Title: Live Hard
Summary: He may not even be considered much of a person anymore but the moon does things that bring out what he used to be, there's a reason the doctor has him on a sedative and there's one unlucky nurse's name on the bottom of the incident report following the bite.
Rating: M
Warnings: Language, violence, sexual innuendo
Spoilers: There are some but they are few and far between for the most part, this story works around the main storyline while incorporating it at key points.
Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Wolf
A/N: Dude, I love writing Derek. A note about some of the comments regarding UST that showed up last chapter, totally didn't do it intentionally. Though I guess it's a good thing that it's coming through on its own but let me just say that right now Derek and Lucette are ambivalent about each other, that's how they feel regardless of what the outside view on what's going on is and if there's sexual tension they don't see it, they're kind of not diggin' each other vibes and this chapter things devolve from ambivalence to plain hostility, they both get on each other's nerves and not the good ones.
Day 50:
Her chosen workout music blasted out through the first floor of the house and she basked in just how much more she enjoyed listening to music with her ears picking up every nuance, the volume didn't bother her, she could feel it rattling her bones in the best way.
It felt whimsical to skid on the bottom of her too long, too loose jeans across the wood floor and spin herself, braid slapping across her shoulders hard and her cigarette leaving trails of smoke wafting around her.
She tried to remember when the last time she felt so fantastic was. When she'd ever felt so rested and strong and vibrant.
Nothing came to mind.
She paused and eyed the staircase with avid interest, puffing idly on filter and clicking the nails of her other hand together.
Her dog remained wary of her but had at least stopped hiding from her, he watched her look around the house in wonder of it, confused by his owner's antics.
It was heady, the high feeling, the casual ease. She was taken with herself, her body, the way she felt, how good the cigarette tasted, how utterly bombastic the music pounded out.
"Brigs, stop looking at me like I should put a shirt on. I can walk around naked if I want, it's my house," she snickered and looked down at her small breasts and thought that she had never loved them quite as much as she did then.
They were perfect. Her sagging jeans were perfect. Her horribly braided hair was perfect. Her chapped lips were perfect. She was perfect.
The way her stride felt was breathtaking, it was as if she'd never actually walked before for real and she finally just woken up and got it, though every so often her stride faltered and she'd stumble into something, not used to how her joints and bones had refused.
She jumped onto the banister and climbed the slope of it and when it grew too steep she crouched and lowered a hand for support, stopping to eye the top railing on the second floor.
Launching herself she caught the wood railing with one hand and swung her body up and around to face the view of downstairs. She watched her toes as she wiggled them and let out a cloud of smoke.
She heard the book before she felt it hit her and sent her flying to the floor below. The textbook landed within a foot and spun out across the floor, crinkling pages like broken bug wings, taking her cigarette with it and waving orange embers everywhere.
Her nails left marks on the floor and she felt her lips crack when she snarled up at the thrower of heavy books.
"Well, at least now it's instantaneous," Derek Hale muttered leaning over the railing lazily.
Within a breath she scaled back up the banister and kicked him back from the railing, landing and planting herself less than a foot from him.
She lunged and found herself flying back downstairs over the railing. Her head pounded in time with the loud music when her vision stopped spotting shooting stars and channel static.
Wiping at her torn lip she looked at her nails and found them less intimidating than they had been a moment before.
Something thrown from above flopped lazily at her splayed legs it was the shirt she'd been wearing before deciding it was too itchy and she'd rather be half-naked.
The idea didn't seem as brilliant as it did before Derek Hale had shown up and pushed her off the banister to the floor thirteen feet below.
"You make a habit of walking around with a shirt on?"
"It's my house. Ring the doorbell and I'd put one on," she answered after a choking gasp on reclaimed air.
"Well the view's pretty unimpressive," he nodded to himself, face scrunching, "Might not be the best thing to flaunt."
With a toss of her head and a glare at the ceiling she pressed a hand to her sternum, "I've noticed. By all means don't feel like it's rude to just not look at them, at all, ever."
"You're the one without a shirt on."
"You're the one who forgot to knock."
They were silent and Lucette walked her fingers down the hills her ribs made under her skin, there was a stabbing throb on her left side, one of them was causing it, she prodded harder, trying to find the one that was misplaced.
"I've got a few hours."
"Training season. Fantastic. Gimme a second to pop my spine back into place," she scowled and arched her back off of and then into the wood floor trying to create some space between the disks.
He came down the stairs and looked down at her; she closed her eyes and tried not to be embarrassed. She tossed a lazy arm over her chest. He snorted and leaned down to pick up the shirt he'd thrown at her and let it fall over her face and torso. She heard him stalk away and start moving furniture in the living room.
"Are you going to get up?"
It was a valid question.
"Let's not do that again, okay? My back kills." She bent her knees and got the floor firmly under her feet, her speech mumbled through the fabric covering her face.
"Crack it," he suggested.
She twisted on the floor and moved her shoulders and hips side to side until something cracked and it suddenly hurt to breathe when a rib popped backed in place.
Standing she pulled on the thermal shirt and helped him with the coffee table.
Her back still hurt, he noticed her flexing her shoulders back and forth and trying to twist.
He came behind her holding her shoulder firm and digging a knuckled fist into the center of her back, bending her spine into her stomach.
The fabric of her shirt rasped her skin hard enough to burn under his fingers and the bony knobs of his knuckles made her squirm in her spot as they ground against her spine, agonizing and inescapable.
It snap, crackle, popped back into feeling less painful.
"Thanks," she muttered.
He nodded walking around her. He planted his foot on the seat of the leather armchair, pushing it back towards the window.
"Alright. Try to hit me," he sounded bored already knowing her performance was bound to be lackluster. She knew it to, but it didn't make his expression less insufferable.
She got two hits to his twenty-three.
"Better," he commented idly after he tossed her carelessly into a wall.
Day 51:
"You're a horrible best friend."
She tied her shoelaces with the phone nestled between her face and shoulder, waving her head back and forth in unseen mockery of the person on the other line.
"Oh puh-lease you never call me back, and you do it on purpose. I don't call you back because I forget."
"I'm not going to return a call when I'm dead tired, Lucette," she was told sternly.
Sighing she smoothed out the cuffs of her pants and realized there was no way to win the argument and not come off as a bitch, "Sorry I forgot to call you back."
Standing she looked down at her sneakers and her jeans and then across the floor at where her dog lay, head on paws, snout pressed against the wood and eyes down.
