THERE&#x27;S NO GLORY IN LOVE.

another nod. “ yes, if you'd like it. ” buying things for others is his way of making friends.

"I mean -- I would. I would. Like it, I mean. It's lovely. It's a really nice thought -- um, thank you? Thank you. So much." Do they hug now? She feels like she owes him a hug. But.

a nod, and a stiff smile. she ought to know him well enough by now to know it's genuine, regardless of how awkward it is. “ of course you may, seeing as though it's yours. i bought it for you. ”

"For me?" Willow peers up at Minsu. "Really--?"

“ this book was published about six months ago, if i am remembering correctly. ” minsu adjusts his glasses, peering down at the cover of the book to jog his memory, “ from what i understand, this artist took the concept of old victorian paranormal photography and mixed it with the television ghost hunting trends of the mid 2000's. very interesting. ”

The last six months have been a blur to her. Willow feels like she's let herself down a bit, finding this gap in her knowledge. Never mind - that's what her holiday was for. Getting back into being her own person.

"I'd love to give this a read - would it be alright with you if I borrowed it for a day or two?"

“ you like spirits and ghosts, yes? ” he holds out a book. spirit photography; a merging of his budding interest in photography and @unpossession 's in the paranormal. he was thinking specifically of her when he bought it.

"I do, yes." They're about the only thing she likes, lately. Her eyes fall to the book first, observing all she can of it without touching it, then takes it gently from his hand to read the back. Brow furrowed. He's earning some points. "--This seems interesting. I've not heard of it. Is it new?"

WHO AM I WITHOUT YOU?

happy birthday willow

altaryen

He tries to connect the dots, map out the course of her fate in her scrambled grief, but there’s too much of it. There’s a lot of lost time to make up for—and her story must be extra lengthy and winding if death is only one part of it. He embraces her again, squeezing her tightly.

The librarian’s watchful eye is drawn to the noise; she locks eyes with Yato, who peers back at her over Willow’s shoulder. She appraises him with a vague, puzzled look, trying to determine if the girl’s distress is somehow his fault, and struggling to remember when he entered the library. He’s too visually striking to have missed, yet this is the first she’s seen of him.

She communicates her distrust in the way she stares into his eyes. You’re on thin ice. Then she looks back at the work on her computer and he slips her mind, forgets him. She does hope that girl is alright…

Maybe they should have the rest of this conversation somewhere else. But Yato is hesitant to leave the tranquility of the library; worried, perhaps, that something will be lost if they do. Libraries are sacred spaces, shrines of their own. Books, made from trees, create a forest indoors, their pages filled with the wisdom of humanity, its spirit. The contemplative hush in these buildings reads almost as ceremonial. There is a sense of kami here, a heightened awareness, that cradles their tragedy; if they go, what if they end up back at square one?

“I’ve got time,” Yato says, gently guiding her deeper, trying to find an even more private, desolate corner. Perhaps behind a shelf where the light doesn’t quite reach. “Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

#things willow should be saying to a therapist but instead-#altaryen

Librarians frighten Willow. Death weeded a lot of her social fears out of her - made her stranger, and bolder in that strangeness that she would try to hide so desperately before - but this small anxiety lingers still. She's glad to be taken a little deeper into this sanctuary, away from its keeper at the desk.

They settle somewhere between the fold-out journal shelves and she takes three deep breaths into the dusty air. She counts her breaths and presses her fingertips to her thumb one by one until the hiccupping slows. She can't quite look at Yato now, feeling foolish and small now that the hysteria has cooled to a simmer.

"Sometime after our first meeting I started writing a book about ghosts." She waits a beat, if only to fact-check herself. Whether the ghost or the book came first is irrelevant, but she finds herself fretting over the timeline whenever she's asked to talk about her inspiration. "It was... A love letter, really. To the dead. To -- to the forgotten things. Frightening things."

