beyondthisillusion | PSL - On a stormy sea of moving emotion...

Entry tags:

PSL - On a stormy sea of moving emotion...

More often than not, Danielle spent most of her days sitting on a moldering motel bedspread, a rifle across her lap, with one eye on the door to the light-tight bathroom, the other on some crappy soap opera or another. Sometimes she would drift a little. And on very rare occasions, she would dream, seeing watery images of the life she should have known, the shapes running together like water colors.

That morning, her attention wasn't quite so split.

From sunrise until the last lingering rays of sunlight vanished beneath the jagged silhouette of the city, she sat by the motel window and stared up at the sky. Why was it she'd never appreciated how beautiful it was? She could still see a sliver of the moon throughout the day, like a pale, white toenail clipping in the sky. Clouds rolled by, shaped like whipped cream on top of sundaes. And then there was the sun. The big, beautiful, perfect sun.

This...this was what she was being asked to give up. How could she? How could anyone?

But people did. It happened all the time. More often than anyone realized and decidedly more often in her family than was normal.

As the sunlight faded in the west...Danielle wondered if she would ever see it again.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

People sometimes had a hard time figuring out when Shawn was teasing and when he was being pretty serious. As a kid, Danielle struggled with it. As she'd gotten older, she'd prided herself on being able to make the distinction. But she had to admit...this one threw her for a loop.

She blinked a few times, her jaw opening slightly. "Are you serious?" she asked, her voice lost somewhere between surprise and incredulity.

Vampires could do that. She knew in a vague, abstract sort of way. But...Shawn getting restaurant recommendations from a dog?

There were way too many ways to react right now.

Edited 2015-06-17 15:09 (UTC)

He gave a lopsided smile. So she did think it was cool.

"Yeah. Took me while to pin it down, though. He kept tryin' to tell me about this awesome squirrel nest —"

And that may or may have been serious. But he was cut off as the waitress approached with a carafe of coffee. Shawn turned his cup over, inviting her to pour.

"And can I get anything started for you?" the waitress asked.

Shawn tapped the edge of the cup's saucer with his fingers. "I'll be stickin' with coffee, thanks."

She turned to Danielle next. "How about you, darlin'? Need a minute?"

Danielle accepted the coffee like mana from Heaven. She'd become pretty damn dependent on it, over the last few years. At least the staff in all night-diners didn't give you funny looks for drinking it after sunset.

"Do you have any Sweet 'n Low?" she asked. The waitress was giving them that annoying, hello-young-lovers look that they got all the time. Why did people always assume that they were a couple?

"Sure, honey. Be right back."

Slowly, Danielle counted to ten before she turned back to Shawn. "Dude, you took a restaurant recomendation from someone who licks his own balls."

Edited 2015-06-17 15:40 (UTC)

"You're assuming he does that for the flavor." Just saying. "Anyway, it's the Middle of Nowhere, Tennessee. Options are sort of limited."

She made a face. The same one she'd made for the last twenty six years, every time Shawn said something truly disgusting.

Someday, her face was going to freeze that way.

...maybe she'd be Embraced with it. That was a sobering though.

The bridge of her nose relaxed and she sank back into the booth. "It's great," she said. And she really meant it. "Thanks."

"'Course." He shrugged, sat forward with his arms folded on the table.

"Y'know. Figured you deserved it."

She eyed him a moment, reading between those lines easily enough. And, despite all of her hopes and dreams for a plan of some kind...

Screw it.

"Shawn," she said softly, "I don't know that I want to go through with it."

His smile faded. It dialed down out of his eyes first, as they lowered to the tabletop, then started to leave the rest of his face. What was left at the end had a rueful look. He sat back again, hands flat on the table.

"Yeah," he answered. Like he saw this coming.

He knew. Of course he knew. Even if he was a vampire, he was still her brother. He still knew her better than anyone in the world. In part, because he was the only one there. And in part...

Well, those feelings went unspoken most of the time.

Danielle sank back further into her side of the booth, dropping her head and folding her hands in her lap. She almost looked like she was saying grace over a cup of diner coffee.

As if grace existed.

"I've been thinking about it," she said. "A lot. Obviously. And it just...it's permanent and...there are things I want, Shawn. In life. For myself."

At first, he was frustrated. Two hours until dad came to pick them up, and she was owning up to the cold feet now?

But he was still her brother. So after the initial flash of frustration, concern took over. So maybe she could have started this conversation earlier. She was starting it now. They could still figure this out.

Shawn shrugged. "Well, y'know, it's not the end of your life." ...well. "Okay, maybe literally it is. Technically. But there's still plenty you can do."

"No."

She said it a little more fervently, more passionately than she meant to. Than she should have. And immediately, a look of pure and unadulterated guilt flashed across her face.

"No," she said again, in a softer, milder tone. "There are just things that...I mean...I've been thinking about things. Like...I don't know...going to law school..."

Well, that... sorta came out of left field. He leveled a bemused expression at her.

"Law school."

She immediately felt embarrassed. Color rose in her cheeks as she lowered her eyes, half burying her face in the menu.

"It's something I've been thinking about," she said quietly. "One of a lot of things I've been thinking about."