"I left like four messages."
"I said I was sorry," she answered not knowing what else her friend wanted her to say about her lack of punctual returns on phone calls.
"Well I was beginning to feel like you were shunning me."
The answer sounded sullen and childish, sad and small. It made Lucette stop and sit back down feeling sobered by the admission, it hollowed her out.
"I wasn't, and now you know how I feel when you don't pick up because you're dead tired."
"Fine from now on I'll pick up and just fall asleep in the middle of you talking."
She smiled at the uppityness of the reply. It filled her mind with thoughts of normalcy, "You do that now. What's up?"
"Nothing."
Lucette flopped back, her hair flying out and falling around her head across the messy slept in sheets and put an arm over her eyes. "You called me seven times and left four messages for nothing?" She tried to sound scathing.
"I miss my best friend. I haven't talked to you in forever."
"Yeah, I know. Work's been hectic lately."
"You get mauled by any wild mountain lions yet?"
The cheerful obliviousness scalded her to her bones. Lucette hung her head off the bed and relished the weight the blood-rush seemed to add to her skull.
"Yeah, barely escaped with my life," a grin grew out of the sheer desperate need to not stall, stop, and sputter out like a candle wick drowning in wax over what was transpiring around her. "A burly lumberjack came and rescued me from the jaws of death and slayed the beast with an axe," she continued feeling the prick of heat behind her eyes and the heaviness above her cheek bones as her face turned a splotchy red.
"Lumberjacks don't use axes, they use chainsaws."
"I'll pass that along." The prickling heat melded into liquid warmth and she felt her temples become sticky and chilled by the awful culmination of stress and being too feeble to help herself.
"A woodsman uses an axe," Molly sounded thoughtful.
"They both like plaid," her voice sounded watery and she coughed to banish anything but a normal intonation. She swung her body up and the wet tracks streamed down instead of up.
Molly didn't notice.
It flayed her emotionally, nicking at something vital as it tore things from her. Things that made her haughty and assured of her worth, things that to her were as fathomable as the fact that she breathed, integral parts of her, parts that were changing.
Molly wouldn't notice because Lucette would choke her watery whimpers on her knees and pull the phone away from her mouth, would stifle her warbling by holding her breath until her lungs shook and shivered.
"So yeah, I missed you. Even though you're a bitch who doesn't pick up her phone."
"Watch it or I'll hang up.
She wanted to, but she wouldn't. She enjoyed the exercise in self-debasement too much, she wanted to subject herself to the conversation, she wanted to be chided and scolded even though she was beyond such things, maybe forever, she wanted it at least for a little while longer in case she never got it again.
"No you won't, you love me too much."
The voice on the other line sounded smug.
"So what have you been up to?" Lucette dragged her forearm across her face and got up to go to the mirror. She wanted to watch herself, she wanted to know what it was like to watch herself be one person and sound like another and have someone have no idea.
"Work, broke up with bubba."
"Broke up? Or are you two just fucking, because if you're still fucking you haven't broken up."
Taking a wash cloth and letting cold water crash out of the facet onto it she took in her face, patchy red and her eyes squinted, veined heavily and hard despite the heat rolling away from them down her face. She licked at her lips and tasted salt and felt the fractures and cracks in the delicate tissue.
"We still have sex."
"Slut," she made herself grin at the mirror and the resounding snort in her ear only made it widen until a lip cracked. She watched the line of red bubble and then slowly she imagined that she could see it heal cell by cell.
"I like having sex with him."
"Is it good sex?"
Her fingers traced over the red line on the pale plumpness of her lower lip, she place a finger on either side and ripped the patches of chapping flesh apart, it stung like a hornet but she licked the spot better and watched it stitch back together.
"It's ah-may-zing, it's nice not having him be my boyfriend."
The conversation went by with her response delivered as if they were being handed to her on a piece paper to read off of, so very much like the things she normally said but her mind was humming the cold distance of a machine hibernating or not yet kick-started to proper functioning.
"What if he starts having amazing sex with someone else, will you be pissed off?"
In the spaced out silence that was created for the woman on the other line to think up a suitable response Lucette tucked the phone away from her mouth and pulled the scaled patches of her lips apart and watched the angry colored gaps suck themselves together and join smoothly together.
"I'd be fucking furious."
"Then you guys are still boyfriend-girlfriend without the titles, better make sure he knows what the arrangement is."
She hadn't wanted her lips to not be chapped, she bit at the bottom and peeled off a thin strip with her clenched teeth and let it waft to the back of her tongue and down her throat.
"He does," Molly assured her.
"No he doesn't because you haven't drawn the line in the sand yet."
Lucette picked up the washcloth and wrung it out, and folded it into a packed square to press against her eyes and sooth her puffy-faced appearance.
She felt better. There was no tightness in her chest choking her and making her eyes want to burst.
"He knows."
Satisfied that her face was less blotchy and she let the rag fall with a slap into the sink and turned away from her reflection to lean against the counter, "Okay, don't call me pissed off and crying when he fucks another girl because he thought it was okay because you're not boyfriend-girlfriend."
"He knows."
"He thinks you're each other booty calls."
"No he doesn't."
"Fine he doesn't," she was only agreeing to piss her friend off, the other woman knew as much.
"Now you're pissing me off."
"Don't get an attitude with me Molls, if you don't want to talk about this we won't."
"Good, we're not going to talk about it."
"Fine. How's work?"
"Good, you?"
With a grim smile Lucette let the quick, punchy tone wash over her and replied with calm ease and a chime in her tone, "I told you, hectic."
"Oh yeah, sorry. Anything exciting going on?"
"No."
"Oh."
There was a pause and then quiet nothing sounds that occurred in the background or the brush and rustle of fabric across the mouthpiece of the other woman's phone.
"You sound annoyed," Lucette pointed out.
"I just thought this was going to be a fun conversation."
"Sorry I'm boring I just got a lot of papers and stuff and I'm tired."
"Do you want me to call you later?"
"No, it's just I don't know what to talk about."
"Find any good looking guys yet?"
"Not really," she shrugged and rubbed the back of her calf with the top of her opposite foot.
"Did you ever see the laundry serial killer guy again?"
"Laundry serial killer guy?" She questioned, pondering the name more than the man. She knew who Molly meant but she focused on the description because she didn't want to think about Derek Hale, she wanted to pretend like he wasn't even a real person.
"The cute guy you told me about that you saw when you were doing laundry that you stabbed with a syringe."
