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 Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:35 am
This RP is backdated to August 11th
It was pretty much a given that Arkady, left to her own devices, would wander off and get into all sorts of trouble. Someone had to be watching her. Or: someone had to be watching her as much as they could spare someone to watch her, and Tallulah, having only a summer course load to occupy her time (she hated that - married and unemployed and still in college, god, this was not part of her life plan at all), had to take a turn or two.
At first, she’d been unnerved by the young woman. She had next to no memories. She sang constantly, and always the same horrifyingly dark nursery rhymes. And she was Avalon. Whether or not Arkady remembered what she’d done, she was still the same person who’d tortured Spinel, threatened Tallulah into marriage, murdered Finn’s father… need she go on?
Today, she was working on basic domestic skills with Arkady. Which was to say, they were baking muffins, because Arkady needed to foster all the good will she could get and Tallulah believed in better living through baked goods. “Okay, so now we wait twenty-five minutes,” she said, closing the oven door. She offered Arkady a restrained smile. “Thanks for all the help mixing.”
She set the bowl on the counter between them. “Now comes the best part,” she said. “We get to eat the leftover batter.”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:36 am
Arkady’s opinions on her housemates were still developing, but Tallulah was one of the ones she liked the most. She was sensible, and she was pretty, and she had a silly and cute clip in her hair. Arkady liked it, and she had copied the style once before deciding it looked far sillier when one had long hair all the way down rather than short and sideswept bangs. Therefore, her lessons in domesticity with Tallulah were some of her most anticipated.
Also, the results were often delicious. “How come you and Nick live together,” she asked, sticking a finger into the batter and examining it before thoughtfully poking her finger into her mouth. “Is it like me and Finn? Did one of you purify and now you are taking care of each other? Why do you wear that clip? I think it’s super cute. Why do you wear that ring? Is it because of the same reason you wear the clip? You’re always wearing them.” She reached across the counter and took Tallulah’s hand in hers, examining it closely. “Is it your signet? How come I can’t see your sigil? I know you’re magic. I should be able to see it.”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:36 am
Arkady always asked a thousand questions, and they were always borderline invasive, and they were always just relevant enough to her reintroduction to society that Tallulah had to answer them or risk confusing her further. So, at Arkady’s question, she twisted the ring on her finger awkwardly. God, she really didn’t remember! “Well, Nick did purify,” she said. “But, um, he only lost half his memories? So he doesn’t need as much help as you do. That’s how it usually works. You’re special that way.”
“No, it’s not my signet,” she corrected gently, allowing Arkady to take her hand and examine it. “I’m a senshi. We don’t have signets. That’s my wedding ring. I wear it because Nick and I are married.” Which was going to lead to several inevitable questions that she could only hope she was prepared to answer - but sincerely doubted.
“I wear the clip because I like it,” she said. “May I have my hand back now, Arkady?”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:36 am
She already knew she was special. Duh. She had Finn, didn’t she? Would anyone not extraordinary have him for theirs? No! Case in point. Although the revelation that not everyone lost their memories like she did was a little saddening. She’d like a few hints as to where she had come from, or what she had been like. All Arkady had to go off of were stories about her past self that she coaxed out of Finn, and those weren’t very helpful towards figuring out who she was meant to be.
Married, though! What on earth? “What’s married,” she asked, letting go of Tallulah’s hand. She pillowed her chin on her palm, muffin batter completely forgotten now in the excitement of a new thing. “Is it like being parents? Are you going to have a baby. You should have a baby, that baby would be literally too cute.” She would have to kill it before it stole all Finn’s love and attention. In movies, babies did that, and that would be just unacceptable. Only Arkady got to be Finn’s love, that was a rule. Maybe Nick and Tallulah shouldn’t have a baby, she thought. “Do you always get jewelry when you get married? Finn gave me a necklace.” She fished it out from beneath her shirt. Between them it glowed a lovely pale blue, like Finn’s eyes.
They were so married.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:36 am
Tallulah forced a laugh, flustered by Arkady’s sudden enthusiasm. She’d expected it, of course, but the young woman’s insistence that she and Nick should have a baby, no matter how playful that insistence might be, was just a little bit too close to Avalon’s earlier threats regarding marriage. “No, uh,” she said, “We are not going to have a baby.” She had very firm convictions on the subject and those convictions were no sooner than age twenty-eight.
How did you explain married to someone who had no context for… anything, really? It didn’t mean you were going to stay together forever - both her parents had been married and divorced before they met each other. “It’s like…” she began, and trailed off, momentarily stumped. “It’s like dating, but the government gives you a piece of paper that says if you break up you’ll be in a whole mess of legal trouble before you can be officially broken up, so you’d better be serious and stable and love each other a hell of a lot,” she said, watching as Arkady pulled the glowing bauble from beneath her shirt.
“Rings are customary,” said Tallulah, twisting her own again. She could see the gears turning. “You and Finn aren’t married, Arkady,” she said gently. “He loves you a lot, but people usually get married after they’ve been together for a while. And they like to have a certain amount of stability before they do it. Like. Degrees. Jobs.”
A job which she didn’t have. God, Tallulah thought. She was so ******** up.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:37 am
Arkady was both disappointed and pleased. Disappointed because she thought she’d really like it if Tallulah and Nick had a baby--it would just complete the whole picture, the young doctor and his family--but pleased because she wouldn’t have to smother anyone in the crib. So, really, more a win than a loss.
She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of the government being able to say s**t about her and Finn and their relationship. Everyone seemed pretty clear on who got to make those decisions--Finn and Arkady--and who didn’t--everyone else--even if sometimes people wanted to stick their noses in and be like, hey, do not kiss the amnesiac. Which, the only person who got to say who kissed who was the people doing the kissing, and she had express consent from Finn to smooch him, so really he wasn’t kissing the amnesiac, the amnesiac was kissing him. Ha ha, so there, rules!
“Finn says I have degrees,” she said, brightly. “So I just need a job and then I can get married to Finn, right?” She could just see it. Maybe they could go live in Babylon together. Then he wouldn’t have anyone but her and she could keep him all to herself, and Chaos wouldn’t be able to get to them. “I mean, if he says yes, then you can’t say no, right? ‘Cause we’re both legal adults, aren’t we?” Although Arkady was pretty sure she, herself, only counted because no one wanted to risk losing her to a state care system, whatever that was. There had been arguments.
She took another fingerful of batter. “Kissing Finn is pretty great,” she admitted, “and he is, like, a champion snuggler. So he would be good marriage material, I think. Also he makes good sandwiches, and he got me a penguin.” Definitely nothing could go wrong with this methodology of marriage determination. Not one thing.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:37 am
Tallulah gave Arkady a deer-in-headlights sort of look, not sure how to field that question. “Uh,” she said finally, nudging the bowl of batter back towards Arkady and hoping to distract her from the topic at hand. “I think that would be Finn’s call, really,” she said. From what she’d heard, Finn wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment - he was still having moral dilemmas about kissing Arkady. Thinking about marrying her would probably send him into some sort of catatonic blue screen of death.
“You know, Arkady,” said Tallulah, dragging a finger gingerly through the batter. “I think Finn might be a little worried about you being too dependent on him.” Which sounded harsh. She cringed inwardly and continued. “I think he’d feel better if you had a way to support yourself and had more friends you wanted to spend time with.” Maybe then he’d hush up about Stockholm syndrome and being scared he was just trying to turn Arkady into Tate - she was going to strangle Nick for bringing that up with him. Lovingly. She was going to strangle him lovingly.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:37 am
“I have Marlo,” said Arkady, and then she frowned. “He thinks I’m stupid, though. I’m not stupid. But he does like me, so that makes us friends, right?” And then there was Hver. Hver had promised that she had friends. That made Hver one of her friends, right? Auriga counted, too. She had three whole friends. “And we’re friends, aren’t we?” So that was like… four. Plus Finn. How many friends did she need?
Probably more than that, she thought, glumly. “So I do need to get a job,” she said, which actually wasn’t a very scary prospect--it seemed kind of cool, actually. Then she could go out on her own and do her own stuff and like, buy more birds. Maybe even a real bird. And a phone! She really, really wanted a phone. “What did me from before want to do? I should do that.”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:37 am
Tallulah nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re friends.” Which was odd, of course. Tate had never been anything approaching cordial with her, and the one time she’d met Vanya, she’d seemed sort of… prickly. But Arkady had none of Tate’s baggage and none of Vanya’s darkness, and she was easy to get along with. Actually, it would probably be hard to actively dislike Arkady: it would be like disliking puppies and sunshine.
“You were an English teacher at Crystal Academy,” said Tallulah measuredly. She didn’t think Arkady could do that now. At least not without recovering significantly more of her memories and a large amount of bluffing. “What do you want to do?”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:38 am
Arkady smiled a little smugly. Of course she and Tallulah were friends. Arkady was great, why wouldn’t they be friends? “No, not that me,” she said. “That me hurt Finn. I don’t want to be like her. The me that he loves, Tate. That one. What did she want to do?” That was a little bit circuitous, but how else was she supposed to explain what she wanted to know? “He doesn’t tell me much about her,” she said, glumly. “Which makes it hard to be like her. I want to, you know. He misses her a lot and I am her except not, right?”
She wished she had a friend who would, like, explain to her exactly how she was supposed to act to make Finn happy. He wasn’t going to leave her, of course not, but… he deserved someone better than a crazy amnesiac, that’s all.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:38 am
Tallulah bit her lip. Nick had been worried that Finn might try to turn Arkady into a copy of Tate, and now it seemed like Arkady had gone and gotten that idea for herself. “Tate wanted to be a police detective,” she said, although she doubted that Arkady would make a very good cop as she was now. “She - you - had a degree in Criminal Justice.” Still had it, she supposed.
“Finn misses Tate because he knows she’s not coming back,” said Tallulah, giving up on trying to draw Arkady’s attention to the mixing bowl. She turned around and put it in the sink. “That doesn’t mean you should spend all your time trying to be her. You should do things that make you happy and be who you want to be right now, and he’ll still love you anyway.”
At least, if Finn was half the man she’d pegged him as then she expected him to.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:38 am
“I don’t want to be a police detective,” she sighed, putting her chin on her hands. She liked to know things, she supposed. About people. About things. But it wasn’t like… detective-y, was it? “I want him to be happy. Wouldn’t he be happy if I were most like her? He loved her.” He said he loved her too, but he didn’t really know her. She didn’t even really know herself. It made her uncomfortable to remember that.
She frowned. “I don’t know who I am. It seemed like a good idea to pick someone to be before I committed. You don’t think that’s so?”
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:39 am
Nick had been lucky, thought Tallulah. Everything would have been way, way harder if he’d forgotten his civilian memories. Their entire relationship had been based on their civilian lives - what would she have done if he’d forgotten her? Well, she doubted they’d still be together. She might be helping with his rehabilitation… but they wouldn’t be be married. “No one else gets to pick who they want to be, they just grow up into themselves,” she said.
“He’s happy just to have you,” she said reassuringly. And honestly - Tallulah had a lot of reasons to not want Arkady to wind up like Tate. Sure, Finn could talk all he wanted about Tate’s compassion and Tate’s humor and Tate’s everything, but Tallulah remembered Tate’s bitterness and Tate’s competitiveness and Tate’s cynicism. “And I think that if you just focus on being you, then all the things about you that he loves will just come naturally, because even without all your memories, you’ve still got the same base.”
God. Being a relationship expert was exhausting.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:39 am
Arkady frowned harder, if that were possible. She didn’t like being told to just wing it. “I’m not a kid,” she said, dropping forward onto the counter. The surface was cold against her skin, but warmed quickly. She dug her nails into it for comfort. It was reassuringly hard against her nails; she scraped them over the surface, impatiently. “I don’t have time to grow up into me. Not like everyone else.” Self-pitying? Yeah. Well, she didn’t think it was undeserved. “Aren’t memories like, formative,” she asked, rocking her head from side to side like that would jar something loose inside her head. “I have to be somebody now, so people don’t think I’m weird and want to know why.”
The Lady in White couldn’t pop up to save her a second time, if people became suspicious of her that was sort of it. She didn’t want to fail at this.
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Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 11:39 am
Tallulah sighed, and decided that this was way above her pay grade and there were certain things about his amnesiac ward-slash-girlfriend-now-apparently? that Finn was going to have to handle himself, and this whole who am I crisis was ultimately one of them. “So you don’t want to be a cop, you don’t want to do anything like what Vanya did,” she said, regathering the last of her patience. “So you should just… pick something else and start working towards it. I’m not inside your head. I can’t tell you what you will and won’t like and honestly I don’t want to. You’ve got to decide for yourself and pretty much no matter what you decide, Finn’s still going to be there wanting to hug you.”
Or whatever. This was getting weird. She glanced tentatively at Arkady, hoping she hadn’t been too harsh with her. This was just intensely frustrating. “Sorry,” she said quietly. “You’ve got lots of options. Stop worrying too hard about being Tate, though, okay? Finn loves her, but he’s also totally resigned to the fact that she’s dead.” Or he was supposed to be, anyway. “Just be you. He loves you.”
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