"You wanna be a lawyer?"

She could read it as judgement if she wanted — depending on just how embarrassed she was — but he was genuinely confused.

"I don't know," she said with a sigh. "Maybe. Maybe there's something to the idea of helping people without having to break the law all the time to do it. Maybe I could use the law to my advantage."

People did that all the time. Followed the rules. Worked within the system. Normal people. Good, regular, old-fashioned, normal people.

Danielle could be like that.

"Or...I don't know. What if...I want to get married some day?"

Of course, there was the little problem that the type of helping they did often existed outside the law. What was she gonna do — hunt down rabid Gangrels through the power of the courts?

"Thinking of settling down?" That came with a little smirk, because come on. It was a little funny to imagine. But — this wasn't really about higher education or a white wedding. It couldn't be. Shawn's expression turned back to something more serious.

"Come on. What's this really about?"

He wasn't wrong. But that somehow managed to infuriate Danielle.

"What if I want to have kids?" she asked sharply, leaning forward in her seat. "What if I want to work a nine to five and come home to a house with white picket fences and eat a pot roast while I listened to my family talk about their days? What if I wanted a life where the worst thing that could possibly happen was an IRS audit?"

She took a deep breath. "Shawn...what if I want a normal life? I go through with this, that's out the window. Gone. Forever."

And forever was literal in this particular instance.

"Maybe." He had to at least acknowledge she had a point. But. "But don't you think that fate was signed, sealed and delivered a long time ago? From the moment we were born? I mean, Jesus. Even the Palmers don't get to live perfect apple-pie lives."

From what he heard about them, at least. Dad's never been on the best terms.

But he kind of life she's talking about... It would mean walking away. From everything. And not just leaving behind the violence. It would mean still knowing everything was out there, and doing nothing about it. He wonders.

"You really wanna leave us?" Leave me?

"No," she said, just a little too quickly, maybe. It seemed to be a running theme for her. "Shawn...it's not about you. It's about me. It's about...growing up. That's what people do. They go out on their own and they live their own lives."

Emphasis on the living.

The corners of her lips turned down in that pensive way she had, the one that made her look strangely like a fish. She was hurting him. And that was the last thing she wanted to do. But Shawn had never been good at separating 'us' and 'you.' Which was probably why he was Dad's perfect soldier.

"Do you really believe in fate?" she asked quietly.

"I believe in something," he shrugged. "Our lives—" so to speak, "—are shaped by the ones that came before us. If you were someone else's daughter, you wouldn't be you. You'd be... Danielle Smith."

And really, who the hell was that?

"I know who I am," Danielle said. "And I know who I want to be." They weren't the same thing. Obviously, they weren't. And it was a problem a lot of people had, she knew that. But that problem generally didn't include a side of facing immortality and dependency on blood.

She sighed. "There are certain doors that...I mean...if I close them now...what happens in twenty years when...I want to open them?"

Shawn had never been one to think about the future. At least not beyond the next job, the next town. Kinda hard to do any long-term planning when you could die tomorrow, or at least need to pack up and move. So at a certain level, he couldn't understand why she was even thinking that far ahead.

"I don't know," he said. "I dunno where I'm gonna be in twenty years. Hell, I dunno where I'm gonna be next week. The future's never a sure thing, no matter what you do.

"But — I'm bein' straight with you — I think that's a good thing. I do. You never know what's around the corner. Or which doors are closed. All you can know is what's right, right now."

And here's what he knew: "We make a good team, Dany. I don't wanna see that end."

Danielle nodded vaguely. Because there was one statement that was pure fact. No contention. They'd always worked well together, complimenting each other as if they'd been designed to do it. But that brought back in the fate issue and...well...Danielle was more on the side of free will.

Maybe it just felt better.

She reached across the table, squeezing his hand. "Danielle," she corrected him gently. She'd always hated the nickname, half-convinced that her father and brother came up with it to try to make her more like the boy they wanted, instead of the girl they got.

Was that a part of it too? The fact that she was a girl? That she could sometimes think about wanting to have kids...

That she did sometimes thing about it...

Letting go of his hand, she picked up the menu, just to give her hands something to do. "What if what I think's right right now is to say no to Dad?"

He gave her a tight, apologetic smile at the correction. He'd always have a soft spot for the nickname, even if she didn't love it.

As for saying no to Dad — he'd be mad, sure. There'd be some tough nights ahead, a lot of disappointment. If she tried to pull this kind of argument with him, it'd go a lot different. But if she wanted to go that way, that was her choice. Seemed like she could use some reassurance of the fact.

"You know, nobody's forcing you to go through with this."

She gave him a matching tight apologetic smile in return. Dad wouldn't exactly tie her to a chair and force her to be Embraced over her objections. She was sure of that. But he'd be...disappointed. To the point of their biggest blow-up yet. And despite their differences, Danielle couldn't stand fighting with Dad. Or Shawn.

They were her world, after all. And she couldn't imagine going out and forging a new one that didn't somehow include them.

Or, at least, Shawn.

It was so complicated.

"What's the best thing about being a Kindred?" she asked Shawn in a low voice. "And don't give me any kind of answer that involves your junk."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject