NO MORE SHAME / NO MORE FEAR / NO MORE DREAD

and that didn't make him better than luke. at night, every night, when he stared at the bottom of the bunk above his and imagined that the knot holes in the wood were stars, he actually thought that it made him worse.

even with all of his blind spots, luke seemed to know who he was. or at least who he should be—needed to be—to get the job done.

adam stumbled backward and fell, hard, onto the ground. the force of luke's palm burned his chest like a brand and sent blood rushing to his ears. katoush katoush katoush.

he scrabbled to his knees, then into a crouch. he held his hands up, but it wasn't a resignation—don't hurt me, don't hurt me—it was an overture: i don't want to hurt you.

he didn't even know whether he could. ( luke was his teacher, and he had always been an inferior student. ) he just knew that he didn't want to.

' —nothing, man. you're right. i'm sorry. i shouldn't have—i shouldn't have said that. ' he got up, slowly, slowly, his hands still raised, his sword still on the ground. it lay between them like a landmine, one of those bombs they used to rig no-man's-land with during times of war. the thing was of no use to him anymore: it wasn't what had hurt luke, and it wasn't what would protect adam now. ' that wasn't fair. i know you're not waiting around for … ' for what? ' anything. ' nothing, man.

Luke does not know to fear this yet. His nightmares are frightening, sometimes viscerally nauseating, but they do not compel him to fret over losing his sense of self. He knows what will happen to him, to the world, once the gods are no longer ruling it. And this brings him rare, admittedly fleeting peace.

Luke, his mouth a skeptical slant, his eyes cruel and calculating, looks down at Adam. He is deciding if it is worth keeping Adam down but, again, remains aware of the potential for spectators. There's got to be a point to this. For the optics.

His foot decisively stomps down on Adam's training sword: a compromise with who he must appear as and who he is. It requires one to maintain the delusion that Adam was ever going to pick it up and retaliate against Luke, but that's a delusion Luke is comfortable with.

Luke's spiked adrenaline fizzles and splatters and doesn't know where to go in the wake of Adam's de-escalation. Luke's steadiness becomes a soft, vulnerable bewilderment.

"—yeah."

Luke stretches his hand out for Adam to take. This is what you do.

"We should go eat. Like you said, right?" Cocksure smile—the Luke that would make Annabeth proud. Thalia'd roll her eyes, but when wouldn't she?

So, 'Beautiful' like stage dressing on Broadway Street. The more she visits here the less real things she sees. Not just where Vought's concerned, but ... everywhere. Is anything real? Truman? She feels real-crazy. The obsessive, needy girlfriend that never was.

"I want to see you today" is almost close enough to "I want you". Something in her roars before a brief dip back down when it picks out the difference. She doesn't understand why she can't be filled on the little things and the smaller moments anyone. She feels atomized via Wonka. Some pieces missed along the way or put back wrong in the process. But she can't quite point out what and where went wrong. Only that everything feels wrong.

And everyone is starting to feel like strangers.

She's alone in her own body.

She makes it turns the exist with every intention of telling him no. The secondary room key slips from bosom to the table near the front door.

"Okay."

He can't read her mind. The key seems like yes.

///

Solar Flare does not go back to the tower to change before he demands some Vought PR salaried worker drive him to Angel Lung's hotel. It's been an hour and a half. He snapped at someone he endeavors to apologize to when it's daylight.

He's moving through sludge when he ignores the receptionist, stumbles onto the elevator, and scans into the room. He smells warm—burnt, more accurately.

The lights are off. His arm spasms to flip a switch on, but he thinks better of it and blinks until he glows.

the bears resented the zen’ins for building their estate in the heart of their territory. for hundreds of years, they hunted the young and the old and the sick. if a zen’in was worth his life, he would survive the encounter; he would come home with a trophy. if not, if he died, then he was of no concern, for he’d certainly never been zen’in at all.

the bears were not like other bears, who attacked only when it was necessary, who fought only for as long as it was wise to do so. these bears did not run from unlikely odds. if they were beaten, they would get up again. and again. and again. their hides were so thick; one bear could take a thousand blows and continue fighting. eventually, if it would not yield, if it would not run, it became necessary to cut off its head. it was the only way to stop it from lashing out with its many teeth, its sharp claws.

and in this way too, he thought, it was like aria.

why couldn't she just listen? why couldn’t she just know her place and stay there?