She was so scared of everything as a child that it became a comfort to linger in the things that others were afraid of. Maybe it made her feel more normal. Maybe that's why, when presented with the carcass-manor in the park, she felt so at home. Willow tells Yato about that next; the haunted place. Then about the possession:

"I had never been happier, Yato," Willow even smiles a bit, through her tearful shivering, saying this. "I- I stopped feeling alone. I finally had someone that understood me, that knew me. I-- I thought we would be together forever, and I didn't care what she did with my body when I wasn't able to control it. I just cared that we were together. It felt so good. Better than anything I have ever felt. Before or since. But then one day she was just -- gone, and I think - I think it just broke me. Broke something inside, and I don't think it ever healed."

Deep breath. Willow takes a few seconds to convince herself that she can recover from this. Tries to smile:

"---But that's not really here nor there, because that isn't really, um, that was just a thing that happened, you know? Something that made me realise that things like that were possible, and-- and I published my book, moved to New York, and then eventually here... And here is where -- everything really went to Hell here, anyway. I don't even know why I brought that up-- um--"

Smile falters. Lip trembles.

"I'm sorry."

skullfck

He doesn’t get a chance to recover from the initial recoil before Willow’s on him. The sudden force sends him crashing to the ground; he pulls her with him, thrashing and biting the air, clawing at her, howling like the beast he is. Coherent thought leaves him entirely—now he doesn’t even have delusion to cling onto, only instinct, pain and rage.

In the chaos, the back of his head cracks against the floor. His vision goes dark and he sees sparks, like the wiring in his head is failing. Then he’s somewhere else. Coughing on the floor of the bathroom, holding up his arms to defend his head as fists and boots come at him. Hand in his hair, knocking his skull against the sink. Listen here you little shit, you fucking worthless pig—keep squealin’, keep fuckin’ squealin’ and see what happens—

An animal wail escapes him. He hurls himself backward, trying to get away from Willow, and only knocks his head again, this time on the low kitchen cabinets.

#skullfck #friends who get high together get ptsd flashbacks together or something i guess

He's not so scary anymore. The brute strength he might have once overpowered her with doesn't work how it used to, and he seems just as afraid of her now, with the way he writhes and thrashes on the floor. She snarls down at him and fails to remember what exactly she's supposed to do next.

In a perfect world she would subdue him enough so that she could escape or break into his mind to stop the spiral he's caught in, but Willow is aware of the thrashing mass beneath her, the smell of blood and the hurt she felt only moments ago. It is not a perfect world. She might even be in Hell.

He's trying to get away from her now. Wailing. She pursues.

"I'm not going back! I'm not going back!"

Willow scratches at his face, punches, and kicks. Hawk is not Hawk, just a threat, a source of blood, and a danger that needs to be neutralised. What she lacks in actual ability, she makes up for with her scrappiness. She punches down and snaps her teeth at him, just narrowly missing his throat when a flailing hand catches the left side of her face hard.

The wet smack of his bloody palm across her cheek sends the sting through her whole body, and worse, some of that concoction he made gets into her eye. Willow shrieks, her hands fly to her face to protect her burning eye.

skullfck

This is the part where, if he weren’t high, he’d get tense. He’d start overthinking, analyzing where the boundaries should be, wondering if he should draw the line; his body would feel itchy and restrictive and not his own. The burden of responsibility would overwhelm before he even had the chance to consciously grapple with it. But, thankfully, he is high, and he can barely feel his body at all, and all his hangups have melted into the dirt. Right now, a cuddle would be nice. They can float away and fall asleep, unburdened, together.

He doesn’t answer; instead he slowly, laboriously shifts closer, throwing an arm around her shoulders and pulling her against him. The movement, slight as it is, makes the world spin. He laughs, feeling like a little kid who has just stumbled off the roundabout at the playground. Shit, he used to love going on the roundabout. He and his friends called it ‘the widowmaker’ on account of all the broken arms it bred.

A heavy breath, a yawn. “Tell me some shit ‘bout space.”

