on winning and losing [for ellie]

[daughterofawolf]

[set to right around Rosie's departure, bc I'm slow af]

Checking the mailbox that sits at the edge of the property after she parks her motorcycle is so second nature that Eponine hardly thinks about it; she almost doesn't look at the mail. Something, some nagging little voice in the back of her mind, draws her eye to the couple of envelopes as she heads toward the house itself, catches the Barton University return address.

She tears the envelope open. She'd submitted a request to have the reqs waived on a 300 level workshop, a class on acting and embodiment that she'd become half obsessed with -- but she hadn't thought to do it until regular registration. (Stupid! She should have done it earlier!) Eponine had sent the professor a painstakingly written and re-written email, explaining her previous experience with Shakespeare in the Park and bluntly admitting that getting comfortable with a character's body language was both the most fun, the easiest -- and somehow also the most terrifying -- part for her about being on stage, and she wanted, needed to figure that out.

The professor had written back, brief and matter of fact, telling her that normally, she only waived requirements for a full audition in person, but that given the time restrictions she'd accept a video. She'd raced to get one perfect; set up her laptop, then her phone, had Ellie hold it, clipped it together -- did a dozen versions; had to stop for laughing or swearing or crying in the middle; finally gave up and sent one.

Now she looks at the letter that politely and unemotionally informs her that your request to waive requirements for THEA 320W | BODIES OF WORK: ACTING AND EMBODIMENT has been granted. Eponine wants to shriek or dance around or maybe burst into relieved tears; except when she actually says "I got in!" it comes out like a stunned whisper, squeaking into voice only at the end.

She half-jogs for the door, already calling, "Ellie! El, are you here?" If she's not, she's not far: her truck's in the drive. "I've got news!"

At the same time as she calls brightly to her girlfriend, she's typing away at her phone, even as she gets the door and hangs up her helmet. Of course Ellie is the first she thinks of telling: wants her to know more than anything, wants her to be proud, maybe a little bit hopes she'll pick her up and spin her around or something equally ridiculous. But there's someone else who she has to tell before any other friend, and of course that's her Olivia, the best Lady Macbeth in the world, the only person ever whose friendship could blossom out of a bizarre forced musical number and navigate being made an accessory to murder and absolute besottedness with such --

Her phone interrupts. It's not its usual noise, an odd, sadly insistent sound that she's heard maybe once before, and something flutters in her chest.

[Message unable to send.]

Eponine hits send again, an ice threading through the light, bubbly excitement in her stomach. Her phone beeps.

[Message unable to send.] And then, as if to prevent her continuing,
[This number is no longer in service.]

It feels as though everything has stopped -- though of course nothing has, the sun and the lake water and the calls of geese and squirrels going on as usual. Eponine lets her bag slide off her shoulder and drop to the floor, heavily.

Comments

[and_survive]

Part of what she'd inherited, all those years ago when Konoha-Uchi had come into her care, was work. There was always something, from the small but usual things, like leaves on the decks, the gutters to the bigger jobs, fixing, repairing. Especially now that animals were entering the equation.

But that was good. That was life. Things that you did that reminded you that you were there, and you were going to stay there. She'd just got done tightening a space of wire on a fence when she heard Eponine, not responding immediately because she was holding a couple of metal staples in her mouth to leave her hands free.

She took them out, tossed them into a toolbox and headed back to the house. "Round here," she called, coming in the door opposite to the entrance nearest the road, finding Eponine... at a whole different affect to how she'd sounded a moment ago. "Epps?"

[daughterofawolf]

Eponine's aware she's just standing, staring at the phone. She can hear Ellie, though it's like she's speaking from the end of a tunnel or through an echoing hallway -- and her racing heart even slows down fractionally at the familiar timbre of her voice -- but for a moment, she can't move or speak, even to assure El she's okay.

She's not okay, but she isn't hurt. Ellie's still here. That's something, even if right now it feels so tenuous. Like all this could disappear.

She comes through the fog, then, a bit, blinking, and says, still almost hearing herself, "Rosie -- Rosie's gone."

Something about saying that brings her more fully into herself and she takes a few steps toward Ellie.

She's been working; even if she hadn't had the toolbox Eponine can see it in the flush of her cheeks, the dirt on her jeans, her hair falling out of its tie in the front. Eponine loves watching Ellie work; if this were another moment she'd make a joke about it being hot, or just quietly delight: in all the knowledge in those hands, in the ways she's learned to help or find other things she can make easier for her -- in the ways they've made this their home.

Right now, though, she feels unmoored entirely, grasping at anything solid. She feels like she's had her chest torn open. Any compliment or joke has been shoved out of her lungs.

