NO MORE SHAME / NO MORE FEAR / NO MORE DREAD

annis shifts the borrowed shotgun awkwardly against her shoulder, trying to keep clear of the damp purple blooms and slippery moss beneath her boots. somewhere above the mist, wings beat once— she fires a heartbeat too late. the recoil makes her jaw tighten.

Glasgow's something else entirely. Something lesser-than.

Even this shotgun, for example—it's not of a quality he'd grown accustomed to, even when he was a body learning to shoot.

"Would that be terrible, truly?"

Shit, he's smarmy. The gunshot doesn't rattle his skull, and he's learned to ignore the perennial ringing in his ears (this is what you do: you repress and ignore and you persist)—but the rest of the moor still feels it.

she's curious as to why that's different for him. but now isn't the time to ask. she's too horny.

pash's lips pillow out when his saliva warms her nipple. alright. dude's gonna be in five easy pieces by the time she's done with him if she's worth her salt at all. pash's neck cranes downward to bury her nose into his scalp, nuzzling in an act to keep his head right where it is. in her tits.

"oh, yeah." they had gone on a little hunt and gather mission to the sex shop, hadn't they? came back with all sorts of little bottles and big buckles. pardon her distraction. she's workin on manual right now.

"mirror, big ol' mirror, you're right on the money... y'want me to help you do your roots?" fuckin around. pash is becoming wildly endeared to that tizzy way gojo rubs up against her yankee humour. "you got a stylist for that."

faucet's still running by the way. she's seen too much flood damage in these so-called top-of-the-line buildings thanks to her one friend in the real estate biz, so pash slaps the mechanism off with an impatient hand. not that gojo couldn't buy, flip and sell this place soon as see an out-of-the-way speck on the carpet, but hell. steam swirls around them, water a little more than waist deep. their bodies are much slicker now, heat pumping more insistently between them.

Maybe everything sounds better when you've got your ears so close to a woman's boobs. Or, dare he suggest: her heart.

"Do my roots!"

His shock and dismay are so genuine that they cannot be muffled by the effect of him mouthing at her skin. Pasha should feel sick with guilt right now—shaken to her very core.

He's nodding, nuzzling her. He does have a stylist! He does not want Pasha to touch-up his roots! Wait—are his roots that grown in?! His appointment's next week! If he needs to move it up, he can do that. He'll do that for her. For himself.

Overly-enunciated: "Scryying?! Ah-ha—!"

Gojo's head jerks up. She wants to see his face; he wants his face to be seen; it all works out. He's less interested in his future, however. Let's keep living where we are, shall we?

"Noooo-uh. Want you to fuck me." He's closer to her ear for most of this, hand braced on the edge of the tub behind her shoulder.

She's so good at everything. Like him! As in: she is so good at him, and she is so good at everything in the way that he is as well.

                   his smile's only in part thanks to her repeated assurance -- they're both glad he's here. now that's out of the way.

                   he's watching the hand he's running down her shin, considerate as though musing aloud. ❝ more trying to figure out if you might need a foot rub, or a bath… ❞

She wants to make fun of him. She does. But she's not so exhausted, so inundated by growing pains, that she fails to revel in how nice it feels to be taken care of by someone else. His generosity is subtle in some ways—unsubtle in others—and though she's not sure how to classify these two offers specifically, they sure are great to hear—to imagine.

And he wouldn't be him if he didn't punctuate a proposed act of service with something unbelievably corny!

Samira pushes herself up, held upright by her palms splayed out on the couch behind her. This decreases the distance between them—she wants it known she won't hold him at am arm's length or further. Not on purpose. She did that for long enough already.

"Well—" She rolls out her neck, testing the extent of her soreness. "—I'm glad you'd be satisfied, but now that you've put those ideas into my head—"

Let her think. Let her kiss him while she does, like it'll help. Or maybe she simply saw an opportunity and took it.

SHE'S SO RIGHT.

Cathy gives him a thin, perfunctory smile, one that fades almost as soon as it appears, pulling her shawl tighter around her shoulders, more out of habit than comfort, her posture stiff against the damp chill.

