#demottcm

𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇 𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐀𝐒 𝐒𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐒𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐁𝐄𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐄 ( the napkins on the table / the coasters with the faded yellow edges / the wooden surface with a million scribbles etched within, the rough, borderline illiterate C + H in the corner ), it feels unfamiliar. the whole bar, actually, feels less like her workplace. she looks around and does not see the counter, or the chair, or the colored glass panels in the window that make it look like a church, when the light is right. wherever she looks, she sees an absence. the corner at the end of the counter where he used to sit, and lean over trying to distract her when her shift would run too long. by the window on the other side of the world, the table they’d first shared a meal on, that one night. what fred isn’t saying is she can’t stay here. what fred can’t explain is that this place is haunted: the ghost of him lingering in every corner of this town, and so she can’t stay. 

it would be hard to say what it is that makes her unable to look randy in the eyes, but fred remains in hiding. her neck craned, she won’t look up. traces the edge of that carved C instead, her finger runs it over and over, as if the repetition could bring any soothing. “ will you take care of charlie ? you or … i don’t know, maybe you could ask lenore. he can’t stay on his own, he needs help ”. when she speaks her words are quiet, far too measured, and spoken without ever looking her in the eyes. she fears she will break down, really break down, if she does. she fears the instinct will take her over: to grab her face and search for signs of a resemblance that she knows can not be there, for obvious reasons. she’ll hold on to anything —— she’d go mad just asking continuously why, why, why ? knowing full well that randy could not give an answer, nor lenore, nor charlie, nor anyone really. 

not even him. he, after all, is a ghost now, and ghosts don’t speak. he just haunts her now, inhabiting the hollow of her bones and the space between each aching, shuddering breath.

“ i can’t look after him now, i don’t —— ” don’t even know how to look after myself anymore. freddie sighs, and after vainly rubbing a hand over the side of her face, as if that could somehow rub away the stress and the insomnia, she brings both hands over her thighs, beneath the table, shameful child admitting defeat. “ i can’t stay here. i have to get away from … from everything. you, too. ” a deeper breath. the reason why is obvious. she sits away from windows now, she sleeps on a chair near the door, and a bag with what little she owns has been ready for days, waiting for the last shred of hope to die. having them was relief, for a while there. she looks at randy just once, half a second. she barely knows her, yeah, but she will miss her anyway. if there’s a resemblance she can see it’s in the way her heart can’t help but trust her, same way it never had a choice in trusting ilias. there’s a thing they themselves won’t recognize, a living thing beneath the layers of all they have been through, the conditioning and the hurt. a thing that feels the hurt and is brought to empathy, a thing that understands grief and the irrationality of love. fred can feel it, can recognize it. it doesn’t bring any relief. it only makes things much harder than they need to be.

freddie sighs, then joins her hands on the table again. “ i found a place in kansas. i don’t think anybody would find me there, i can lie low for a while, i got some money, and i… ” a shrug. a laugh. she can feel her voice crack, and so she swallows. “ … i know it’s stupid. but i'm gonna lose my mind if i stay here. ”

💛 full opinionated analysis on our shared storm children, please and thank

(((((: i’ve ranted abt them 24/7 for like the past month idk what more to tell you !!, she said, while simultaneously breeding 2678 more thoughts, a critical essay and several spinoffs for television. but anyway. uh. i’m gonna slap a small summary here for those who don’t know about the current obsession that has caused me to become kalfred central but basically 

KALFRED FOR DUMMIES !! —— take the most clichè of plots, big bad assassin ( ilias, posing under the alias of kal ) is sent by fred’s uncle to retrieve her / bring her back / idk, but while he’s posing as a mechanic in her town to try and get intel and figure out if this is even worth his time, fred w the power of being a fckn dumbass and an overall nuisance bullies him into falling in love w her and they have that kind of relationship that makes fred say i love you first which i’m telling you is rarer than the sun spinning around the earth and anyway it all goes to shit when she learns he’s actually an assassin and she feels betrayed and humiliated and never wants to see him again and so ofc he leaves and she hates everything and she’s scared but he comes back bc victor’s still out to get her and ofc he has to make sure she’s not like. killed or maimed or turned into pig food and basically a whole load of shit happens and there is a lot of heartbreak and he handles her uncle but then this fucking walnut of a man leaves again and leaves fred a grieving broken lifeless mess and idk they get kind of a happy ending but it’s fucking sad bc what are we if not bitches to our characters honestly anyway AAAAAAAAA ok this is over.

