Effy's Fangirl Problem
Of Knowing
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A/N: I hope whoever is brave enough to get this far is still enjoying this….Well, whatever this is. Unbeta-ed, so any mistakes are mine.
Disclaimer: Skins? I own nothing of the sort. Sometimes I wake up crying when I remember that.
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Law # 2: be able to read your idol as an open book.
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Understanding people's thought patterns and reactions was Effy's specialty. She would never, as far as she can remember, be surprised by anyone's 'unexpected' reaction to any situation, in fact she was pretty sure that if she wrote a fiction featuring everyone she knew, their actions and feelings would be so close from reality that it could be set on Mars for all she cared, they would take it for reality and suddenly believe in interspatial travelling and then go off telling everybody about how they went to Mars and befriended a Martian named E.T. who was obsessed with telephones. So, alright, maybe she watched E.T. far too much for own good. What? She was allowed to be a regular fangirl from time to time, it was a nice break.
The first people she learned how to read were obviously her parents. Right, so they weren't the hardest specimens around to be honest, they fucked you up like any other parent and were so dim and self-centered that she was sure they would never really get to know her enough to realize she had been observing them.
When she was seven, she hid in her own closet while playing hide and seek with her mum because she just knew, far too well at that, that it was the last place her mum could go looking. Just as the last thing on her mum's mind was how to get into her thoughts and fully know her daughter, she had always foolishly assumed that because she rested in her womb for 9 months, a full understanding of Effy's personality was just given. There was no use looking, she knew. Except she didn't, not even nearly, and then it was just too easy to hide off and just shine that 'Effy' all-knowing smile of hers at her incredulous face hours later. She never lost at that game again. Sometimes, when she hugged Pato the giraffe at night and told him all about it, she wished she had.
Her brother, it seemed, was both the hardest and easiest for her to pinpoint. Oh, she had soon learnt that people could rarely be discarded in boxes or even labeled (although she always kept that bin her mind where she would throw in some personalities coming her way, "Useless Cliché-d Paper-Thin and Entirely Vacant Beings", those were too easy to read, manipulate and discard soon afterwards, never wholesome enough to catch her attention) but usually one could sort out common responses to situations dictated by society's norms and all that to describe people. But Tony, he was different from everyone else. As she discovered, after a few years of living in the same house and watching his interactions with his friends; he was in fact playing the same game. They liked challenges, them Stonems; they liked competition even. Apparently Tony had somewhat caught up with what she was doing, carefully observing and all that, and he too used his incredible intelligence only ever rivaled by hers to read people like open books. Except he was much more outspoken about it, sliding snide remarks on his friends' doings and using of his own knowledge to somewhat manipulate them into getting what he wanted. He didn't mean it though, he never meant to be a jerk, she could tell as much. But it was almost too easy and seemed to work for him, he would shine this all-knowing aura around his head and girls and boys would be attracted to it like flies to a light bulb and soon everybody would be at his feet.
He blinded them sometimes though, and that was when they would get pissed, flip him off and leave him. But to be so blinded, so burned by his all-seeing nature, they would have to be so close to him that they would sometimes have faint glimpses of what he really was behind all that. Effy was too stoic to ever be burned or blinded, her walls acting as shields to his fire, but she believed she was one of the few to have ever watched and carefully observed what he really was underneath.
Sid and Michelle, they both got close enough to burn and finally tell Tony to fuck off long enough so they could recover. Sid was the simplest of souls though, as Effy had soon read, and going back to Tony wasn't too hard for him. He wasn't scared; she believed he was too simple to be scared of anything actually or to even know what he was scared off, so he just flew back with no protections whatsoever. And maybe that was it, he was too simplistic to be blinded by Tony anymore, too trustful, too loyal to be burnt what this odd mystique around his friend. He just flew right through the whole aura and stood next to the real Tony and said: "Alright, mate? What about breakfast, I'm starving." And walked off, all innocent and clueless, and maybe he would never understand how much that meant for Tony. But that night, when Effy couldn't take all of the pression and voices in her head and ended up in the hospital for too much drug abuse all at once, that was all Sid needed to do to change Tony entirely, to show him what he could really be.
Michelle, now that was a whole other business. Michelle was scared, so scared Effy could basically feel the goose bumps on her skin if she closed her eyes and tried hard enough. Because suddenly she wasn't sure of anything, and Tony was just so certain of everything. But he couldn't be sure for her anymore; maybe she just had to find things out by herself. And suddenly, Tony was clueless, unaware and blinded – for once – blinded by hope and love. Fucking love, caring – as far as Effy was concerned – was useless and love, of all things, was such an irrational thing she couldn't really understand how people would allow themselves be carried away by it. (She could never stand it, love. She couldn't stand it when Tony pointed out her own weaknesses to it, the breaches in her so carefully built wall. She couldn't stand it when Freddie jumped in the water and swam to her, splashing violent waves against her barriers turning those breaches into cracks and those cracks into large holes as water came pouring in her fortress. Freddie, she couldn't think about Freddie.)