Hard for a few days. Aye, that was one way of putting it.

She'd long ago learned that hardship rarely arrived for only a few days. It settled in. Made itself comfortable. Took up residence in the corners of her life until she scarcely remembered what things had been like before.

"A few days would be a blessin'," she says softly. "Ah've weathered worse than a few difficult days." A beat. "Still," she adds after a moment, a trace of warmth creeping into her expression, "it's kind of ye tae think on it." Her shoulders rise in a small shrug.

Cathy seems to mirror this at first—to fall into social custom as well as two people, a man and a woman, speaking in a semi-public place must. Dolokhov appreciates the routine of this. He isn't sure why he feels so uncomfortable, so out of place—but as soon as he realizes that's what the feeling is, he blames his discomfort on this entire damp country.

"Yes," he says. He nods curtly, with some amount of finality. Yes, she's encountered worse. Yes, she can handle it. Yes, he worried—still worries, in fact.

This is a little infuriating. He endeavors to live a life as carefree as his peers, but the truth is that his peers now have very much to worry about back home, and Dolokhov isn't sure anything will ever be the same again.

(She never texted Ino back. She didn't even try. She did not want him to watch the three dots appear, disappear, appear, and disappear for good. She had a hunch this is how that would go.)

"Um."

Stella grimaces, confronted with her own conflicting realities. She wants to say Blackwell's is like a family, of course, which is important in its own way, but the Romanos are a family, by blood, which is an endlessly significant thing (as Ranta knows better than he knows anything else).

Instead, she turns her head, partially concealing the aggravated slant of her mouth.

It's normal, she would insist, for some family members to live separately from other family members. She cannot fathom that Ranta's entire bloodline and those who married into it live on the same property. That is one extreme.

The other extreme, or some approximation of the other extreme, is this: an aunt who lives on a farm upstate, where she raised her children—your cousins, whom you've only met a handful of times; an uncle who was murdered right before you were born, which nobody wants to tell you, so they haven't; another aunt who lives in the city but you aren't sure which part since you've never visited (although she lets you follow one of her Instagram accounts, so long as you follow from a finsta, which is a word she taught you); and Burns Harris, whoever that is, who disappeared right when your uncle was murdered, which, again, you have been spared from knowing.

Moreover, Stella has never been invited to visit her half-brother's family in Mexico City with him, though she's grateful, so beyond grateful, to God and to everyone else, to see her father's extended and sometimes distant relations in Florence because it reminds her that she is less alone.

She often feels alone.

She has no idea what it is like to live on a sprawling estate in the mountains where everybody has the same goals and agrees how things should be done—where everything belongs to them collectively.

Your mother too?

Stella's head snaps back up. She stares at Ranta—who has only been staring at her, who very well may not have blinked this entire time, though Stella won't think too critically on that.

"My mom doesn't really have a family."

What?!

"I mean!"

She leans in to convey how urgently she must backtrack that statement—not only because it is a lie, but because it implies something she cannot allow Ranta to believe. Unfortunately, this jerky movement means her knee jostles his knee, again. She cannot notice.

to spare them both some indignity—indecency?—he shifts his knee a little to the left.

my mom doesn’t really have a family doesn’t resonate with him as much as it should, or at least not in the way that it should, in the way that stella means, or the way that it really is. more than any language barrier, it gets lost along the paradigm of their very, very different lived experiences.

what he assumes stella means is that her mother is a bad wife, which is something that ranta understands due to the other extreme that he was raised in. bad wives aren’t really part of the family, but they’re tolerated because they bear children who are. like stella! and like ranta, whose own mother had been bad because she’d died giving birth to one such good child, and whose step-mother must have been bad since she’d disappeared one day.

maybe he should warn stella: keep an eye on your mother, or she’ll wander into a forest full of bears and never come back. as the story goes.

whether he believes that isn’t relevant.

ranta nods self-evidently, sagely. ' and she will be there tonight. with your brother and your father. ' once more he neglects to mention everyone here, who are—at best—guests of varying degrees of honour. for now. until whatever arrangements are being made are made.

despite all this talk of half-dead mothers, he smiles more genuinely than he has tofore. ' i’m happy i’ll meet them. it’s kind of mister romano to have us. he’s a good man. ' other than running the exploitative circus of mutant-abasement, which ranta is currently not thinking about because he really can’t stop fantasising about dinner.