but the point is. 

i honestly cannot stop obsessing over them them. which everyone knows by now, i’m sure. if they don’t, the band c/amino for sure will know by the overwhelming amount of streams the black and white and berenstein got from me myself and i. neways —— ok the thing about these two is, i think, their story feels epic. it’s big and wild and dramatic and funny and sexy and it does remind me a lot of wuthering heights bc … they truly are storm children, both tempestuous and reckless and passionate as fuck and just. sometimes i think that if i was writing a story with fred as the main character and i had to create a character to be her main love interest i would 100% create someone like ilias / kal ( except i wouldn’t bc such a brilliant, complicated, layered creature could only come from your beautifully brilliant brain ) bc he’s … he’s nothing like you would expect and he’s somehow both exactly what fred needs and exactly what will completely throw her off her game, and a catalyst of growth in a way, and a lot of development that is NOT necessarily good ( bc as i told you, when he leaves the second time fred is truly going to hit rock bottom and in a sick way i’m also excited to explore that - how it’s gonna shift her entire perspective on her trauma and surviving bc she survived something horrible but she still had herself and now she simply doesn’t anymore ) and just. i could honestly find a million sources for inspiration both on a singular character level ( because you HAVE made me realize things about fred i had no idea about ) and on a relationship level and i’m just. simply ? truly ? obsessed.

i’ll stop now or else i’m gonna rant for the rest of the night but the point of this is: my heart is bursting. it can’t contain the love i have for them, it just can’t.

@demottcm​ said, ❆ our muses (ilias & moa , fantasy verse owo ) get shut in due to a storm ――   send me a symbol,   currently not accepting.   @kalixus​.

          𝐈𝐓 𝐓𝐀𝐊𝐄𝐒 𝐀 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓 𝐀𝐌𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐔𝐀𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐎 𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐍.   The gale is deafening,   the hail and snow that pours down onto the mountain ledge both found shelter under terribly overpowering ――   and FRUSTRATING in the way it traps her.   If it were just the snow, she wouldn’t mind;   clothes and hair are already soaked,   feet willing to carry her further towards the lighthouse even if the weight of the weather forced her to CRAWL.   But with the wind’s volume and the almost non-existent pause between merciless lashes of freezing air,   comes the knowledge that stubbornly marching on would pay a costly price.   Behind her, the stone contorts into an opening ――   the cave behind it offering even further safety and warmth,   and Ilias is right,   however little she wants to hear it.   Silhouette follows him deeper into the dark hollow,   charcoal eyes not meeting his while hands attempt to gather every piece of dry wood she finds.   With a little skill and patience,   she can make a fire.   One she despises, but one that will keep him warm.

“  you’re safe with me. you can let go. breathe. ” — from kal, pre-apocalypse.

her eyes are scared little things.

they won’t look for his, for the weight of the words he has spoken is far too heavy for them to bear. she can’t handle that gaze, sometimes —— the way he seems to dissect her with just one look, as if she was just another broken car of his. disassembles her and looks at the faulty gears, shines a light through the rust and the cobwebs and laughs like he can repair whatever damage he comes across. at night sometimes she swears he’s fixed her —— comes back to life under his touch, her flesh igniting, a hallelujah coming out each time she parts her lips.

her damage, so far, has been a fortress. a prison not for herself but to keep the world outside: she’d lean out the window and smile at passer-bys but her tower would remain untouched, its stern walls shielding the blows. so far, she’ll tell herself, it’s been just perfect —— built herself a purgatory where her relentless praying drowns out the sound of her demons, and the light of penumbra is not too blinding, in between shadows she believed she could rebuild herself.

what good has that done to her ? purgatory was never meant to be permanent.

