Cunt Was Served I Fear - Blog Posts
Forward, but Never Forget/XOXO - Ch: 33 - Blood Game
Snippet:
"Thanks for the tip," Vi says, rising to her feet. "I'd do the same for you, if I had any fucks left to give."
"Is that right?" Sevika's eyes glow, a pair of ashed-out cigarettes. "If I were you, sweetie, I'd save my fucks for a fight I can win."
"Funny. I seem to recall kicking your ass at least once before."
"Once. With the element of surprise." The glow hardens. "Not to mention an Uppside bitch playing back-up."
"You saying you'd beat me in a fair fight?"
"In a fair fight, Vi, you'd be a smear on the floor." Sevika's eyes cut her up and down. "I've had bigger and badder than little shit-kickers like you come to heel."
"That a fact?" Vi takes a step closer. She's a good head shorter, but doesn't miss the subtle flexing of Sevika's jaw. "'Cause I've got no problem taking a run at it."
They stand face-to-face. A breath away from collision.
The sun, blood-red, crests over the Aerie.
Vi swears she glimpses her sister's silhouette against the sky.
A crow readying for flight.
Sevika's right fist dry-gulches Vi—a nasty suckerpunch straight to her ribs. The blow would've laid Vi out flat. Except her reflexes have already kicked into gear. She rolls with the punch, torquing her hips at the last minute. Her uppercut, meeting Sevika's momentum, connects her knuckles solidly with the underside of Sevika's jaw.
Sevika's head snaps back. Blood and spittle spray. A split-second later, the shocked glaze fades from her eyes, and she lets loose a war-whoop that could rattle the joists of a steel-walled battleship. Then she's coming at Vi with a haymaker that collides straight into the gut. The blow drops Vi to her knees. Arctic spiders crawl up her sides; her insides are aflame.
Her stare connects with Sevika's. The older woman shrugs, and her mouth curls. A succinct two syllable taunt—
"Square up."
—And she kicks Vi hard enough to send her skidding across the courtyard.
The rest of the recruits, their game suspended, stare in stunned silence. Ran and Dustin, locked in a rowdy clinch, fall apart. Lock, sensing a real match in the offing, sensibly retreats from the fray. Others crowd in a loose circle. The betting begins in a hushed buzz of coins passing from hand to hand.
It's one thing to have the blackguard brass at each other's throats. It's another thing entirely to bear witness to a no-holds-barred showdown between Zaun's two most formidable combatants.
One: the daughter of the Wharfside Devil. The other: the whelp of the Hound of the Underground.
A grudge-match for the ages.
AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO
FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)
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Forward, but Never Forget/XOXO - Ch: 32 - Sunk Cost Fallacy
Snippet:
A tiny tremor—a temblor—rattles the dishes on the table.
Vi is hit by a different quake. As if the floor, the walls, the balcony are falling away. Everything, except Silco's words. Throughout the night, they've strobed at the back of her mind.
Vander, saying the same things. Vander, warning her. Vander, and Blut.
Blut.
Vi's mind, struggling against the epiphany, bursts at the seams. Memories burst too: a red tide gone blue. She'd spent all this time fixated on him. The man who's ruined her sister, and her life. The man whose accent—when it lapses from sterling correctness—bares the serrated edges of the Lanes. Whose voice—when it's not spouting convoluted spiels—becomes soothing as a bedtime story. Whose eyes—red and blue—are a mirror reflecting more than her hatred back to her, but the safety of a simpler palette.
"You," Vi chokes. "I know you."
"What?"
Vi's lungs seize. Gods, she'd been so stupid. She'd had the puzzle sitting right in front of her, and hadn't seen it. Because she couldn't accept what it meant.
The man who's taken everything from her, the man she's hated for seven long years, the man she's determined to hate until her dying breath:
They're the same.
She remembers him—Blut—tossing her to the ceiling to her gleeful shrieks. Sitting, crosslegged, with a comic book open in his lap, and reciting the dialogue in funny voices. Scooping her into his arms and carrying her into the Last Drop, humming a tune that's now embedded into her bones...
Silco's knuckles rap on the table. "What's gotten into you, girl?"
She wants to say, "Nothing." Except her throat is glued. So are her eyes.
This man. This murderer.
The stranger... and who he once was.
"It's you."
"Me?"
"Blut." She points a quavering finger. "The one Vander always talked about. God, why didn't I—?"
Silco's expression morphs from surprise, to understanding, to the smallest iota of apprehension. "What did he say about Blut?"
"He was Vander's childhood friend." Vi can barely squeeze the words out. Her heart is racing a mile a minute. "He was—the smartest guy Vander knew. And he—he was my friend, too. When Mom and I were staying at the Last Drop, Blut was there. He'd call me Pet, and tickle me, and make me laugh. In the evenings, we'd play in the cellar. Hide-and-seek. Sock puppets. Whack-a-mole. Sometimes, he'd read to me. The old comics from the trunk—"
Very quietly, Silco says, "Mavis and Mutthead."
"He'd put on a show. Like a vaudeville act. He'd do the funniest voices." She tries, and fails, to replicate the squeaky tone. "'Hoy, Mavvy! What'd the ceiling say to the wall?' 'Dunno, Mutthead. What?' 'Hold me up, I'm plastered!'" The laugh is a paroxysm. "Vander told me... he'd died on the Day of Ash. Killed during the blast on the Bridge. Nothing left but cinders."
Silco's jaw works, as if his tongue has burnt to cinders too. "Vander said that?"
"Every year." Her breath hitches. "I never forgot. But I never put it together. He—you—"
Silco's expression holds a shadowed emptiness. The shark-eye inverts: a trick of light. The blue blooms: bright as memory.
"It's a lie," he says.
AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO
FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)
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