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Smoke heavily scented with cloves and similar spices wafts through the room, Fig’s cigarette filling the air. She sits by the window, flicking ash out of it and presumably onto the first-floor patio beneath them.
Not that Kristen is paying attention to the smoke rings that Fig is blowing from her lips, or the expert way that she raises it, drags, blows, and then shakes the burnt scraps of clove and paper. She’s not watching, eyes sliding one into the other like pucks across ice, as Fig’s nose wrinkles while she extinguishes the butt against the windowsill and then chucks it out, flying somewhere into the parking lot of the Strongtower Luxury Apartments. She’s definitely not watching as Fig looks over her shoulder, brown eyes piercing right into Kristen’s own (that are definitely staring) and then sliding past, looking somewhere to the left of Kristen.
Oh, yeah. Adaine and Riz are on the couch chatting about something—not anything her mind can grasp at the moment, wobbly as it is. Their conversation is hushed, low, also seeming a little slowed by the flask of gnomish whiskey being passed back and forth between them.
The wine that Fig had given her still slurs through her veins even now, several hours and a departure from Fabian and Gorgug later. Elves must know how to fucking drink if this stuff is still coursing through her—though admittedly, she’s been nursing the last one for around a half hour, now.
“It’s getting late,” Riz says, a bit louder and heavy enough to pierce the cloud surrounding Kristen’s thoughts. Fig glances over at the three of them—Kristen on the floor, back against the base of the couch, Adaine curled up against the arm of the sofa, and Riz in a dining chair that’s been pulled up astride her. “Gilear’s already in bed, right?”
Fig nods. “He didn’t have to work his other job tonight, so he crashed a few hours ago. Texted me to lock up when I got here.”
“Did you lock up?” Adaine swirls the flask—Kristen hasn’t actually seen her drink out of it, but her eyes are blinking a bit out of sync, and her gaze looks unfocused, so she must have consumed some of it.
Fig blinks. “…No.”
“You can get it after me, then,” Riz says, standing up and checking his crystal for the time. “My mom should be home by now, which means I should get back there, too.”
Adaine and Kristen wave their goodbyes, and Fig nods and scrambles to her feet after him—Kristen looks to Adaine.
“Are you done with that?” She manages to ask, fully aware that she still has half a glass of wine left but wanting to change it up a little. She should drink water, and she knows she should drink water, but so much of her is alight with nerves and stress and anxiety that it feels better , feels a little less like living in reality to lose half of her mind in itself. Adaine bobs her head and tosses her the flask.
“It’s wretched,” Adaine warns, twisting her feet to slide her socks off onto the carpet—the apartment is a bit warm since Gilear doesn’t keep the air conditioning very high. “I can’t get the taste out of my throat for anything.”
“Don’t think that’s the point,” Kristen mumbles, bringing it to her lips and taking the largest swallow she can manage without spluttering it everywhere. Adaine’s brows just raise as she watches, silently gauging.
She tends to do that—calculating, waiting, planning her next move. Her brows always arch and her lips always purse, and sometimes, when she’s particularly deep in thought, she’ll chew the inside of her mouth. Kristen doesn’t know why she knows these things, or how they’ve all so neatly filed into her brain that the information flies to her fingertips at a moment’s notice, but she tries to find something similar on Gorgug, Fabian, or Riz, and comes up empty.
Fig, too, has a wealth of deposits in Kristen’s brain, she realizes. How her knuckles are a bit knobbled and her fingertips are calloused from playing her bass. How over the last month, her horns have grown about another inch, and Fig has started decorating them with metal bands, caps, and chains that hook from an earring to the tip of the horn. How she usually shoots for a black lipstick, but some days it’s a dark red that her skin fills in the color of very nicely.
“Kristen?” Adaine says, for presumably the third or fourth time, and she’s staring with large eyes full of concern at her, leaning forward from her perch on the couch.
“‘M fine.” Kristen waves her off but relinquishes the flask once more—Adaine regards it cautiously, like a bomb that might go off. A month ago, Kristen would have done much the same. Now… well, nothing mattered now, so why not?
As she says this, Fig’s legs slide over the back of the couch, and their third friend plops back into their midst ungracefully. She takes the flask from Adaine without waiting to see if she was going to drink it, and knocks back a mouthful of her own.
“Now that,” and Fig pauses to cough, “hits.”
Adaine’s brow does that same arch, and Kristen knows she isn’t going to get any more of that whiskey tonight—she settles for swirling the wine again and taking another mouthful, trying not to make a face at the warmth of it.
“We have school tomorrow,” Adaine points out, meek in tone. Fig waves dismissively, taking another swallow of it and holding it there for a few gulps.