Head on his shoulder, she shuts her eyes. Happy. What a strange feeling it is. They've been through so much together that it almost becomes impossible to imagine herself in a room with him and a smile on her face at the same time. To be fair, a smile is a rarity in any circumstance -- a genuine smile, at least. She bares her teeth in the shape of one often, just trying to get people to stop looking at her with varying degrees of worry, but it doesn't come with the feeling that this one does.

She doesn't think too hard about what Hawk is feeling. For once, that's his business. What she does know is his arm is warm around her shoulders, and with the request of space facts at the forefront of her mind, she can't really keep a train of thought in any other direction.

"They sent out this space probe in 1977," Willow sighs, "Called Voyager 1, and it's been going out and out and out ever since. It's somewhere outside the solar system now. Pretty soon it's gonna take a whole day for all it's information to get back to us... 'Cause of lightspeed and whatever, and in a couple years... I think like ten years, it's gonna run out of batteries and die."

On a normal day she thinks about the space probe, out there all alone, and wants to cry. Now she doesn't mind it so much.

#skullfck

birthday success

killerdame

evolution should've had enough time to straighten out these defects in the time between dove's birth and the younger girl's: this persistent, risky faith in the goodness of others. the guttural and base instinct to trust. she's angry at nature's inability — or it's refusal — to correct what it had gotten wrong with her. hadn't enough been done to her all those decades ago? hadn't she endured enough violence to justify some mutative change, some developmental fucking chance at survival?

she passes from the dining room into the kitchen, depositing emptied plates into the sink. when she returns she begins stacking the remainder of the dishes ⸺ salad bowls and side plates and smeared utensils atop a platter. one delicate thing on top of another.

"what are your reasons believing i'm trustworthy?" she looks at wraith over the waver of a candle, gaze as level as her tone. a flat place for the girl to write her answers on. "because you watched me when you were a little girl? because i made you dinner or have, on occasion, shown what you perceive as kindness?"

#killerdame #inside u there are two wolves--#alt: hero.

Willow is starting to get red in the face. A mortified flush of pink smatters across her cheeks. Willow - not Wraith - is starting to feel like a scolded child. All the more frustrating, as Dove references her childhood obsession with White Diamond, she starts to see herself as that little girl again; all alone in her room, talking to ghosts that nobody believed were real.

There's logic to the argument that Willow has been incredibly naïve. It makes it all the more frustrating. How badly she wants to dig her nails in and reject the idea entirely is all the more embarrassing.

Of course. Willow overreached. Willow got too attached, too excited, too eager. Her eyes sting.

Wraith hardens up. Back straight, chin up. Stubborn. Blinks back her would-be tears and shakes her head.

"I thought that we had an understanding. Or maybe that you liked me. Am I wrong?"

id1eyouth

His jaw locks. For a second, it looks like he might snap back, tear into it, dismantle her with that precision he used to pride himself on—but she turns away. Just like that. Dismissed. Filed away. Reduced to background noise. That stings more than the insult.

So he goes still. His gaze lingers on her as she writes. Tracks the motion of her pen, the furrow of her concentration. He doesn't interrupt. Doesn't give her the satisfaction of proving her right.

When she finally speaks again, finally acknowledges him, his head tilts just slightly, as if considering whether to answer at all.

"Somewhere crowded," he says at last. "Somewhere loud."

Willow nods, but doesn't have it in her to look too deeply into his eyes as she agrees to his request. Somewhere crowded and loud. She knows just the place - packed with bodies and smoke machines and music that would make a lesser mortal's ears bleed at the volume they blast it out.

She's silent on the drive there, too. Doesn't bother to change out of her casual clothing - it's not the sort of place that cares how you dress up. Her boots peel off of the sticky floor like velcro with each sticky step up to the bar.

"What are we drinking?" She asks.

