knightsoflegend | Valentine's Day }{ Open post

Faye glances over lazily when her door opens. Only a few people would come in unannounced, but the last one she expects to see right now is the one standing in her room. She thinks about telling her to get out, throwing something. But she doesn't. She just stares for a few seconds that seem to stretch out forever.

"No clue what you're talking about." Her tone is flat, bored. She's not even trying to hide it as a lie, which is all the more obvious when her gaze shifts from Lila to the box still on her dresser. She huffs out a sigh and shoves herself up to sit up in her bed.

"What do you want? I thought you were done with me and my messes."

Twisting her purse between her hands in a rare show of nervousness, she lifts a shoulder in a shrug, unconcerned with Faye's tone. "Yeah, well, you fucked up. You never said you were done with my messes."

Crossing the floor, she drops her purse along the way and snatches the gift off the dresser, throwing it on the bed and following it down to sit, unasked, tucking her legs up underneath her. The nervousness shows up again in the way she starts twisting her new watch around her wrist.

"Open it."

Again, Faye thinks about doing a lot of things - kicking her out, throwing the gift box back in her face, telling her to fuck off and die. But all she does is press her lips into a thin line and tries to swallow the creeping feeling of a lump forming in her throat. She's not going to get fucking emotional. Getting mad is always better.

She snatches the present off the bed and opens it as angrily as possible. When it's open, she doesn't even look inside, just drops it back on the bed. When Faye's pissed, she can be kind of an intolerable brat. Lila said to open it, so she did.

"There. Happy?"

Lila flinches. She knows that Faye is pissed at her, she knows why, and she knows that she has every right to be. Especially because Lila isn't going to apologize. Someone needed to tell Faye to tone it down when she didn't need to pick a fight. Faye is her best friend, which she is still struggling to comprehend because Lila is pretty sure Faye is her first friend too. The idea of her in pointless danger is maddening.

Her fingers dig into her wrist roughly and she blinks rapidly before she decides to explain the gift. "It's called a curse amulet. I made it. Basically, I cursed the stone so that if a dream worker ever tries to curse you, it'll stop the curse and break so you know what happened." She forgoes explaining how much effort it takes to make an amulet, how she gets destroyed by the blowback after hours of effort. She doesn't want any condescending pity and she thinks Faye might be angry enough to shove that in her face.

She knows that Faye is smart enough to know what it means. It's an amulet that will protect Faye from Lila.

Edited 2014-02-07 04:43 (UTC)

Stubbornness runs deep in Faye's soul, but as Lila explains the gift, curiosity gets the better of her. More than that, she can't help but immediately start to think about the way that Lila's gift works. She doesn't really understand how the blowback works, but she knows it exists... and she knows that Lila doesn't like it, that it's not fun.

So why the fuck would she go through it just to make Faye a stupid necklace.

She's not stupid. She's knows why it's there. She knows that there aren't other curse workers around that they know of, let alone dream workers specifically. So this necklace is really only here to protect Faye against one person, and that person happens to be in the room with her.

Leaning forward, she pulls it from the box so she can get a look at it. Her expression is indifferent, but not quite as infuriated as it was a few seconds ago. She lets the chain dangle from her index finger, the stone twirling slightly from the momentum. Her gaze shifts from the pendent to the girl at the end of her bed. Her hand drops back to her lap, but she doesn't let go of the chain. In fact, her finger slowly gather it until the whole necklace is held in her fist.

"You didn't have to." The words are grumbled, less biting and more reluctant gratitude. But there's something else there, something she's not saying. Even through all of it, she's still not scared of Lila coming after her. Her door has been unlocked. She hasn't lost any sleep out of fear. If she keeps it, if she wears it... it won't be to protect herself, but just because it's a gift from Lila.

[ paris is burning - st. vincent ]

It's not the first time she's made an amulet, it probably won't be the last. But it is the only time she's positive the amulet will never be used.

"I know," she says simply. She's always known that Faye isn't scared of what she can do, she'd outright said so in Paris. She could explain the whole just in case parts of the necklace -- other magic -- but she refrains because in all honesty, it's not important. "That's why it's called a gift."

