tallyyoungblood (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tallyyoungblood) wrote2024-08-04 01:13 pm
tallyyoungblood) wrote2024-08-04 01:13 pm
Entry tags:
interlude: handwriting practice
Content warnings: self-harm, ableism
--
Tally’s hand is utterly cramping, so she takes a break to stretch it. She can’t believe that pre-Rusties used to write whole books like this--she’s seen a few of them in the library here, pages filled with spidery, beautiful handwriting. Hers, in comparison, looks like a total mess.
After struggling through her best attempt at writing down what had happened on the day when she’d been Special, she’s moved on to her new memories from before Other Tally was Special, but after when Real Tally had been spirited away to the mansion, which are marginally less trauma-triggering.
Zane and I got everyone to pour alcohol on the floating ice rink so that it shattered. The fall was bubbly-making for everyone, even Peris. At the after-party bonfire Dr. Cable came to me and asked me if I wanted to be Special, but I said no, obviously.
Her memories come in tons of different flavors, now, like a frozen yogurt machine. The clearest memories are what happened, like, yesterday: her brain isn’t so broken that isn’t still true. The further she goes back into her pretty memories, though, the fuzzier they get. Kissing Gideon on the roof is clear; meeting Gideon for the first time isn’t. Even further back than that, her time in New Pretty Town is soft and out of focus, champagne-addled and blurry. Her time as an ugly is an order of magnitude clearer, only marred by the passage of time. It’s been more than a year since she turned pretty, a fact which seems utterly unbelievable.
I yelled at Dr. Cable within earshot of the party, which was utterly stupid. Shay heard me, and I had to tell her about the cure. She was furious with me, over not sharing the cure with her, over stealing David, over getting her turned pretty. She told me, “You didn't need any operation to make you selfish and shallow and full of yourself. You already were.”
Tally has to stop, then, tears clouding her vision. Much clearer than her memories of New Pretty Town are her memories of being Special. Tally’s woken up from nightmares hundreds of times in her life, the horrors concocted by her unconscious mind making her totally spinning for a few minutes before they fade away. Her Special memories, though, are so crisp that they don’t fade; the moment where they don’t seem real never comes. She can hear, clearly, a crunch of leaves underfoot from when she’d trained with the other Cutters in the wild, all of them teasing her over skintenna for being so loud and clumsy. It hadn’t hurt, though, because she’d belonged, all the other Cutters feeling closer than her own thoughts.
Tally blinks the tears away and keeps writing.
Zane had to leave the bash early, because he had a headache. The lesions were eating his brain. He’d had the real cure, and I had taken the pill that would have stopped the lesions after fixing his pretty-mindedness. That pill did nothing for me. It would have saved his brain.
Very, very clear: her memory of going to see Zane in New Pretty Town after she’d been turned Special. He’d repulsed her with his averageness and with his sickness, the way his hands had shaken. That, too, almost drives her to tears. Her own hand is shaking, now, and she thinks of Sagramore: he’d had to run away, so no one would think his sickness was his father’s fault. Zane’s sickness actually was her fault, and Other Tally hadn’t even been able to fight her Special conditioning against it.
Other Tally had asked Shay, then, to make Zane Special. Her feelings for Zane create another doubly-layered memory. Her normal self, her real self, barely knows Zane. Other Tally, though, had been fully in love with him, lived with him, had sex with him, shared every bubbly moment together. Tally can feel that love still, and she can’t; it makes her feel dizzy, like trying to reorient herself after falling off her hoverboard and getting swung upside down by her crash bracelets. She’d needed him to be Special with her, more than anything. She’d insisted upon it to Shay until Shay had given her an intense look, a possessive look, and kissed her. She’d said, icy-making, huh, Tally-wa? and Tally had known, then, that everything she’d ever done had been about Shay, had been leading up to this.
That night is when Shay decided to get bubbly on her own. She stopped answering my pings and totally disappeared. I didn’t see her until a few days later, when we stumbled on her in the park in Uglyville. I didn’t know what she was doing with all those Crim wannabes at first, standing in a circle in the rain like that, until I saw her pull out the knife. She cut herself. They all cut themselves, trying to be bubbly through pain.
It’s hard to know what to feel about that, now. She’s repulsed, of course, but she also remembers the icy thrill of doing it herself, the special moment when everything crystallized around the pain. Sometimes Tally thinks she’ll never find a balance, that her whole life will be stuck swinging between intense iciness and complete pretty-minded haze.
She leans back in her chair, stretching her shoulders. She hadn’t known that writing affected muscles all the way at the top of her arm. It seems bogus, somehow, that every little action should have such far-reaching consequences.
She looks at her name, signed at the top of the page like it’s a school assignment: Tally Youngblood. It looks much better than anything else she’s written, since she’d been taught to sign her name as a child, but she feels like it shouldn’t. What does it mean, even, to be Tally Youngblood? Is she really destined to be selfish and shallow forever, no matter what anyone does to her brain? Isn’t this line of thought, in itself, utterly self-interested?
