oh the weight it must be light wherever you are.

[amethysts]

CHARACTERS: Libby and YOU (OTA)
LOCATION: Room 008 >> 189, floor 8 kitchens and living areas
WARNINGS: Substance abuse, cursing
SUMMARY: Libby is not taking certain losses well
NOTES: Bump into her any day whenever, profit from drunken honesty



Day One

Nikolai and Syg are gone.

Shrike checks on her people every day. She knows almost to the second when they've...just been gone. Like Kurt's Blaine. And she'll live, she tells herself. It'll be fine.

Nikolai was her one hope for opting out. Syg was her one girl friend. She is not going to be fine.

Shrike cuts out the blue in her hair and dumps all her piercings in the trash. That's when she starts drinking in her room. This isn't fair. This isn't--this isn't fair, she's losing everyone, and she doesn't know what to do.

Day Two

She wakes up shaking and sick with Nikolai's remaining cigarettes by her bed. She doesn't remember taking them. On the way to the kitchen to get more alcohol she tries lighting one up--

She pukes into her cupped hands, then the kitchen sink. She could clean up, sure. But she doesn't. Instead she curls up on a couch with a bottle of nearly vodka and teaches herself to smoke. She throws up three times and doesn't care. Somebody else can deal with it.

Day Three

They fucking abandoned her.

This is what she has to tell herself to get angry, lying on a table in the common room and wishing anyone else was gone. They left her and she doesn't give a fuck about them. Whatev, right? Nikolai was an asshole and Syg was stupid and she doesn't care except oh, fuck, she cares so much. She cares all the time and it's fucking horrible.

She needs to cut them out as efficiently as her blue streak, but she's keeping that in a box too. Sentimental. The colour of her hair and the colour of her heart were blue, blue, blue, and she misses them all--

That's what gets her going. She's given people prison tattoos before. She knows what she's doing. So after some more alcohol to ease the pain she traces two things: a reaper over her heart and spikes on her right wrist. Then she starts filling them in with ink she makes in her little lab in Engineering, biting down on a rag. So there she sits, naked from the waist up except for her bra, because she cares too much. Her heart is too big and it's choking her and she hates it, dully.

(She knows she'll lose everything, eventually.)

Comments

[rickon]

Shrikes aren't native to the places Rickon has lived; he doesn't make the connection between the name and the feathers on her arms.

"I'm Rickon," he says, "and this is Shaggydog. Are you a bird girl? We saw a bird girl yesterday, with wings."

[amethysts]

"Nill, yeah?" That's the only other bird girl Shrike knows. It makes her sick, but--Nill is beautiful and sweet and she'd kill anyone who hurt her. So it's fine.

"Hey--you're the badass you threatened everyone on the net." It made her smile even as she added him to the people she has to protect, and oh, fuck, he's so little. It hurts. It hurts looking at him and remembering another little kid who died in her lap--that's never happening again. She slides off her table. "Yeah, I'm a bird girl. Uh--I was just about to make something to eat. You and Shaggy hungry?"

[rickon]

There is rarely a time when Shaggy isn't hungry, and Rickon is something of an opportunist where food is concerned. "Can we make a fire to cook it?" He really wants to make a fire. Ygritte's post inspired him.

Shaggydog makes an inquisitive sound, tilting his great dark head. A wrong-smell, not animal and not person. There are many wrong smells in this place, and this one is far from the most disturbing. What he acts upon, almost always, is a person's intent toward Rickon, and he senses no wrong intent from this wrong-smelling one.

"You sit, Shaggy," Rickon tells him, not unkindly but with the imperious nature of a child to his pet. "You can't put your nose in the food until it's done." To Shrike, then: "Were you drawing on yourself? Are we going into a battle?"

[amethysts]

No, no wrong intent. Shrike plays at being hard, but give her a kid and she's broken. Like now, with a sweet, gentle smile.

"Kind of a battle." She can tell him. He's just little, he won't fuck her over. She starts walking to the kitchens. (That's her vomit dried on the floor.) "I--two people I knew are gone. So I miss them. And it's called a tattoo. It's permanent. You know, forever?"

She finished Nikolai's reaper already. Syg's spikes will take maybe another hour. She thinks after this she should add--no, not anyone else. That's like admitting they could leave her too. "It's like a battle 'cause I won't let this ship have them. I want them back. She can't keep them, fuck her, right?"

[rickon]

"Like a war paint that doesn't wash off," Rickon decides. "I want one too. On my face!" He turns up his nose at the mess on the floor. "Watch out, don't step in it," he warns Libby helpfully. "Where did your friends go? Did the king make them leave?"

[amethysts]

"Exactly like war paint." Trust a kid to get it. Libby likes kids for that, not being full of bullshit. They can be stupid, but a lot of the time they just...get it.

She doesn't step in the sick. Doesn't even look at it.

"The king of the ship, I figure." But she doesn't want to talk it. Instead she laughs, scrunching her nose. "What do you want? I can do a practice one that'll last a couple days, so you can see if you like it. Sound 'kay?"

Because she's irresponsible, but she is not tattooing a small child on the face.

[rickon]

Rickon wrinkles his own nose in unconscious echo. "I want a quirty op. A big one with teeth."

It is the emblem of his independence and resourcefulness. It is also something he ... doesn't know what it is but he's going to find one and sic it on Stannis Baratheon.

[amethysts]

"...what kind of quirty op?" She is just. Going to run with this. Fuck it, it might be a real thing, and if it isn't she's not going to be a dick and say so. Instead she preps the ink and the stylus again, brushing her hair back and leaving a black smudge in it.

"And I forget how many legs they have." She glances at him subtly, gauging if he's inventing or not.