Demon Marcus, Sunday

[myownface]

So, Sparkle wasn't sure, but he was starting to get the feeling that maybe he was actually the only Demon Marcus employee on the island that didn't up and graduate last week. And, really, he wasn't certain what to make of that. Did that mean he got free reign over the place, now? Maybe nobody would give a shit if he took a peek at the spring catalogues and picked out a few articles of clothing to order for purely selfish reasons?

He didn't know, and frankly, he didn't care. He was going to do it anyhow. And then maybe put some sort of sale on today, because it was like a holiday or something stupid.

Are You a Mother?
Half off if you can prove you're a mom.
or if you have a mom
or want to be a mom
or whatever
I don't care I just work here.

Sparkle wasn't a mom, and he didn't have a mom, and he didn't want to be a mom. But that wasn't going to stop him from ringing in the sale price for himself on top of his employee discount after he stumbled across a pair of shoes he absolutely needed to have. And if anyone had a problem with that, well, at least he'd know if he actually had a boss or something.

[Open and OCD-free!]

Comments

[endsthegame]

"Ah," Ender said, having opened the door and stepped in roughly five seconds before that 'ah', "I was right. Good morning, Sparkle."

He'd just been taking a walk to see if the island had changed any since he left, but the sign had been... hard to ignore.

[myownface]

Now there was a voice that Sparkle hadn't heard in a while. And it was a welcome one, too. So if he perked up a little from where he was sitting at the counter, the nails on his left hand halfway to being painted black, well, that would be why.

"Prof!" Sparkle's favourite teacher, all returned to the island to be the only sane person here! "Hey! Right about what?"

[endsthegame]

"That the sign meant you were in," Ender said easily. He stuck his hands in his pockets as he walked towards the counter. "Having a rough Mother's Day?"

[myownface]

"Nah," Sparkle replied, putting the cap back on his nail polish bottle and giving his half-finished hand a wave. "It's mostly just another day of the week. So what if people get all crazy about it, like no matter what they owe their mother for bringing them into the world, like getting knocked up is all it takes to be a good parent."

Okay, so there were some issues with the holiday going on, there.

"So long as they don't get on my case about it, I don't really give a shit."

[endsthegame]

"I can tell," Ender said, with passionate dedication to deadpan understatement. "And here I thought the sale sign was there to solicit rambling argumentative preaching about motherhood."

He looked faintly amused, though: Sparkle was on the list of Things About The Island That Hadn't Changed Much. "How are you doing, besides not giving a shit?"

[myownface]

"Alive," Sparkle replied, because that seemed to be his go-to, these days. "In spite of all this fucking island's efforts to change that. Still here. Still pissed off at this place."

All true!

"New kids showed up yesterday. I didn't talk to any of 'em. Figured if I did, my glowing testimonials would mean the island would lose all its fresh blood and I'd be left to take the brunt of its bullshit without that shiny 'new car smell' buffer going on, there."

[endsthegame]

"Not much of a good Samaritan, are you?" Ender asked. "Not that it matters much. Most of the new kids wouldn't have believed you anyway, and in several months they'd be stuck with the same sense of self-destructive attachment almost everyone develops about this place."

... Sorry, Fandom.

[myownface]

Well, if you were right, you were right. Sparkle was one of a precious few who didn't get Stockholm Syndromed into thinking the island was the greatest thing since toilet paper. Things that succeeded at killing him generally left him feeling that way.

"Yeah, no point telling stories now when they're just going to laugh in your face for it." Sparks shrugged, tipping his closed nail polish bottle over and idly rolling it across the countertop with one finger. "Either it comes off as crazy, or it comes off as one big fucking sob story, and I'm not about to risk the second."

The sob stories that Sparkle tended to default to were always bullshit, and he could laugh in their faces about it later, when people actually started to believe him. The trauma this place threw at him was way harder to laugh off.

[endsthegame]

"I heard some bad things went down here not too long ago," Ender said. "I take it you were caught in the middle of it."

He wasn't looking forward to another few months of worrying about ending up back in the middle of it. He had several lifetimes' worth of blood on his hands as it stood.

[myownface]

"Something like that," Sparkle confirmed, after a long hesitation. It was enough time to reinforce that wall of not caring. He'd already cried on Alec's fucking shoulder about it yesterday. He wasn't going for a repeat performance here today. "I ended up getting hurt, and then some other people got hurt, and it was just all kinds of fucked up. The kind of fucked up you can't talk to your legal caretaker about because instead of bringing you home he'll just send you to a shrink or something, get that head all checked out."

[endsthegame]

Ender nodded, running that through his mental translator - taking out the bricks of that giant wall of not-caring and reconstructing some sense of what happened.

"I've never understood why we don't have more shrinks on the island," he said lightly. "That's all too common."

[myownface]

"There's a school counselor now," Sparkle offered, clinging to a detour in the conversation, whether there was supposed to be one there or not. "People get these e-mails at random telling them to come talk to her, make sure the island isn't fucking us all over for life or whatever. Talked to her in January. Mostly she called me a punk and asked if I was crying myself to sleep at night. Told me to try some positive thinking because stress can fucking kill you or something like that."

That had been more or less the gist of it, anyhow.

[endsthegame]

Ender's eyebrows had crawled half an inch up onto his forehead by the time he was done.

"That's helpful."

[myownface]

"What? Positive thinking? Or random check-ins with the school's mental parole officer?"

Because positive thinking could do a lot of things, but it sure as hell hadn't kept Sparkle from being killed and turned by a vampire a few weeks back or anything.

[endsthegame]

"That approach to counseling," Ender said, his eyes flicking over Sparkle's face and taking a quick inventory of the boy's state of mind. "Telling someone who's gone through some trauma to invest in positive thinking is more likely to make them feel ashamed or not taken seriously than to improve their state of mind."

[myownface]

"Uh, yeah. Especially with the shit this place throws at people." Seriously, Sparkle could say that with some conviction, by this point. "The random e-mails aren't all that bad, though. You kind of get the feeling that she doesn't want to be in that office any more than you do when you go in. She asks her questions, lets you take it from there, and if you don't, you don't. No sweat off her ass."

Not being obligated to share was a nice change.

[endsthegame]

"You haven't been to her about what happened," Ender noted. "Don't want to deal with the questions?"

In which case talking to Ender was a bad idea too.

[myownface]

"Don't want to deal with the answers," Sparkle replied, being blatantly, brutally honest for just a moment before trying to pull that wall up all over again. "Don't want to deal with people telling me that people get over this shit all the time on this island, like I should be other people, like it should be fucking okay by now that I did the things I did because it wasn't totally me. It's not okay. I have a friend that won't talk to me right now and I don't fucking blame her, and she doesn't need to be okay either. Bad shit happens here all the time and like two, three weeks later you have every super kid or whatever on the goddamn island shrugging it off like it never happened and the rest of us, the losers with no powers who haven't had to deal with fucking aliens and v-vampires we're supposed to get over it too, because it's a matter of time before the next thing happens and we wouldn't want to still be fucked in the head from the last time, would we?"

... The wall didn't go up quickly enough.

[endsthegame]

Ender didn't mind. He listened. And when he was done, all he said was, "It's not okay. I'd be worried if you were."

[myownface]

"So how does everyone else do it?" Sparkle wasn't looking up, now. He was reaching for his nail polish again, because fuck it, his hand was only half-painted and he was going to finish the job, thanks. "Like, I don't even know where the hell to start. Got off the island for a week with a friend, made some stupid choices, was mostly okay again, and then I came right back here."

There was a street in town that he couldn't walk down anymore. He didn't trust that there wouldn't be some crazy girl with sharp teeth waiting there for him again.

[endsthegame]

"They repress," Ender said. "They shuffle that trauma right back underground and they deal with it in the nightmares they lie about later. Sometimes they laugh and they joke and they run off to get drunk to do stupid things and they just hope nobody notices that they've stopped taking off their shirt when they take a dunk because there's scars all over their back that they just can't show."

He tilted his head. "Or maybe they're used to it," he said, "and at best what happens here just reinforces what they already know. The damage is already done, so what's a little extra scratch going to do?"

[myownface]

"... I don't get it," Sparkle admitted, after a moment. "I don't get how people can still like this place, think it's the best thing that's ever happened to them, when it does shit like that. Yeah, so you make friends here, great. A bunch of other people that are stuck going to school here who might or might not survive the next time."

[endsthegame]

"That's the wrong question to ask," Ender said quietly. "The right one is, 'How bad is the place that they come from that this one is an improvement'. And oftentimes the answer is 'pretty bad'."

[myownface]

That one had Sparkle sitting in silence for a few seconds, brush halfway along one nail and in the process of leaving an extra large blob of black polish behind for good measure.

"Guess it would have to be." He had a difficult time picturing it, even after his field trip to Nar Shaddaa, but what Ender was saying did make sense, at least. "So... What brings you back here, then?"

[endsthegame]

"Portalocity," Ender said wryly, shifting topics with ease. "We've spent the past two weeks trying to get to, and then back from, graduation. Now our connection is busted until September at the earliest. We're stranded here until then."