- Lily Babineaux: 25/25 - Getting her mind wrecked, getting her body out of here
Lily caught Jamie in her arms as the blonde shoved him aside, and in her mind swelled an instinctual rage that mingled with the familiar warmth of he pack bond. In a rare show of anger, the lanky teen actually bared her fangs as she snarled, but otherwise said nothing to express the contempt boiling under her skin. Shiloh had already been a nuisance at Blackfriar's when he startled Jamie and freaked about their collective changes, so the new behavior wasn't doing him any favors. But at her core, Lily wasn't a confrontational person, and so with a scowl she wrapped her arms around Jamie, holding him close and drawing him a step away from the fighting.
She would have gone further, except that her world went white.
Lily was twelve, and blinded by lights on a stage, fidgeting with legs that has sprouted up in a single summer, too long, too clumsy. Somewhere in the distant, a microphone squeaked in protest, and chairs from an unseen audience scraped on a linoleum floor.
"Now don't you look pretty," crackled the voice from a half-broken speaker, it's tone maliciously sweet. "It's just, well...we're going for a look that's a little less dark and broken."
In the dream, in the real world, Lily sightlessly groped at her face, where her mask mimicked crumbled porcelain from the nose down. Distantly, she knew she was still holding Jamie, that things were happening elsewhere, but all she saw were stage lights pinning her down.
"I'm not broken," she protested weakly, her ears flattening against her head.
"No, you were just never made right in the first place," the voice crooned, and for the first time she heard her mother in those dulcet tones. "That hair, that nose, those legs...did you really think you stood a chance? Did you ever think you were worth something more than a participation ribbon?" The voice chucked in dozens of peals, and as Lily watched her hands began to warp and twist into claws instead of manicured, dainty hands.
"You silly beast, you're not even human, much less a lady."
There were sounds of screams and a pained bark that sounded like Eve, shaking Lily from her limp stupor. She blinked, wide-eyed, as the world swirled into shaky color, watching shapes and figures stumble away. In her arms she held a shuddering bundle of fur, and her head throbbed with the ache of the laughter tumbling around in her brain, but she had at least enough sense to start moving her legs, one after the other.
"I'm sorry, too," she whispered to the hare as she fled, though she couldn't quite place why.
saedusk