“We’re having fun, we did some cool shit, we deserve a break.” Fig was probably already decently buzzed still by the time they got back to Gilear’s, and even more so after a little more of the vodka (gone now) and a clove cigarette in the window. The smell alone intimidates Kristen much too much to try one, but the idea is tempting. She reassures herself that there will be time to indulge in plenty of temptations, now—infinitely so, in fact. It’s not as though her parents will tell her what she can do under their roof.
The thought is sobering, just a bit. The screaming, the anger, the blood rushing through Kristen’s head until she couldn’t see straight without gushing tears, pushing past her dad and out of the front door of the house. Not her house, not anymore. Theirs. The Applebees’, all of the Applebees’ but Kristen’s. Trembling, she’d thrown a change of clothes and her new books into a bag and stormed out of the door, but with her head against the couch cushion now, it strikes her that she should’ve grabbed her toothbrush on the way out.
It’s odd to think about a toothbrush when she knows, somewhere underneath this swimming drunkness, that she’s not welcome at home. In the house where she grew up in, in the bedroom she built her formative memories in. Unwelcome in the kitchen with scores in the doorframe with her name and height penned to the side over the span of fifteen years, in the yard where she played catch with her brothers, in her parents’ bedroom where she’d crawled in and slept on some of the worst nights of her life. And never, before this, before tonight, had she imagined that it would be taken away. That her life would be taken away by two people that were supposed to love her, supposed to cherish her and keep her safe, protected from the worst that the world to throw at her.
Did they know Kristen was here? She hadn’t told them where she was going, just that she was leaving.
Did they care?
Kristen takes a deeper drink than before, draining her glass.
“Do either of you want to do something?” She asks as she sets it down, perhaps impulsively but choosing to double down instead of back down. “It’s still a bit early.”
Adaine gives her a sympathetic look—it’s selfish, but the thought flashes across Kristen’s mind nonetheless: at least her family is fucked up, too. At least someone in their party, their group, knew what it was like to have parents whose affection depended on expectations and fulfillment of them. For Adaine, she’d never had a chance to fill them in the first place. Kristen muses on whether that’s better or worse than having it and then having it taken away.
Fig regards both of them for a moment, probably either contrasting the time (late) with what Kristen had said, or spinning her wheels coming up with something truly diabolical for them to do to pass the time. That’s fine. Anything Fig suggests will be better than stewing in her own self-pity.
Fig strums a chord on her bass. “We could set up beer pong, or something.”
Adaine looks away, chewing her lip and mumbling something about being in trouble if she stays out too late—which isn’t true in the slightest. Her parents would hardly notice if she didn’t come home at all.
“Or we could just hang,” Fig amends, looking over her two friends that are equal amounts sleepy and drunk, and seems to piece together that neither of them want to get too crazy right now. Fig’s drunkenness always leads to chaos, to danger and adrenaline. All Kristen seems to want is warmth and somewhere dark to crawl into and close her eyes.
It’s dark in the apartment, at least—light from the street streams into the window and in squares across the floor, brushing her calves with a pale gold. Her mind drifts from her friends in front of her to the events of the day, the events of the last several days, the last few weeks and really, everything from the beginning of the school year until now. She remembers the enthusiasm with which she’d insisted that Coach Daybreak let her into detention with the rest of them so that she could bring Helio to them—after all, what would be more holy than bringing the Gospel to her peers in need of having their souls saved?
Then she’d died. Because of course, nothing ever went simply for Kristen Applebees, and something had to shift. Helio left her with more questions than answers, and for the first time, she’d questioned what she believed in.
Everything felt different after that, hadn’t it? Her powers had diminished even as her skills grew—drawing on Helio was unreliable, but what else could she call on? What other options were there?
It seemed so simple for everyone else. Everyone she’d ever met seemed confident in their beliefs: Fig in her belief of the power of devils, Tracker in her moon goddess, Coach Daybreak and everyone at home in their belief of Helio. Actually, she’s not entirely sure on the Tracker note—they hadn’t spoken much, per se, before she had begun writhing and transforming before Kristen’s eyes into a beast, a creature, a wolf that immediately sprung into a blood rage. It was probably a conversation of about ninety seconds total, but she’d been kissed and then immediately attacked. So that was… confusing.
More confusing was the twist of guilt in her chest at the memory of leaving her—she’d intended to look for her, to come back, she really had, but everything had swept her up in a whirlwind of activity and motion and by the time she’d remembered to look for Tracker, they were blocks away and police were swarming the scene.
It’s not like it’s Kristen’s fault if Tracker got locked up, right?