' stop! ' again her body froze. her palm hung, mid-air, a centimetre from his cheek. ' there’s no point, ms. borden. you have to know that. '

ranta frowned—no, scowled. she really was an animal. he looked at her and saw a bear. ' please, don’t make me— '

the door swung open with a jaunty little jingle: another customer. ranta grabbed aria’s wrist and wrenched down her arm. he felt bad about tearing through her paralyzed muscles. it was cruel; it had to hurt. but it couldn’t be helped. appearances must always be maintained.

he stared at her imploringly. ' do your job. ' know your place. ' please. '

aria could move again.

There is no satisfying SMACK. No skin against skin in the only way that Aria ever bothers to want on her own.

In no time at all, her anger, the realness and the brutality of it, has been frozen as if in sap spontaneously crystallized into anger. This means that when Ranta refers to Aria using a stupid, condescendingly faux-polite prefix and her awful family name, she already looks as furious as this makes her. It can't get any worse—both because she is paralyzed and because things couldn't possibly get worse.

Her instincts are screaming for something to do She's always alert. Having her back to a customer, who could very well be an intruder, an assailant, isn't acceptable. She knows better.

Aria moves—is moved—and feels like she's on fire. Fire so hot it's cold.

Aria's been in pain before so blinding, so shocking to her nervous system, that she couldn't heal any of the self-inflicted lacerations littering her arms and hands. There was nothing else to heal from—the pain existed only for as long as she could experience her neurotransmitters being duped into the illusion of torture. This is a little different—a little worse, arguably, because all of the muscles and ligaments in her shoulder are actually being torn.

They—the muscles and ligaments—don't start the uncomfortable, vaguely itchy process of healing until Ranta permits Aria to move again. Her vision's blurry.

To the unsuspecting customer, it appears as if Ranta has said something to Aria worth crying for, then left her to cry. Maybe he dumped her, then realized he still needed to buy a snack for the road. It ultimately means very little to the customer, who's here to buy cigarettes. He goes right to the counter without making eye contact with anybody.

He has to wait for Aria to walk back behind the counter. He's ultimately very patient about it, despite Aria taking her sweet time. Her steps are lurching and uncertain—like she'd already forgotten how to move on her own after spending a cumulative sixty seconds paralyzed.

Pack of Newports. Ten on pump two. Aria obliges, mechanical. The customer leaves, and Aria finally uses the pinkish sleeves of her formerly white long sleeve t-shirt to wipe her face.

"Are you gonna get anything?" It is an accusation.

"Come here and pay so I can lock up."

" well, the therapy industrial complex would never let anyone get away with just figuring it out like that. "

and he feels a bit self conscious about the expression on dafne's face. looking away from it, he tries to parse through the memories of jayne and audrey, for something both vague and meaningful enough.

sighing, " old boss of mine told me once, " granted, will had shared it in what he thought at the time was an entirely different context, but chris has found it applies just the same:

" that if it's confusing, like if you're really trying but you still don't know what's going on or where you stand, then that means something about it is wrong for you. " picking at the peeling label of his empty beer bottle, trying to make eye contact with their server to order another one.

She doesn't know if she's consider herself generous or selfness or anything like that. She cares for Chris so much that comforting him in small, ultimately meaningless ways comes easily to her. Like instinct.

It does reassure her that she can still do nice things. Be a nice person. Is she giving herself too much credit?

Dafne forces herself to focus—even as she blinks blearily.

She nods. She thinks she understands—that you can sit with some discomfort but you can't accept things that fundamentally unnerve you. In Chris's world, this is true. In most of the world, this should be true.

She sips her Paloma, the remnants of it, so that she has something to do.

"So it was bad for you, too? It hurt, you know, so you stopped it? You walked away? Because it was wrong, or—"

Shrug—helpless.

with her lower lip permanently hardened and her eyebrows in a knot jackie isn't much more than a petulant teenager right now, and doesn't she have a right to be? the only responsibility she should be having right now is picking out what throw pillows to buy for college and how to get contraceptives without her mom finding out. not keeping her team and herself alive out in the wilderness.

Jackie's stubborn. Tai, too. But some things are more powerful than a teenage girl's willfulness—like a plane crash. Like the place they've been brought.

as aria had appropriated his previous gesture, he now appropriated hers—only that when he held out his palm, when he motioned don't speak at all, he really meant it: don't speak. don't move.

aria froze; around her, the world kept turning, the radio kept playing, the freezers kept humming. she could even keep thinking, if she wished. she could feel. and it wouldn't help her at all.

she was very tall and far too close. he could make out the size and shape of her teeth; he could count them, if he wanted to. but he didn't. he didn't want to be anywhere near her, actually. and it had nothing to do with the murder in her eyes. blue eyes. large. far too close.

