notes ⸺ in between working on two other fics for this fandom (jesus fucking christ, i know), this messy stream-of-conscious somehow slipped out. literally written entirely on my phone during my break at work, so any and all errors are my own. it's messy and probably...bad, honestly, but i had fun trying to get into evie's mindset and it's rare that i am so comfortable writing in first person. i had to seize the opportunity. also, this fandom seems to have a habit of sleeping on my favorite ships. stop sleeping on queer girl ships bc queer girls are so important 2 me.
triggers ⸺ none i can think of except for a tiny mention of blood near the end as well as some...strange imagery (body horror?)
「 ❛ KISSING DEAD STARS ❜ 」
i am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and i thought people would see it because 'romantic'
doesn't mean 'sugary.' it's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of idealism.
The first thought that crosses my mind when I see her that this is some sort of joke, because this isn't Mal. It looks like Mal, but it isn't; I'm suddenly living on the reverse side of the mirror, where things are similar but if you look hard enough, you'll find something out of place. That flower over there is purple in real life, but through the mirror it's more pink. The grass is taller and the sun is brighter and our teeth are sharper.
But it is her. This I know. It's her, but it's not.
She's wearing a skirt. Like, a real skirt, long and flowing, floral patterns crawling all over it. No leather. And she's barefoot. And she's smiling. Like, really smiling. Her hair is the same. Her face is the same. She's still shorter than me, but only by an inch or so. But she looks...different, somehow. Softer. Now that inch feels palpable. It feels real, and my heart aches for the times when it always felt like she was something larger than life, towering over me, all-consuming despite that inch difference. The last time I saw her, her grins were always more teeth than lips, laughter that dripped with a sort of wickedness that had the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
She hugs me. It's not that, exactly, that bothers me, except that it's so soft, like she's afraid of breaking me.
Mal has never hugged me like she was afraid to break me before. My skin is crawling.
It's not just that, though. Everything about her is softer. Her hair, her skin, her smile. Her voice. What was once a serpent tongue that spit unforgiving words without thought now curls lazily around the words she speaks, quiet and punctuated by more gentle grins and rosy cheeks.
"I've missed you so much," she murmurs, lips brushing my ear as she pulls away. Goosebumps raise on my arms, and I pinch them away quickly because it is a sweltering day in July and I want her so badly I think I might scream. "You look great, E."
She's right ⸺ I do look great. Blue and pale silk, ruby lips and gold around my neck. Lashes so long I think they could be mistaken for butterflies. If anyone else told me this, I would remain unfazed. Perhaps a simple thanks or even an I know would suffice, because I learned long ago that my beauty is not something to be built up and approved by the hungry eyes of men who only see the curve of my hips and the swell of my breast. They miss the blood on my lips, the ice in my eyes and the broken glass in my throat.
But this isn't anyone else. This is Mal, and the words, no matter how innocent and well-intentioned they are, have my stomach twisting and turning like eels.
"You do, too." And she does, hair of pressed violets and sparkling eyes and smooth, milky skin. She looks beautiful, but she doesn't look like her. She looks like a picture of Mal that has been mostly erased, or a glass sculpture of herself. A princess cut from marble by Ben's own hands. I clear my throat, shifting the conversation away from myself, shifting my thoughts away from the way my fists clench at the thoughts of him touching her like she's glass because she has never been glass. I wonder if she's ever moaned his name the way she used to moan mine, hands fisted in my hair and nails raking down my back. Probably not. "So. How are you? How has everything been?" I haven't seen her in six months and there are certainly more interesting things to be discussing but none of them will live my lips, so the mundane will have to do for now.
I expect her to tease me, for her pretty mouth to turn downwards into a scowl, eyes darkening like oncoming night. What, that's it? Six months and that's all you have to say? That's what she'd say if we were sixteen again, but we are not and so she merely smiles again, completely oblivious to my discomfort and the way my posture shifts like I'm about to fold in on myself.
"I'm great. Amazing even, E." She takes my hands in hers and squeezes tight. My heart rolls over on itself. "Everything is so great." She is practically breathless, as if the weight of how wonderful and great and amazing everything is is a boulder between her shoulder blades.
Her hand rests on the gentle slope of her stomach, a gesture all too familiar and my stomach twists and I don't want to look, I don't, but I hate myself and I love her so I look anyway and ⸺ oh. She's pregnant; barely, but still. Still months away from her twentieth year of life and she is pregnant. That's his child in there. It feels like a finale, the last nail in my coffin. Bile crawls up my throat, slimy fingers of it slipping under my tongue and I fight the urge to spit it into the grass. I want to poison all of the flowers in this garden with my acid and venom until they dry up and wither away.
Pregnancy is a good look on her. She looks happy, and for the first time I think I truly understand the term glowing, because that's what she is. It's like she's carrying the sun around inside of her skin and the light is leaking out through her pores, eyes glittering and cheeks flushed prettily.
I don't like this. I don't want her soft. I want sixteen year old Mal and sixteen year old me, bare legs tangled together in the dark, angular hipbones brushing, all sharp edges crashing together like waves and razor blades, no give and all take. Taking from each other, taking for each other. Mal has always been an anchor and a lifesaver in one. Her power to drag me down into murky depths, hands on my saltwater skin and tangled in my seaweed hair, has always been greater than her ability to lift me up. I have grown accustomed to breathing in toxins and rot and living amongst creatures dead from the moment they are born, and I think this is the first time I have ever felt her trying to lift me up. The first time she is tugging me towards the surface so I can suck in clean air, and yet I still cannot breathe; my lungs and my chest feel heavy as ever.
