silence gnaws at her. theresa finds herself reaching to scratch an itch on her palm — a habit she’s picked up off kit — and drops the blunt. a spark sets, brief and fleeting on the pile of dead leaves, before it’s stamped out by her foot, the surge of fear it had prompted enough to let tessa know it’s not a phantom. this is real ; she’s here. when a stillness has settled and the forest seems to listen rather than to shout, tess takes the opportunity to draw a little closer. “more like… i don’t know, a pack of hellhounds flanking you or— some follow the spiders harry potter shit.” everything she says feels hugely inappropriate, but then communicating with the dead was hardly taught in etiquette classes at saint bernadette’s. surely edgar allen poe should have prepared her for this.
“the white lady,” tess breathes. it’s cold enough to see her breath catch on the air. “or do you call her the brown lady in these parts?” if she made it out unscathed, she’d surely spend hours in the library trawling over scottish folklore, tales of phantom women seeking vengeance in the woods. “either way… she was lost before her time — sometimes suicide, sometimes murder, sometimes death through childbirth — and steals away children, sickens crops, causes motorway pile-ups…” she takes a moment to pause, wetting her lips, and lets her eyes roam over octavia’s ghost. “bit extra, but i suppose i’ve never been murdered.” the ease at which she’s accepted this is both unsettling and unsurprising. hadn’t she always been reaching for spaces beyond her grasp, trying faultlessly to will herself into other planes, searching for colour at the edge of her vision and rendering it divine intervention? but that word, danger, cuts at her skin, a dagger blade thrust deep in her stomach. for a second, she can feel herself bleeding — then it’s gone, the only evidence of it a drop of blood glistening on the tip of her finger. “fuck. i think i smoked too much.” tess closes her eyes, wills the ambient noise of a thunderstorm to quiet, and tries to open herself to the spectral.
“what danger? this whole… all-knowing spirit thing is totally cliche.” she pauses, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “sorry. that sounds a bit offensive, it’s just… well you can’t just load onto me that something terrible’s about to happen and then go giggling off into the woods.” she could, and the hardest part is theresa feels owed something for the grief that octavia’s ghost has given her, before they even met. octavia stands in the corner of rooms when a door slams too quickly, when something shifts under her foot. she sees the film over her eyes, her cold hands, body still warm to the touch and a scalp thick with blood. she feels owed — and talk of danger weakens her stomach. she feels like she’s next. “just tell me.” now it’s tessa who’s the impatient one.
– OCTAVIA KNOWS THAT SHE’S PUTTING HER AT RISK, but that’s the thing. everyone’s at risk, in a way – surely theresa won’t make her same mistakes, but still, her murderer LIVES in her room, and despite what cal might like to think about himself, there’s a killer. “ you want to know everything ? ” she leans in close, “ how i blackmailed the princess of ashcroft and she took my life for it ? you want to know how you can’t trust either of your roommates, because they’d rather watch an innocent man burn than tell the truth about what they did to me ? ”
two steps closer. the two are opposites, tessa is as warm as octavia is cold, as alive as octavia is dead, tessa wants truth and octavia wants justice. “ i’m sorry. that you had to see me, maybe it’s selfish, but that’s not how i wanted you to remember me. i wanted to be pretty. ”
she sounds a little maniacal the way she talks, the cadence of her voice is slightly unhinged – there’s something DEMONIC about her, not quite human at all. when she walks, the leaves don’t crunch beneath her feet. “ so, what would you do if you knew everything ? if you knew your roommate was a KILLER ? ”
