The yellow mark is where the skill checks landed on my new laptop, when using muscle memory to hit a great skill check. absolutely insane.

He's really telling on himself here... a man whose entire life - or at least his public persona and the lifestyle he espouses - is defined by the endless pursuit of appetites for sex, money and fame.

He's a ballhair away from perceiving the howling emptiness at the heart of his little world of endless consumption.

also u WILL shut up about the mitski lyrics i've incorporated in here shut up shut UP /lh

......................................................................................

Hiber Day hits the whole town on the last day they were spending in Wartwood before the army moves north to Newtopia.

The situation had been okay, at first—almost hilarious, really, given how bad the timing is. Had the times been better, Sasha would be running around in the snow and indulging in something California has once in a blue moon—a snow day with her girls, petty snowball fights with Anne while they’d beg Marcy to take their side respectively so she could help them come up with a strategy to declare who the true “snow queen” really is.

But now, the sky is gray; the wet log she’s sitting on leaves a Marcy-sized space that aches for her return—and Anne doesn’t listen to her pleas nor her cries, that Marcy is alive alive alive because she has to be—but Anne has been pushed too far for her to ever take her back, and in the end, it was nobody else’s fault but hers.

See, here's the thing about anger: hers burns, passed down from her parents' veins to her very own, all the destructive behaviors and all the wrong paths she takes because it's the only path she ever knows. She's the fire, the forest, the very hands that lit the roots and soil on fire, and she's the pair of eyes that stood there in the dark watching it all burn down. 

And Anne? 

She never knows how to be angry until it's too late. Even then, her anger freezes everything down in her path instead of burning it all down—trapping it all in a slow, painful death with all her might without a chance of return. Her cold, hollow stares, like she's looking at empty air instead of the girl she learned how to tie her shoelaces with. All the silence she brings along like an omen, all the words she doesn't say. 

Somehow, Sasha thinks that the anger she carries would have hurt less than Anne's. That the fire would hurt less than the snow. 

But, oh well. What's done is done—she couldn't turn the stars around if she tried, now. All she had ever fought for was the glory for the three of them to bask on, a world where Marcy and Anne would never have to get hurt because it's a world where she's in control and they're in control and so everything will be alright. It would be their own little happily ever after, like the glittery picture books they used to read below the shelter of the giant library bookshelves. If only she had succeeded despite it all, Sasha thinks it would redeem all of the horrible paths she took, all of the ugliness that marred her insides. Sasha thinks they might still be able to love her then.

In the end, where did all that get her?

"I'm not petty enough for this."

There's a defeated sigh from her side, the sound of a coat brushing against the rough skin of a tree bark as the girl in her near distance shifts to walk over towards the piece of log she's sitting on, placed around the pitiful campfire they had managed to build before the blizzard around the forest confined them both in town (maybe they really should have attended those summer girl scouts trainings). 

Anne's grand presence beside her felt more numbing than the frostbites that had crept its way to her fingertips while she desperately curled tighter and tighter into herself for warmth, her hands buried between all the scrapped layers of fabric she had found from all around the house. 

"Well?"

Sasha turns her head around to her side, and Anne has an eyebrow raised, an arm spreading out a side of the fur coat she's wearing, slightly reminding her of an owl spreading its wing for its owlets to huddle beneath.

Oh.

Oh.

"Fine," she blurts out raspily, her voice breaking out humiliatingly as she pulls in the sheets that she's wearing over her shoulders just a little bit tighter. "'M fine. I'll be fine."

"Still petty enough to die, I see," Anne says it like a statement, but somehow she could still hear the slightly exasperated amusement in her voice like a burst of color between the monochromes. Or it might be one of her desperate, feeble hopes, but Anne is already inching closer before she could figure it out. 

An arm wraps around her trembling body, pulling closer and tighter and Sasha lets herself imagine that she does it because she doesn't want to lose her. She leans her head against Anne's lap for convenience instead, slow and careful like she's asking for permission, perhaps a little bit of clarity, forgiveness, another chance—and Anne doesn't utter out another word, but she doesn't flinch when her head meets the soft flesh of her thigh either, and Sasha takes it as a good sign. She'll take anything Anne will give her, a sinner begging on her knees. She'll take anything Anne will give her and it will be more than enough.

Anne tugs her closer, tighter, and not a word was said, but the bumps of their heartbeats might be enough to melt off the snow and put out the fire.