I wish I didn't care so much what she thought of me, but I do. I wish I didn't care so much about her in the first place, but I know I always will.
Even if it kills me.
And it will kill me, eventually. That much I know. When I was small, my mother taught me that a broken heart can be as lethal as a knife, though in those hypothetical situations she painted inside my head I was always the vixen, the one breaking hearts. Snapping them like twigs under my feet. But I don't think anyone has ever fallen in love with my smile the way I have fallen in love with Mal's.
My chest is a haunted house, vast and empty and Mal is the ghost that haunts it. She lingers in the spaces between my ribs, voice catching in the grooves of my brain, touch clinging to my skin like static on hot summer days like today. Mal is a ghost, pale grey and filmy and torn at the edges, or at least she used to be. Now, she's a spirit, a creature of light weaving her way through my fingertips and setting my skin on fire but at the end of the day she's still haunting me and I never want her to stop.
Ben comes out then, almost mercifully before I am assaulted with questions about how I am doing, his arms hooking around her waist from behind, hand resting protectively over her stomach where his spawn is flowering. My mother would be so disappointed for more reasons than one. He is looking at me, and I know that he knows. He knows that I know that he knows because he might have been raised behind sturdy walls with clean tables and parents to listen to his stories but he is still smarter than he lets on, and I know he sees it in my eyes.
He knows that he's won. I am not competition, at least not anymore. Instead, I am something to be pitied. Weak. Pathetic. Cursed to remain the runner-up for the rest of my days, I've lost and we both know it. He feels sorry for me and I hate it. He never stops feeling sorry for people. After all, the guilt that seized his heart is the reason Mal is here in the first place.
I wish he never brought us here. I will go to hell for thinking that, but it's true. I will go to hell for thinking that because without him I would probably be dead, and Mal too, and now she's got nineteen years tucked neatly under her belt and a baby growing inside of her. Back on the Isle, sometimes at night she'd whisper to me that she was sure her mother was going to kill her someday. I never said this out loud, but I always thought so, too. We were destined to die young, skeletal fingers reaching for the sun in our last moments of life, fragile blacklight hearts finally faltering under the weight of our parents' disapproval and our own bad habits that we picked up like loose change.
I think about love spells and magic potions. I think about how before he loved Mal, Ben loved Audrey. I wonder if that means Mal can love me (again, I remind myself; love me again) someday, too, leave Ben in the dust like he left Audrey.
Somehow, I doubt it, but it's nice to pretend.
He whispers something into her ear and she's giggling and the sound makes me want to scream. He's not supposed to make her laugh, and she isn't supposed to laugh like that. Mal kisses him then, and it is nothing but a soft brush of lips, chaste as he squeezes her arms gently but I cannot watch, so I turn away. Somehow, it's worse and I think I'd rather watch her jam her tongue down his throat.
Mal whips around with a promise to be right back, and then she's leaving me in the garden alone with Ben and we're staring at each other from across the lawn, Adam and Eve or maybe Adam and the serpent. I haven't quite figured out which one I am yet. Perhaps I am just an apple, pretty and sparkling and red and overflowing with toxins. I want him to bite me and I want him dead. The worst part is that I don't even hate him; I just want him gone.
"Nobody has ever forced her to stay here, you know." His voice splits the silence hanging between us and he's right. I know he's right and I know he's won and maybe my mother would back down from an argument such as this one ⸺ insurmountable, she'd call it ⸺ but I am not my mother. Somehow, I am far more bitter than even she ever was, my soul consumed by an ever-present sense of grief and anger and desperation. I will not let him know that I have been defeated.
"That's why you've knocked her up, then." I say it calmly. Poised and pretty, but my words are laced with venom and from the look on Ben's face, I know he's tasted it.
"Evie," he says. Slow and solemn, tone laced with caution tape. He's giving me time to back out. Of course he is, because he's soft and too forgiving and gives too many second chances and maybe I do, too. Maybe that's why I hate him so much.
"I do love her, you know." And Mal loves him. Both of these things are true, and this realization wraps tight around my heart like a fishing line and tugs.
Because he loves her, and she loves him. She does love him. But she loves me, too. After all, it wasn't Ben who was there she was starving and I was, too, rumbling stomachs and parched mouths and chapped lips. He wasn't the one who skinny dipped with her when he were fifteen, and it wasn't him that she kissed while the stars burned. It wasn't Ben's stupid, tacky friendship bracelet that Mal wore for six years straight, even when it started falling apart, cheap string coming undone and beads cracking. Mal didn't cut open her palm just to press her hand against Ben's ⸺ that was all mine, blood mingling together with our hearts racing in our chests as we howled at the moon and ran from the things that lurked in the bushes and around corners.
Instead, I smile at him, a little rueful. I want to laugh, but when I do, it's too dry and too watery at the same time and it feels like I'm choking instead. "I know you do. But I've loved her longer." My gleaming eyes trace along the shape of the castle that towers over us, casting its colossal shadow over ours, stark against the afternoon sky. "I loved her first."