IT SHOULDN'T MAKE HER SMILE, the thought that she drove larissa to break a phone through mere words — and thoughtless ones, at that. millicent's never been good at that sort of thing. she slips out her own phone and turns her attention to it for a moment. google -> rabindranath tagore, collected short stories. that's for her to read later. it might beat reddit or captured and impr(egg)nated by the alien shapeshifter queen, volume 62.
she awaits no invitation to cross to the altar and put her hands on everything. there's something deeply naughty about it, because millicent should be handling these relics with gloves. she'd shoot anybody on her team for touching originals. but she's desperate to entrench herself in larissa's world. the contrast is heavy: this is one of the most modern apartments millicent has seen, yet its contents are plucked from the past. unknown material brushes the tips of her fingers. secret wonder underneath her palms. that smile-that-shouldn't-be brightens.
❛ what arrogance, ❜ millicent asks, ❛ when i was the one saying yay? ❜
she's turned away from larissa for a reason. millicent is ravenous. her eyes devour the room and, with it, what it means to be larissa. she circles the room urgently, with a goal of memorising every facet of larissa displayed openly for millicent to see. when she's gorged herself to satisfaction, she stops before larissa — larissa, magnum opus — and takes the broken phone to set on the altar. blasphemy? could be. but she needed to free larissa's hands, which she now takes with her own.
the hunger returns. and here she'd thought she was satisfied.
❛ everything is possible. ❜ again, what arrogance? it'll pale against millicent's and she's both ashamed and unashamed to admit it. ❛ I FOUND YOU. a week ago, we did the improbable — you, who should not be alive. i could've moved to iran with my mother, or i could have stayed at oxford, and we wouldn't never… ❜ but they did. she looks between those frightening, dazzling eyes that yearned for her last night and then were cast away, punished, upon being struck with the worst feeling: guilt. guilt inflicted by millicent, no less, to both sweeten and augment the poison. so her alien shapeshifter queen walks the earth. so millicent found her. she squeezes those cold hands that'll never retain warmth no matter how much of herself millicent pours into them. larissa is indestructible and vulnerable, fragile, her worth amounting to what millicent assigns. and millicent assigns her the worth of the world. she presses each hand to her lips — a moment to demonstrate that millicent will honour larissa in turn — and she thinks she might laugh. no, she does. it's small and delighted and doesn't capture a fraction of how millicent feels.
i was the one saying yay.
❛ would you give me the world if i asked for it? ❜ before, she'd only wanted larissa's world. now she's changed her mind. these are the inefficiencies of being human. these are the tendencies of being millicent clyde. ❛ tell me. PROMISE ME? ❜
