fuck

@fuckingstripe​

        Kate’s tried, but there’s no budging Molly: she’ll come out of her room when she’s good and ready. It used to be that Zephyr’s visits brought her bounding out, all smiles, looking for a present, a laugh, a rumbling, “Hey, kid,” from the closest thing she’s ever had to a second mum–or a da, Kate supposes–but sixteen is a hard age. Not so easy to put off a sixteen-year-old with white lies and generalities about where Zephyr goes and what she does, about what she means to Kate, who she is to their little family of two. Not easy to explain why sometimes they’re three–wonderfully, happily three–but just as often, not.

         Just the two of them on the sofa. Kate brings their cups of tea round. Sitting with her, she looks again–can’t help but look–at the fresh scar, a confronting pink, crossing almost the whole of Zephyr’s face in a slash across her aquiline nose. She makes a little sound of sympathetic pain, of frustration and tenderness, their mugs clinking onto coasters on the low table before she can scoot forward on the cushions and reach for her, taking her chin.

         “Shouldnae ask where you got it, then,” she says. “No, I don’t want to know. C’mere.” She cups her face in both hands, looking deeply at her. Still Zephyr, fitting just right between her palms. Still all the usual questions–where have you been, what have you done, who were you with? Did you see someone else, touch someone else, while you were out there? Did someone else make you smile like me, and laugh? Did you miss me at all? And all the answers she’s afraid of, too. No, I don’t want to know. You could fill an ocean with the murk of all the things that go unsaid between them two.

         She leans in and puts a kiss on the scar, right where it makes a jagged path over the bridge of Zephyr’s nose. “Poor lamb,” she says softly. She kisses her brow. “I’ve missed you. You don’t have any more, do you? That I can’t see?” It makes her gut clench to think of it. She needs to take inventory of these wounds, start pouring tenderness on them now.

Kate fusses. To anyone else, to a random observer, she wouldn't appear to be but she is. In her own obstinate way. Kate fusses. With tea, with concerned looks and tender touches, with what she keeps behind the blue of her eyes. "That's asking," Zephyr points out, the corner of her mouth denting a wry smile in her right cheek. Indirectly. Hopefully. A quiet entreaty teeming with the tenuous hope that a story will be told - as if knowing what happened to mar her face like that will help tend to it or understand or even just help with whatever it is brooding inside Kate. It won't. It never does.

The fussing simultaneously intensifies and mollifies. Warm lips find the wound still in the fresh, pink stage of its healing process, move upward. "If I said no you'd still take an inventory." The truth is that Zephyr doesn't know because she doesn't remember. Kate will. She's good like that. Stores so much in that stubborn head of hers. So much that needn't be stored. Chin jutting out, Zephyr peers down at her and her smile softens, her brows relax, her body sinks a little into the inviting softness of the cushion - of Kate's body. "You thought about me?" A tease. Some cheap, transparent ploy designed to goad her into talking. Zephyr missed listening to her, to the inflection in her voice.  Missed watching her, too. So now, she is. Watching her. Gazing into her eyes. 

The blue of the sky or that of the sea have never come close to that unique shade in her irises. Zephyr knows. She's looked for it. At dawn, midday, dusk. Between clouds. By the shore right before the waves break and crash. Even in flower petals or blossoms. It doesn't exist anywhere. Only here. In those eyes. She'd tell her if she could but Zephyr doesn't know how. She's a soldier, not a fucking poet.

        Stripe laughs at her. There’s a flurry of sensations in Jane’s head, hot and cold and hot and cold and she’s dizzy with it; her heart is pounding. Her brow pinches, mouth tightening into a line.

        “It’s not,” she says, and with great delicacy and effort repeats, “Bullshit.” She feels the drag at the corners of her mouth as she frowns. “You’re bullshit.” She doesn’t touch Stripe uninvited, except when she’s hurt, but she’d like to touch her now. She’d like to shove her hands away from her bag, from her boots, to take Stripe by the shoulders and shake her, or by the arm and pull on it, to make her feel, physically, immediately, the urgency of what’s in Jane’s heart and head.

          “You like to do whatever you want,” she says, her voice climbing a little louder, “and whatever you think is right. Because you think you’re always right. You’re not. You’re not right about me. Or yourself. So you. You spare me the… Bullshit. You don’t get to talk to me like that. You don’t get to laugh at me.” She takes a breath through her flaring nostrils. “And you can’t have any pheen.”

The curse word in Knitter’s mouth momentarily clears away the look of exasperation and resentment on Stripe’s face and supplants it with surprise; then surprise just as quickly and unforgivably morphs into something plainly akin to amusement. “I’m bullshit.” She wipes non-existent residue of water off her mouth with the back of her hand but it fails to fully muzzle the faint scoff. What does that even mean? Still, it’s something. Maybe Stripe’s rattled her enough for the medic to start waking the fuck up.

Mark the day… June 17 2021… Jane has said a cuss

it’s what Scientists call The Stripe Effect

(read more for internal dialogue)

Hands seize her. Alright then. Spinning and twisting, she disentangles herself from the male’s grip then kicks him out before jumping, spread eagle, from the stage to the drunken mass of patrons fighting each other in a great, thick miasma of expletives and exclamations heavily coated with a layer of body odour from which exudes the generous fumes of various kinds of alcohol and tobacco. She feels alive enough to pull and push and punch and hit, and the great volley of blows are returned with an adrenaline fuelled by the pints of ale she’s consummated and sustained by a strength unnatural for a woman. What bruises and cuts she sustains are cushioned with less efficacy than a couple of shots of morphine. Alcohol doesn’t so much take the edge off as it erodes it - or gives the impression to erode it. Because that fucker is back, hours later, sharper than ever. It hurts. Not enough. Never enough. Still, she crawls out of the fight, stumbles against a tall chap minding his own business, snatches the pint from his hand.

 “That’s a good lad,” she slurs, her fingers a brusque slap on his back. The glance she spares him from above the rim of the tankard gives way to a glare than a stare, eyes widening quite eloquently when she slams the empty cup on the table. “Shit!” Drops of beer generously rain on the woman’s coat. Because it is a woman. “”Fuck, I’m sorry. You…” True snorts at her own naive surprise and swipes the back of her hand across her mouth. There is a moment, a frown, a cant of her head just as the idea hits her again “How much does a violin cost?”

Astonishment is plain enough on her face, obvious in that obnoxious (and quite frankly, borderline conceited) way Stripe likes to indulge in whenever that exact kind of attention gets delivered. And it’s all the more exaggerated - the wry arch of her brow creasing her forehead, the hook-like quality of her lips curving up up up - when she already knew. Because of course she knew. The medic’s hardly any good at that either. Pretending. Faking. Concealing. Something Stripe usually resents, begrudging Knitter for increasing risks, rendering situations more perilous than they ought to be or already were, or even straight up endangering the both of them. Now, though, oh now she doesn’t mind that fucking trait of her at all, no ma’am.