"Oh, him. No," she lied pretending like she had been confused as to who she'd been talking about. Brigadier watched her sit on the edge of the bed again and run her nails across the small open box lying next to the cut glass candy dish that was revived as an ashtray.
"Well did they catch him?"
"Probably," she wondered idly and not really concerned if in fact the police were still manhunting him with dogs and car chases and guns and smoke bombs and raids and all the rest.
"Probably?"
"What's with the shrieky tone?" Her own was unconcerned and neutral and did nothing to soothe the woman on the other line.
"What if you go to do laundry and he like sees you and kidnaps you and murders you to make sure there are no witnesses to his crimes?"
"Then I guess I'll get murdered."
"That is not funny!"
"Calm down. Jeez. I was kidding."
Not really, because the thought amused her. Derek Hale murdering her was only a step above throwing heavy books at her head and tossing her down stairs and into walls, breaking her fingers and ribs and stomping on her spine.
"Well did you talk to the police and stuff?"
"Yeah, they did a follow-up they were nice and if it helps they've been saying on the news that he's no longer the prime suspect."
She picked up her lighter and played with it, flicking the wheel over and over again wondering where the thought to hover her tongue over the tiny flame came from, she didn't but she eyed the flicker of orange light drawing black waves over the back of her hand with trancelike fixation.
"Suspect in what?"
"The killings and stuff."
"There's been more killings?"
Oops, she hadn't meant to mention that there had been more killings, she wondered quickly if there had been, she thought there were, she wasn't sure, she hadn't turned on the news in days.
It didn't matter. She didn't care. "No but they think the guy I found was killed by an animal and then the other guys were uh slain in relation to whatever."
"What whatever?"
The shrillness of the question made her move her gaze and wince.
"I don't know a drug cartel, car thefts, organized crime, aliens; I wasn't really paying attention to the story."
"Well you should be paying attention!"
"If it makes you feel better I'll get my washing machine fixed so that way I won't ever have to leave the house again except to go to work."
"God, you are cranky."
Lucette made it a point to keep her most recent conclusions to herself on how people were only worried so far as they could take care of it or yell about it but that they always failed to notice the oddness of everyone's actions, always failed to really listen and perk up their ears.
She found that she didn't care quite so much, Molly was suddenly just a silly person, someone she could never talk to again from that moment and never even care that that was the end of it.
She knew that the sentiment hadn't just developed, that it hadn't sprung from sense of change within her, it had always been there. Now, at the point where everything faltered and she suddenly seemed to feel tired that much more deeply, grave deep, eye teeth deep, echo deep, she wondered if she had it in her anymore to play so many roles, so many games she'd suddenly lost the patience for.
"Sorry," she answered knowing she didn't want so many parts to dress up for anymore.
"So you're going to call someone to fix the washing machine?"
"I was just going to do it myself."
"You know how to fix a washing machine?"
"I'll figure it out."
"You're nuts."
"For your goodies."
Automatic responses, an articulated snort or laugh and affective tone that made the woman on the other line sparked up by the friendly teasing.
"Ewwww."
"Baby, waaaah."
"You are mean."
"Glad to hear it."
"Nice to see you haven't gotten rusty."
"Glad you're still a masochist."
"Do you really wanna talk to me right now?"
"Not really, don't feel bad. I'm just out of it and have a lot of shit to do."
"Okay then call me back later and go get shit done."
"Alright, thanks. Bye."
"Yup."
She let the phone drop onto the mattress; it bounced weakly and turned itself over.
Lighting a cigarette she found she could not remember most of the conversation she just had, she remembered what she had said but none of the other woman's answers. The inability to remember was so engrossing that she wondered if she had just actually been on the phone or if she'd been thinking about having a conversation on the phone but never actually had it.
It bothered her enough to check her caller ID and see if she had in fact received a call.
Her eyes watered hard for a moment when the smoke she exhaled hung heavily over her face for too long instead of wafting and wasting away.
It was suddenly hard to consider getting up and going out, she wanted to sulk and mull over things.
Changing was hard. It wasn't reliable yet. She was trying. But she wasn't making leeway and Derek Hale was losing patience.
Being thrown into walls made her angry, getting thrown off the banister made her angrier, a few broken fingers made the change last only as long as they took to heal, it was frustrating, she wasn't used to not being good at things she tried to be good at.
She pondered whether she was trying hard enough. She wasn't. Retreating into her thoughts she realized that it would take some restructuring to be able to get good at it. She could be pushed to change but that wasn't what she wanted.
She wanted to pull It out of her, on her own, control it, temper it, open the cage by undoing the latch instead of having someone tear off the bars and poke at it with a sharp stick.
It was there, smothered and sleepy in the back of its cave, Derek Hale could start a rock fall to wake it up and make it run out of its dark, deep place angry and growling ready to rend something apart but she wanted to make it wake up, stretch, lick its paws, lope out and howl.
There was a fracture in her, a crack, a chasm and at the bottom something stalked and growled and kept itself separate from the rest of her mind, but nonetheless a newly synthesized part of her being and body. It liked it down there in its dark, damp place. It needed a reason to want to come out, it needed to be tempted and coaxed to settle itself inside her skin.
Lucette wondered if all it would take was for her to want it to be there, if it would surface so long as it knew it had a place or a purpose or a reason.
At the bottom of the schism in her nature something rumbled and luxuriated in being acknowledged.
She twisted her head and let her chin drop to her chest. She let her shoulders roll in their sockets and flexed out her fingers touching at invisible strings.
Suddenly it was there, pressing itself tight against her thoughts, nuzzling at her, ardent and intimate, primordial and feral.
But it was like something at the edge of her vision, a shadow cast from a flicker of movement that passed and left nothing in its wake, and it flitted away, out of sight, and she shivered coming back to the moment and It going back to its dark, deep place.
She had found It.
It was pleased.
"Brigs," her tone was a bark in the quiet house and broke apart the hanging smoke like it was cloud cover.
The animal looked up and she patted the empty space behind her head, "Bounce."
His reaction was prompt and she laid her head on the animal's back when he settled in the spot on the bed. "I've missed you, you know? It's like you don't like me anymore, do I smell weird now?"
Pressing at her offered hand Brigadier licked her fingers.
"Am I really that different now, huh?"
Large wet eyes just looked back at her, she felt no ingrained canine connection with the dog, and she knew she wouldn't but it still left her feeling cold and windy inside her chest.
