#luke830

"I'm not getting in bed with you while you're drunk." Chair pulled up, ankle propped atop a knee, as he set to chugging the bottle of water. "Even if it's my fucking bed."

you asked for this. literally.

She’s not that drunk. Tipsy maybe, from too many glasses of wine at a library event with nothing in her stomach - and a Four Loko on the ride back to his home. But she’s not drunk. Not shitfaced. Enough of her wits about her to recognize the situation she’s put herself in - and how he’s not having any of it. Completely closed off, from posture to mentality, from emotions that she already has a hard enough time reading to personality. 

Closed down. Shut off. Lights on but no business allowed.

And maybe she is drunk, because the sparrow hearted girl wants the business. Any business. Anything he can afford her, she wants it. Lonely, and tired, and cold. Desperate for a connection that felt real when everything around her had once again collapsed. Lincoln logs on the floor, collapsed and lying next to her bruised, abandoned heart.

Unfolding herself from where she’d curled up moments before, she considers him for a few seconds. Considers the closeness, the strength she knew he had. The strength she knew she had, even with alcohol in her system. She doesn’t leap - she pounces. Nearly tripping herself up in her floral skirt as she flings herself from the cold bed, into his warmth. Into his lap. Arms coming up to wrap around his shoulders with a grip that’s like iron, fingers pulling at the back of his shirt.

"Birdie, Birdie - come here." Hand coming to frame her face, leaned in close. "You don't need to apologize." Breathing something soft, warm, and fond ... "Just know that my deception skill is unrivaled." And, with that? Would he smack his free hand, covered in paint, onto her ass and RUN. 

this is an attack on our person and we will not be having it, christopher.

Like Icarus of myth and legend before her, Birdie does not heed any obvious warnings that come from flying too close to her sun. In truth, he could burn her, and she would forgive him instantly. Her trust in him is unwavering, even as he chooses a tone that’s all sweetness and warmth - something that is akin to a siren’s call before a fatal drowning. A thing she knows better than to fall to, history and past loves considered, but something she falls prey to none-the-less. 

In the end, Eddie does burn her, although not in the way expected. His hand slapping down on her bottom in a way that has her jerking. Squealing out a noise that crosses the line of a pg-13 rating. Her cheeks flushing red as she presses the back of her hand to her mouth and stares at his retreating back.

"If I showed you my fangs would you tell me that they're cool?"

bitch whore slut

Birdie is beginning to think that, perhaps, her love is like a curse. Bad things seemingly always happening to those that fell victim to it. Countless girls outed and sent away to camps or disowned, the boy she’d met at summer camp that had turned into a wolf, the boy she’d learn to love after that had always been a wolf.. All of them doomed, all of them destroyed... All of them leaving her behind to pick up the fragile pieces, not even noticing the shards of her that clung to them still.

Eddie, at least, had not run away - but there was always time for that.

“If you showed me your fangs...” Bundled up in a blanket like a burrito, Birdie peers at her friend - her very vampiric friend. Green eyes watching as he sits almost anxiously on her carpet, among the pillow-and butterfly-patterned-sheet nest she’d made for them both. A black void among all the brightness of her room. Death in amidst a room of life. 

‘ either way you choose you cannot win. ’ 

meme  /  accepting

Birdie was a naïve girl, that much was true. She was foolish, and at times dull-witted, and her lack of socialization for most of her life had made her difficult in any and all sense of the word. But she wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t a moron, and she knew how hard life could be. She knew that there would be times were she would have to make choices she didn’t want to, and she would have regrets over those choices. That was a factor of living, of growing up, of being an adult. Sometimes you just had to do things that were unpleasant, and often times, you would regret them but be unable to take them back.

What he speaks of so bluntly, however, is not a choice she’d thought she’d have to make. Not even something she’d considered before that moment. Having to choose between them, between the two most important people in her life... 

Birdie doesn’t understand. Is shocked still by the harsh observation, green eyes looking at him something with akin to betrayal as she realizes that he wants her to do it, to make a choice. He’s done what she had previously thought to be impossible: Frank brandishes her open affection for them all like it’s a weapon, and she sees a streak of sadism in him once she realizes he doesn’t fully expect to be the choice she makes.

After all, who would choose the man who wanted to become a monster, over the man who wanted not to be one? Who would pick the person who was determined to continue killing, over the person who was trying to learn to stop?

Her heart aches for him. For her.  For Nick, who remained oblivious to the cruelty placed upon her, the weapon being used against them all. Her love. Their love.

Birdie takes a breath, and makes her choice.

“Then, we’ll all go down together.” Her fingers squeeze his with a confidence she truly felt. Reassured when he doesn’t snatch his hand away, or scoff in disgust over her tenderness. “Because I pick you both, Frank. You and him. I love you both too much to let one of you go. And maybe we’ll lose, maybe I’ll lose. But... I’m still going to be happy. We all are.”

send   “ look at me. “   for my muse’s reaction to yours grabbing mine by the chin and forcing mine to look at them during a tense / highly emotional moment.

meme  /  always accepting

She’s ten years old, and at the beach with her twin. It’s lunchtime, and the tide is rough and coming in, but they’re strong swimmers, beach babies, so it’s nothing for them. They’re going to be mermaids when they grow up, well mermaids and veterinarians like their daddy, and the little yellow flags aren’t going to stop them from having their beach day.

The rip is swift. It separates them. It’s the first time Birdie wakes up alone, but it won’t be the last.

She’s exactly ten and a half years old, and they’re moving homes. Momma calls it downsizing, and Daddy just looks sad. There’s a bubblegum pink urn strapped in the seat where her sister used to always sit, and Birdie watches the reflection of passing homes in it’s shiny surface.

She’s tired, and sad, and doesn’t understand the weight in her heart, but knows it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

She’s thirteen, and on her third school in the third town they’ve moved to in just three short years. The boys call her weird, and the girls talk about her dirty and skinned knees. Parents and teachers alike whisper about her being a tragedy. How awful, for a girl to lose her sibling... How terrible for the parents...

Birdie wonders how a tragedy is supposed to live, decides it must be the fullest. Tragedies, after all, always find their lonely end sooner rather than later. She needs to be prepared.

She’s seventeen by the time she finds it in her to rebel. Eighteen when she finds ground beneath her to be successful. Nineteen when she gets her first job that’s not working with her daddy. Almost twenty when someone suggests they she do a summer camp because it would be good for her to be out in nature, and because she’s good with library kids.

Birdie is twenty, in a few months twenty-one, when tragedy strikes her life for a second time. When the boy she likes turns into something other and the boy she trusts drags her to a canoe. She’s cold, and she’s wet, and she’s sticky with blood. There’s tear tracks on her face, and her fingers are clenched around the edges of the canoe, rocking it slightly on the lake’s smooth surface as she peers at the shoreline.

Frank, the boy she trusts, the boy that lets her touch him and pretends to scoff and find her annoying, grabs her face when she shakes the canoe just too much. Grabs her face and growls at her to look at him, and obediently, she does. She stares at him with wide, vacant eyes. Feels his dirty knees bracketing her bloodied ones. Tastes his nicotine-soaked breath in the small space between them.

She wonders if this is a part of a pre-destined tragedy she’s always meant to have. A dead twin and a bubblegum pink urn. A love triangle, with a boy she liked that turned into a wolf and another girl. A boy that looked like destruction, but felt more solid than hope...

Birdie opens her mouth, partially to reassure him that she’s fine. That Nick needs her but she’s fine, Frank. 

What comes out instead? Is anything but reassuring.