                            “ i know ”.

call it a white flag —— falling so casually out of her lips, a half sigh, any louder it would startle her. to admit to safety means stepping out of the fortress. to admit she’s been stripping her armor off every night because of him means admitting her flesh is far too tender beneath, and he could hold it or cut right through it: either way she would let him. there is a prickling feeling behind the bridge of her nose, where feelings fail to be translated into words and surrender feels too close to defeat to truly be happy about it, to smile about it. but stripping herself of her lies means facing the truth for once, and the truth is she’s breathing in by the lungful and sleeping at night, and when the nightmares come she wakes up to a startled heartbeat she looks for his hand and falls right back into it with a sad serenity, but not much terror anymore. the truth of it is if she raises her gaze to meet his all this would pour out of her in stupid baby tears, and so she doesn’t, and falls lightly against him instead, her place against his side, falling always out of her traps and into him, out of her games and into that light-hearted way he has to rip masks off her ghosts and make her laugh at the funny little monsters beneath. eyes close, it’s a ritual of sorts —— exhaustion washing over her in calm waves, filling the gap between the muscles now releasing their tension. it’s not much of a conscious effort, her armor is stripped off her by the simple force of gravity —— the battle has been long and dreadful, and she’s tried to keep him out for far too long, refusing to see that he too could be an armor, a steel-coat, her shield.

“ i know ”.

a hand looks for his like she’s waking up from a nightmare again; her peace is found with fingers curled around his, her head resting on his chest. the things she wants ( the things she needs ) to say to him pool somewhere in the back of her mind, but the day pulls her down with her tiredness, and her chest is aching with all this breathing it wasn’t used to —— resurrection is an aching, exhausting affair. all those words won’t come out, but she adjusts herself against him, no space in between, and as her barriers fall down and she begins to drift off her brain’s still awake enough to know what it means, what the sound hiding beneath her tongue was meant to say all along. half-asleep, defeated, she lets out a breath:

“ i love you. ”

“  i’ll kill him. i’ll kill him for taking your smile.  ” — from ilias , post-apocalypse

     she hears it.

she’d like to turn a deaf ear to it, really. to that minor, out of tune chord in his voice —— a dissonance of sorts, a downward note that seems to say: expect something deeper. expect something lower. expect a pitfall and a descent and the loss of any guarantee that you will make it out with all your limbs intact. thing is, she doesn’t really give a shit about her own limbs —— doesn’t care about her skin, has never cared less about her own smile. ‘ happiness ’ is a shifting concept, once the half-blurred polaroid of a distant planet and now something akin to survival, in a binary code that says it’s either that or it’s the apocalypse, annihilation, the end of all. she could care less about happiness —— but her survival depends on him. not him protecting her, but him with her. as broken as they are, as charred and half-chewed, only parts of them barely hanging on: as skeletons, as ghouls, but never apart. that note in his voice, that darker string he doesn’t seem to mind, she fears it will mark him as gone, already —— lost to a depth in which she can’t reach, where all her hopeless devotion spills out of her in vain.

   that’s why she lets her hands rest over the sides of his face, reaching, always reaching —— forcing his gaze into her own, and forcing her voice to grow one single note louder, enough to drown out the crescendo in his words: if she can’t reach far enough, he’s gonna have to reach back towards her. 

     “ look at me, hey —— look at me. ”, a note of despair, the frantic rage with which she holds on to him —— the same that makes her hold on too tight, now, like she does at night. sometimes she lies behind him and stares at the door and wonders which shape they will take now, their enemies —— if the men who have once carved her into a half woman, then corpse, then roadkill or the faceless, shapeless ghosts of his past. she imagines her fear might conjure them, ash-like spirits hanging above their bed marked with ‘ peace ’ to remind them that peace is a luxury and they are but beggars —— and then he is taken from her, again. and again. and she remembers it’s not the demons that frighten her, but the empty space left beside her when he’s gone —— ripped out of her arms, out of her lungs: and her left breathless, one more death like this might leave her dead for good, this time.

     he loses himself in her same kind of despair, she knows, but he won’t understand —— that the only threat she truly fears anymore is losing him, and the demons can’t damage her more than the way her chest would cave in and turn into cosmic void, should he leave with all she’s given him.

    so there’s fear in her voice, yes —— an irrational, childish ache.