"I'm sorry, Brigs. I don't even know what's going on."
She turned her head and took a drag "Pfffh," she blew out heavily. "I really am sorry," she told him quietly.
" Hmmmph. I don't even know, jeez. It's so dumb."
It took her an hour of doing nothing but contemplate the patterns the blue smoke filling the room made before she'd stirred her thoughts enough to want to do something.
Brigadier went happily at her side through the house and going through the motions of grabbing her keys and his leash she felt oddly sexless and mechanic, a droid devoid of everything but motion and checklist thoughts, it was soothing.
She drove for awhile in silence forgetting why she was driving in the first place and missing the turn she needed to take.
As she pulled a turn to go back in the direction she'd come from she realized she didn't have a library card and that since she didn't live in Beacon Hills she couldn't get one, she hoped the library had a copy machine.
Parking next to a dented Jeep she looked in the rearview mirror at her dog and smiled.
Walking in she made her way into nonfiction content to just eye the selection and pull books as she found them without looking up the locations of the ones she was most interested in.
The book she wanted was much too large to copy, it wasn't practical to stand around and copy two-hundred pages for over an hour. She let the text fall open in her hands and found no sensor inside, eyeing the row she stood in and the ones that had a view of her she found no one looking in her direction. She listened and heard no one around in the accompanying rows.
She slid the book inside her bag and shook it down to fit better among the contents.
It wasn't as if she planned of keeping it but the thought appealed to her urge to collect and hoard books, but she'd return the book after she fixed her washing machine, she swore to herself that she would.
Turning out of the aisle she avoided a collision by stepping back and spinning on her toes out and around, even to herself she noted that it was some pretty fancy footwork. Her bag swung and smacked the leg of the person she had managed to avoid crashing into.
He was cute, jailbait but cute nonetheless and his apology was a streamlined fast paced garble of speech as he strode away with an stack of book perched on his hip, more concerned with whatever it was he was thinking than her.
She smiled bemused and left the cute community library climbing into her truck and pausing before pulling out to find a radio station she liked that didn't boast a constant stream of commercials.
A conversation started up in the car next to hers between the driver and passenger. She listened without meaning to because one boy spoke loudly, she focused and listened to the response of the other.
They tossed insults back and forth with the practiced ease of best friends. One boy's description of someone they knew reminded her of Derek Hale, he was a 'constant pain in the ass jerk who really needed to throw some color into his wardrobe,' it made her lips curve and the smile stay on her face as she started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot.
Day 52:
It was irritating to not be told when he'd show up in a specific sense. She could do without all the vagueness that he seemed to perpetuate merely by existing.
She squatted behind the metal box and worked at a rather tightly spun nut and bolt combination, she wiped at a sweaty itch at the back of her neck, looking at her palm she found the mashed remains of an insect with bits of the small creature under her nail, she wiped away it's mushed body on her jeans and wiped at her neck again in reflex.
"You should learn to call or something, seriously what if I decided to have someone over?"
"You don't know anyone here," he replied sitting up on the wooden counter that was for folding clothes on, ankles uncrossed and legs hanging, loose and unswaying.
She put her knee closet to the outside down and reached around to the top of the metal, tilting her slick forehead onto the cool surface she squinted at him and blew dryer lint stuck on her nails off her fingers.
Not appreciating his flippant response she felt an overwhelming urge to make him uncomfortable.
"I could always decide to go on that blind date with the 'fine' oral lady surgeon. It'd be inopportune if you showed up and spoiled girl time."
She disappeared again behind the machine and picked up a screwdriver.
"You're not a lesbian."
Rolling her eyes she flicked her wrist up and out impishly, despite knowing he wouldn't be able to see her do it, "How could you possibly know definitively either way?"
Lucette didn't put much stock in gay-dar. She worked on taking out the screws on the ring around a hole in the wall a pipe went through.
"You stare and I can…," he started before she went up on her knees and stood a bit to look over the top of the washing machine with the screwdriver brandished and poised for a quick launch at his head.
"If you say smell it I'll throw this at you and not miss," she warned.
He turned his head as if to hide a small grin but she couldn't make one out, she crouched back down and went back to the screws.
"Fine. You stare and appraise."
"Appraise what?"
She finished turning a screw with her fingers and put it in her empty coffee mug so it wouldn't roll away and disappear for when she needed it later.
"Me. Other men. Any man actually," it sounded thoughtful.
"When?"
She already knew but she wanted to see if he did or if he was just bluffing.
"At the laundromat, at the nursing home, the first time," he paused. "A few times since. You've avoided doing it obviously since the night you changed." His tone was one that she imagined someone who was filing their nails would use.
It sounded strange coming from a guy.
"Trust me it's not exactly special treatment." It wasn't, she just liked to browse rather than buy.
"I know. But you're not a lesbian."
"No, I'm not," she agreed. She picked up the remote for the music dock set down on the basement floor meaning to turn on a playlist but she stopped with her finger on the play button when he started talking again.
"You're not very discreet by the way."
"Why should I be? I check out guys, it's kind of the point to let them know I'm checking them out if they're attractive."
"That's weird," he told her when she was about to press the button again, she sighed and put the remote down deciding that if they were going to have a conversation that she didn't need background noise distracting her.
"Don't guys do that?" She thought they did, it seemed like they did. Now she wasn't so sure.
"Not intentionally."
"So guys are just oblivious is what you're saying."
"Some."
She snorted and finished unscrewing the metal ring from around the piping, she slid it off and put it down next to the assortment of various hardware bits and bobs. "You're not?"
"You don't want me to answer that."
"Why because I'll think the answer is creepy?"
"Probably," he stated offhandedly.
"Well now you have to tell me."
She didn't think he would so she started pulling at the piping not noticing it was secured further up the wall with brackets.
"You're what, a size four? Thirty-four A cup size? Seven, seven in a half shoe?"
It wasn't really a question because she was and he was right the answer was a little creepy especially now that she had stood up and wondered if he could see her butt from over the washing machine.
"Are you gay?" She asked setting to work on the brackets.
"…"
"Because I have a gay friend that can do that. With sizes and stuff. Okay yep, that's creepy."
"But you never saw me looking close enough to figure all that out did you?"
"Not helping make yourself seem less creepy," she sing-songed turning her head so her voice carried over her shoulder.
"Didn't know I had to defend myself, I'm a guy."
Lucette held her hand cupped over the bracket as she loosened the last screw and let it fall into her palm.