Even though dream work is something she always wants to do, fingers brushing across the back of hands and bare shoulders to spend her sleepless evenings flipping through peoples' dreams like her own personal Netflix, she rarely wants to actually curse Faye. She doesn't need to poke through her friend's brain because she could just, surprise of all surprises, ask.

Her fingertips gently press against the chain and pendant, committing the textures to memory. She drops her gaze to some nondescript part of the room, anywhere to not keep looking at the girl she wants to be mad at. Fighting with Lila was stupid. They were allies, ...friends? Faye barely knew what to call it before, but now it was all that much more complicated.

"It's harder to be mad at you when you're being nice to me." She manages to make it sound like a bad thing, annoying. As her rage fades, all she's left with are emotions she doesn't want to face- regret, loneliness. Her pride keeps her from succumbing to them fully, but the fact that she recognizes the urge makes her want to scream. "I'm guessing you got laid?" Those thoughts are only barely connected, but there is the underlying implication that Lila only came to her because she's riding a post boyfriend visit high.

A little snort of laughter precedes the way her eyebrows lift. That's sort of the point of being nice to her.

Faye is definitely right. Lila came because Sylar left. But it's not so much a high as post-boyfriend blues -- and the person she wanted to see was Faye.

She shrugs, playing with the watch again. She's not used to having anything on her wrist because it bumps against the edge of her glove, but it's loose like a bracelet so it doesn't bother her, she just needs to get used to it. The same why she needed to get used to wearing earrings 24/7 when she got her ears pierced.

Her hand drifts up to catch the edge of her ear, the faint scar left over from the pin Cassel used before her head shakes like she's trying to banish the memory.

"Yeah. We went to Nando's." Just like their first date, which Lila has definitely mentioned.

"You have a problem with that place." A better person would think it was cute, romantic that he took her to the same place as their first date. Faye doesn't, but that's because she vehemently denies that there's a need for romance. It fell into the same category as needing people. She wasn't interested in that, especially now. "I made Andie watch action movies with me." Something with explosions, blood, thrills. Something that had nothing to do with romance. The funny thing is, Faye doesn't even particularly like action flicks. It was just something to watch, to take her mind off how shitty the last two weeks have been.

She's actively not talking about the problem, not saying anything about the strange tension that still lingers between them, twisting in her gut. She doesn't want to be the one to give in and address it, because that means possibly feeling it, and she doesn't want to do that...now or ever.

Delicious chicken, of course she has a problem with Nando's, and she says as much, tumbling head first into bluntness. "I love food. You, on the other hand, don't love action movies, so what gives? Trying to get in Andie's pants?"

Faye scoffs a laugh and shakes her head. "I'm not even sure I want to know what sex with Andie is like. Pretty sure they don't make vibrators that move that fast." There is such thing as TMI with these two, even with things being weird.

"I just wasn't in the mood for the romantic bullshit." Which vaguely translates to 'we broke up right before valentines day and it sucked.' Nevermind that Lila would have been out with her actual significant other that day anyway. Faye doesn't understand her feelings. Whatever.

"Isn't the point of Valentine's Day just chocolate?" Oh poor Lila and her incredibly romantic ideals of holidays. (To be fair, it had been romantic, but it was a surprise. Her plans had consisted of chocolate and tv before the surprise date.)

"And those dumb stuffed bears that say romantic shit like 'Let's Bang'." Yep. Very romantic.

"I think the point is to be with people you give a shit about." The bitter edge to her tone is NOT supposed to be as prominent as it ends up being. Whoops. She tries to cover it with a sarcastic smile that's masking how she's still pissed and hurt and confused by everything she's been feeling. Unfortunately, it's not the most convincing look (bluff 17).

"And I'm fresh out of those."

Lila's mouth presses into a line and it's clear Faye's words struck her. Not because she's insulted by the fact that Faye can't seem to give a fuck (and that is so clearly debatable (sense motive 17) that Lila isn't going to touch it) or that she can read the implications that her best friend is jealous.

