fandomtownies | Stark Industries

With a little guidance from Arden, Eleanor came into Stark Industries that afternoon nervously bearing not coffees but two red Squishies.

She was honestly surprised one,if not both, hadn't exploded in her hand from the anxious grip she had on them.

"Hi," she said, trying her best at a smile as she held one out for Kamala. "I know I said coffee, but a little bird told me you might like this instead."

Edited 2024-07-15 10:54 (UTC)

"Awww! I love a good squishy!" Kamala said,. practically bouncing up to meet Eleanor. "You know, I don't care what people say? Red dye #3 is an essential nutrition supplement. It should always be a part of your daily intake."

She gave Eleanor a smile as she took the squishy cup from El. "Thank you. That was very thoughtful of you."

She nodded in the general direction of the internal Starbucks within the towerlet where there was some open tables. "Is that good enough? Or do you want someplace more private?"

Some of the butterflies wreaking havoc on Eleanor's stomach right now moved to her chest with that bouncing, smiling approach, although the dreadful nausea remained anchored there like a stone. Her attention shifted, slightly delayed, from Kamala to where she'd indicated.

"Oh," she said, "I didn't realize there was a coffee shop already here..."

Buy, no, this was fine. The Squishy was much better. God, she owed Arden a big one. If anything, then, after everything terrible about to transpire, at least Kamala would have the comfort of a favorite drink, right?

She nodded. "No, that's...that's good. That's...I mean, is there somewhere more private? I, um, brought rum," she dug the little bottles out of her bag, holding them clinking in her hand. For the squirrels? For them? The answer was pissibly both, "and Arden's got radio tomorrow, but...wherever you think works best, I guess?"

Clearly the squishy was totally the right call because Kamala was already drinking it.

"Oh, well if you brought the rum for the squirrels then the table should be fine," Kamala said reaching out to take Eleanor's hand which would hopefully sooth her nerves. Kamala could see she was nervous, poor thing. Maybe taking her hand would help?

"Or if you feel more comfortable I can get a conference room or something?"

"I--" Eleanor's hand tightened on Kamala's as she took it; she forced herself to loosen her grip. "--table's fine."

Easier to escape, really, for either of them, when things inevitably went downhill.

Kamala looked at how nervous Eleanor was and gave her hand just a little squeeze for encouragement. “Hey. Don’t be nervous.”

Like those words would help her.

“Take some deep slow breaths,” Kamala said and demonstrated a few times to try and help Eleanor calm herself. “C’mom. Let’s sit down.”

She gave Eleanor’s hand a little tug to start leading her to the table.

Eleanor's attempt at slow, deep breaths came out as more of wry huff. Don't be nervous. Pretty easy for Kamala to say; she wasn't coming into this conversation with her bags half-packed, half-expecting to be run out of...well, if not town entirely, but at least their social group. Nothing she wasn't used to, of course, and she sort of expected it would come to that eventually, but she'd really enjoyed all this. She had hoped it would have lasted at least a little bit longer...

She let Kamala lead her ~~to her doom~~, dropping off little bottles of rum on nearly every surface along the way.

“I usually find one bottle is usually enough,” Kamala said in a light teasing tone as she pulled out a chair for Eleanor. “I think three and four are usually reserved for government secrets.”

And now, Eleanor’s tension was beginning to worry Kamala. Not for whatever Eleanor had to tell her but just Eleanor’s state of mind. “Can I get you something to drink? Maybe some tea? They have a few nice herbal blends here.”

Definitely decaffeinated.

"I just really want to make sure," said Eleanor, taking her seat and now wondering if she was overthrowing this, but, no. It might not be federal level, but these secrets could be pretty nuclear on a personal level.

And maybe if she plied them with enough booze while she was already at it, they'd stop bothering her about doing radio on Fridays, too. Silver lining.

If she even stuck around long enough yo get to Friday after this, even.

