fandomtownies | The Park, Friday Afternoon (Before Detention's Visiting Hours)

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The Park, Friday Afternoon (Before Detention's Visiting Hours)

Karla had been patrolling this morning and, Mother Night, was it such a rush. The ability to do as she pleased--so long as she was obeying the rules, of course!--when she pleased and where she pleased was practically intoxicating. She'd been skulking and hiding for so long, hoarding her Craft like a miser, Bah! What kind of life was what? She should have known she was on the wrong side from the moment she'd realized she couldn't be a proper witch as long as she was with the Resistance.

She was using Craft right now, in fact. There were flamingos and the odd squirrel that sometimes took it into their head to make noises at her. Karla was showing them exactly why one didn't sass one of the High Inquisitor's most faithful. No fatalities yet, but the reek of scorched feathers and singed fur lay heavy in the air.

In all, it was a good day.

[Anyone interested in talking to/tangling with an Imperio'd Karla before Ghanima fixes her, now is the time!]

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Barely enough room to breathe. Maybe that was why Warren was having so much difficulty making the attempt, gasping at the old, familiar feel of heat between them.

"You're everything I've wanted," he murmured, lifting a hand and letting it hover so near to her cheek that his fingers just barely brushed her skin in a touch that was nearly a whisper. "You're everything I've wanted since I left. Everything except yourself."

He took a step backward, the breath leaving his lungs as though he was leaving it behind with her. Maybe he wouldn't need it, in whatever hell this life had become.

A bruised look bloomed in her eyes. "I...I don't understand," she said, turning her face towards his palm, her lips almost grazing her skin. "I'm right here, Warren. Right here. Waiting to be with you. What's wrong with that?"

His hand was shaking. His hand was shaking, and if he were to pull his wings in against himself any more tightly, he'd be slicing himself open from the inside.

"Honestly... It would be a dream come true." A bittersweet smile graced his lips for a moment, and then he was closing his hand and putting it down at his side. "If she hadn't gotten you first. If you were still Karla."

He turned around. Closed his eyes and clenched his teeth.

"If I were still..." She trailed off in disbelief. "What the Hell are you saying, Warren?! Who do you think I am, who is standing in front of you?! It's me! Me! I can recite to you every last whispered endearment, every last shared dream, every hurled insult we ever exchanged! And now we're finally on the same side! So what the Hell do you mean 'still Karla'? I'm still me."

"No," he murmured, shaking his head. "You're not. You think you are. You won't know the difference until somewhere in the back of your head, it starts to sink in that you're doing things you'd never do, in your own right mind."

He glanced toward the flamingos, furrowing his brow at the wounded ones that were trying to nurse their burns in the water.

"You think she'll approve of you lighting the only birds on the island that actually match her wardrobe on fire?"

Karla glanced over at the flamingos, not entirely sure where Warren was going with this. "They were sassing me," she said. "Honking and trying to attack me. I had to remind them that they are not not to touch."

None shall touch ~~Loki~~ Karla!

"Waterfowl are filthy beasts anyway." Go on, Warren. Deny that. "But I don't understand what this has to do with the other!"

It took Warren a fair bit of self-control to keep from walking over to the birds and checking them over for wounds they wouldn't recover from. Putting them out of their misery would be a mercy.

One of them did seem to be dragging around a wing that was too mutilated to ever heal, among a myriad of other injuries. One flick of his own wing, and a poison-tipped feather buried itself in the bird's heart.

Mercy.

"The woman I fell in love with never would have done this." His jaw clenched, imperceptibly. "I'm sure she's in there somewhere, buried under an Imperio and screaming. But you aren't her."

Karla watched him coldly, now, stepping back a few paces. "You seem oddly certain of what the female you fell in love with would or would not do," she stated. "I distinctly remember thinking the same of you, when I first saw that you had joined the other side. And yet, I was wrong then, too."

Narrowing her eyes, she added, "You seem unhappy to find that I've discovered where my proper loyalties lie. Is this because I'm now abiding by the rules and refusing to let you touch? Or because you've replaced me in the interim?"