The part of her that still hasn’t been squished (and either it’s just a particularly difficult fly to squash, or something in her doesn’t want to let go of this voice), the voice of her parents and her upbringing through Helio, whispers to her that it doesn’t matter. That Tracker was a beast, someone that had chosen that life of damnation. Hell, the fact that Kristen had been accosted, had her defenses lowered and then preyed upon by some lesbian looking for… what? Genuine connection? At the challenge, the voice peters off, meekly returning to wherever it came from.
People are just people, Kristen chastises herself, perhaps a bit harshly but she’s honestly impatient with herself. Who cares if she likes girls. Who cares if you like girls?
Her fingers twist into the fabric of her shirt at that thought.
“Do you guys ever… think about the things your parents taught you, and you think about the people that you’ve met out there in the world, and you think you realize that a bunch of it just doesn’t add up?” She tries to keep the obvious shake from her voice, but her thoughts are her enemy right now, betrayed from the inside. To her somewhat surprise, both of them nod quite a bit.
“My mom didn’t tell me who my dad was,” Fig says, and though they’ve been over this many times, she seems more than happy to rehash it. “And she was totally happy to just let me think that Gilear was my dad until the horns came in. So, I pretty much just went through my head and threw out everything my mom ever told me. If she lied about that, what else did she lie about, you know?”
Kristen blinks at her. “How do you just… decide not to believe that, anymore?”
“It’s easy. If my mom said it, then I don’t believe it.” Fig takes a swig out of the whiskey and then passes it to Adaine, who surprisingly indulges in another large gulp.
“That’s truly abhorrent,” Adaine coughs, and takes a moment to collect her composure again. As she passes it to Kristen, her hand lingers for a moment, and Kristen finds herself doing the same. “I’m still trying to figure that out, though,” Adaine murmurs, voice lower, referring back to Kristen’s question. “My parents are absolutely vile, so it’s a lot more throwing away than it is keeping. There are always a few things worth thinking about, though.”
“Like what?” Kristen’s lips are already to the metal nozzle as she asks, but she asks anyway. Adaine hesitates for a long moment.
“Well, my parents would often make me do chores around the house, even though we had invisible servants that did most of the work for us. They told me it was character-building, but never did the same to Aelwyn.” Adaine’s nose scrunches up in distaste. “So I’m not sure if it was only my character they were interested in building, or if they only sought to enact punishment on me for being born—“
The last word is hissed out of her mouth as Fig places a gentle hand on her arm, and Adaine stops, her cheeks flushed.
“But you think that there was, like, a real lesson in that?” Kristen prompts. Adaine nods, exhaling slowly through pursed lips like she’s blowing out smoke.
“I think that most everything your parents teach you has some sort of meaning to it. Of course, the meaning can be complete bullshit and suck really, really bad.”
Kristen ponders that for a moment—the good of the church of Helio combined with the bad. How they’re often inextricable from each other. How it would be impossible to parse out the valuable lessons from the hatefulness and cruelty, the callous things said to someone so young and impressionable that she had no choice but to believe them.
“Do you think it’s worth trying to untangle all of the good things and the bad things?”
Adaine’s interest has turned elsewhere—if it weren’t for the slight frown tugging at her lips, Kristen would assume she’s bored of the topic, but she’s in fact disgusted. Probably out of thinking of her parents for too long.
“Personally? No. I’d rather just start over and find some new lessons.” She glances back towards Kristen, and her gaze softens just a little. “But there’s often valuable things left behind if you choose a fresh start.”
Kristen nods, pacing her own breathing. Her head feels like it’s swimming—the whiskey, wine, and vodka are all bobbing her head along on their waves, and she’s doing her best to keep her head upright against the couch. How long has it been since she started drinking? How many hours?
“Thanks,” she rasps out. “There’s just—there’s so much…” A hiccup forces its way through her throat unbidden.
Fig’s hand leaves Adaine’s and rests on Kristen’s head, her fingers curling into her hair. There’s a hesitation, a small moment, and then both of Fig’s hands tug the hair tie out, loosing Kristen’s hair to her shoulders. Fig’s fingers tickle her scalp, gently pushing through the roots and rubbing small, repetitive strokes that soothe Kristen more effectively than anything said so far. She lets herself close her eyes to the motion.
Something settles inside of her, shifting and slotting into place. It takes her a long, silent moment to place it, but the thought is persistent, and her mind wrestles with it until she realizes it’s the shift of everything moving just slightly as a lens is changed, not quite clear but a clearer picture than before.
“Were you you guys…” It wriggles away from her grasp, and either fear or uncertainty (or both) makes her sentence scatter in the silence of the dark living room. It could be real, but speaking it now would certainly shatter it. She switches tacks. “What did your parents tell you guys about, like, dating and stuff?” That saves some of it—this small, glistening thing that feels so fragile in Kristen’s hands.