"You're justifying your creepy actions. That's a form of defense."
"You asked."
"I did."
"…"
At his silence she really wondered if he could see her butt, she looked behind her and saw that at least half of it was visible, she wished she'd worn looser jeans.
She looked over at him and turned, placing the hardware on top of the washing machine.
"Why are you checking me out?"
"Because you're female. It's not really 'checking out,' it's just an observation."
"Seriously?"
"…"
"You're a weirdo."
"..."
Derek Hale raised one scruffy eyebrow and said nothing more; she raised her own and turned to undo the tightened metal ring around the seam in the pipe so she could disassemble it.
"And you my friend are of a very tricky sort," she said through pressed together teeth as she twisted with her fingers at the pipe trying to turn the ends apart from each other.
"What?"
He had been in his own thoughts, she knew, his voice perked as if he'd zoned out and she was talking to him.
"Talking to the washing machine."
"Are you going to be done soon?" His shoes made a sound against the dirty floor as they touched down and started moving in little skids over into what was her line of sight when she turned her head to the side.
"I'll be done when I'm done; stop looming and maybe it will go faster. You're blocking the fan," the breeze was nonexistent and the heat in the small space was sweltering without it.
"Do you know what you're doing?" He sounded like he would if he was doing the fixing but she didn't, like he knew because he was a guy and she didn't because she was a girl.
"I read how to do it."
"That doesn't mean you know how to do it."
She glared sideways at him and pushed out her lips in an angry pucker, "It pretty much does."
Even to her it sounded stuck-up, especially when she bunched up her shoulders and squinted her eyes tilting her head, daring him to say something smart-assed.
He didn't disappoint.
"No one just reads a book and gets how to do something, the first time."
"They would if they paid attention to what they read the first time. I'm a book learner. Here, I'll prove it. This is like my one and only party trick."
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
He questioned when she held out the stolen library book and then stabbed in closer towards him when he didn't immediately remove it from her grasp.
"Open it, pick a heading and be amazed."
Crouching back down she twisted at the bottom of the pipe. She heard the crackle of the book spine and his fingers leafing through pages half-heartedly.
"Duct systems," he supplied closing the book around his index finger to save the page.
"Chapter two…left sided page," she recalled. "Somewhere in the fifties with a picture of some coils arranged in size order on the opposite page," she added, going on and taking in his silence.
"That's memorization."
How scathing, she thought suppressing a snort and an insult to his intelligence at not being able to recognize her own.
"Yeah, so? Doesn't mean it's not impressive." It was impressive; she knew it was. He said nothing so she went on.
"There's a textbook upstairs it's purple and orange, that's my old med-surg book, cardiac chapters are twenty-one through twenty…eight. Twenty-five is the chapter on deciphering a read out. Third or fourth left side page has a blurb about atrial fibrillation with a picture of it a page back."
She remembered the placement vividly, as if she just put the book down a moment ago. His expression seemed sobered, as if he was suddenly in awe of how amazing her present since birth skills were, she liked to think that's why his face was so blank, she knew she was wrong but she didn't mind it so much.
"Is that something that you've only been able to do recently?"
Turning her head away she managed to unstick the pipes and lay them down on the floor next to her foot.
"No. I've always been able to do that, in school everyone said it was photographic memory, I guess it is but it's not like a picture in my head it's a dimensional-spatial thing, I memorize the layout of topics more than specific passages," she explained before setting a hard, shifty look on him.
"And I also know you were in my house earlier," she felt smug when his expression waved like water, caught and found out, it didn't waver for long before the coolness re-etched itself into his mouth and eyes.
"Sure I was."
She gave him an eye roll that was meant to say: 'sure you weren't.'
"Don't move things and I won't know. You were also out of cigarettes, one of my half-smoked butts was completely smoked and the mug on the counter had the handle pointing to the left when I saw it again, I'm right handed so it wasn't me who put it down like that. The curtains on the back door where moved a little to the side. You were here."
"So? I was here."
As if it was perfectly okay to wander through her house and poke through her things whenever he wanted to. His look asked her if there was something else she wanted to say.
She waved vaguely, "Nothing, you can move curtains and smoke butts and play with the mugs just don't touch my stuff. I don't like it."
"…"
He stared at her as if he cared very little what she did or didn't like. She turned on her music and worked while he threw himself on top of the washing machine, somehow she wondered if he knew that it annoyed her. Chances were good that he guessed it would.
"You know though there is something I noticed that's changed."
"Changed?"
He looked down at her, his head blocking the light she was using to see with.
"With my senses," she informed him, pausing and motioning for him to move his head out of her light. "Beyond the obvious," she added.
Lucette sat down from her squat and folded her legs to the side, her grip lax and loose on the tool in her hand, he didn't say anything.
"It's like the way I hear and see things has shifted. Fine-tuned. Like if you hear someone laugh you can picture the way their face looks when they laugh, right? Well I can picture the way their larynx vibrates, I can wrap my mind around that and focus on it. I couldn't do that before."
"…"
"I feel like I could play an instrument now if I wanted to. I was never any good, I can multitask but not like you have to do when you play a piano or a guitar or whatever. Maybe that can be my hobby. Fixing things isn't exactly exciting."
"…"
"I can also split wood. I couldn't do that before."
"Split wood?"
"Yeah, before I just couldn't coordinate the strike right because the thing was too heavy and my aim didn't hit right."
"Why are you splitting wood?"
"Because I have a fireplace and the oil tank is getting low. I'd rather have hot water than heat."
"I thought you favored the ice bath."
"…"
"What?"
"Was that a joke?"
"That was sarcasm, read a book about it."
She turned her head so he couldn't see her grin, because it was funny but he was behaving like he usually did so she wasn't going to let him know she thought it was something worth grinning or laughing over.
He got off the washing machine and walked around to loom down at her.
"Oooh. You're a regular mister chuckles, stop moving in front of the fan, it's hot back here."
Derek Hale's version of moving was to turn and lean against the wall, "Why does everyone call you Lucette?" He asked without looking at her.
"Because that's my name."
"That's not what your name tag said."
"I know."
"So why don't they call you Lucinda?"
"No one really calls me Lucinda, even though it's my name. Lucette is what my family calls me, I just got used to it."
"Why did they name you Lucinda then if they were just going to call you Lucette?"