So, this time, Effy in all of her stoic and objective power, had to step in and fix everything, because if love was what would make her brother happy then she would have to fix that. For the first time she used her years and years of observations to go off, fix Tony's relationship, bring Cassie back on the right track, smack Sid in the head hard enough so he would finally understand that no – things were never that simple, but sometimes they could be if he wanted them hard enough. In the process, she had met Pandora and that was a whole other business of confusion all together.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Pandora was her ability to make everything simple, not see everything as a simple equation as Sid did (never really helped him that, did it?), but just see things in their whole complex form then roughly imprint them in her mind long enough to distract Effy from her careful complicated observations and state the obvious, point out the most important points in the simplest of ways. Sometimes Effy didn't need complicated, sometimes the voices were too loud for complicated and it made her dizzy and sick and she couldn't stand it – but then Panda would show up and go off in one of her magnificent rants and it eased Effy off, it rounded up some sharp corners and made believing much easier. Just that, believing. That was what Pandora was all about, believing. So Effy, for once, did not try to read too much into her, did not want to know Pandora like an open book because then it would make everything complicated again. Pandora was simple. Pandora was good for her. (She had a special box in her brain for Panda with a simple label: 'Whizzer', she'd thrown Pato the funny giraffe in there too. They were her comfort. Sometimes she thought Panda was like a gif macro fangirls made to state simple facts on fandoms.)
Naomi Campbell, now that was another level of complicated. She'd glimpsed the girl around town sometimes even before Roundview, with her short bright blonde hair and a scowl seemingly permanently glued to her face. She was twelve. The first time she saw her, the blonde had been sitting against the middle school's wall, a school Effy did not attend but where she knew a couple of people and had come to watch their interactions as she often did. Naomi (as she had soon learnt her name through her friends' snickering) was reading some book apparently overly complicated and deep for a twelve year old; her eyebrows knitted close together as she tried to focus through the noise and bustling of people around her. She didn't have many friends, afraid to get close to people – much like Effy herself, she'd reasoned – and stood at a distance seemingly careless to the rest of the world.
She wasn't, at that point, the most interesting person Effy had come across (Chris, for instance, had been the center of her attention at that time, his character was simply fascinating), it was fairly easy to read into her. Afraid of getting hurt, independent, opinionated, undeniably clever, probably less than sympathetic to her family issues, possibly lost a relative or said relative ran off to god knows where, eccentric household by the looks of her unusual clothing, desperate need to be both fit in and be unique at the same time.
But when she thought her examination had been throughout, something caught her eye. You see, she heard before she saw Katie walking nearby with a cheery gang of the posh-est blonde giggling girls, telling whoever wanted to hear about how Benjamin had kissed her in the courtyard the day before and how he was 'well fit and lush, yeah? And like his Nike t-shirt was so great and get this, he had a band– yeah? And like, babe, he's mature yeah and all that and he listens to Linkin Park and is all well cool and all that'. She knew by then how Emily was shy and liked to hide in her sister's shadow. People would rarely notice her, especially if Katie was anywhere to be seen (or heard.). So Effy in all her self-confidence and observation skills was pretty sure she would be the first, if not the only one to notice the youngest twin.
But, for once, she was surprised out of her own certainty. She saw Naomi nearly snap her neck roughly in Katie's direction, an annoyed frown in her face suddenly dissipating into some sort of ridiculous awe. By the time she followed Naomi's gaze, she saw Emily standing only a few feet from the blonde, crouching down to look at some of the flowers nearby, a book still open in her hand on which Effy could decipher the title Alice in Wonderland. Naomi shook her head, apparently confused out of her careful reading and returned her gaze to her book. Effy was close enough to them to overhear whatever Emily seemed to be muttering now and listened intently.
"Do you reckon that if you were small enough – maybe you could hear the flowers singing too?" the short girl said, more to herself than anyone else.
Effy was sure she could have heard Naomi's neck crack as she snapped her head to look at the younger twin, her eyebrows shooting up in a mixture of surprise and confusion at being spoken to, her breath seemed to catch in her throat as she simply stared at the girl. Surely, such a confident-looking girl could come up with a snide and possibly hurtful remark as to why she was being bothered out of her reading, or simply answer something simple and meaningless to her classmate and maybe even strike up a conversation on the book Emily held. But the blonde didn't blink, coughed once as if she were about to speak then retreated back into shocked silence, her eyes never leaving the side of Emily's head.
The latter suddenly realized that she had spoken out loud or maybe just thought that she was too insignificant for anyone to actually care about her personal musings and stood upright again, blushing furiously. "Sorry" she slipped under her breath as she hurried off to catch up with Katie, hugging her book tightly against herself and obviously trying to disappear under anyone's gaze.
Naomi watched her go, her mouth still gaping and her brow furrowed in a mixture of confusion and shock, thousands of different thoughts seemed to run through her mind as she bit on her lower lip. She then jerked her head up, shook it a couple of times, muttered something under her breath and went back to her reading, her eyes glancing up only a few times to scan the street for the twins again.
Now, Effy thought then her lips mouthing a curious 'oh' as she watched the exchange, those were very – very – interesting specimens.
When she got home that night, she locked herself in the bathroom with Pato and flailed.
And thus, Effy became the very first and possibly the most fervent Naomily shipper in this or any other universe.