Still and Stolen (Lucy)

[Dominique Chevalier]

Hiding a bottle of rather expensive tequila in a paper bag; this was his life. Given a good few swallows of the bottle were sitting like nice warm coals in his stomach, the thought became funny enough to warrant a good chuckle around his cigarette.

He was king of the mountain, and next to him was the queen.

It was a very small mountain. In fact, it couldn’t even be called a hill by the most generous geologist, but whatever it was: lump, moll hill, foothill, he was king of it and that was something.

And there was someone beside him as well. There was space between them, but every time Lucy so much as shifted over the ground the vibrations shivered through the bones of his feet.

He’d talked to his parents, even his mother, though it was only a few words before he’d made excuses and pushed out of the crowds of black robes and smiling parents. He’d felt a deep, heavy nausea as he’d spoken to his father, and as he’d turned away the air had started to ring. It had been difficult to breath as he’d found his way back to the dorm under the weight of something he wasn't able to vocalise. Something heavy and solid and cold that was wrapping around his organs and squeezing tight, tight, tighter until his lungs were flat and empty and the ground was swelling under his feet as his heart pounded so loudly that being swallowed by the ground would be a blessing.

He imagined it, sinking down between the layers of earth and stone and grit, past the granite and shale and slag into the bright, brilliant molten core where everything would just stop.

It was still now, and when Lucy spoke her voice didn’t distort. His stomach stopped spinning like a fan. The ground was solid again. Well, mostly solid, it had started to get a little unsteady; he had started drinking as soon as he'd reached his room, and dinner had been out of the question.

“Got any questions planned for our next sex talk?” he murmured as he passed the bottle over. Legs drawn up, his arms resting on his knees, Dom had to turn to see her properly.

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

What was she going to do now. When the question was given to her by her psychometric counterpart, Lucy didn't have an answer. Once she left, she didn't know what to do. Where to go or how to cope. As much as she'd hidden the inner workings of her mentality - though she faltered at the finest step - there was little she could do to suppress it forever. Lucy considered talking to Rowan. Or Sawyer. They both failed, too. They'd understand the difficulty, right?

Of course they would. They'd understand the struggle of failing when graduation was literally in front of them. But they wouldn't understand the multiple hits. The toll it took to relive that failure more than once.

Only one person in these halls knew that; she needed him. And she bet - or rather hoped - that he'd need her too.

A mountain. A hill. A mound. Whatever it was, it belonged to them. Hammel's latest failures. Repeat offenders. The brightest, but the lowest of the low.

The proverbial king and queen.

Lucy glanced over at the younger Chevalier twin. Her favourite, despite the way the tally favoured the other party. The corner of her mouth dragged into a grin as she considered a question to ask. "Never got a chance last year." She reasoned, taking the the bottle from him as her gaze stayed forward. "You fellas put on a hell of a show. I liked it. Very stylish." Her expression coloured with evident humour, that lazy grin breaking to let the burning liquid sink in, settling the covered class in her lap as she thought. As she pondered.

"I never fucked her, y'know." She offered suddenly, tilting her head as she finally looked over at him again. But she never simply looked. Never could she glance past the striking features of her favourite twin.

[Dominique Chevalier]

"We're stylish, classy people," Dom agreed, in a way that made it hard to believe the incident they were referring to involved handing out safe words to a public forum, along with an invitation to try them out. It had all been done in a stylish way, if that was believable.

But the announcement had started because he'd gotten punched in the face by that blue haired bitch... The curves and softness his amusement had created faded quickly as Dom's jaw set. The twins did not easily forgive, and they would never forget. When it came to interfering with Lucy, forgiveness was about as possible for Dom as wearing flannel unironically, or enjoying NAScar racing.

When she turned, her eyes caught Dom's and he didn't so much as blink. His back teeth clicked together at the new information, his blue eyes widening for just a moment. He was surprised. He was relieved. And for a moment it showed and the pause dragged because there were so many ways to reply, so much to say to that.

"Good," he said, finally and flatly. "She was fucking crazy, Serreno."

Twice he'd had to deal with that fucking manic pixie and both times it had been unpleasant to say the least. Thinking about Lucy, with her dark hair and her sharp smile and sharper words, with that had also been... unpleasant.

But Dom was perceptive, when he wished to be, and even if he hadn't been sharing the same spaces as Lucy for a while, he had seen the way she'd looked at, called out to, that dark haired girl at graduation. It had been a distant hurt, this time. A sort of deep ache, like someone had tugged at one of his strings.

"But-" he started, and then for a few seconds his mouth worked without sound.

Are you fucking her he wanted to ask, the dark haired one, with the eyes? And does she know you stole my shirt? And that in your sleep you cling like a monkey? And that you don't snore, but you make soft sighs that tickled the back of my neck all night like some sort of Chinese water torture?

"But now," he said instead, mouth dry, "now I will never know if the carpet matched the drapes. I was counting on you, you raging lesbian."

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

Nodding her head a few times, Lucy couldn't help but laugh. "She so was."

And he didn't know the half of it.

Immediately, she thought of telling him. The blurred lines of her logical mind listed all the things he didn't know that she wished she could tell someone. Him, if he were willing to listen.

Locked in the dark room, beating a storage shelf to expel her aggression as the blue haired girl berated her with honeyed words and false apologies. How she kissed her and felt everything but called her nothing. Then being dragged to her aid during a storm. Where she admitted that she wasn't nothing, but her mind was already elsewhere. With someone else. Torn amidst multiple people; himself included.

And then she left. Where, Lucy still didn't know. Upon her return, she expected everything. But time had stretched and frayed everything she still barely understood. It brought a psychometrist into her sight line. And with short, harsh, abrasively desperate encounters, the ink manipulator brought her into her bed.

Because he needed time. And she had disappeared. And so few people were willing to listen.

To be understood by someone - and not feared, nor turned away - had been too enthralling. Too much. And for it to be Penelope Blaise was the most enthralling thing of all.

But. Lucy drank from the bottle and her nose crinkled instinctively as the liquid burned her throat to its end. Adept at a drink or not, there was no denying the residual feeling. She had absolutely nothing against it.

She laughed. Heartily. Genuinely. She threw her head back as the obnoxious sound filled the air, and she handed him back the bottle they shared. Dominique had a newfound penchant for commenting on her sexuality, and she had no means to argue against him for it. She wouldn't agree to a label, but arguing with him was just a waste of time. Besides, it was funny.

"Once," Lucy started, holding her eyes shut tight before opening them for him again. The moment her dark eyes collided with bright ones, she was grinning again. "She'd gotten into the bloody dorm and I found her on the bed part-starkers?" Phrasing it as a question, she raised an eyebrow for him in curiosity. Is that something people do normally, or was it another stint of crazy? "I closed the door on her and was like; uhh, can you put some clothes on?" Was that how it went? She was relatively sure that was how it went. The recollection was as hazy as everything else, but she snarked at it regardless.

Until she settled. Just a bit.

"Is that what it's like being a bit like you?" Lucy asked genuinely. She always wondered, because Rowan was in a similar vein, and she never quite understood it. "You go home and people turn up a bit in the raw, and expect you to get keen? Cause fuck, that's a bit fucked."