. Sullen and yet, somehow empty. But he flicks the match to whip out the fire before dropping it, snuffing it out into the dirt below. That hand sticks itself deep into his pocket while the other holds his own cigarette, looking at Camille ruefully. ]
[He's not leaving. Fright fades out for hollow distance. Worse in some respects.
Camille is thrilled to see it. Don't leave. Even if he gets colder. Even if he doesn't like her, not half so much as she likes him. Just as long as he doesn't go.
She's so tired of being the loser.]
Momma had her way of doing things. [She wets her lips.] She liked her girls sickly.
[An understatement. Camille takes a drag off the cigarette and looks to the side, blinking back the pricks in her eyes.]
[Not a one of them came out right. Save for one. Camille takes another puff, sweet toxins curling their hooks into her blood.
She doesn't want to talk about Marian. Dropping her into conversation of any kind felt like cheapening her. And she's selfish: Marian is hers, now. No one has a claim to her but Camille.]
...I'm sorry. None of it is nice to see.
[Her mother's love. Her scrap paper body. Whichever had put him off, she was sorry for it.]
[ He stands there, little bits of burning ash falling from the tip of his cigarette. The embers burn out before they can land anywhere, disappearing into the fog. He looks ever-so-slightly spaced out, staring into some middle distance. ]
Nnh. But she went to prison, didn't she. Even if it was for a different thing.
They mean well. [Camille nods. Karlach especially. The woman was so inescapably There For You, it made her feel ashamed to have mentioned a thing to her at all. Someone else needs those attentions, surely.
In the meantime, here they are. Bitter husks huffing nicotine, as if smoke could fill the pernicious hollows inside.]
You too, huh? [Should have figured. He doesn't seem a man for whom many things went right.] What did they do?
[ Karlach really is just their positive cheeseball. Squishes her. Don't die or else.
Daan looks at Camille with an unreadable eye, shadowed, like he's deeply debating it -- but fuck it, you know? She's already learned more than he'd typically like to share, and what's another to rip the plaster off here rather than find out one more depressing factoid about him later in the line like an extended revelation of misery.
He's tired of it. The repeated echo 'Oh, I'm sorry', the multiple looks of pity about his bizarre and wretched life. ]
Worshippers of an older cult sect of an old god. Travelled all over Europa to keep finding their like. I hated that life, but they didn't listen much. Tried to get me in on it but if there's one single good thing I'll say about Sylvian, it's that She doesn't allow children who refuse to be involved in Her name.
...
They're gone now. Left for the meadows like they usually did one night and never came back.
That's what the occult does to you -- deteriorates your mind and eats you alive. And still, they loved it more than they loved me.
[don't jinx it??????? Puts Karlach in a bulletproof glass case
It's a different refrain from her own. Not beyond imagination though. His cults probably have more push behind the propaganda. Helps to buy in when the proof is in front of your eyes. Still, the frame remains the same, mundane or magical. She's never heard of a family in that situation that came out clean. To raise your kids in it takes a special level of gall. To leave them for it, even more.
Camille shakes her head, ruminating on the cigarette.]
You're lucky you got out. Unlucky that they went all in, but... [She trails off. Thinking. Pulling another drag.] Nothing fills it in right. The holes they gouge in you, growing up. I think there's a cut off for healing a fucked up kid. You can get better, but getting "fixed" is like chasing rainbows. Can't really catch up.
I've got people looking out for me now. It helps. [She nods.] And I care for them. Don't really deserve them, frankly. As much as they do to show me I'm loved, it's coming about twenty years too late.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
She feels greedy eyeing up his cigarettes. Precious commodity, that. She holds her hand out anyway.]
May I have one?
[It's less personal for her, but it's still a horror show. Her nerves could use the soothing.]
If that's usual way the place works, then... Why trust it? It's a personalized Fuck You from hell.
[Is it, though? She thinks of the base of each stitch in mottled skin and shivers. If it had been Marian she'd have ripped herself apart.]
Elise is the woman you talked to. The one you loved while she lived. You still love her, but she's not with you. Not in the way this "Prehival" wants you to think.
no subject
He pauses for a moment, and then holds the carton out so she can take one herself. ]
Thank you, but I didn't ask for a pep talk. I'd like to forget about it, actually.
[ He's not going to forget about it. It's haunting him so fucking bad, because her -- this 'Stitches' wasn't the only thing, more laughter echoing in the back of his head. Stitches and Needles and Patches. Ha-ha-ha. The hand that holds out the carton shakes ever so-slightly. ]
1/2
[If he wants to push it down then fast be it from her to stop him. That's a living nightmare, as nonsensical as dreams and real as day. You don't bounce back from that with a pat on the back.
Camille slips a smoke out for herself, flipping the end deftly and holding it out to be lit.]