She sighs and shuts her notebook. Somehow, even though sitting and writing isn’t very bubbly-making, her mind is as ugly as it’s ever been.
--
Tally’s hand is utterly cramping, so she takes a break to stretch it. She can’t believe that pre-Rusties used to write whole books like this--she’s seen a few of them in the library here, pages filled with spidery, beautiful handwriting. Hers, in comparison, looks like a total mess.
After struggling through her best attempt at writing down what had happened on the day when she’d been Special, she’s moved on to her new memories from before Other Tally was Special, but after when Real Tally had been spirited away to the mansion, which are marginally less trauma-triggering.
Zane and I got everyone to pour alcohol on the floating ice rink so that it shattered. The fall was bubbly-making for everyone, even Peris. At the after-party bonfire Dr. Cable came to me and asked me if I wanted to be Special, but I said no, obviously.
Her memories come in tons of different flavors, now, like a frozen yogurt machine. The clearest memories are what happened, like, yesterday: her brain isn’t so broken that isn’t still true. The further she goes back into her pretty memories, though, the fuzzier they get. Kissing Gideon on the roof is clear; meeting Gideon for the first time isn’t. Even further back than that, her time in New Pretty Town is soft and out of focus, champagne-addled and blurry. Her time as an ugly is an order of magnitude clearer, only marred by the passage of time. It’s been more than a year since she turned pretty, a fact which seems utterly unbelievable.
I yelled at Dr. Cable within earshot of the party, which was utterly stupid. Shay heard me, and I had to tell her about the cure. She was furious with me, over not sharing the cure with her, over stealing David, over getting her turned pretty. She told me, “You didn't need any operation to make you selfish and shallow and full of yourself. You already were.”
Tally has to stop, then, tears clouding her vision. Much clearer than her memories of New Pretty Town are her memories of being Special. Tally’s woken up from nightmares hundreds of times in her life, the horrors concocted by her unconscious mind making her totally spinning for a few minutes before they fade away. Her Special memories, though, are so crisp that they don’t fade; the moment where they don’t seem real never comes. She can hear, clearly, a crunch of leaves underfoot from when she’d trained with the other Cutters in the wild, all of them teasing her over skintenna for being so loud and clumsy. It hadn’t hurt, though, because she’d belonged, all the other Cutters feeling closer than her own thoughts.
Tally blinks the tears away and keeps writing.
Zane had to leave the bash early, because he had a headache. The lesions were eating his brain. He’d had the real cure, and I had taken the pill that would have stopped the lesions after fixing his pretty-mindedness. That pill did nothing for me. It would have saved his brain.
Very, very clear: her memory of going to see Zane in New Pretty Town after she’d been turned Special. He’d repulsed her with his averageness and with his sickness, the way his hands had shaken. That, too, almost drives her to tears. Her own hand is shaking, now, and she thinks of Sagramore: he’d had to run away, so no one would think his sickness was his father’s fault. Zane’s sickness actually was her fault, and Other Tally hadn’t even been able to fight her Special conditioning against it.
Other Tally had asked Shay, then, to make Zane Special. Her feelings for Zane create another doubly-layered memory. Her normal self, her real self, barely knows Zane. Other Tally, though, had been fully in love with him, lived with him, had sex with him, shared every bubbly moment together. Tally can feel that love still, and she can’t; it makes her feel dizzy, like trying to reorient herself after falling off her hoverboard and getting swung upside down by her crash bracelets. She’d needed him to be Special with her, more than anything. She’d insisted upon it to Shay until Shay had given her an intense look, a possessive look, and kissed her. She’d said, icy-making, huh, Tally-wa? and Tally had known, then, that everything she’d ever done had been about Shay, had been leading up to this.
That night is when Shay decided to get bubbly on her own. She stopped answering my pings and totally disappeared. I didn’t see her until a few days later, when we stumbled on her in the park in Uglyville. I didn’t know what she was doing with all those Crim wannabes at first, standing in a circle in the rain like that, until I saw her pull out the knife. She cut herself. They all cut themselves, trying to be bubbly through pain.
It’s hard to know what to feel about that, now. She’s repulsed, of course, but she also remembers the icy thrill of doing it herself, the special moment when everything crystallized around the pain. Sometimes Tally thinks she’ll never find a balance, that her whole life will be stuck swinging between intense iciness and complete pretty-minded haze.
She leans back in her chair, stretching her shoulders. She hadn’t known that writing affected muscles all the way at the top of her arm. It seems bogus, somehow, that every little action should have such far-reaching consequences.
She looks at her name, signed at the top of the page like it’s a school assignment: Tally Youngblood. It looks much better than anything else she’s written, since she’d been taught to sign her name as a child, but she feels like it shouldn’t. What does it mean, even, to be Tally Youngblood? Is she really destined to be selfish and shallow forever, no matter what anyone does to her brain? Isn’t this line of thought, in itself, utterly self-interested?
She sighs and shuts her notebook. Somehow, even though sitting and writing isn’t very bubbly-making, her mind is as ugly as it’s ever been.