"My dad named me after my grandmother and then everyone realized how confusing it got to have two Lucinda's in the family. So for awhile they all just called me Little Lucy. My grandmother hated it so everyone just started calling me Lucette. Which I guess in whatever language means Little Lu-whatever. So really it's like they're still calling me Little Lucy only it sounds better."
"It's French," he informed her. She didn't find it very interesting to know it was French. It didn't matter.
"I guess they just liked it. No one calls my sister by her name. Everyone just calls her Stella instead of Estelle."
"You have a sister?"
"Yeah, two years younger. You have a sister right?"
She remembered their first post-bite conversation when he'd shown up in athletic apparel.
"I did."
Stopping what she was doing she realized that the past tense meant his sister was dead.
"Sorry."
"…"
Lucette thought she saw him nod from the corner of her eye.
"Older or younger?"
"Older."
"How many years apart were you two?"
"Two."
"We're not really bitches you know."
"…"
"Older sisters. We're not trying to be bitches."
"…"
"It might be different between brother and sister than two sisters, but it's hard to be older and a girl. Because you're older and because you're not a boy you kind of have to act like one in order to have the power in the whole dynamic."
Thinking about her own little sister made her stomach drop unpleasantly.
"My sister didn't act like a boy."
"Probably because she had a brother instead of a sister."
"What does acting like a boy have to do with power dynamics between siblings?"
"When you're just a kid you have to listen to everyone, parents and whoever but the only person you don't have to listen to is your sibling," he looked down at her with a tilted glance as she spoke. "You have no control over your own environment and the things you get to do and none over anybody else except you're brother or sister if they're younger. But if your two brothers or two sisters you relate to each other and everyone expects you to be attached at the hip."
She fell back into old memories, things only half-remembered before and now surfacing like a body from a river, morbid and futile now that their time had passed, she shook her head and tried to sink them with mental rocks before going on.
"Not all kids act like that. I didn't, I wanted to be in charge of me and my sister's relationship so I just made myself not like her. I wasn't very nice when I was a kid. To her mostly. And other kids."
"So you were a brat," he said it as confidently as someone who knew they were right.
"I was cruel," but he wasn't right and her rebuttal made him raise his chin and smirk as if he didn't believe her.
"So why'd you change?"
"Who said I've changed?"
His eyes shot open and studied her face for as long as she kept it turned toward him.
"You're not cruel, just irritating."
"Maybe I've gotten better at it; maybe I'm just crueler in different ways."
"All kids are cruel. They grow out of it."
"Heh."
She made a gesture that told him to think whatever he wanted to think and pushed her shoulders into the washing machine to shove it back another inch and give her more room to work.
"You don't think so?"
"No, I do. Because kids don't develop moral codes until they understand the correlation between their actions and interpersonal relationships. Most kids grow out of it when they figure it out," she shrugged and changed the song that came on because it wasn't a song she wanted playing when someone else was around, especially if they didn't speak and all there was to listen to the lyrics, which were less than appropriate.
"So what was so funny?"
Derek Hale spoke around a cigarette, she held out her hand for one. He smoked reds, she smoked golds, it could be worse she decided, he could have smoked the plum ones. Lucette stifled the mental gag from becoming a physical gesture of palate cleansing, she hated the plum ones.
"Some kids just have no interest in interpersonal relationships. They understand the relationship but they're cold, detached by choice instead of social ineptitude. Or at least that's how other people see them. Jeez…"
She stopped and thought about Molly, tapping her ashes onto the floor next to her boot.
"What?"
"Just remembered that I already had this conversation, sort of."
"With who?"
Lucette sat down and leaned her shoulders into the metal; it wasn't cold like she'd thought it be, warmed by her approximation to it for so long, ash dropped onto her shirt and left a black smear when she wiped the cylindrical particle across the white ribbed fabric.
"My friend, she was having way too much fun with the whole thing."
"She thinks that you're one of those kids."
"She thinks I have aspergers."
"What's that?"
"You know how autistic kids act?" She asked gazing up bored with her cigarette on her lip.
"Yeah," he took a drag and blew smoke out of his nostrils, his heel pressed up onto the wall and the fan sending the blue tendrils across the space between him, she watched it spiral over her head.
"It's the social form of that minus the intellectual deficits," she explained still eyeing the smoke.
"So you're socially awkward?"
"In general terms, it's more about being abnormally inclined to not be social."
"So no one invites you to their parties because you're boring."
"If you say so," she sniffed and put her cigarette between her teeth ready to get back to work.
"You are boring. Bland."
"I'm not going to argue with you about this."
She wondered why he was so keen on arguing his point, wrong as it was with her.
"Good."
The talking dwindled and she focused on puffing and letting her mind drift, letting it dive into the trenches it always seem to favor: an evitable journey through all topics sexual and mundane and medical and oddball referential. She got stuck up on how other people thought of her, wondering if she really came off as frigid and priggish, boring and bland.
"…that's weird," she spoke out loud without really meaning anything by it, or wanting a response.
"…," Derek Hale swept his gaze down lazily and then back up when he realized she was talking to herself.
"Do werewolves live longer?"
"Yes. Our cells heal faster and more normally, even as we age."
She nodded and dropped the cigarette between her fingers and ground it into the cement floor with her boot, "Maybe I become a geneticist now then," she stated dragging the butt back and forth and then picking it off her sole and flicking it at his feet.
"Why would you do that?"
It was a reaction that made her never want to tell anyone anything ever again because it was so damn irritating to hear something so unintelligent come out of someone's mouth, she decided that Derek Hale probably thought that the subject couldn't possibly ever be interesting or worthwhile or applicable to real life.
"Because I want to."
"Don't they make test tube babies and stuff like that?"
Unintelligent, she thought wanting to growl at him for being so obvious and predictable in his stupidity, "Some do, I want to splice stuff though. Create something. I guess I want to be a genetic engineer," she settled for saying, sighing to herself.
"Sounds exciting," he deadpanned sounding unenthused.
Lucette no longer felt the urge to speak to him directly, she just talked at him.
"With an emphasis on brain development and physical retuning, I had a dream once about being a brain in a jar."
She had liked that particular dream even though she'd woke up profoundly disturbed and unsettled by just how much she had liked being a brain in a jar in the dream.
"…," he blew out a plod of wayward curlicues and spinning spirals.
"Sometimes I think I'd like that."
"This is a strange conversation to watch you have with a washing machine," he told her eyeing the end of his cigarette.
"I'm having a conversation with you."
"You think so, don't you?"
He sounded amused.