#id1eyouth #alt: hero.

nonplayabl

She’s tried that before and it didn’t work, but then again she was the one trying it. Zero is less likely to be suspicious of Willow’s motives. Roxy glances between the two, then nods.

“Sure, say that,” she says, dropping the empty bottles into the bag. “We don’t even have to use the word ‘rehab.’ Make him think he’s going to the fucking White Lotus.”

She laughs, sharp and cynical. Then she sighs.

“You know, the first time he did this shit, I was scared out of my mind. Like an idiot. Holding back tears, trying not to be hysterical. Now it happens and I feel nothing.” The bedside table drawer is opened; she starts tossing the collection of pills and powders into the bag. “Nothing but annoyance, anyway.”

He’s so selfish. Forcibly desensitizing everyone around him, dragging them all into his nihilistic bullshit. She wishes he would care about something, anything, for once—or, if not that, then at least just fucking commit to killing himself. Then she could take on a handful of normal clients like everyone else.

Her stomach twists, alarmed at how deep the desensitization runs. Thank God her phone buzzes in her pocket, giving her something else to focus on.

Updated ETA. Fucking LA traffic. Roxy counts to ten and keeps cleaning up.

"Empathy fatigue. Or just general fatigue." Willow nods a bit, wanders slowly to sit beside Sleeping Beauty on the bed. Pushes a stray curl from his face and tucks it behind his ear. "I know what you mean."

It's hard for her to say right now, whether or not she has ever really worried about Zero that way though. Looking back on times before the change, he was the one thing she never really concerned herself with. She was just a human, after all, and new to the city and his ways and to drugs - if the big bad demon wanted to take so many pills that he'd pass out like this, who was she - a mere mortal - to judge? To worry?

Even now, knowing what it feels like herself, Willow isn't sure she can bring herself to really feel the concern she should. He'll wake up eventually.

Willow doesn't like to think of her own calculated detachment. She glances back to Roxy with a little huff - shrugging her shoulders.

"It fascinates me that you stick around. Surely there are other things you'd rather be doing?"

#nonplayabl

@petitsdieu ♡'d !

"I miss it up there." Willow murmurs. She seems to be the only one who feels like reaching land was a terrible mistake. In the sky, isolated, there were so many terrors -- but they were terrors she understood, terrors she could even admire. Willow does not know these people, their customs, their motives. They cannot be anticipated. She feels unsafe.

But not with Hara. She has a gentle spirit. Willow can tell even from the arms-length they seem to be kept at. She peers up at the sky and then back over to the princess.

"Everything is so much heavier here."

#petitsdieu #alt: space.

killerdame

WRAITH. OF COURSE I TRUST YOU. IT WAS NEVER ABOUT TRUST.

"have you considered that you shouldn't?"

some days dove thinks all those years locked into that diamond state rung out all the liquid there was inside her, kept it from coming back. her body clean and cool and glittering, her kidneys something you could slip out and wear dangling from your ears. but blood, tears ⸺ those things were inaccessible. faraway.

it's coming back slowly. now, on the other side of the dinner table, she can feel the way something dampens under the weight of wraith's affection.

"jesus, kid, i—" she stands, lifting @unpossession's plate as she does. "this is how you get yourself hurt."

With how Wraith lives, it's impossible not to become cynical of every person she comes into contact with. It's crossed her mind more than once that this - whatever bond you might call what Willow and Dove have - will end with one of them getting hurt. Probably Willow; she's built for pain in a way that most people aren't.

Dove invites her over for dinner and then chastises her for believing that it means something. Doesn't she know how lonely Willow is? How much a small gesture like this might amount to in her heart? Why ask her around if she isn't wanted? Why pretend to care and then tell her to be wary?

She's so exhausted. She's so tired of being scared. Willow blinks back the sting in her eyes; tears are unbecoming of a superhero.

"Are you saying I shouldn't trust you?" Wraith would rather know now, so she can lean in to the punch if there's one coming.

#killerdame #alt: hero.

deficd

"Please don't."