GIRLS&GUNS

i actually have been enjoying being active and back again and i DO wanna do more and interact and stuff, i’m just in the middle of something else with my health that keeps getting worse and it’s just fucking up. like. everything.

my life right now is literally struggling through my four work days, and then basically being unable to do anything but sleep on my three off days so that i can make it through my work days again because i can’t lose any more time at work or i’m gonna get fucking fired lmao.

like! i still have almost a month before i can see a specialist about this and i’m so fucking frustrated. i’ve consumed a serving of mashed potatoes, a chicken salad, two slices of gluten free pizza, and tonight i said fuck this shit and got a double cheese burger from sonic.

since wednesday. that’s the only solid food i’ve been able to eat since fucking wednesday. the rest is just meal replacement shakes.

and again i know No One Asked and i don’t feel like i’m being pressured to be more active but i still feel bad about it and i don’t want people to think i’m just fucking about or being standoffish or anything :(

somehow her magic’s just fine when it comes to sensing the projectile twinkies and snatching them out of midair, and for a moment that’s funny, for a moment loki wants to laugh, because it’s ridiculous. but it isn’t ridiculous, it’s defensive, it’s the part of her that’s always on guard for norman to try and hurt her. it’s the part of her that can’t fucking rest, the part of her that’s been vigilant since she was a child.

and for all the good it’s done her, maybe she should laugh. tragedy and comedy, that’s right, like the way she turns around on instinct to come over because he’s suggested she should, the way she’s smoking that cigarette down and not tasting it at all. 

the only thing she can taste is gin. her head’s already spinning, she’s somewhere a few inches outside of her own body, the way it’s like she shadows her own steps to come approach him. all laid out and rumpled and no better nor worse than her, really, too small to live up to anyone’s grandiose expectations of her. too volatile to have a shred of anyone’s respect. too weak to not weigh the risk of settling down on top of him and tucking her head in against his shoulder.

just smart enough to know that’s a bad idea, and nudge his feet off the other end of the couch and fall heavily into the space there, set her glass down on the end table, fish out the ashtray that lives in its drawer. tap her cigarette and tuck it into one of the notches while she tries, harder than she should have to, to open the little plastic wrapped pastry.

she doesn’t want it, of course, but saying no to norman’s dangerous even when he’s perfectly fucking sober.

“i, um.”

loki doesn’t actually have anything to say, and a look of consternation flits across her face. she should have something to say. she should have plenty to say, she has every right to come in here arguing and screaming and giving norman a taste of what she’d felt when the void had taken hold. how it felt for the darkness of it to pierce the center of her and for the faultlines to run along her skin and her spirit and crack and split her to the point of shattering.

“i.”

no, there’s nothing there. nothing of her left at all, it seems. she pitches forward, the movement jerking and sudden as if she’s about to vomit but it doesn’t come, and she’s quick in picking that glass of gin up again. funny that they’re really the same in this, just keep fucking drinking, just keep fucking drowning.

she’s got no reason to be here. she’s got to fucking breathe, and it shakes in her, it all fucking shakes.

“sorry.”

“oh, c’mon,” he says, “even dead gods need to eat.”

although...

“i suppose i never actually considered before if that’s true in any sense,” he muses. “i know bob said he didn’t, but like i told him, we don’t always do things because we have to, we do it because it feels nice.”

his eyes fall to the watery, lukewarm scotch left behind in the bottom of the glass in his hand, and for a quick second considers how that isn’t always true, either.

he sure as shit hasn’t been drying the stores of the tower out because he’s feeling good about anything, is he?

he drains the dregs of the booze and stands, forced when he does to pause for a moment so that the room doesn’t deign it apt to spin too very much around him, and is polite enough to pick up her glass to get her another refill despite knowing he doesn’t have to.

he does not know if perhaps, he’s doing it because it feels nice.

“feeling” at the moment is a bit too close to “thinking” and his brain is far too impaired to do much of either.

the goblin formula burns inebriates like fire does kindling, but there was a lot of them scattered around, and even his enhancements have their limits. frankly, huffing paint thinner in the maintenance closet is the only thing he hasn’t gotten around to doing yet, and wise betters wouldn’t turn that one down.

“sorry, my dear,” he says, dropping ice in both glasses, “is for people who have done something wrong and feel bad about it, or people who are about to do something wrong and feel about it, and i don’t see where either of that applies to you in this moment.”

he returns to the couch, scotch in one hand and her gin in the other and holding it out to her.

“eat,” he says, “drink. or...don’t, it’s not like i can force you.”

and, ah.

    “And people just let this person run around hurting folks like this? That’s- Well, this is New York, I don’t know what I expected.” She really didn’t have any right to complain either. Gotham was just as bad, if not worse. At least there was sunlight in this city, it was always so gloomy back home. 

  She doesn’t think anything about this bit of shoulder-to-shoulder. She’s also a very friendly person, and she would’ve been in the same boat if her mind still wasn’t doing Mach 8 trying to figure out just what in the world was going on here. 

    “Someone needs to do something about him! If he’s out here hurting people like this…? I can’t let that keep happening, no one should!”