"You think this isn't a conversation, ask a question or something if you feel like the washing machine is getting all my attention."
She let her lips separate and pull up while she clenched her teeth in a way that felt like an old woman might tell her was saucy.
"I really don't need your attention."
Her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together but curved sharply at the side away from him, and then it was there wading through her, out of the deep and into the shallows climbing up onto shore. It said hello and she felt like she was smiling sassy at it instead of Derek Hale's silly, unintelligent retorts.
"Everyone wants attention, Mr. Hale."
"…"
"…"
She came back to herself and told It to be good and not be so bold as to try and put words into her mouth and on her tongue to savor and speak.
"Why did you start talking about being a scientist and a brain in a jar?"
"Because I realized that aspergers is the same thing as another thing and that someone should try and figure out why that is instead of keeping two different names for the same thing or see if one's because of nature and the other because of nurture."
"What is it the same as?"
"Schizoid personality disorder."
"So bipolar disorder."
"Totally different thing, I have a book about it upstairs. Completely different, so different that if they were animals one would have fins and the other would have wings."
She felt It get bored and trot off somewhere on the edge of her thoughts, surveying the landscape of her mind and the emotional terrain.
"…so what made you a bratty kid."
"I wasn't a brat, I was cruel. I said that already," she corrected him.
"Fine, but they're pretty much the same."
They weren't but she didn't say it like that, she didn't just want to say things, she liked to explain them.
"Brats have a limit they toe the line of; cruelness doesn't go away because you punish someone. It's always there, you can't just give a kid like that a smack and have them never do it again."
"So what did you do?"
Lucette remembered how crisp certain moments of her childhood were in her mind, how they shone vibrant and plush and inviting and so very ripe for psychoanalysis, she picked a particularly disquieting instance.
"When I was seven, eight, around there, I was on the bus and there was a third grader who was older than me who was really nice and I guess one of us, me I think, came up with the idea to see how far we could bend our fingers back, so she bent mine and stopped when I told her too and then I did hers and when she told me to stop I didn't and I kept going until I broke her finger."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to see what it was like to break someone's finger. I probably came up with the idea knowing I was going to do it."
She and It knew there was no 'probably,' only the certainty that she wasn't going to tell him about, it would turn the disquieting into the horrific and of all the things she wanted Derek Hale to be, horrified wasn't one of them, it was annoying to deal with people who found the things once did horrific instead of just bratty or cruel.
"That's depraved."
Tilting her head and splaying her hands in the air she was telling him, without words and without any shame and just a dash of pride that came from It, that, yes, it was depraved. And, no, she didn't find that so abhorable. It was just something she'd done something that made her fingers prickle with the sensory memory of how it had felt to do it.
"I never tortured small animals or set things on fire or anything, I wasn't that kind of destructive or curious. I just wanted to break things and see how they got put back together, see if I could fix it."
"And you're a nurse." It was an accusation that made her whip her head at him as he lit up a new smoke and blew the first drag in her face. Her jaw hurt from the force of her clench.
"Yeah, I am. A good fucking nurse, a fucking great nurse in fact."
Her knuckles ground together from the tightness of her grip on the screwdriver in her hand.
"But it's all fake, it's an act," he shrugged and berated her with the truth that any average person could come up with, it was the easy thing to say, the nice opinion to have, the morally acceptable thing to believe.
She put down her screwdriver when she realized there was no way she was going to be able to pry the metal pipe from the wall with it, it had too thick of an edge.
The simple folding knife in the toolbox was something she'd forgotten about, something she'd forgotten had felt good in her hands, she enjoyed folding it open and then closed, the mechanical automation she could do without acknowledgment of her hands and fingers.
"So? It's a job. I get paid to be a nurse in attitude and aptitude. You can't fake intelligence, you can fake personality. You don't like people like that, do you?"
She slapped the blade back into the handle.
"I think people like that just like to play pretend. It's easy to pretend."
She flicked it open with one motion that made the tendon between her thumb and forefinger stretch and burn.
"Why not play pretend, why show everyone and anyone who you really are, why be so personal with everyone you meet, why not let someone try to figure you out?"
She repeated the movements in rapid succession and acknowledged his glare with a blankness that felt nice.
"Life's just a game right?"
Forcing the knife in between the wall and the pipe she pried at it and levered the plaster of the wall back.
"Game of power, sure," she told him. "People can opt out but the game still gets played, might as well learn to be good at it. Think about it," she yanked the pipe out of the wall and narrowly avoided slicing into the mound of flesh under her thumb when she forgot she was still holding the sharp instrument.
"I'd rather not play games."
"That's probably because you suck at playing Mr. Hale. Probably you don't like to play because you're bad at it and that upsets you but instead of learning how to be better you want to just want to go around and knock everyone down to the level that upsets them. That's power play, underhanded and ineffective but it's still power play."
Her voice was a low unnatural hiss, bluntly affected and measured out into a tone that compacted each word down hard and sharp.
"…"
"I said 'probably,' didn't I?" She looked at him and arched her head onto her shoulder her hands playing with opening and closing the sharp instrument she had yet to put down.
His eyes narrowed when they took hers in, they looked wide and questioning, fakely girlish and insipid. Behind them It gazed out fierce and vehement, masked but peeking out, slowly, insinuating.
"I wasn't saying that that's what you do or feel but it's likely that I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. Don't pour your heart out or get angry it's just an opinion and Jesus fucking Christ!"
She snapped the knife closed and then open and stabbed at the plaster sideboard of the wall.
"Stop. Blocking. That. Fan."
He spun fast and sent it flying with a blow of his tensed forearm. It broke violent and loud, it's parts bouncing out across the cement floor.
"Thanks, I love fixing things; it's a hobby of mine in case you haven't noticed," she said rolling over her words eyeing the ruined appliance
"Shut the fuck up."
"Hngh," she intoned with a grim smile that pinched the last nerve holding his self-control intact.
He lunged and grabbed at her shirt tenting it as he yanked her up and his fingers blanched from the strength of his grip.
"Reading a lot of books doesn't make you smart."
Her eyes narrowed and he grinned viciously.
"Being able to pretend to be a different type of person doesn't mean you're better than anyone."
She wiggled the knife out of the plaster.
"Saying you're detached doesn't mean it doesn't kill you when they don't fall for the bullshit."
He grabbed her wrist and she let the knife drop without any fight, it made his eye twitch because he knew she was mocking him.
"You aren't powerful; you're still just dumb and weak, playing pretend."