And to Kamala's offer, she shook her head. "No, I got a Squishy for myself, too," which she now pulled closer to herself. She took a performative sip, even though she didn't really want to, and tried not to react too much to how sweet and sugary it was.

And she realized she was stalling, that she was dragging it put, and that if she really wanted to do this, she needed to do it now or she might just chicken out. So she took a deep breath and let it gush out of her.

"Okay, so, listen," she said, looking up at Kamala, not sure of that would steel her resolve or make it even harder, but she'd soon find out, "I like you, Kamala. I like you a lot, but there's things about me you should know, and I don't know if you'll like me very much after you hear them."

Kamala paused for a moment to reflect on what Eleanor was saying. She already knew that Eleanor came from a family of werewolves and witches. And while Kamala hadn’t give it a lot of thought, Eleanor was clearly nervous about what she was about to say.

So Kamala reached out to take Eleanor’s hand. “Well, it goes without saying that I like you a lot too. And while I get you’re nervous, just know I’m going to listen and give you the space to you need to talk to me about anything. Okay?”

"Okay," said Eleanor, who took her hand across the table, but loosely; she was pretty sure Kamala would want it back, once she got done saying what she needed to.

"Well..."

And how did someone even begin, when it came to telling someone else that you were a monster? Even here, were most people were something, surely there were lines, and she was on the wrong side of most of them. But she'd thought about it a lot this weekend, mostly adrift in the water and just wishing she could be swept down into the depths by the undertow, and figured the best way to do this was to just fling herself off the cliff with some of the worst of it and then see where she landed.

"I came to this school because I pretty much destroyed almost my entire family after running away from my last school. I had to run away from my last school because I almost killed the last girl I liked when she tripped me down the stairs. And I was sent to that school because I did kill someone." She swallowed the hard lump in her throat, as if that poor kid had tried to finally work his way out of there. "By swallowing him whole."

There. That should at least cover the basics.

Well, Kamala didn't release Eleanor's hand but the smile did fade to an expression of concern. "Okay."

She paused for a second as she took all of it in. And while it sounded horrible from beginning to end, if Kamala had learned anything with dealing with the Clandestines and Dar-Benn is that not everything is what it seems on the surface.

Kamala leaned in. "So... I think I'm missing something here. Because what you say you did and who I think you are doesn't add up yet."

She reached out with her free hand so that both hands were holding Eleanor's.

"Let's talk about the whole... swallowing people first. How does that work?"

Well, of course it didn't add up; Eleanor had only been giving people a fraction of the equation. The 2+2=4 was just a parenthetical segment of the more complex quantum mathematical nightmare.

But the fact that Kamala hadn't immediately just pulled back in abject horror was a good thing, right? She hadn't pulled back at all, in fact, although Eleanor was just going by her hands over hers, since she couldn't bring herself to look at Kamala to confirm, eyes instead focusing on some blurry spot off to the side.

"I just...unhinge my jaw." She shrugged, as if forcing it to be normal, ignoring the way that jaw ached just thinking about. "I unhinge it and open wide into some kind of vast, endless space and just suck people right inside. And they either stay in there and probably rot, or if I spit them out, they just lifeless husks of their former selves unless I tell them what to do..."

Her eyes chanced a quick glance across the table.

"That's what I mean, when I say I take after my mother's side. I don't know exactly what we are, but that's what we do. I can also sometimes just tell people that to do, I don't have to always eat them first, but some people, like my sister, are immune to that. That's also part of it."

Edited 2024-07-15 15:57 (UTC)

"So... you have the power to control people and swallow them. And spit them out whole," Kamala repeated slowly. "Kind of like a flerkin."

Granted flerkins didn't spit out lifeless husks of people, so that was a bit creepy but still Kamala felt like she was missing something.

"So to clarify: at any time while you were here on the island you could have controlled me or told me what to do and I would have no ability but to do it? Or you could have swallowed me and made me your... minion?"

"Well," Eleanor said, protesting slightly, "I might not be able to. You could be immune, like Luma. I really don't care to find out, either way. Just like with eating people. I did it to my cousin. I hate it, it's awful."

The green tinge to Eleanor's skin now had nothing to do eith blushing, and everything to do with looking like she was about ready to throw up those few sips of Squishy she'd had right onto the table.

But to help keep herself from doing that, her brow knitted a little as she asked,"what's a flerkin?"

Besides a potentially obscenely cute name for something capable of what she was.

"Oh! A flerkin is an alien. That looks like a cat and has an extra-dimensional space inside of them. They have giant tentacles they use to swallow people or things and usually spits them back out again," Kamala explained. "Hang on a sec."

She reluctantly let go of Eleanor's hands to pull out her phone. "Hang on. I got a video of Goose in here somewhere." In a moment she found the video and turned it around for Eleanor to watch.

It was a video of what looked like an ordinary orange cat sitting on a chair staring at the camera. "Goose!" came Kamala's voice from behind the camera. "Spit him out. Now."

Goose opened his mouth and a variety of tentacles that were way to large for the cat's body came out and splayed out. A second later a tall man with dark hair and a long beard wearing glasses was spat out on the floor.

"AAAH!" the man cried out.

The camera now focused in on the man lying on the floor. "Aamir!" Kamala's voice called out again from behind the camera. "What did you do to Goose?"

"He was in my chair!" Aamir protested. "So I tried to push him off."

"You don't move Goose! No wonder he swallowed you!"

"I wanted to watch TV!"

Kamala stopped the video as it continued to be just two siblings bickering. She placed the camera to the side and reached out to take Eleanor's hand again.

"So. Yeah, I've seen people getting swallowed before but I want to circle back a second," Kamala continued. "You say you hate it. And you killed a boy by doing it. So why did you do it? When was this?"

Eleanor gave Kamala a curious, doubtful sort of look before leaning forward, eyes wide and body tense, to watch the video. She flinched back a little, when the cat--flerkin--opened its mouth and those tentacles came put, only relaxing marginally once it went back to looking like a normal cat and the man was clearly alright, and her brow remained creased in a complicated knot.

But...okay. Alright. So abilities like hers were not completely unknown in Kamala's world. So no wonder she wasn't immediately thrown by the whole 'I can swallow people whole thing.'

But now all the other stuff...

She was still sort of staring at where the phone had been, before blinking and shifting her attention back to Kamala. Right. The whole 'eating a kid' thing.

She sighed. "It was a while ago," she said, "about nine years ago. My grandparents had someone over, and he brought his son, you know, thinking we could all play together while he met with them."

Big mistake.

"We started chasing him into the woods," she continued, "me and my sister and our cousins. We weren't supposed to, but we didn't care, all the adults were busy, so I guess we figured they wouldn't notice. But we got...I got...carried away. I didn't even know what happened, one minute we were chasing him, the next minute, I was pouncing him and saying I wanted to eat him, Rhys and Luma cheering, I'd never wanted to eat anyone before, and Charlie said we should go back before we got in trouble..."

She shook her head, the memory still hazy and awful and terrible, especially now that she knew what had happened.

"One minute he was there, the next, he wasn't. I thought maybe he actually did escape, I don't even remember eating him, I didn't even know that's what happened until recently. All I knew was that he was no where to be found and I was in a lot of trouble."

Edited 2024-07-15 17:39 (UTC)

Okay. So now some things were beginning to fit together. "So, you were 8 or 9 when that happened," Kamala said slowly. "And your cousin and your sister were cheering you on. Your cousin and sister who are werewolves."

She paused nodding and thinking. "And you didn't even know you could do this. It just happened like an instinctual thing. And you didn't even remember doing it until recently."

She pondered that for a second or two. "Did your parents know about this swallowing thing? Did they warn you about it?"

Recalling the events of that night to Kamala had made Eleanor's stomach twist uncomfortably, and she blinked back the tears stinging her eyes as she shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "They didn't tell me anything. They just sent me away after that. I think...I think my grandmother must have know something. And my mother, too. But I think maybe they kind of hoped that, like her, I didn't have it."

Edited 2024-07-15 18:37 (UTC)

"They knew?"

Kamala was feeling a lot of things right now. Bewilderment. Horror. Anger at a family she had never met. But probably the feeling she felt the most was concern for Eleanor.

There were a lot of things El had said just now. About her abilities. About events that happened in the past. It would be easy to dismiss Eleanor as some kind of nightmarish creature, but sitting before Kamala was a woman who was distraught and clearly regretful for the actions she had taken. Watching her blink back tears was enough to make her curiosity stop asking questions for a moment.

"Okay. Okay," she said softly giving Eleanor's hand a reassuring squeeze before letting go and standing up from her chair. She walked around the table and attempted to engulf Eleanor in a gentle hug from behind. She moved carefully so as not to spook Eleanor and provide some comfort. "It's okay."

Oh. Oh no. Eleanor didn't know if she could handle a hug right now.

Of all thing things she could have expected to come from this, this hadn't even once entered her mind. And now Kamala had her arms around her and it dislodged some odd sound like a sob out of her, but even after all this time and everything she'd been through, she fought to not let herself give in to showing any of that kind of weakness. Like she could already hear the giggling whispers: and then she just started blubbering...

And they hadn't even gotten to Lucy yet...

Still, despite that, Eleanor leaned back into Kamala, craving every single second of it, lifting a hand to rest on her arm, as if to help her hold onto it just a little bit longer.

"I told you it was a lot," she finally managed to murmur out.

Kamala heard the tears and just held on to Eleanor. It made her wonder when the last time Eleanor had told anyone about this.

Or if anyone had ever tried to give her any kind of comfort.

Clearly not. When Eleanor became a problem for her family, the family sent her away. Seriously? They had two kids who were werewolves. They knew she could have this ability and didn't even tell her. They sent her away with the ability to swallow people and made it someone else's problem.

"Just take a moment," Kamala whispered softly and then reconsidered what she just said. "Actually, take all the time you need."

Edited 2024-07-15 19:19 (UTC)

But Kamala didn't understand. Werewolves were the good, proper kind of weird. Fierce and noble and carried down from the right bloodline. But Eleanor was something different, from somewhere else, like an unwelcome intruder on hallowed ground. You couldn't trust that. Only the pack.

Eleanor did take a moment. She took several, slowly sucking in her breath and trying to calm herself down before she said anything. Especially since that was when thing tended to go wrong, when she just let herself get carried away in her emotions, and so she made sure they were neatly in check before saying anything more.

It helped, too, that she wasn't sure what else to say, and she could spend the time trying to think of something.

And even after all that, all she managed to really come up with, was just a squeeze of her arm and a "Thanks, Kam."

Kamala held on for a moment or two longer before finally giving Eleanor a reassuring squeeze and then letting go. Instead of moving back to her chair she knelt down on the floor next to Eleanor and put her hand on her shoulder.

"You're welcome," she said, kindly and gave her a small smile. "Are you sure you don't want a cup of tea or anything?"

Even if the answer was no, her hope was to at least give Eleanor another moment or two to recover.

And the answer almost was no, especially since Eleanor was already feeling the loss of Kamala moving away, and when she hadn't completely tried to pull away to a much safer distance, she just sort of also wanted to keep her there longer. But then she smiled, and Eleanor felt herself softly smiling back.

"Maybe," she said, "that's not a bad idea after all. Something with mint or ginger, maybe? To settle my stomach a little?"

That great vast fathomless unknown inside of her was just a whole big overwhelming mess at the moment.

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NFB from here, please!

Re: NFB from here, please!

Re: NFB from here, please!

Re: NFB from here, please!

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.

Re: NFB from here; CW for death and other gruesome things.