Warren wanted to scream, all at once, a grabbing, clawing feeling in his chest that demanded that he lay it all out for her straight, that he tell her that he and Tony weren't like that, that they weren't Loyalists, weren't Resistance, were something in the middle, in that no-man's land that was just so damn tired of burying people...

That he never would have touched Raven, if he didn't know it was the only way to keep Raven from dragging Karla into this life in the first place.

At least he didn't have any reason to submit to that treatment again.

"If you spoke to Umbridge herself, how can I be certain that it's your loyalties making you so obedient to her rules? That you won't shake yourself free of this within the week, and then turn around and take us all down from the inside?"

A different tactic, then. One that he prayed Karla would recognize for what it was, someday.

And for now, he just had to pray that she believed that he couldn't bring himself to trust her. That this was too good to be true.

"What else could it be?" Karla said, caught somewhere between outrage and heartbreak. "You know yourself this is the right side! You can't possibly deny Lady Umbridge's powers of persuasion! This isn't--I don't understand why you persist in believing that this is some kind of temporary aberration! This is who I am! It's who I always should have been!"

Tears started falling and she dashed them away with angry hands. "What will it take you convince you? I've already told the Lady everything I can, everything I know! Who can I kill to prove myself to you! Name someone! Anyone! I will lay their broken body at your feet as proof of my loyalty!"

One person?

Umbridge. But Warren didn't dare voice that name. Instead he just curled his lip back and shook his head. Best feign disgust, best break the heart of a puppet, rather than risk being turned in and subjected to Imperio himself. If there was anything left to know after Karla's own mental infection, he'd say it. He remembered too much even now. Knew students who were leaning toward defecting and running to the resistance.

He couldn't risk doing anything less than break her heart again.

"You can feel it, can't you? Somewhere in the back of your head, there's that doubt, chewing at you. Did you cry, Karla, when Raven killed that girl in detention? Do you catch yourself feeling pangs of regret and not knowing where they come from?"

He shook his head, his voice cold and carefully hollow.

"You dance because Imperio is telling you to. You haven't seen the light, you've simply been blinded by a flash in the dark."

Karla raised a hand up to slap his face; the no touching rule to be suspended for violence. "How dare you," she said, voice trembling either with anger or because she was on the brink of tears. Or both.

"If you don't want to be with me anymore, then don't," she spat, trying to claw his face with her other hand. "But don't pretend it's for any reason other than that. Yes, I was upset when Sookie died--because it was a waste. Because it undid all the work I'd done in Detention that day. That is who I am, who I always have been! Lady Umbridge just let me finally become my true self!"

Warren took the slap to his face. But the one reaching up to claw at him, he caught, tightening his grip enough to make damn certain she'd understand that he would fight back, if pushed, and that he was a force to be reckoned with if it came to that.

He loved her. But he wasn't going to take abuse from a pawn the same way he had, constantly, from the real thing for the past year.

"You keep telling yourself that, Karla. You go right ahead and tell it to yourself when you go to sleep at night, when you wake up in a cold sweat because you're dreaming of the penance that you believe deep down that you really deserve. You speak the words she'd want you to speak, and you torture in her name, but deep down, you're still exactly what you've always been. You're one of them."

He tightened his grip until he felt bones grind, narrowed his eyes and tried like hell to just will her into snapping out of it. And then he let go, practically throwing her arm back to her before backing away.

"And if you ever snap out of it, remember, I was the one who saw you for what you really are."

Karla was a welter of emotions: hurt, anger, fear, even a nagging sense of guilt.

"Warren," she said in a whisper, cradling her wounded arm. This was her last chance to reach him, her last chance to try and save what they had. "Warren, stop. I--I love you. Please don't turn away from me. I love you. I just want to be with you. Surely anything else, we can work through. Together. Please."

She couldn't have wounded him more thoroughly if she'd gone and stabbed him through the heart with one of his own toxin-laced feathers.