Fig’s hands pause. Kristen can tell that there’s a trepidation in the room in response to her words, and when she glances at Adaine out of the corner of her eye, she can see that her friend is looking down at the couch, away from Kristen.
Is she not looking at her?
“Well,” Fig starts, and her hands retreat from Kristen’s head, leaving her to mourn them. “What do you mean?”
“Like…” Frustration blooms in her chest—what does Fig mean ‘what do you mean’? The question was clear, and there’s hardly another way she can phrase it without prying into the heart of it. “About… who you could date, and like, you know.”
“My parents never gave me any kind of romantic advice, if that’s what you’re asking.” Adaine still doesn’t quite look at Kristen. “In fact, I think they were hardly interested in my personal life at all.”
Fig nods. “My mom always told me it didn’t matter who I dated, as long as they were respectful and I felt comfortable with them. But also, it’s my mom, so…” Fig’s sentence trails off as she clearly tries to grapple with genuinely good advice coming from a figure she has no desire to respect or listen to.
Kristen feels her jaw clench at their responses, though—this isn’t right. They’re supposed to tell her that their parents always told them to save themselves for the right boy, to never touch themselves and never give themselves away because their bodies were sacred and should be a marriage gift to a man. Dating is an avenue for marriage, and all relationships should be chaste and holy. Kristen finds herself shaking her head before the thoughts tumble around and out of her mouth, and Fig again nudges Kristen.
“Everything okay?”
“That’s…” Her mouth forms the word wrong, but the word refuses to fall out of her mouth. Is it? Is it so wrong that, for the first time in her life, something had felt right when Tracker kissed her in that bar? Is it so wrong that something feels like it settles into place every time Fig throws a grin her way and trills on her bass, or every time Adaine’s brows furrow and her eyes flash white with a sliver of the future revealed to her in the moment. Is it so wrong? Kristen just closes her mouth and shakes her head again.
“Kristen,” Fig starts, and both of her hands clasp both of Kristen’s—she looks up at her friend, hair loose and curled around her face instead of pulled into its traditional braid. She looks gentler like this, less wild and more calm, put together and relaxed. “I know you grew up in… a place that wasn’t very open minded.”
Immediately, Kristen’s defenses raise, and she bites back a defense for her home. There’s so much wrong with her family and her parents, so much they told her that was outright cruel and harmful, but she can’t bring herself to hate them, as hard as she tries. Every time she wants to hate them, she remembers warm bread on a cold night, shared with her younger brothers underneath blankets, asking her mom what made grass so green while they sat on the hill in the backyard, long conversations with her father about the instability of their income and how, Helio willing, they’d sort it out eventually. She can’t hate the people that raised her, the people that loved her, even if their love was revoked.
Fig flinches when Kristen gives her a glare, and she starts rubbing soothing circles in Kristen’s palms. “And I know it’s hard to sort out what, exactly, is good and what’s bad. It’s complicated. Just know that we’re here for you, no matter what, okay? Whatever you decide and however you feel.”
“I know what it’s like to have a shitty family,” Adaine adds, and then hesitates. “I can’t really sympathize with the defensive desire for mine, but I can imagine it’s difficult when there’s much more good mixed in with it.”
Kristen feels tears pressing against her throat, making the laugh that bubbles out of her warbly and wet. She takes a hand back from Fig and presses her palm to her eye, dabbing the tears there. “I just wish everything went back to how it was. Before it was all… confusing.”
Fig hums. “Were you happy before?”
I was happier not knowing. Not thinking about it. She ignores the part of her, the tiny voice in the back of her head that says you couldn’t have put it off forever. You would’ve ended up in a loveless marriage with a man you hated and never would have ever found peace with yourself. You would’ve hated yourself every minute of existence, and you would’ve died and gone to the heaven of a god you don’t even care about.
“I… think it was just easier, you know?”
Adaine scooches across the couch and rests her palms on Kristen’s other knee, not offering much in the way of comfort but offering her presence, and Krisen gratefully accepts it. There’s at least solace in knowing she’s not alone.
“Discovering yourself is hard,” Fig murmurs, running her thumb over Kristen’s knuckles. “But I think ultimately, you’ll be happier for it.”
I hope so , Kristen thinks, the drunkenness still leaving her in a stupor despite the swirling of her thoughts. She leans into Adaine’s side, tilting her cheek to rest on her shoulder and holding Fig’s hands in her lap. She’s pretty sure her last thought before sleep claims her is maybe they’re right. Maybe it is worth it.