She's pissed off again.

"You ever been to a funeral, Faye? No, didn't think so." She barrels onward without letting Faye answer because she knows the girl doesn't remember much, if anything, about her past. Faye and Sylar were like a matching set of dumbasses. She has to put up with Sylar occasionally dying -- she's never sure whose blood it is -- but he comes back and Faye does not. Faye will not. That isn't her super power.

"I have. They're nice, people say really wonderful things about dead jackasses, I mean you cannot find more lying anywhere else than at a funeral." The funeral she remembers, of course, is Philip Sharpe's so she might be just a tad bitter in her own right. "They always have someone really close to the dead person say something extra nice. Some stupid anecdote about the ridiculous time they ate sixteen boxes of pizza rolls when they were drunk. How they were a soldier in God's army and now they're marching with the angels. It's great."

Her fingers clench against Faye's bedspread. "If you died, do you know who they would make do that dumb speech? Me. How fucking dare you act like I shouldn't be pissed off at you for getting shot because you can't seem to figure out how to keep your mouth shut for five seconds. You don't even the right to be angry with me. Because you're mad that I do actually give a shit about you." She shoves herself to her feet. "So fuck you, Faye. Fuck you for making me care and then acting like it doesn't even matter."

Edited 2014-02-11 17:08 (UTC)

Unbeknownst to her, Faye has been to plenty of funerals, most when she was a small child, one of them being her father's. There was also the Henderson girl who had her neck snapped. That was a waste of good witch blood, really. But she doesn't know anything about that. It's frustrating for her to have no frame of reference for her own life, so she looks away, feeling a little anger bubble up but knowing that isn't the point. Unfortunately, Lila's point falls on dead ears for totally different reasons.

"You weren't there." She says cooly, looking back at the girl. "I went to find you after and you weren't there so i handled it. I got over it. You couldn't even answer a fucking text for days because you were busy with him. So don't talk to me about how much you care okay." As far as Faye knew, Lila had taken off with Sylar, not embarked on an unauthorized mission. To her, nothing would have stopped the girl from responding when Faye had tried to reach out to work up the nerve to explain what happened.

"You're mad at me, because--" Taking a literal step back like she was just slapped, Lila's mouth pops open. She should have known, it was the reason she was still mad at her dad after everything.

He wasn't there.

And now Lila wasn't.

"I wasn't with him." Scotland cat is out of the bag and Lila can't find it in herself to be fussed with what the blowout is going to be because her friend, her only friend, thinks that the reason she didn't answer the phone was because she was too busy screwing her boyfriend. She sounds exhausted, like that brief burst of anger took all her energy. "I was in Scotland, trying to find a stupid magic apple to break Amara's curse."

"Scotland." The word comes out flat, and there's an instant connection. "With Gold and Emma." That's where Gold had said he was taking Emma for their special magic lessons. That's why Emma thought that Lila had told her something about the trip she had gone on. God, it all made so much fucking sense.

"You lied to me." The way she says it just makes it a fact. She's not even upset about it, because why would she be? Lying was fine, lying was normal for them. At least now she didn't feel like Lila had just blatantly ignored her for days on end because she had more important people to occupy her attention. The relief of the truth cracks her exterior, the impact spreading slow and steady. Tears spring to her eyes, because being lied to is better than feeling as alone as she had. Spending the last two weeks all tightly wound and on edge has taken its toll and she finds herself unable to stop it, hard as she may try (will 10).

"Did you at least get the fucking thing?" She grabs the nearest throw pillow and halfheartedly chucks it in Lila's direction. She doesn't really know anything about the Amara situation. She met the woman once with Gold in the library, but other than being utterly depressing about the possibility of magic being stripped from them, she didn't seem hurt or anything.

"Do you really think that's the point?" She bats the pillow away from her like a cat with a ball of yarn (reflex save 13), before picking it up and chucking it back at Faye.