"I've been waiting a year to hear you say those words," he managed, speaking low and deep, eyes turned away. If he kept his voice low, she wouldn't hear the way he choked on it. If he looked away, perhaps she'd miss the tears that were burning at eyes that, mercifully, were already red. "To say anything beyond what sort of traitor I am. A year. And then suddenly you've seen the light, suddenly you're on my side and you want to pick up where we left off? Forgive me for remaining unconvinced, Karla. This is too much of a face-heel-turn for me to believe it could possibly be real. Either I'm dreaming, or this is a lie. But whatever this is, it isn't you."

He felt sick. So, so sick.

A tear slipped down her face. "You can't believe that I've just been wrong for a year?" Karla asked, willing her voice not to tremble. "You don't think that so much of what I've done this past year was for any other reason than for you?! Every fight, every argument, ever screaming fit was just so that I could talk to you again. Every time I struck at you, it was for the chance to touch you again. Every time I threw myself at Peter, it was in hopes that I could finally, finally forget the feel of you against my skin, the feel of you inside me. You say this is too fast, too abrupt--but really, Warren, it's been building for the entire year. I'm only just now able to unbend enough to say so."

... Damn you, Umbridge, for this. If what Karla was saying was true, this was not how Warren wanted to hear it.

He choked. This time, he choked, his composure slipping for a moment as he keened forward, trying to catch his breath.

"I'm not resistance. I could never be resistance again. But you... Karla, I never stopped wishing I could go back to you." And that line alone was a risk. Was enough to get him killed, if she were to go to Umbridge with it. He let it stand. "When you yelled, I pulled away more. When you struck me, I was struck. An Imperio spell can't take that away, can't make that undo itself. And I can't just take you at your word about it until I can see more of... of you in you."

Which meant that, as things were, they just... they couldn't be.

"I'm sorry."

She had no idea just how sorry he really was.

"You are sorry," Karla choked out. "And so am I. I'm sorry that you don't know me well enough to realize this is me. I'm sorry that you think it takes some kind of magic spell to get me to love you. I'm sorry that you don't believe in me enough to accept my love. I'm sorry that I hurt you so badly that you feel you can't."

She had more to say, insults she could hurl, emotions she could tear out. But she didn't. She couldn't make that mistake again. All she could do was fight the pink fuzziness for a moment and ask--beg--"Please, can't you just try? Hold me for a moment, look at me, and really tell me that it's not meant to be?"

"I can't do that," Warren murmured, looking at her with a face that betrayed exactly how much he was dying inside just then. "You won't let me hold you."

He turned to look down at the ground again.

"And I won't ever be able to accept that it isn't meant to be." Just not then. Not like this. "I can't breathe, Karla. I can't do this right now. Not... not like this."

Not you.

"I'm willing to let you now," Karla said, her face showing the strain of fighting off the curse even this much. "Maybe...just for a moment?"

"A moment... isn't enough."

He exhaled, something ragged and half-broken as he stepped back toward her regardless, reaching a hand up to brush fingers longingly over her cheek. And then his face fell and he pulled his hand away as though he'd been burned.

Some part of him had been.

"I'd just keep wanting more moments."

"If you turn away from me now," Karla warned, voice shaky, "you might not get another chance. I won't throw myself at you again, Warren."

Warren closed his eyes and pulled in another deep breath.

"I said that about you half a year ago."

He couldn't do this. He couldn't couldn't couldn't, it wasn't her and he was going to break her, right there and then, because he wasn't whatever it was that she seemed to think he was.

He spread his wings, then. Took another step back.

"You aren't the woman I fell in love with."

And then he flew.

A bolt of Sapphire followed him into the sky. Had it hit, it might have knocked him back down to the ground, left him bent and wingless and broken as he'd been a year ago.

But it didn't. It veered off sharply to the left to burn out somewhere over town. The wordless keen of agony, however followed him straight on.

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The Park, Friday Afternoon (Before Detention's Visiting Hours)

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