open post: averageness

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally's first clue that it hadn't been a dream was that she'd woken up alone in her room.

Nowadays, she and Gideon have been sharing a room, so that Tally can protect her from ever finding a body alone again--and maybe conspicuously leave out some clothes that fit Gideon but aren't, like, ratty black pants. That day, though, she'd woken in an empty room, gasping from something that felt like a nightmare, but somehow more vivid than real life.

Without even getting dressed, she'd run for the woods to confirm what had happened. Horror had flooded her when she found the knife-mark, exactly where she remembered throwing it yesterday. It was true. She'd been Special. She'd been awful. She'd seen and felt the world with more harsh clarity than she'd ever thought possible. She'd hit Gideon.

Tally had collapsed onto the stump, gripping her own arms to make sure her familiar, average body was still there.

Over the next few days, Tally doesn't sleep well, and people getting swapped out for a second time doesn't help. People might find her wandering the mansion like a zombie, or in one of the kitchens, contemplating getting drunk. She's not as put together as usual, either, but of course on her even bedhead and sweats look beautiful.

Comments

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon chuckles. "If anything traumatized me about the encounter we had, it was not the catsuit.¹ And yeah, who needs a shitty little knife when you've got a sword?"

¹ Not how trauma works, but okay.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Maybe I'll wear it for you, then." Tally can imagine herself in the sneak suit with all its scales set to black, or maybe silver, to compliment her eyes. "Swords are definitely bubblier than knives. You are crazy, though, you know. I'm sure the pretty committee never thought someone would see a Special and react like you did."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah, well. I got a kind of anti-respect for authority." Gideon messes with her hair. "The Marshal on the Ninth hated me so bad I thought his rotten old heart would explode every time he wasn't allowed to kill me where I stood." She laughs. "God, speaking of crumbly. Crux was so crumbly he had bits falling off."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally wishes she had a tablet to take notes on, or even a piece of paper to write in her wobbly new handwriting.

"Sounds like he had totally bogus taste in people," she says. "Was it because of, um... all the death and stuff? Or did he just suck majorly?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"He just sucked majorly," says Gideon. "But if I get into all the old people who sucked majorly on the Ninth, we'll be here all day, and you're supposed to talk to me about Shay."

[tallyyoungblood]

Gideon's as good at dodging questions as she is blows. Tally sighs.

"We met a few months before my sixteenth birthday," she starts. "Our sixteenth birthday, actually. It's the same. September ninth. Both of us were the youngest of our groups of friends, so we were alone after all our friends turned pretty and moved across the river."

[ninth_cavalier]

God, every detail of Tally's society Gideon gets just convinces her it's even more wack. "Alone for how long?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Um... like for the summer." Tally flushes faintly. It seems like a short amount of time now that she has oceans of time to swim in, but at the time it had seemed dire. "So, I met her on the way back from crashing a party in New Pretty Town. We started hanging out, and right away she was different. She didn't want to make face morphs, and she taught me how to hoverboard. We flew to the Rusty Ruins a lot. She was so..." Tally sighs dreamily. "Different. No one I ever met talked like she did. Eventually she told me she didn't want to be pretty, and she was going to run away before her birthday. We got into a huge fight because I thought that was totally brain-missing, but right before she did it, she asked me to come with her."

[ninth_cavalier]

Okay, the last thing Gideon had been expecting to feel is the urge to like Shay, despite the dreamy look in Tally's eyes. She keeps that shit to herself. It won't last. "Did you go?"

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally shakes her head, ashamed. "No. I was too scared. She left me coded directions in case I wanted to go, but I knew I wouldn't use them. I wanted to be pretty. But on my sixteenth birthday, they took me to Special Circumstances headquarters instead of the hospital to get my surge. Dr. Cable--she's the leader of the Specials--told me I had to go after Shay and find the Smoke or they wouldn't make me pretty. I had to betray Shay. And after a couple days I agreed to do it." Tally sighs. "I know it must seem utterly pathetic that that worked on me, when you were willing to die for Harrow, but..." All her excuses feel weak and pathetic.

[ninth_cavalier]

"What? That's not the same at all," says Gideon, surprised by the comparison.