This place just likes to push on our bruises.
[And as if summoned, another shadow swallows them whole.]
2/2 ((SPOILERS, CW: self-harm, parental/caregiver abuse, sadism, loss of autonomy, body exposure))
"Camille. Open up." My mother, but not angry. Coaxing. Nice, even. I remained silent. A few more jiggles. A knock. Then silence as she padded away again.
Camille. Open up. The image of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, a spoonful of sour-smelling syrup hovering over me. Her medicine always made me feel sicker than before. Weak stomach. Not as bad as Marian's, but still weak.
My hands began sweating. Please don't let her come back. I had a flash of Curry, one of his crappy ties swinging wildly over his belly, busting into the room to save me. Carrying me off in his smoky Ford Taurus, Eileen stroking my hair on the way back to Chicago.
My mother slipped a key into the lock. I never knew she had a key. She entered the room smugly, her chin tilted high as usual, the key dangling from a long pink ribbon. She wore a powder blue sundress and carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a box of tissues, and a satiny red cosmetic bag.
"Hi baby," she sighed. "Amma told me about what happened to you two. My poor little ones. She's been purging all morning. I swear, and I know it will sound boastful, but except for our own little outfit, meat is getting completely unreliable these days. Amma said it was probably the chicken?"
"I guess so," I said. I could only run with whatever lie Amma told. It was clear she could maneuver better than I.
"I can't believe you both fainted right on our own stairs, while I was sleeping just inside. I hate that idea," Adora said. "Her bruises! You'd have thought she was in a catfight."
There's no way my mother bought that story. She was an expert in illness and injury, and she would not be taken in unless she wanted to be. Now she was going to tend to me, and I was too weak and desperate to ward her off. I began crying again, unable to stop.
"I feel sick, Momma."
"I know, baby." She stripped the sheet off me, flung it down past my toes in one efficient move, and when I instinctively put my hands across myself, she took them and placed them firmly to my side.
"I have to see what's wrong, Camille." She tilted my jaw from side to side and pulled my lower lip down, like she was inspecting a horse. She raised each of my arms slowly and peered into my armpits, jabbing fingers into the hollows, then rubbed my throat to feel for swollen glands. I remembered the drill. She put a hand between my legs, quickly, professionally. It was the best way to feel a temperature, she always said. Then she softly, lightly drew her cool fingers down my legs, and jabbed her thumb directly into open wound of my smashed ankle. Bright green splashes exploded in front of my eyes, and I automatically tucked my legs beneath me, turned on my side. She used the moment to poke at my head until she hit the smashed-fruit spot on its crown.
"Just another little bit, Camille, and we'll be all over." She wet her tissues with alcohol and scrubbed at my ankle until I couldn't see anything for my tears and snot. Then she wrapped it tight with gauze that she cut with tiny clippers from her cosmetic bag. The wound began bleeding through immediately so the wrapping soon looked like the flag of Japan: pure white with a defiant red circle. Next she tilted my head down with one hand and I felt an urgent tugging at my hair. She was cutting it off around the wound. I began to pull away.
"Don't you dare, Camille. I'll cut you. Lie back down and be a good girl." She pressed a cool hand on my cheek, holding my head in place against the pillow, and snip snip snip, sawed through a swath of my hair until I felt a release. An eerie exposure to air that my scalp was unused to. I reached back and felt a prickly patch the size of a half dollar on my head. My mother quickly pulled my hand away, tucked it against my side, and began rubbing alcohol on my scalp. Again I lost my breath the pain was so stunning.
She rolled me onto my back and ran a wet washcloth over my limbs as if I were bedridden. Her eyes were pink where she'd been pulling at the lashes. Her cheeks had that girlish flush. She'd plucked up her cosmetic bag and began sifting through various pillboxes and tubes, finding a square of folded tissue from the bottom, wadded and slightly stained. From its centre she produced an electric blue pill.
"One second, sweetheart."
I could hear her hit the steps urgently, and knew she was heading down to the kitchen.
no subject
And then he flinches back like he's done it wrong, like he's burnt himself on the flame when the shadows envelop them a second time. The dulled light in his eye goes wild briefly at the invasive touches of the check-up, a flare rarely seen in his often-blank and passive face, memory and sensation bleeding over to him. You don't want something like that. It's for a good cause. It's because she loves you. It's because She loves you.
He takes one heavy step back and then two, and the way he looks at Camille is like a person keeping eye contact with a wild animal that stands still for now, even though it just bit him moments earlier. ]
no subject
Camille watches her body be invaded by pale fingers. From this angle the curve and thin knuckles made them look like spiders. She swallows seeing the pink rim of Adora's eyes, lashes newly plucked from nerves or eagerness. She looks hungry. Camille is a dead fish in her own bed, flopped this way and that, sweat-sheen from the comedown beading like scales over her forehead and back.