She tries to explain, "I got good news, from school --" but she can feel her throat closing, choking on it. "I just wanted her to know," she finishes quietly, and turns the phone around as though it can say any more than she already has.

[and_survive]

She'd lost a lot of people, before Darrow, many of them abrupt, a sudden shearing of the person out of the world. Darrow was more peaceful than that, a place where people died of natural causes and only occasionally of others, rather than the other way around. But it wasn't free of that moment where you looked down and a part of you was missing.

Eponine had had a harsh life, too, before Darrow; she didn't think that inured you any from loss. From the phantom limb of I just wanted her to know.

"Yeah," she said, ignoring the phone to step past it and Eponine's arm to wrap her in a hug. "Yeah, I know. She would have wanted to know."

[holy shit sorry for the novel]

[daughterofawolf]

Ellie doesn't even know what she's saying Rosie would have wanted to know yet, but it doesn't matter; she's not wrong. She's not wrong, and it doesn't feel better, exactly, to think Rosie would have wanted to know -- perhaps it's even more horrible, in a way -- but it's the way she says it, and the pragmatic, Ellie way that she skips right past the proof of it to come embrace Eponine at once.

Eponine just lets herself be tugged, the letter still in her other hand; she drops her phone on top of her bag so she can close her hand into Ellie's shirt.

It's not that Darrow's some paradise. It's not even that she hasn't lost anyone here. But it's still safe. Even the monsters, the evil things, the haunting reminders of her past -- the worst of them here, really -- not the eeriest or most unnatural, but the worst -- had been things that were at home too. And, more often than not, more often than it should be, everyone gets through the monsters, the nightmares, and the just plain evil -- alive and together and still all wanting to be that way.

It feels ...permanent. Or like it could be, if they try hard enough.

Which is ridiculous. All of them, they've all lost plenty of people. They'd mourned, they'd gritted their teeth through it, they'd been angry. She's grieved her own losses and held them through theirs. She's lost most of the friends she'd made here.

But the closest of them, Ellie, Rosie, Bev; Elio, Jamie and Eddie -- they've all stuck around. She isn't holding her breath over them or counting the seconds, not anymore. Not over the people who feel like -- like the sort of beams that hold up a house. It isn't as though loss never happens here. It's that this has become the sort of place where she doesn't expect it. She doesn't walk past children she's known for years curled in frozen death and simply think that's a shame; she makes plans; she has times she simply isn't hungry and neither is anyone around her.

It's been so long since she has thought of that that the Eponine that had taunted her father's men with it, had held her own death in front of her like a dare, a challenge to just try and scare her -- seems like another person. She has people she wants to live for. She has things she wants to do.

Right now, though, she feels exactly like a structure that has had its load-bearing beams pulled out. Like she's swaying, a frame just waiting for a little nudge.

"It's not fair," she says, and it's childish: she can hear the petulance in her own voice. "She promised." The tears have finally sprung to her eyes now and she swallows hard against a lump in her throat. Eponine knows that if she lets them, they'll keep coming and she hates crying more than anything. "I -- I made her promise me, that neither of us would go before the other. If we were either to disappear, it would just have to be at the same time --"

She laughs, a little hiccupy sob sort of thing that isn't really a laugh, but is, too, at her own expense. It must sound so absurd and naive. "Back at Christmas. She was talking about how she'd been here too long. Like she knew, or something; only of course, that was -- god, nearly a year ago. I'd half forgotten until now." Only she hadn't. She hadn't forgotten, not really: she had just put it away in a box somewhere, shut aside from her daily thoughts.

What she had done was let herself become complacent. Soft. Rosie hadn't disappeared right away so she'd let herself think it might not happen at all. As though Darrow was a thing that could be trusted.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I shouldn't -- I haven't even told you --" She wobbles. Eponine hadn't teased Ellie about not knowing what Rosie would have wanted to know because she was too distressed, but she also hadn't done it because it was true. Now, half-hysterically, she thinks, What about all the things that we might do still that she would have wanted to know about?

It's not a thought she's expecting at all, nor does it provide her with any useful specifics so much as a vast, idyllic and possibly ridiculous future spread out like a landscape dotted with every plausible landmark that Rosie might have been witness to between Eponine and Ellie. She's not even sure she knew until this moment that she wanted any of it. Or even if -- and what, and what it might look like -- she does want, much less what Ellie does, which is terrifying:

All she knows is Rosie doesn't get to see any of whatever they do, and she still hasn't even said out loud that she got into a university class.

She bursts into full on tears, abruptly, and hating it.