" i've looked worse. " the wryness wrenching her rejoinder flinches into an unguarded wince before she can staunch it. red soaks the black fibers of her scrubs, painting the palm of her hand as she quashes it down against the wound in a vain effort to slow the flood of vital fluid from the broken flesh.

chin cast upward, teeth gritting out against the pain, cassie strains not to look down at what's beneath the quickly dampening cloth, pressed flat beneath her hand until she has to confront that this isn't the kind of thing to wait.

" okay ... "

she finally peels back the fabric to reveal a laceration splitting through a constellation of freckles along pale skin, the tatters open & dark with crimson.

Anything beyond that, like what she's currently perceiving, extends beyond her reflexive, superficial judgments.

Like, yes—it's bad. It's not fine. But what is a woman like Gabriela Glass to do about that?

"Oh, fuck."

Gabriela does not know with confidence what a suture kit is, but she's got the context necessary to pick up what appears to be a travel manicure kit, unclasp it, and hold it open for Cassie to inspect or select something from.

Somewhat rudely, Gabriela continues to gawk at Cassie's wound. She's never seen so much blood.

maternal instinct, or muscle memory, should allow selene to field such monochromatic questions the same way she would when her son would ask them. growing up, don't you love mommy? then why can't she sleep in bed with you when the moon gets big? is mommy bad? are you bad? then why do you cry so much? however, when roscoe is called into question, it's different.

"that's... of course i do," huffy, dismissive. "he's - it's complicated between us. we grew up weird. he's a lot older than me, but..." something's in her throat. is what choso has contagious?

Choso listens without fully comprehending. We grew up weird doesn't really mean anything. Choso can't read her mind. He can make stuff up, of course, which he often does: picnics in the park, a trip to the zoo. You don't have to let any of it be weird. You can make it into something good.

"Especially if he's your older brother, you should care about him. He wants to protect you, and you should be there for him. Always." Like Choso is TRYING to protect HIS younger brothers!

Choso shrugs—not to dismiss any of this, but to slide off his bag. He catches it before it hits the ground. Cradling it in one arm, he opens the main pouch and takes out his makeup pouch. It is black but noticeably stained.

"now, buddy..."

he edges closer, minutely, she almost gags.

there's a reek on him. not the hot cloister of body odor you can't help but slice through in the subterranean summer heat. it's different, like an illness, rancidity crawling from his innards past his molars. no one else would be able to catch it, pash would lay that bet. but if she breathes wrong, and if she weren't so chemically sharpened, it would knock her out.

he's someplace that he shouldn't be.

where are they?

she doesn't know why he'd ask that. it alarms her that he'd ask that, in a way that rigs all the hairs on her arms erect. she can't pinpoint exactly why, but pash knows she won't be answering.

Choso's perpetually-exhausted eyes are briefly frantic and wide. He doesn't know what Now, buddy is meant to convey, and the confusion renders his eyelids heavy again.

The incoming train whooshes into place. Doing so disrupts Choso's loose sleeves, his long paints. They billow. His hair, too, ruffles itself out of place.

While this is happening, Choso himself moves. He does not move as quickly as Pash moved, as this came as surprise to him. Why didn't she stay to answer his questions? Another train would have come eventually, or they would have left together, to take the train that leads him to his brothers.

Being half-human, Choso is all the way corporeal: visible to non-sorcerers, for once thing, but more obtrusively, he can be felt when he bumps against every single passenger in this subway car—compelled to follow Pash by the lingering energy of his brothers.

In this state, Choso does not cringe-grimace and whisper sorry, so sorry, not in any language at all. Choso does not look around him at all. He only sees her.

And she sees him.

"Stop." He clasps his hands together, arms held down rigidly in front of him. It is, effectively, brandishing a gun and preparing to raise it.