And when it's all done she's the one still holding her ground. Daan is backing up. Daan is looking at her like a new beast in his unholy city. Her throat clenches to a girlish rasp. Small, desperate.]
...Daan?
no subject
She's not any of them. He breathes out, hollow, and straightens his posture.
His expression dims back to its usual dullness, maybe even a little more than before. Sullen and yet, somehow empty. But he flicks the match to whip out the fire before dropping it, snuffing it out into the dirt below. That hand sticks itself deep into his pocket while the other holds his own cigarette, looking at Camille ruefully. ]
...Not much for good bedside manners, was she...?
no subject
Camille is thrilled to see it. Don't leave. Even if he gets colder. Even if he doesn't like her, not half so much as she likes him. Just as long as he doesn't go.
She's so tired of being the loser.]
Momma had her way of doing things. [She wets her lips.] She liked her girls sickly.
[An understatement. Camille takes a drag off the cigarette and looks to the side, blinking back the pricks in her eyes.]
no subject
Fucking awful person, she sounds like.
[ If Camille still has some shred of love for her -- Daan doesn't care to respect it too much, not without her speaking up for it willingly, anyway. ]
no subject
You could carve that into the family tree.
[Not a one of them came out right. Save for one. Camille takes another puff, sweet toxins curling their hooks into her blood.
She doesn't want to talk about Marian. Dropping her into conversation of any kind felt like cheapening her. And she's selfish: Marian is hers, now. No one has a claim to her but Camille.]
...I'm sorry. None of it is nice to see.
[Her mother's love. Her scrap paper body. Whichever had put him off, she was sorry for it.]
no subject
[ He stands there, little bits of burning ash falling from the tip of his cigarette. The embers burn out before they can land anywhere, disappearing into the fog. He looks ever-so-slightly spaced out, staring into some middle distance. ]
Nnh. But she went to prison, didn't she. Even if it was for a different thing.
More big spoilers
Much the same, actually.
I had another sister, when I was young. Momma loved her to death.
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Sorry.
[ To hear it. That it happened to you. What happened to her other sister. ]
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[For his wife, her father. The whole damned hellscape of Prehevil. For whatever she'd done to spook him.
She sucks back on the cigarette and blows the smoke in a thin stream.]
Well. Aren't we just a pair of peaches on a fine summer day.
no subject
[ He knows people are trying, and good for the ones that have succeeded to some level. ]
Would've been in a pretty different situation. Maybe not even here at all if our parents loved us the way they should've.
no subject
In the meantime, here they are. Bitter husks huffing nicotine, as if smoke could fill the pernicious hollows inside.]
You too, huh? [Should have figured. He doesn't seem a man for whom many things went right.] What did they do?
cw implications of cult child abuse
Daan looks at Camille with an unreadable eye, shadowed, like he's deeply debating it -- but fuck it, you know? She's already learned more than he'd typically like to share, and what's another to rip the plaster off here rather than find out one more depressing factoid about him later in the line like an extended revelation of misery.
He's tired of it. The repeated echo 'Oh, I'm sorry', the multiple looks of pity about his bizarre and wretched life. ]
Worshippers of an older cult sect of an old god. Travelled all over Europa to keep finding their like. I hated that life, but they didn't listen much. Tried to get me in on it but if there's one single good thing I'll say about Sylvian, it's that She doesn't allow children who refuse to be involved in Her name.
...
They're gone now. Left for the meadows like they usually did one night and never came back.
That's what the occult does to you -- deteriorates your mind and eats you alive. And still, they loved it more than they loved me.
no subject
It's a different refrain from her own. Not beyond imagination though. His cults probably have more push behind the propaganda. Helps to buy in when the proof is in front of your eyes. Still, the frame remains the same, mundane or magical. She's never heard of a family in that situation that came out clean. To raise your kids in it takes a special level of gall. To leave them for it, even more.
Camille shakes her head, ruminating on the cigarette.]
You're lucky you got out. Unlucky that they went all in, but... [She trails off. Thinking. Pulling another drag.] Nothing fills it in right. The holes they gouge in you, growing up. I think there's a cut off for healing a fucked up kid. You can get better, but getting "fixed" is like chasing rainbows. Can't really catch up.
I've got people looking out for me now. It helps. [She nods.] And I care for them. Don't really deserve them, frankly. As much as they do to show me I'm loved, it's coming about twenty years too late.
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[ They just left him, after all. But maybe that's just semantics. It all still follows him like a plague.
But he looks at her instead. ]
What... so that's it for you, then? You think you'll never move on?
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I'll move, but I'm carrying a few things with me.
Will you?
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I will once I have my answers.
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[Monsters and what have you.]
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I don't know.
[ Calling it the source feels wrong. ]
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