    “ look at me. it’s still here, don’t you see ?     you gave it back to me. i don’t ——      i don’t give a shit about them anymore, ilias, please, i — ”

it still aches, to confess all of this. exorcising herself over and over to dig out the words that were once so dreadful and harrowing and are now the only lifeline she has to hold on to him —— lest he slips away from her again. lest she finds herself hollow.

    “ i smile for you, still. ” words a hushed murmur now, as she brings his forehead close to hers, a breath in between them, and not even that —— ‘one and the same’ for she doesn’t care about the distance anymore, or realizing where she ends and he begins, if there has ever even been a time her heart could beat at a rhythm not set by his own. a life before him seems a ridiculous thought now, her past a sad story that suddenly does not concern her anymore. it doesn’t matter. survival matters. his face in her hands matters.

    “ i smile only for you. i don’t care about smiling for anyone else ”.

that downward note moves from his voice to hers and she feels herself cracking —— tiny angry tears stabbing at the corners of her eyes, begging to come out, but choked back just as stubbornly as she holds him, rejecting defeat, rejecting the reckless instinct of her fight. 

there is irony in this, she knows. this tragedy seems to be looking more and more like a comedy, these days —— she fears the lovers will still die in the end, but she’s made her peace with that, too: as long as it happens side by side, in one single last breath. that would be fine. that would be such a lovely way to go, really.

when her voice comes back it’s low, it is a murmur: it is a prayer, uttered in hushed breaths as she doesn’t dare take a single step back, and like a penitent soul on the altar then recites:

“ i need you. i don’t care about anything else. i’m not afraid anymore. not of him. not of them, i just —— i need you. i just don’t know how to live on without you. ”

𝐅𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐃𝐈𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄 𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘 𝐎𝐔𝐓 like she’d seen the movie before. at times the town seemed trapped into its own special brand of stillness, a washed out purgatory in between real life and complete oblivion —— and then something would intrude, a splinter from the outer world, doing nothing more than stepping in and, by that very act, upsetting this quiet, precarious balance. she’d been the object of that sort of confused staring before — the first week at st. peter’s had been an experience akin to being a museum piece, only none of the patrons had other peculiar pieces and halls to go through, just her and her out-of-state accent and the hesitancy with which she approached every bottle they asked her to grab.

now the stranger made his way to the counter, nosy glances following him as if to usher him to his designed seat — it was the tiniest bit amusing, the stark contrast between him and the small spectacle of drinkers on the other side of the room. if this was a movie, she thought, the choice to leave the light off of him would be deliberate — only faint reflections of the golden lightbulbs above the counter seemed to outline his features, but as he walked and picked the stool at the far end of the bar, he seemed to be one with the shadows. fred understood their interest, couldn’t quite blame them for it — seemed the whole town had been yearning for a tall dark stranger to come shake things up, lately. she nodded at his request, eyebrows raised in surprised approval of his choice, and moved to look through the liquor shelf — casually, her old hesitancy forgotten. disappointed, she turned with an apologetic smile. ❝ no woodford, buffalo trace alright ? ❞. 

as she went to heat up the water and slice the lemon, freddie laughed at his remark. ❝ they’re an exclusive club, not too used to foreigners ❞, rolling her eyes, she moved to peek at the table where the gawkers pretended to be busy drinking. ❝ hey joe ❞, she called out to the one with the most insistent stare. ❝ saw larry asking about you earlier, i think we should tell him you're out and about and ready to see him now, uh ? ❞. joe, frowning, muttered some thin apology and lowered his gaze, focusing on his beer. ❝ there ❞, fred smirked as she mixed the drink. ❝ they just need to be put in their place now and then, don’t know their manners around here  ❞. as she squeezed the last drop of lemon juice in the glass, and stirred it a couple times for good measure, fred set the glass down on top of a coaster and moved it towards him. she had half a mind to warn him, how she hadn’t made one of these in a while, and couldn’t be sure she’d got the proportions right —— but she saw the bill, heard his words, and couldn’t help the chuckle that followed.