we support women's wrongs

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Twenty days and Outis still hasn’t gotten over the argument.

She tends the front garden, her single “constructive” hobby, stabbing the earth with her hand-trowel. These sprouts need to be planted now. The frosts have stopped and with all due fortune won’t resume. It feels good to work with her hands, even if the result last year had been a garden of zucchini and nothing else. This year will be different.

If they even make it through the year.

Twenty days ago, Outis had confronted Faust. “Don Quixote. Really.”

Faust, in her usual impassive way, didn’t look Outis in the eye and merely continued tending to her claws. “You are really going to question this.”

“You’re going to endanger everything we stand for here!” Outis stepped into her space, trying to force Faust’s gaze. It didn’t work.

“As is my right.” Faust continued to work the points of her nails, the scratch of keratin on the file grating on Outis’s ears.

“And I am appealing to your right mind!”

Scratch scratch scratch. “The right mind has been reached, and agrees with the decision made prior.” The response that showed Faust would be stonewalling her. Outis gritted her teeth and reached for the file. That forced Faust’s eyes to turn to her. “…I see. The pet is jealous, is that it? Afraid Faust is seeking an exciting new heretic to replace her current one? Do you need consoling, then?”

“I don’t give a— Don’t you speak to me like I’m a child!” Outis waved the file in Faust’s face. “I’m running your county! They know my face better than yours at this point! I am asking to be included in the decisions!”

“You’re not a child. You’re a dog.” Faust’s expression did not shift. Cold. Impassive. “And frankly, if it is not positive redirection you are asking for, I will resort to more dramatic measures should you not take two steps back. Now.”

Outis’s jaw clenched. Loathing herself, loathing Faust more, she took two steps back.

“My file.” Faust’s hand extended.

With her ears flicking back, she placed the file in Faust’s hand.

“You are dismissed,” Faust said, and that ended the argument. Anyone but Faust and Outis would have shifted. She had half a mind to do it anyway, to see how quick her teeth could sink into Faust’s skinny little neck.

But, as Outis knew when she took this position, Faust may be the single most powerful woman in the world, perhaps the most powerful person if the vampire Armand did not exist. Their positions were never meant to be equal. And Outis had survived Armand’s wrath once. It had cost her everything.