' what you can do—it’s better than what they can do. ' she didn't have the right to ask questions, but he had the right to ignore them. which he did, gently, veiling rejection as deflection.

' some of them are very good. too good for that place, i think. but you are even better than them. ' ranta worked while he spoke. he frisked her quickly and efficiently, searching for whatever she was reaching for. when his fingers passed over the rough landscape of her wrists, he grimaced. ' is that why you're not there? '

he kept his voice neutral, pleasant—though their proximity continued to disturb him. it was the other members of the hei who dealt in the physical. without them, there was no plexiglass, no degree of separation. it was his hands doing the touching, his hands that held the knife. aria's knife, to be exact.

' your talents are wasted here. ' he clasped the blade between his palms and stepped back—well back—as one did with unpredictable, possibly rabid animals. there was a prolonged pause.

Is she dead? Did she have a stroke?

No—no. She can still hear the blood rushing to her ears. She can hear her own heart beating wildly, indignantly. Everything sounds as outrageously visceral as it always does. She can't even engage her periphery vision, however, so as Ranta diligently performs his duties, all she does is hear herself grow more and more livid.

Actually—she hears Ranta, too. She wishes she couldn't—wishes he'd made her oblivious to the outside world. He's saying crazy bullshit and asking stupid questions—iS ThAT whY YoU'Re NoT thErE—he shouldn't be—

fuck.

He's ultimately right. Blackwell's and Rhett himself and even (insignificantly, irrelevantly) the Bordens, who actually raised her—they all rejected Aria for how quick she is to do harm. She won't exempt herself from experiencing the consequences of such willingness. In fact, she's grown quite fond of it—has done it so frequently and so cruelly that the scars never get a chance to fully heal like the rest of her usually does.

Aria stays where she had been forced to stay until she realizes she can see her hair, long and unruly, shifting out of the corner of her eye. Maybe her hair was always moving; it often has a mind of its own. The air conditioning and fans in here are reliable, too. However: it doesn't matter. What matters is the ability to move any part of her of her own free will.

Forget her pockets. She knows he has what she wanted from them. Instead, she closes the distance between herself and Ranta that he'd attempted to create, and she swings her arm out in a dramatic, winding arc.

He swallows their breath easily, one hand moving to their jaw as the other stays warm on their waist, circling their lower back. Tate keeps them steady against him - encourages their hips to roll against his, even though he doesn't have a dick for them to grind on.

well, maybe he understood that last thing.

privately, he thought both of them—aria and the man with philosophical opinions about gas prices—were being unreasonable. publicly, openly, he smiled as if in solidarity. but in solidarity with whom? both of them, perhaps. and consequently with neither.

he was still smiling by the time aria stopped.

' ah—excuse me. not ... ' ranta retrieved a flyer from his pocket. he'd spent some time and effort folding it neatly into fourths; now, he unfolded it just as methodically. blackwell's bizarre. ' ... here. '

rather than passing it through to her, he held the paper up to the plexiglass. aria was a zoo animal: she was to be entertained but not fed. not yet. not until she performed. until then, he would keep from sticking his fingers through the bars.

With the flyer now creating an opaque barrier between Ranta and Aria that the plexiglass alone could not, Aria allows her expression to contort into one of pure mortification.

This corny fucking place with its corny fucking advertisements. The tent's probably the same bullshit tent from before Aria's miserable time on this miserable Earth. Rhett will repair it and care for it and convince himself everything is fine, and Daniel's probably too cheap to replace it.

Raya—radiant, intelligent, promising Raya—features prominently. This is Stella's friend—who, as far as Aria knows, doesn't even need to be a carnie for a living! She has hopes and dreams and a future! AND! People still like having her around when she is generous enough to grace them with her presence! Her powers don't upset kids or freak anybody out!

"Euuuugh."

Aria pulls herself onto her feet and marches from the seclusion provided by the counter. She kicks a door, flings it open the rest of the day, and is stepping up to Ranta in an instant. This is not an option most zoo inhabitants have. It is not an option Rhett's fucking friends and colleagues have, either, if you really think about it.

Aria's reaching for her knife—not for Ranta. In this exact moment, anyways. Her snarl, the way her lips curl and her teeth gleam might manage to wound all the same.