"You are such a dumbass." But now she sounds more fond than pissed off and so very tired because emotions are exhausting and emotions she's not used to having are exhausting by a margin of a thousand. "Why wouldn't I text you while I was with you? Who else am I going to gloat about having wildly acrobatic and excessive sex to?"

She's pointedly ignoring the tears like they don't exist.

The pillow comes back at her and Faye just catches it (reflex 16) before dropping it beside her on the bed. Her free hand still has the necklace in it, and the weight in her palm is suddenly less bothersome, perhaps even welcome. She doesn't know the details. Some of this makes the conversation with Emma at the party make more sense. She really wants to grill Gold now, since he started that woven lie and she can only imagine he's the one behind any large scale trip.

"You want to help me with this." She holds out her hand and uncurls her fingers to reveal the coiled chain and pendant. She can do it on her own, but it's gayer this way.

She can't help rolling her eyes, even as she moves forward to take the necklace out of Faye's hand. "You know I could easily choke you with this, you're taking a risk. Now move your hair."

So kind. So bossy.

"If you wanted to kill me, I'd be dead already." She doesn't seem at all bothered with this knowledge. Instead, she just smoothly brushes her hair to one side for Lila to have better access. She's quiet again, debating saying something or just letting them fall into their old habits. It's easier to act like she doesn't care, but they both had sort of thrown that out of the water.

"I'm trying to work on my temper. It's not easy, but... I don't like fighting with you. These last few weeks have sucked."

Lila takes that in just as quietly, clasping the chain around Faye's neck and stepping back a little to perch on the edge of her bed, hands curling around the edge of the mattress. She could agree with her, the last weeks had sucked. She'd gotten used to having Faye around on the daily when one or both of them weren't away on missions. Faye is basically the only person she hangs out with outside of squiring parties that isn't mentoring crap from Eric or Russian lessons with Dimitri -- neither of which she would classify as fun.

Aside from Sylar, Faye one of maybe two people she could classify as her friend. (The other being Felicity, that thief is pretty cool.) Emma she just doesn't... know how to classify. But Faye makes sense, they're friends, they're just both really awful at it.

"I'm not used to giving a shit about people, it always backfires in new and emotionally traumatizing ways, so that's why I got mad. Because I gave a shit and you... didn't." It didn't matter that Faye had had time to come to terms with being shot, Lila hadn't and she just reacted.

"It hurt more than I thought it would. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even move." Her hand instinctively goes to rest against where the wound once was. "It happened fast and I..." She glances down, because her pride is just as bad as her temper. "I was scared. I thought I was just going to die on the floor." This may be the most honest Faye has ever been with another person.

"All I kept thinking about was that it wouldn't really matter. Wynn would lose a Knight but no one would really care, right? I'm not used to this. You and me. I know it might be because I can't remember my life before, but it just doesn't feel natural to think that someone might care if I was gone. Everyone here has always been great. Even when I'm a bitch, they just roll their eyes but they're still...there. So I don't get why I always feel like I'm on my own."

"Because you're a dumbass." It's her first instinct, to inject some levity into the situation because as much as Lila will spill her guts all over Sylar, she doesn't like doing it to anyone else. But she understands what Faye means to a T and it makes her skin crawl.

Still, she tries again.

"I get it. I mean, I get feeling like someone is going to just drop you and leave without warning or if you leave, disappear, they won't bother looking for you. Like it's... an acceptable loss." There is definitely a lot of personal experience talking there, she probably won't ever get over being abandoned by her dad. "But if you ever left or died, or something, I would drag your ass back. So I could kill you myself. You made me like you, you don't get to leave now."

"It goes both ways. Every time you talk about taking off for Oregon, it sucks. Because I know you'd rather be there. Or least somewhere else with him." It's usually a joke, something easy to brush off when they pretend they're still casual acquaintances. But Faye can't help but feel like Lila could leave...whenever. Maybe that's why it was so easy to believe the story about her being with Sylar when she was actually in Scotland. She just assumes that's how it's going to work one day.

"I'll try to stay alive if you do. And I'll stick around...if you do too." There is nothing she hates more than feeling this vulnerable

Valentine's Day }{ Open post

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