Lucette craned her neck up and gripped the top of the washing machine to raise her torso to force his back and away. Her knees were cramping against the hard floor, she bent her toes and moved into a deep, obtuse crouch. Her quadriceps were tensile and hard and started to burn but the added two inches of height the stance gave her wasn't something she was about to give up.
"And everyone is still better at this game than you are. Nobody wants to follow your lead; they do it because they need to. And look at whose lead you're following, you want me around on a short leash so in case something goes wrong you've got a way out and the only reason I'm here is because I need to be, not because you're a paragon of leadership and camaraderie and I want to."
His eyes were the blue of something that could have sparked off of a Tesla invention, the eyes of Frankenstein's monster with the memory of lighting forking out in electric licks, destructive and arbitrary; she felt the opposite, devious and devoted to digging whatever it was out of him that made him so unrestrained because she didn't like his eyes or his claws on her like that, as if he was the biggest, baddest thing around and she was supposed to be cowed because of it.
"…"
His mouth was a snarling fracture of pointed enamel and wet strands of saliva.
She arched her chest into his for the way it made her taller and forced him back as if he'd been scalded, jumpy nerved and alert where she was languid and liquid bones.
"You've got no power at all Derek; you should learn how to get some otherwise no one will invite you to their party because they'd rather forget about you than acknowledge you exist," she mocked with wide eyes and her lips set viciously curved and pulled up from teeth that were sharp and long and made for something that lived in deep, dark places.
"…"
He pushed her and left lines of ripped skin on her collar bone and throat, nothing drastic but not so fine or delicate to not draw small orbs of blood out of her flesh.
Her foot rolled over the small pipe parts and she fell back to crack her skull against the floor, her head bounced and she rubbed at the spot feeling the pain subside fast and the knob forming even out just as quick as it came.
It faded under her finger tips and she sucked her teeth finding that she'd lost her fangs; it was disappointing for some reason she couldn't quite articulate or flesh out in her mind.
The only remaining sign of Derek Hale in the room were his abandoned, still lit cigarette on the floor. She left it and let it burn itself out, it felt like a small symbolic gesture, of what she couldn't decide.
She went back to work and found that all the various parts she'd been working with had been strewn about and put out of place.
Picking up a random metal bit she examined it with her mind clearing and resettling itself from its previously predatory bent, "Now where do you go my oddly shaped friend? Ah! Right with this one. Mister washing machine I am so good at twisting your screws, of this are you aware?" She banged her head back into the metal and let it hum.
"Tis true tis true I say! And adieu adieu to you too…woohoo," she rhymed with a monotonous beat.
She sneezed a moment after wiping at her nose with a dirty arm.
"Ha! Achoo. I wish 'onomatopoeia' rhymed with that, I would be the shit at Shakespearean rap is it did, right washing machine?"
Lucette grinned at herself and looked at the metal pieces on the floor, spinning them idly with her fingers and arranging them by which joined with each other.
"The boy part connects to the…girl part. The boy part connects to the…girl part. La la la la la la…laaaaaaaaaa."
Her cell phone jingled a rock and roll tune and she pressed at the key with the green telephone not recognizing the number that her screen flashed.
"Hello?"
"Stop. Singing." Derek Hale ground out.
Her mouth fell open; she had expected him to leave instead of stick around. She wished he'd left, "If you're going to get pissed off at least leave the house and slam the door behind you. Don't act like my wife."
"You must really like fixing things."
She hung up and heard something break a moment later upstairs.
Taking the basement stairs two at a time she skidded into her kitchen and looked around the fridge at her broken back door. She listened and heard no other heart beating or lungs breathing, no other sound of any other living creature in her house besides her.
"Real smooth. How about I find out where you live and burn it down? Fuck, what is wrong with him." She spoke to herself, walking outside and taking in the door's extensive destruction and the parts of it lying across the deck.
She heard him before she saw him.
"Dude!" Lucette swiped at the hand ripping into her arm, spinning her around. Her evasion skills were severely lacking she decided when she realized she wasn't fast enough to dodge the fist coming at her jaw.
"Motherfucker!" She snarled and spat blood on his shoes, and there was nothing in her besides animal rage and the seething, filling need to rip his jaw off and use it for an ashtray.
"Calm down!" He swayed away from her and over the deck railing; she swung onto the small ledge and sat on it, feet pressed flat against the vertical beams beneath. Tracking him with her eyes, she waited for him to step back and put more distance between them that she would savor lunging across.
"…," she wondered if he knew she was imagining the crack and crunch his sternum would make as she punched it into pieces, she was.
"I'll hit you again." He didn't look especially aggressive without the It in him looking at her through Teslan blue eyes.
"Do it," she commanded with a low rolling growl that came from her chest.
"…"
He did nothing besides make a fist that she eyed and sneered at.
"Do it!" Blood flecked spittle flew off her teeth and onto him, he didn't so much as flinch.
"…"
Tsking she made her fingers curve and clench and pulled her arm back tightly, coiled and ready to yank out his trachea.
And then he did, and unconsciousness was velvet lined and deep and dark and sweet because It was there and wanted to curl up close with her inside her head, inside her bones.
A/N: In case some of you are confused "It" is the werewolf part of Lucette that she's trying to be able to become at will instead of being forced to become when Derek starts training her or when she gets hurt. Still violent tension going on, I guess it comes off sexual to a lot of you reading and maybe that's a good thing but it's not intentional and I'm not writing it trying for it to be sexual tension if that makes sense to you. The boy in the library is Stiles, the passenger in his Jeep is Scott and they are talking about Derek. The stuff about aspergers and personality disorders is abbreviated but accurate and nonetheless interesting to me as someone who had to learn about them. The color references to cigarettes are based on the boxes they come in, Derek smokes regular Marlboros, Lucette smokes Marlboro Lights, the plum ones are Marlboro Virginia Blend. I imagine Lucette's workout music as something that has a lot of drum, heavy bass, and male vocals going on, the song she flips past while talking to Derek I imagined as The Bloodhound Gang's "Bad Touch" but any song with dirty lyrics can work I guess. Lucette was crying while on the phone with Molly for anyone who might be confused by that part. I wrote this chapter the way I did intentionally, I wanted it to come across part strange, part confusing, part convoluted because it's a largely introspective chapter focusing on what is changing in Lucette mind wise and her mind is well not a structured well-kept place, it's a jumble of thoughts and emotions at this point in the story.