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally shifts uncomfortably. "I'm just saying, I'm not very good at not putting myself first."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon snorts. "Babe, me dying for Harrow was putting myself first."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally remembers a lot of stuff about oaths and knowing each other intimately and being two people against the universe, et cetera, but okay.

"I forgot you were crazy for a minute," she says. She realizes she's smiling at babe, which is utterly inappropriate when they're talking about Gideon and maybe Harrow dying. The past few sleepless nights are totally doing a number on her. She tries to straighten her face. "My bad."

[ninth_cavalier]

"No, really," Gideon insists, flashing a smile at Tally's smile before she sobers again. "The other option was letting her do it, which wouldn't have done either of us any good, and would've been way less sexy--she was already bleeding out, we would've just had to wait, and then I'd be by myself." A profound by-herself-ness, worse than the regular kind. The kind of by herself that Camilla had been. "So instead I jumped the gun and did that to her. Totally selfish." She thinks about her conversation with Lancelot about God and puppets. "Plus, like--that whole thing, her becoming a Lyctor, that was what the Emperor wanted us to do. It was the point of the whole fucking thing. So it's actually more like you deciding to become a pretty than not."

[tallyyoungblood]

"What do you mean, a Lyctor?" They're getting utterly sidetracked, but what is she talking about? "This is the whole thing about her, um, eating you, right? And by the way, I still hate your god and think he's beyond bogus for allowing all that."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon rolls her shoulders. "Yeah, been thinking a lot about that. If I ever get an audience with the motherfucker¹, I will have some questions. But—yeah, the eating me thing. It was supposed to make us a Saint. So like—it's what He wanted, as well as what I wanted. The same way your society wanted you to be a pretty, and you wanted it, too. Point is, either neither of us are cowards or both of us are, which makes it all pretty null, right?"

¹ Blasphemous AND ironic!

[tallyyoungblood]

"I... guess, yeah," Tally accedes. She has to admit she might be tempted by a title like "Saint" if it weren't so religion-y. She also thinks of Andrew Simpson Smith, telling her about how hard it was for him to defy the gods. "It's not easy to be a rebel, when the way things are is all you've ever known. It was easier when I met David."

[ninth_cavalier]

"He's the one you met in the Smoke?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Yeah. He was an ugly who was raised in the wild, since his parents found out about the brain lesions and ran away before the had him. They founded the Smoke, actually--Maddy and Az. David was sort of a legend in the city, because he would come recruit tricky uglies for the Smoke. Shay talked about him all the time, even before we all ended up there. She was sort of obsessed with him. Maybe you can see where this is going."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon smirks a little. "You got jealous, and stole your girl's man."

[tallyyoungblood]

"I wasn't jealous!" Tally protests. "Well, maybe a little, but David pursued me." A thousand old mental arguments with Shay rise up within her, but she squashes them down. "He told me I was beautiful, even though I was ugly. He gave me gloves to protect my hands, which was a big deal in the Smoke, since you had to barter for stuff there. Anyway, Shay got mad at me, partly because I told her that I had a crush back in the city to cover for my tracker, because it was a heart-shaped locket. She was like, how come you're stealing my boyfriend when you have another crush?" Tally laughs bitterly. "I told David that's what the tracker was, too, and threw it in the fire to show him that I wanted to be with him, not go back. And I meant it."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon sobers, her smirk fading. She likes Tally's normal laugh way better than this one. "What went wrong?"

[tallyyoungblood]

"Turns out throwing a tracker into a fire is a great way to set it off. When I woke up the whole Smoke was crawling with Specials. Everyone but me and David got arrested." Tally closes her eyes, remembering how all the Smokies had left their shoes for her when they saw her escaping barefoot. "They killed some people, too. This crumbly guy called the Boss, and David's dad. Shay didn't get killed, but... they turned her pretty. After she'd been the first person I ever knew who liked her real face." Tally's voice wobbles."By the time David and I showed up to break her out, it was too late. She wasn't even mad at me, which was the worst part. They made her not care. She wasn't her any more. And it's my fault."

[ninth_cavalier]

"So, okay. You agreed to betray your friend, in exchange for some scientist bitch not withholding the only thing you'd been taught made life livable, and then when it came down to it you didn't even do the betrayal, and it only went wrong because they're constantly foisting technology on you without explaining how any of it works, because they, like, gatekeep the fuck out of all knowledge, including the part about giving everyone brain lesions."